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What's in a year?
My year begins now and ends a year from now, and in that year I have a time, with time. Maybe this is one of those mysteries.
Essays in time
By Jon Rieley-Goddard
copyright 2007-2008
Warm day
-- April boon
or boondoggle?
The insecure child will say to his mama – I know that you said that you love me a minute ago, but do you still love me?
The insecure lover of spring will say to April – I know you bless me this day, but what of tomorrow?
And the rest of us wonder -- What other surprises will this most cruel of months will spring on us, like season’s greetings, in the days to come before May, the most lovely of months, pushes its way into our lives, like one hamster jumping into a spinning exercise cage will eject another?
It is ambivalence that touches both halves of the heart when one is confronted by the seasons in this cruel month of April – snow early on, with many cold mornings and a few cold days following, rainy days that look both ways, and now a day from another planet where spring comes with fresh, warm breezes and stays its allotted time before yielding with grace to reason and mourning the passing of a day or a season. To paraphrase Robert Frost.
In Buffalonya, on the west side of the city, nearer the lake, spring starts on the cool side and endures in coolness until some time in May or even June.
The weather people call it good sleeping weather.
I love the way weather people think, as shown by and judging according to what they say to us, from the airwaves that have their own weather that corresponds to nothing you can see or touch or feel.
Another of their sayings – it will be warmer away from the lakes (Erie and
I’m sure that this month of surprises will do so once again err its end.
- A version of this piece appears in my Grimoire: The Bros Grim Breakfast Serial.
By Jon Rieley-Goddard
copyright 2007-2008
Attic squirrel
in wet maple --
buds in branches.
On Sunday, I noticed that ash trees that I had watched for a few months now, for signs of new life, continued to shun their phoenix nature. I wanted to see green shoots rising from these ashes, but no, they would not.On Monday, in the rain, the maple outside our window was trying on green leaves, while the squirrel ( not exactly one of my buds) that lives in our attic sat, tail curved over his back like a ratty old umbrella.
April -- most cruel of months -- continues to change and mock and make promises in the mud.
April -- most cruel of months -- continues to mix memory and desire.
Memory of what is to come -- warm days, then hot ones.
Desire for what has been -- warm days, then hot ones.
- A version of this piece appears in my Grimoire: The Bros Grim Breakfast Serial.
By Jon Rieley-Goddard
copyright 2007-2008
The flakes actlike crazy people,
dancing in air.
April is the cruelest month, mixing memory and desire, (and, I might add, breeding lilacs out of the dead land). Thanks to T.S. Eliot. In the sense of thanks not for the phenomenon but for the phenomenal verses.
April, in Buffalonya (TM), my city (Buffalonya rhymes with Bologna -- mostly just for fun), is the cruelest month for reasons having to do with the antics of snowflakes, that dance in the air and seek to mass themselves on the ground for a last assault on the emerging springtime.
Every April, without fail, the snowflakes make what one hopes is a final appearance. Like little lovers, they tease and swirl, seeking to excite old passions for coldness.
Look, they say, we make the trees and bushes white with the flocking of seasons past. Is it not beautiful?
But we resist, saving ourselves for the sun of summer, opening our arms to the memory of heat.
No, say the snowflakes, do not turn away, for we will be cold in our turn if you send us away. Think ahead to next winter. You will miss us if we stay away.
Yes, we say. Go, and go quickly. Enough of this unseemly display. Yield to the season, and try no more to trick us with reason. Weather or not, there you go.
- A version of this piece appears in my Grimoire: The Bros Grim Breakfast Serial.
By Jon Rieley-Goddard
copyright 2007-2009
My wife and I just got back from a week-long vacation -- a roadtrip to Disney World, from Buffalo, so that she could run in the Princess Half Marathon.
We chose to drive, so we could see some new country.
After 2,400 digital photos and 2,600 miles of driving, we are back home.
In between, we discovered the gospel voice of Elvis.
A friend had given me a CD of Elvis gospel songs that he burned from stuff that he found on YouTube.
I enjoyed his selections, but it was the particular setting, I believe, that made one particular song come alive for me.
It was on the second day of our trip, after we had decided to sneak up on Savannah, Georgia, by back road rather than Interstate. Something about South Carolina that we had seen so far made the prospect of the interstate unbearable to contemplate.
The road that we chose was straight as an arrow, and more than a hundred miles long, shadowing a railroad track and taking us through town after town and pine plantation after pine plantation.
Being closer to the pines and the bleached and sandy soil made a critical difference.
When we got closer to the coast, and the road narrowed and took some twists and turns, we had been listening to the Elvis CD for a while. My friend had said that he loved the way that Elvis played with his range and tone in the gospel music, and he advanced the opinion that the gospel Elvis was far better than the rock n roll Elvis.
We were in the hardwoods and Spanish moss now, and a chip truck had just passed us on a short straightaway, cutting back in when I gave him a flash of my brights, the way that my father, a trucker himself, had taught me.The chip truck driver gave us a merry double flash of his taillights in thanks for my all-clear signal.
Cathy had commented that the Elvis was perfect for the Bible Belt country that we were riding through.
Elvis began to sing He Touched Me, as the chip truck balled around the next corner, never to be seen again.
It's not the traditional gospel touches that got me but the joy that Elvis let loose when he opened his throat and soared above the bass, the tenor, and the baritone.
He held nothing back.
I have listened to the tape since we got back home, and I have checked on YouTube to see if I had the right version to offer as a download at the end of this piece (it was), but there was something about the time and place, with my father's memory bright in my mind, that made that one rendition somehow different from the same track at any other time, before or since.
It wasn't the tears that sprang from my eyes like rain.
That happens most of the time when I listen to really, really good gospel music.
No, it was the day, the trip, and my princess-precious companion.
I've been thinking about it, and I decided that it was something about the words, the memory associations, and my way of experiencing God as much in my body as in my mind.
In the moment when Elvis soared, I remembered how much my own experience of God is so big on mystery and so small on certainty.
All I know is that God has touched me, in ways I cannot explain or understand with my mind.
But my body knows.
I even had to overcome some negatives about this particular song. I can remember joking that "he touched me" is bad news, sometimes, in other contexts.
But this time, in that place, God did touch me, cleanly and completely, with the memory that this is what has made me whole.
Blessings and peace.
Note: I am posting this essay, from 2002, that I wrote after my father's death. The time of posting is near to the first anniversary of my mother's death.
By Jon Rieley-Goddard
copyright 2007-2008
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My father could make a boat dance and sing.
My father could make a boat.
My father.
My father was shorter than your father, and stronger, especially in his legs.
My father was more silent than your father, and more kind and gentle.
My father had less schooling than your father, and was more wise.
My father was selfless and humble, and he taught me competitiveness.
My father drove noisy trucks and hated them as much as he loved them.
My father died, and something in me was born, kicking and screaming,crying and longing, hurting and very much alive. Like my father. Very much alive. In me. Enduring and more lovely with each passing year.
Less in focus and sharper in the mind.
***
I’ve been meaning to write about my father, but I was putting it off, and putting it off, afraid that if I began, that I would end up writing a book. That is an odd fear for one who loves to write and to tell stories. So maybe there are other reasons for my delays, other becauses, other yes, buts. Who really wants to see and swim in the well of my tears, I would ask myself. It is dark and dangerous down there. Who would be so interested in such emotion in another?
I find myself fascinating, and my life amazes me, but how far does this transfer? The writer’s art can make art of one’s reality, I know, but how far can I fling these images of mine, and who would want to catch them?
And so I write, sometimes cowering behind the pulpit of my narrative, sometimes standing tall and proud, praise ringing in my ears.
***
I have pictures of my father and the boats that he built, with a few hand tools and a tiny tilt-table saw. Four pictures that I placed in a photo album show his abilities as a dancing master. My father, 15 horses of horsepower, and a pile of sticks in the water -- dancing (and singing to the tune of those 15 throaty horses).
When I fish out the photo album and look at the four photos, I am first struck by the presence of my mother, the one who couldn’t swim, the one who always said, Be careful. Riding like the wind in my father’s boat.
The fourth photo is the astounding one. The wake of the boat has drawn a comma in the water, and there at the tail of that comma is my father’s boat, my father, and my mother, reaching for the sky. The nose of the boat is 10 feet in the air and the rump of the boat is digging a hole to drown in. Be careful?
***
Now I build boats, with great care and love. My latest is a tubby jonboat with an odd little cabin that seems perfect for the Erie Canal. My wife has suggested that we call the boat Flipper, because she helped with the flipping of this boat after the hull was finished and painted. I kinda, sorta, wanna call the boat Wallbanger in honor of my father, but Wallbanger will be the next boat’s name. This one is called Flipper.Dad was a trucker, which meant that he was a CB’er, too, because the advent of the Citizen Band radio made truck driving safer, more effective, and a lot like a party. If I had ever owned a CB radio, my handle would have been Mr. Ed, because for a long time I was a copy editor. My father’s handle was Wallbanger because his name was Harvey, and because of a sweetish alcoholic drink known as the Harvey Wallbanger.
Nicknames are best when there is a current of cleverness borne on an undercurrent of malice, and Wallbanger has those two currents in balance. To call my mild and gentle father Wallbanger requires a dash of malice.
Sometimes I call him Harvey Rabbit, in my mind, because he was so cute and at the same time so strong and silent as to be almost invisible. A dash of malice, and a jigger of love and affection.
***
We were having breakfast in a nondescript diner, my father and I, talking about nothing and everything, in the way of fathers and sons. Somewhere in the flow of this, my father tells me that sometimes, when he is working alone in his workshop, he feels the presence of my Aunt Martha, dead these many years. I forget what I said in reply, but I fancy that I will always remember this day when my father taught me how to talk with the dead.
He taught me how to pull a bent nail by placing a scrap of wood under the head of the hammer, and when I pull a bent nail, I say, Thanks, Dad.
He taught me how to tap a nail on its nose before driving that nail into a board so that the nail won’t split the board, and when I tap a nail on its nose and drive it into a board, I say, Thanks, Dad.
He taught me how to kerf a board carefully with the saw before cutting with great vigor, because one careful cut will guide the saw accurately the rest of the way, and when I kerf a board, I say, Thanks, Dad.
***
Because I live, Jesus tells us, you will live. It sounds so puffed up and pretentious, taken out of context and stripped of its divinity. In that naked condition, the phrase stands for my enduring and continuing connection with my father: Because I live, he lives, and because he lived, I live.
Sometimes when I talk now with my father, I realize how close the talking comes to prayer, and how I want to separate this communication with my father from my communication with THE Father. I don’t pray to my dad; I simply talk to him, and I don’t ask him for things – I thank him for his love and wisdom. When I pray, I usually can’t get much beyond loving God, loving God, loving God. Help me. Help me. Help me, except on Sundays when I can lose and find myself in the Prayers of the People.
If you had known my father, you would know me, Jesus tells us. That’s true for the rest of us, too, I believe. One piano-playing blues performer says it this way, about her mentor:
She’s in my right hand, she’s in my left hand ... .
My father taught me how to build boats, and he taught me how to heal with a touch and a gentle word. He was extraordinary, and I miss him like fire.
***
The other day, in the run-up to Father’s Day, there was a segment on National Public Radio about the different way in which men grieve. The idea was that women grieve in company, by crying and feeling, and that men grieve alone, by thinking and doing. The point was made that grieving styles are personal, that grieving styles are unique mixtures with parts of the masculine and parts of the feminine styles shaken together.
I grieve by crying. And doing. And thinking. And feeling. I can’t remember my father ever crying in my presence beyond a quickly strangled tear or two, but he certainly has taught me how to cry. This radio program also examined how a close relationship with one’s father will be sharply grieved and then integrated, and how a more distant relationship with one’s father will be grieved over a much longer time.
Guilty, guilty, guilty.
I regret that I waited so long to write these things, but I am grateful that my love and my memories do not fade but grow stronger. It is because I have been loved by such persons as my father that I know God and God's love.
Some things light a fire that never dies, but warms and burns.
blessings and peace ... jonago
By Jon Rieley-Goddard
copyright 2007-2008
Jack Kerouac, we’re told (v. Penny Vlagopoulos, “Rewriting America,” in On the Road: The Original Scroll) was born Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac. His native tongue was joual, a French-Canadian koine/patois of the working classes in Montreal.
Jack, as he became in time, did not speak English until he was 6 years old.
STOP!
Already, we have identified many roots, living in darkness, ready to illuminate us – too many roots to follow, going too deep for us to feel along, back to their points of departure.
Like hyperlinking web-surfers, though, let us isolate a few of the many roots diving down from this page.
These roots resemble those of the alfalfa, growing twenty feet in friendly soil, bringing a wealth of dark treasures to the surface.
I take the OED by the bedside, and hoist it onto my lap (v. John Updike, who somewhere, in some book review, commented on an oversized, supersized mass of a big book, saying that it was the kind of book so big that one only could wrestle it open and read it in bed).
Take the OED and dig up a meaning for root:
- Root(s) – substantive [Late Old English rot, Old Norse rot, with the “original stem wrot- ... connected with L. (Latin) radix and with O.E. wyrt wort”].
Already we get a prize in the use of the figurative original stem -- rot .. wrot- .. radix .. wyrt -- to describe the actual thing-in-itself – the root of root.
This reminds us --
- that language is ideographic, always,
- and that words evoke images, or pictures, in the mind,
- and that the mind interprets and understands some version of truth – what is meant and intended – by the word and by the word-wielder.
Notice, though, that going downward, looking for the point of departure, becomes impossible, because it is too confusing. Etymologists guess at best, among a crowded patch of old, old versions of versions of modern languages.
The further we go, downward, the more choices we have, as the roots branch endlessly and multiply, from a single stem to a multitude of feeder roots and rootlets.
Thank God that we aren’t doing internal medicine or rocket science.
Better to begin at the end of some rootlet and feel one’s way upward until at last, to grasp the one true stock or trunk or vine, only to follow, now in the light, branches beyond belief in number and complexity.
Metaphors, like shorthand, make quicker work for those of us who are trying, trying, trying to keep up with the relentless press of language – downward and upward ... and sideways, too, and all at once.
Try again. It can’t be that complex or confusing.
- Vlagopoulos, a name that includes an echo of the Greek word polis, or city/state with a strong nod to the people that inhabit city/state, with branches in so many downward and upward, and lateral directions, too – police, polity, population, polished.
That is the beauty of roots, that roots like their brothers and sisters in the light have branches.
That the upward and upright structure takes its form and function from its downward and dark creator – roots.
This tells me that what I see, against the blue sky, is the inverse proportion of the hidden tendrils that give the tree of language its life.
We can see the tree as a mirrored form of its roots, thinking that what we see is what is real.
We see, in the same way that we think, by extension and by metaphor and by interpretation – and usually in the dark, like bookworms or rooting creatures. Moles and voles.
We match the image in the eye with the image-memory in the mind -- thus do we interpret/see our reality.
We say tree but could as easily say roots. They do look almost the same, after all, when represented graphically in a line drawing.
That is the Real,
which clearly
is not really real.
No wonder I prefer to follow the roots, into the dark, where the organs of sight and insight become more simple and yet also more close to the source.
- joual – no refs. in OED by my bedside, so I’m switching to the Internet.
A note: I surf the Internet – that mother root of information – in my home office. My small but powerful personal computer is surrounded by about 1,600 used books on shelves to the ceiling, which is my inventory of books for sale on Amazon.com, from my used-book business, BaldyBooks. The 1,600 
books speak volumes about information, available though hidden, often residing at the boundary of awareness and memory, endless in scope but bound by ink and paper, and space available times money spent.Googling joual over here, Boss:
First hit, an entry in Wikipedia. The anonymous contributor says that joual has roots in the way that speakers of joual say the French word for horse – cheval. From that point, s/he adroitly describes the process of vocalization that turns che- into jou-.
Amazing! Well-done!
Following the sub-root that I grafted onto this discussion, we examine s/he:
- s/he ... which a link from an online version of the American Heritage Dictionary vocalizes in a sound file as she or he. I thought that the point of such a strange and wonderful word-coining would be to avoid the constant and absurd chanting of the phrase she or he in one’s attempts to be inclusive as to language concerning persons. And I had always thought that the word looked like it meant itself to be said as shuh-hee or suh-hee, which would add some whimsy to an otherwise grim and politically correct situation (because when one calls all persons by the technically collective, pharasaically correct he, we often have a situation here).
A paragraph with she or he or he or she, repeated even once, sets up a totalitarian tone and I get that here we go again feeling, all over again and yet once more. So much better to use shuh-hee or its possessive form shuh-heen.
Or maybe just substitute a beautiful sound such as joual.
***
Roots become personal in the downward movement from general to specific.
My roots are what gave rise to this piece about Jack Kerouac and his native tongue. I had meant to write a piece of endless digression, where each word of size, beyond a, an, and the, and including and, would be printed with its etymology. The trick, I quickly found, was to check word roots while maintaining a narrative, which for me is a listening and scribing experience, which it also was for Kerouac, who admonished an early editor of his to leave his words alone, because the Holy Ghost had dictated them to him.
I know that Jack was not kidding, though he might have been having some fun.
***
- Kerouac – a name that has become synonymous with the longing for the freedom of the Road (“O.E. rad ‘riding, hostile incursion,’ from P.Gmc. ridanan, source of ridan (see ride). Also related to raid.”) This from the Online Etymology Dictionary.
This entry creates two branches from our subroot road that I have grafted onto the examination of the root sof Kerouac. We move from thicker to thinner:
- What the bleep is P.Gmc? My initial Googling yields Philadelphia Gay Men’s Chorus. Subsequent Googling helps me see a possibility in pre-Grermanic or proto-Germanic, with a deadend at Germanic weak verb.
- What are the implications of moving from my bed and the hefty two-volume Shorter OED c. 1954 to the computer ,surrounded by 1,600 glowering used books ... a computer, which is too big for my lap and only to be opened if one has the secret password to do so.
On P.Gmc, I have nothing further to say. I have no response.
On opening the OED, in bed, or by opening a file on my computer hard drive, I do have a response:
As much as I appreciate my computer, for the information that it gives me access to instantly, like an extravagant finale to a fireworks show, I also appreciate my glowering books that surround me with promise and mystery and joy. And I’m writing this on paper, with a pen, and after copying this draft into a notebook that I use to save my writings in one place, I will create a computer file on my hard drive and edit it, again and again, printing out and reading, on paper, what now exists only on a silicon wafer, in a binary notation of incredible power, based on two words/images/conceptions ...
Yes ... No
– or –
Up ... Down.
***
It was not arbitrary that I chose to write about the roots of Jack, as in Kerouac, because he made a big impression on me while I was still a little guy trying to survive the mind-pickling experience also know as (or, AKA, which does not scan quickly because of the K-thing) high school.
I’ve been reading the recently published On the Road: The Original Scroll and savoring the four essays that precede the text-as-Kerouac-intended – one paragraph of more than three hundred pages in length that Kerouac typed on a roll of paper that he pasted together from a stash of artist’s paper that he had found in someone’s apartment.
I’m enjoying these four intense-but-controlled essays that seek to describe a creative impulse that flew far higher than the expository writing that the four editors of the scroll book do – and do well.
Thus do I brood, amid my glowering and under-used used books, on the uselessness of letters (v. Kenneth Rexroth) and find that that brooding satisfies me, like a hen chucking over his or her eggs.
***
- joual cf. the Trieste dialect of Italo Svevo and his friend and language tutor James Joyce (whose family spoke the dialect in the home, we are told). Also cf. Italo Svevo and Jack Kerouac (who both use pen-names that reflect lingual richness and confusion). The Trieste dialect – Germanic and Italian in its roots -- makes Canadian French, even in its koine/patois form, joural, look like the King’s or Queen’s English. by comparison, or so they say.
***
I read tonight, in another of the four essays preceding the Scroll ms. of On the Road (v. Joshua Kupetz, “The Straight Line Will Take You to Death”) that Kerouac had a theory of the circle of despair, where the deflections in life form a series of right-hand turns that eventually draw a circle around what is fundamental, and challenging, for a person and also helpful, since the straight way will lead one directly to death, according to Jack.
Who never made it out of his 40s but died, well-pickled in alcohol, at age-47-and-going-on-eternity.
blessings and peace ... jonago
By Jon Rieley-Goddard
copyright 2008
I had this dream last night.
And what a dream it was.
A man, maybe me, lost the top inch of his skull in a violent clash with another man. He ran to the hospital. He lived.
He had humiliated the man who cut his lid off. He may have had it coming. The man had a knife that the cutter took from him, by grabbing the blade, being cut several times, and losing all the fingers on his right hand, before gaining possession and doing the deed. His was a pyrrhic victory. He could not afford another such victory and still wield a knife in anger.
The humiliation had to do with a woman, that I remember, but nothing else about the woman.
I woke up, certain that the dream was about me. Why, I don't yet know.
I went back to sleep. The man who had lost his lid was walking hand in hand with his wife. I had the conviction that his tragedy was about to happen all over again. I awoke, realizing that I could refuse to go further into that dream-story. Then.
Later, while writing this journal entry, I drew a picture of the man with the flat top. I showed it to my wife.
Her question: Why is he smiling, then?
I just don't know. Yet.
It may be something about headiness -- taking an inch off the top, being an inch more into feelngs rather than thoughts. I just don't know. Yet.
There was no fear when I awoke, only a thought-feeling that the dream had been strange and probably important, and perhaps even lovely and wonderful. In time.
I had the conviction that it had something to do with My Year with the Mysteries.
And so it did.
blessings and peace ... jonago
P.S.
- I take dreams to be all about the dreamer.
- I believe that all the persons in a dream are aspects of the dreamer's person.
- Death in dreams has more to do with transformation than death in life.
- Loss in dreams is a matter for reflection rather than grief.
- You might have thought that i was writing in a kind of code. I was not.
I was, however, dreaming in the code that God has embedded in the soul.
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