One Art

BY ELIZABETH BISHOP

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

The Waking

BY THEODORE ROETHKE

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.  

I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.   

I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?  

I hear my being dance from ear to ear.  

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?  

God bless the Ground!   I shall walk softly there,  

And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?  

The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;  

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do  

To you and me; so take the lively air,  

And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.  

What falls away is always. And is near.  

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.  

I learn by going where I have to go.

Two villanelles have been on my mind today...

They were brought to my attention by important women in my  life.  The first poem, by Roethke, was in a home made card by the late, amazing, Ruth Slickman, lately of Cortez, Colorado.  She gave it to me for my birthday, around 2000, and it's stayed embedded in my imagination ever since.  The second, the Bishop poem, was given to me by my former wife, a great teacher or literature, particularly to me, and it still rings sadly, like a bronze bell.  I tried to teach it to my students in Viet Nam, but they were convinced that it was a poem about blithely letting go.  I think it's harder and less sentimental than that.

The Waking

Theodore Roethke

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.   

I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.   

I learn by going where I have to go. 

We think by feeling. What is there to know?   

I hear my being dance from ear to ear.   

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. 

Of those so close beside me, which are you?   

God bless the Ground!   I shall walk softly there,   

And learn by going where I have to go. 

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?   

The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;   

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. 

Great Nature has another thing to do   

To you and me; so take the lively air,   

And, lovely, learn by going where to go. 

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.   
What falls away is always. And is near.   

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.   

I learn by going where I have to go.

One Art

Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn’t hard to master; 

so many things seem filled with the intent 

to be lost that their loss is no disaster. 

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster 

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. 

The art of losing isn’t hard to master. 

Then practice losing farther, losing faster: 

places, and names, and where it was you meant 

to travel. None of these will bring disaster. 

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or 

next-to-last, of three loved houses went. 

The art of losing isn’t hard to master. 

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, 

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. 

I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster. 

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture 

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident 

the art of losing’s not too hard to master 

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.  

HEALTH AND AGING

Twice in a week.  That's pretty good.  

If you don't admire hypochondria, move along past this one and the next couple. I can't tell what's a healthy preoccupation with my own health, staying health and whole.

Robin pointed out today that my relationship to food is like his relationship to tobacco.  There's some truth in that.  I have a hard time not cleaning the plate.  I binge on food I don't really enjoy.  I over-order at fast food (which I try to avoid, unsuccessfully) and I over-buy healthy food at the farmers' market and Costco and at the grocery stores.  And then it mulches in the mulch bins at the bottom of the refrigerator. But food is an issue for lots of people and my eating is much more episodic than Robin's smoking.  None of what's healthy eating--like the health advantages to smoking tobacco--is news.  It's all in the quantities and proportions.  An average man of sedentary or moderately active habit needs just little over 2000 calories.  Well yesterday I had a milkshake--only the beverage for a good sized lunch from Jack-in-the-Box, my newest favorite neighborhood pusher.  The milkshake--(I'm not sure about the dairy content, actually) was macadamia--so I guess it was local food, and nuts are healthy, right?--was over a thousand calories.  That would be half my dietary alliance. For the day.  But I didn't stop with it, of course.  What is that makes me, or anyone, eat when they're not hungry, don't particularly enjoy what they're consuming, and am not even particularly "down?"  I understand from people who have actually starved that hunger can be actually painful.  But I've not been there.  I've fasted a few times for four or five days.  The trick was to drink plenty and go out into the desert.  The secret of fasting for Jesus or me is to somewhere where there's no food and committing to stay. So here's to a healthy, balanced, ecologically sound, and  ethical diet.

But more what's on my mind is the condition of my hands.  I've had tingling in my hands before--most notably during the AIDS rides and when I was "training" (if I could ever call such desultory riding that) back in the 2000s.  But this time was something else.  July 1st, driving from Derbyshire to Devon, my fingers started to tingle enough that Robin noticed me wiggling and shaking my hands.  He was nervous enough with the driving on the left.  He wasn't approved to drive the rental, was freaked out completely with the mirror-image driving, and is nervous (very nervous) with me in the driver's seat, anyway.  No matter that we both learned to drive in Boston.  No matter that I haven't had an accident (including weeks of driving in New Zealand and England over the years) since 1974.  So of course I was nervous too.  The endless chain or rotaries (in England they're "roundabouts" but I grew up in New England where they still exist as rotaries) didn't help. So at first I chalked my hands up to tension and the long drive.  But then my leg started to hurt. Zinging right down from the heart of my right ass cheek down to the knee. Eventually it extended down my shin, wrapped around my ankle and big my foot like a snake.  And then my toes started going numb. And my wrist hurt, and that extended up my arm almost to my shoulder.  And of course my bum knee hurt like hell from endless walking in London and the country houses that I kept pushing through.  This all continued until I got back to Hawaii.  And then some.  The doctor thought carpal tunnel but was surprised it began on both sides, to pretty much the same degree, simultaneously.  Tests.  maybe Rheumatoid Arthritis, which would have explained a lot.  MRIs (head, lower back), more blood tests (no STIs, no HIV)(and ultimately no Rheumatoid Arthritis.  Off to the neurologist who scheduled an another MRI on the upper back and neck--we know a lot about my spinal chord: it's good, EMG (Electromyography) and told me my legs are fine, my spine is good if a little worn and torn.  "Bad, bad carpal tunnel.", though.  That's apparently a diagnostic term. {More on physicians and diagnostic terms in another post}

So the conservative treatment is to keep wearing the wrist braces I've been wearing for two months, "since most people want to avoid surgery."

"I don't." I explained, heartily.

"Well, let's wait a couple more months."

"Let's do it by the end of the freaking year!" and I educated him about my "'AFFORDABLE' Care" health insurance which costs me 365$ a month with a 6000$ deductible--when I have no income.  I'm determined every procedure I could possibly need in the next ten years is going to come in after my deductible this year.  Nearly there.

"Well give it another month and a half."--"I'll give it a month and a half."--"And no exercise that puts pressure on the wrist."  "And keep the braces on twenty four seven unless you have to take them off for washing or something.""And no biking."

So I'm banking on surgery in December.  What I don't know yet are the drawbacks.  I don't know if it will be arthroscopic.  I image, out of consideration for Robin, that the month of December holds two surgeries a couple of weeks apart.  Still no information about the occurrence in both hands at the same time.  And no word about why the leg issue just disappeared (But I'm counting my blessings and not questioning them too closely.)  Mercifully the pool at Makaha Valley Towers opened almost two weeks ago and treading water for an hour or so every day feels...well...therapeutic.

It always helps to sort of know what's going on and the immediate future is holding. Sort of.

VOLKSWAGEN AND THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CHEATING AND DEFRAUDING

I've driven two VWs in my lifetime.  Both were my father's.  The first was a dark green bug in the late 1960s, and the second was the square back he got to replace the bug in the early '70s.  He loved them both and I did too.  They got good mileage, which somehow mattered even when gas was thirty cents a gallon. They were inexpensive--about half what most entry level cars cost, at least my entry with a 1970 Camaro.  They were nicely engineered, it seemed to me, admittedly a budding humanist with no car skills, but also to my father, an airplane mechanic.  If I'd known how to articulate it then, I would have characterized the VW as precision quality for the working class.  The Camaro didn't not so much. In 1973 three college friends and I took the square back to Kalispell, Montana, for a Christmas break adventure drive across I80.  We never made it.  In the middle of the night, when the rest of us were asleep, the driver dozed and rolled the car beside the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania, knocking around us four boys and scattering and destroying our skis which clattered from the roof rack like so many pick up sticks.  No one was hurt.  Except my father who drove out to reclaim us.  The car was a total loss. My memory of Dad was that he never cried, but I won't forget his shoulders heaving as he bowed his head on his arms along the gutter above the driver's side doors. He never drove a Volkswagen again.

My next experience with the company was when another good college friend got an Audi.  I was clueless enough to miss that it wasn't a working class car, but I knew it was a good one.  In graduate school I drove my Professor's diesel from upstate New York to an exhibition at the Toledo Museum of Art.  My memory of that, beyond the good mileage and comfortable ride for five grad students, was in the middle of the night after the gas station attendant had filled it up when one of us realized that he'd filled it with gasoline instead of diesel.  The attendant had to suck on a rubber tube to siphon the tank and replace it at the station's cost.  The diesel ran cheaply and clean.  That was when diesel was cheaper than gasoline and got great mileage. Volkswagens were distinctive, economical, trustworthy--qualities that showed up in their marketing for the revived "Bug" as pitched, as one commentator pointed out, to aging hippies with its streamlined retro design and cheery, Peter Max-styled graphics.

NowVW is known as the company that "cheated."  VW--whomever that is--built software into the car's operating system that deliberately falsified data detailing the diesel car's emissions and mileage.  Something that the NPR reporter said bothered me.  She repeatedly stated that the company "cheated."  Like VW had taken a test and got the answers out of the regulator's desk.  Or incorporated somebody's software, or spark plug as their own. As an educator, I'm familiar with the concept. Passing off someone else's work as one's own. As a lifelong, but casual Patriot's fan, I'm acutely aware of inflation and deflation in more than trivial, economic terms. But it didn't feel quite right in the face of revelations about VW's deceptions.  I couldn't reconcile VW's corporate responsibility with cheating.  The CEO said he was "endlessly sorry."  I'll bet. He promised to work to regain consumer trust.  Good luck with that.  When did he become sorry?  Is the company sorry?  What does that even mean? It's a symptom of the corporatization of the Western World that the spokesperson almost certainly has--and will take--no personal responsibility.  And without personal responsibility, any responsibility will effervesce and evaporate like so many gas bubbles.

Cheating is when you pass off a car, most of the parts of which are made in East Asia as "American." Cheating is when governments secretly subsidize the production of cars produced in their country to give an unfair market advantage.  What VW--people at VW--engineers and supervisors and their supervisors--did was promise one thing and deliver another.  Their engineers  (and at the very lest the software and the internal combustion engineers and their keepers, and their keepers, colluded at promising one level of performance while deliberately delivering another.  It just added injury to insult that the level of performance that VW promised was so peculiarly identified with its brand.  VWs promises were hardly verifiable. Before World War II a good mechanic could figure out what was wrong with a misbehaving car and how to fix it.  Things became more complicated in the 60s and 70s as parts became less and less interchangeable--the hallmark of American industry.  More and more specialized knowledge, and particular manufactures, are essential for parts and service.  For the last fifteen years, a humanist could barely hope to change the oil let alone understand the operational workings of new cars.  In short, we have to take the word of the corporation--which has it's own concerns and demands keeping up with the running of the country.  It's claims aren't verifiable.  And most people could care less.  And here I'm talking not just about VW.  Volkswagen is hardly alone, and I don't think for a minute   that other automobile manufacturers aren't delivering what they say they are. We don't know what's in our hotdogs let alone our dietary supplements or TV dinners. And we couldn't hope to understand thew workings of our cars without a degree in engineering.  Or an MBA. This fraud was not perpetrated by mid level engineers who wrote some code to save their bosses some bucks.

My Grandparents and their car in the 1930s - He could fix it (but he was an engineer).

What Volkswagen did was pretend to do one thing--produce the image of a car that appealed to our feel good concern with our environment in the vaguest possible terms--and deliver another--a car that had the power and comfort the Western public has come to demand.  By a software sleight of hand, Volkswagen delivered to the Western world a vehicle that made them feel good about their corrupting addiction to fossil fueled transportation (and I certainly am aware that I keep that company).  They defrauded the consumer by making it pay for one clean thing and delivering another, just as dirty as ever.

I said it was a slow boat.  I'm trying again.  This time not restricting myself, but writing about things that are important to me as they come to me.  This will touch on art, film, books, travel, Hawaii, my family, politics, gay subjects and, mostly likely meditations on my meditations on the Bible that I read every day--the Psalms in Latin, the Old Testament and New Testament readings in the King James, and the gospels in French (using the lectionary for the daily office in the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer. Let's see whom I can manage to piss off without meaning to.  I'm gay.  I consider myself an orthodox Christian (though I don't fit in very well with most "Christian institutions" which is why I'm an Episcopalian.  I'm a left wing democrat.  I believe in conservative fiscal responsibility.  I'm a cheery depressive, and manage to find the flaws in all those things that I love best without loving them any less.  Here we go.