Confusion or Clarity?

Interesting week/weekend thusfar. My brain feels full.

I just got back from a poetry festival – I saw, but ultimately missed (as in did not meet up with) several old faces, the director of the festival excepted. With the beard and the short hair, protected by strong backlighting, I went unnoticed in the audience. So I got to observe while relatively unobserved. The community the reading took place in is drastically white, mid-to-upper class, or able to fake it so well it makes no difference, which I think has some bearing on my mood and my subsequent comments.

I usually applaud leftist/humanistic efforts, especially ones which are communicative in the sense that they seek to educate. I guess I still do. The poems were good, but kept looking abroad in an effort to be cultured, kept on the fence in an effort not to be polemic. But I’m not sure, that as a country or a people, we’ve needed either for years. 

I think the past few years have crystallized a number of things for me – how I look at our nation as a set of interlocking cultures, how I view poetry’s place in that dynamic, how I view the law (and the myths of justice) informing that dynamic, and how I view the various knee jerk assumptions about how people thing and feel and act and decide.

Certainly I had opinions on such things before I went to law school, but now I feel as though I have a different perspective on them, a different vocabulary with which to express myself. And yet the dialog which would be required to express my reservations and concerns would be so lengthy, so tangled, the thought of beginning such a project is wearisome.  It’s not like I have time to burn at this point. 

So I’ll just throw out some piecemeal examples, as seen through the lens of the poems I heard, and the reactions to them which I witnessed. For example, while some of the poems read focused on the humanistic and healing interactions between the poetic narrator and the dying, my thoughts turned to my clients who have died, or those who were denied opportunities for such fundamentally compelling human interaction – the roots of which run far beyond whatever discrete thing landed them in their most immediate troubles. They run back to the circumstances of their birth, the abuses and indignities they suffer(ed), their lack of opportunities in an oppressively materialistic culture, and any other number of burdens, of costs they bear due to how we structure our country and ourselves.  So a poem that unquestioningly incorporates all the architectures of privilege (plane flights to visit the dying and so forth) and so suggesting that such moral/human interactions are only a matter of personal will, of individual resolve, shortchanges so many of us who are structurally barred from such an understanding or interaction. 
 

Why do we need to lament, in poetry, without a call for concrete action, our tragedies abroad, when so many here suffer unnoticed? 

Why write cautionary poems about global warming in front of a relatively privileged audience who probably couldn’t even bother to carpool, yet alone bicycle out to hear such a warning? 

And of course, as suggested, I find myself lost in the irony of it all.

I just found out an old friend, whom my heart is still a bit tangled over, got hit by a car while cycling on her work commute. (I expect a full recovery (there was surgery) but this is distressing without even considering some oddball complications that the brain turns to.) This is a person who cares enough about these issues to actually *do something* about them with her life; the cycling is just one extension of that. 

I myself bear any number of secrets and confidences and confidences from my clients, many of which stem from the brutality of poverty (material, spiritual, and intellectual poverty) which we as a society conspire to conceal so well, daily. If it’s repudiated in the occasional mentally disturbed and homeless beggar who wanders into an area where she is unwelcome, how all the more disturbing for most.

I’d like to take people on tours of my various worlds. Sometimes I think everyone knows already – how could one not? But I’m often shocked when it comes down to concretely discussing “how it is” with people – they often know far more or far less than I’ve assumed. 

And yet I don't complain of the poetry - better that than nothing at all. 

**

I’m not really sure if this is a complaint or not. I think it’s not. It’s just been an overwhelming weekend.

In addition to (or underlying) all the churning thoughts stirred up by the small and insular poetry world (a current/former world of mine which I have not visited in a bit, sort of like a birth town one has moved from but visits every third winter holiday), recently a whole host of things came into the small space I’ve wrangled for myself, space I had a few (probably misguided) plans for.

I got some bad family news. Which will work itself out as it must. But still. Ugh. Fucking ugh. 

Some of that news interlocks and reminds me of (overtly) the friend who was hit by the car – so while both situations are not all that far from my mind, they're getting poked about in even odder ways.

Another old friend made a distant appearance. Her father faces (absurdly!) a jail sentence – I will try to get what wheels turning I can, dig up some info.

I also picked up one of my most tragic clients this week. Not sure what I’m going to do with this ultimately, but at least I have a game plan.  This is also kind of linked in to all of the above.

**

It’s odd that I’m getting my mind and heart tangled up in the distant. I think because I feel (rightly or wrongly) somehow judged wanting by their lives, and my own in relation to them. Not that I’m unhappy with my own in isolation – I am. While I’m at peace with my own small joys and troubles, my own odd everythingness, while I actually like the fullness of myself, I’m still oddly open and raw and prone to being unsettled by the problems of everyone I care about. Why is that?

**

And lest this seem a total downer of a post, I remind myself that there’s good news in California and Canada.

I was wished a Happy Robbie Burns Day (spent the day in court but had a quiet toast to the Bard in the evening) by a genuinely good guy who is about to get married to a dear young woman.  I will try to visit them in the upcoming summer, as I will be (boo!) unable to go dog-sledding with them as part of their wedding festivities.   

I also got stuff done, client-wise, and have enough space to go on the attack for my guys and my ladies. 

I had a great afternoon with TLF – though she’s a bit heart-broken right now; we walked on the beach, heard some poetry (see above), were thwarted in our attempt to play chess, and made friends with a lizard.

I also spent some time chilling with another unmonikered friend, who has a similar philosophy to mine about the law and social justice. You’d think that’d be easy to find in a PDs office – but there are huge differences, even here.

Also, I should remind myself that of all my friends going through troubles (or dealing with the pains of those they love), the two I mentioned above (car and father) are some of the smartest and most tenacious people I know – it’s good to know they’re out in world, doing what they do, regardless of if that takes them from me. There are so many, unfortunately, who just stop fighting or ground themselves into trivialities. But not them.

And in closing, for I’d like this to mark the end of the past week/span and the beginning of another, I just learned this morning that another old friend has moved here, to my new city. Which I think is pretty cool, though we have yet to find out as we parted ways both badly and somewhat confusingly. So perhaps it’s presumptuous to name her a friend, although I’d like to treat her as one.

There may have been some etheric rumblings over the move, as the night before I heard from her, I got a bunch of grapes stamped on the back of my hand and so thought of her.   Some people have associations, others embody symbols – and if I ever found a Dionysian, she’d be the one.  She’s also one of the few rare talents I’ve ever met. Among the hapless, I’ve met people who are skilled in many ways, but few genuine talents – where what someone does and makes in the world runs deeply from and into their souls. I’ll admit that I’m now curious as hell to know what she’s been up to.

**
P.S.  Another good thing in the world.  When I posted this, I had some photos sent from my cousin and his intended - they have a tradition of turning their shared birthday into a fund-raiser for local charity. No gifts, just a party at a local establishment and donaitons in lieu of.  How great is that?  My soon-to-be  cousin-in-law is so loved by our family - we're not dumb, and neither is my cousin.