The Search for Beauty

Such exquisite beauty and sadness in the world.  

It is the knife that pierces my heart most cleanly, 

two sides of one blade.  It may manifest through 

music, literature, or the visual arts motivating my 

attempts to participate in it as best I can, whether

strumming on a guitar and trying not to strain 

while singing or maybe writing something that 

I hope moves someone or taking a photograph 

to capture the same sad but beautiful effect.  

I see these images everywhere and everywhen.

I would love to be a great writer or musician

but it is the visual aspect that comes most 

effortlessly to me and the eye of my heart.

And whatever it is it has to be enough for now.

I am old enough to have squandered too much

time in the pursuit of pleasurable things that 

are transient and too easily attained without 

the single-mindedness needed for greatness.

***

December Sunday

The drive to and from work
on a dreary December Sunday
when the world has died or
at least gone into a deep slumber.

The tall weeds and slender trees
flow by gray-brown and naked
while flocks of birds fly from
place to place listless and cold.

A time to be alone and enclosed in
my shiny red box, coming or going,
a peaceful bit of purgatory before
reaching either heaven or hell.

***

The Train

 

My grandpa loved trains and when I see them on occasion I think of him.  He was a peculiar man, possibly even eccentric.  He spent the last half of his eighty years divorced from my grandma and living as a single man, working as a janitor, and habitating in various rented spaces before transitioning to a nursing home when dementia set in in his seventies.  

He was gruff, especially to women and children, but as I grew older I began to appreciate him more.  Like all of us, he was who he was and had been formed by forces mostly outside of his control.  He boiled Quaker oats on the stove top every morning and added a pinch of salt.  Lunch and supper were always accompanied by a slice of buttered white bread.  

He kept to his rituals until the inexorableness of his cognitive decline robbed him of them.  I visited him at the nursing home when I could.  I would take my college books down there to work on assignments and study.  I don’t think he knew who I was but seemed appreciative of the company and sometimes unexpected wisdom would manifest in his lost thoughts.

I won’t lie, there was a very attractive nurse there that made it easier to spend time with him.  She and I lived in two completely different social spheres but it was nice to see her smile.  I once challenged my grandpa to a race down her wing.  I took off running half in jest  but when I looked around he was right on my tail.  Her lovely eyes registered surprise if not alarm.

And the train has come a long way since then.  I watch it speed over my head on the way home.  A lifetime of change and choices have come and gone like those coupled railroad cars flying by.  I wonder where they are headed at such breakneck speed?  I sometimes wish life would slow down and let me catch my breath so I can remember who I am.  

***

The Moving Monolith

 

It’s familiar yet alien 

with the caring coming

through in solid stone.

Somewhat like Ray’s 

mysterious Martians 

hapless to time and 

desecration by men

who visit and forget

kindness due to fear.

A lesson we would

do well to learn and

burn into our brains.

***

Attack of the Santa Clones

 

The diminutive Santa clones had attacked Grandma Dee in the run up to Christmas.  

They marched in columns down the alley forming dark parallel lines through the frost and surrounded the back porch with malice in their beady eyes.  Their sparkling artificial eyebrows and mustaches caught the slanting rays of the morning sun as they stood breathless and bearded portending something ominous.

Grandma Dee was busy in the kitchen prepping food for the holiday when she spied them through the window.  “What the heck?” she mumbled as she dried her hands on her apron.  “Ain’t nobody got time for that!”  Family and guests would be arriving later that afternoon.

With a determined look in her eye she tied up her housecoat and slid a large carving knife out of its holder.  On the elevated back porch she waved it around and told the clones in no uncertain terms they should turn around and go back to wherever they came from.

When that didn’t work she waddled down the steps and charged into their ranks, knife flashing in the sun, her slippers stomping and kicking as she went.  Little red bodies converged only to be dispersed by the irate woman intent on saving the holiday from certain disaster.  “For the grandkids!” she bellowed.

Later when the guests arrived and Grandma Dee  had changed into something more presentable they marveled at her Christmas lights and decorations that covered every conceivable surface.  And from the rafters hung with care were several shiny Santa heads.

The Lord provides indeed.

***

STATION ELEVEN

January 5th, 2022

STATION ELEVEN is a new post-apocalyptic series on HBO Max based on an award winning SciFi novel of the same name.

I have been captivated by these type of stories since I was a teenager when there was so much I did not understand about the wider world and what dangers might lurk there.  Post-apocalyptic stories were a way for me to explore some of these dangers from the safety of my bedroom.  If I were to look for metaphors of what an apocalypse might be and what follows it I could do worse than to see it as that transition from the stability and comforts of home as a child to being exiled into the unknown territory of adulthood where one must begin to make one’s own way in the world, sink or swim.  It is simultaneously an exhilarating and terrifying prospect that involves finding seemingly radical new ways to adapt.

My transition was extremely bumpy and protracted to the point my mother despaired that I might be that “failure to launch” scenario.  I threw myself into impossible situations to see how I would respond with varying degrees of success and failure.  This included changing my major in college at least three times, changing colleges, dropping out of college and joining the Army during the first Gulf War, ending up in Korea for two years, returning to finish college and then globetrotting for a bit.  I did not lock into a trajectory as such until a decade after graduating from high school when I was accepted to medical school.  At that point I felt I was finally moving into what my metaphor might consider the post post-apocalyptic period.

And STATION ELEVEN hits all the sweet spots for me.  A pandemic sweeps the planet with a one in one thousand survival rate.  I read today that it was developed (and two of the episodes filmed) pre-pandemic so its release has been coincidental to our own pandemic woes, but everything hits so much harder now that we are in the midst of our own.  The characters that emerge are distorted by it just like we are seeing now, bringing out both the best and the worst in us in how we adapt to this new situation.

At the heart of the series is a comic book entitled “STATION ELEVEN” that features a mysterious character in a blue space suit who lives on an abandoned space station and is known as “Dr. Eleven”.  Yesterday I was wearing my PAPRs (powered air-purifying respirator) to see a Covid patient and it struck me that my appearance was not unlike Dr. Eleven.  So, of course, I took a selfie and cosplayed myself into the STATION ELEVEN universe, imagining I’m in one of those stories I love so much.

***

 

Fade to Gray

***

Mixed emotions

Dead devotions

Empty oceans

I 

Fade to gray

Posthumous Letter to KVJ

 

Hello Kurt, you probably don’t remember me but we met at a high school somewhere in Indianapolis.  I was the teenager with a copy of Cat’s Cradle and a pen trying to get you to autograph it.  There was no Security present so my friends and I simply ambushed you at the back stage door.  You were smoking a cigarette (nothing you'd blink your eye at inside a building in the mid-80’s).  I wish I’d made a better impression.  You looked irritated.  I understand that now.  The cult of celebrity is a mixed blessing at best, a perpetual curse at worst.  

I remember it was a cold and wet evening in late Fall.  We drove up from Mitchell, Indiana.  The only thing I can still remember about your talk these 36 years later is that you were mad as hell at Ronald Reagan and his bombing of Libya.  At the time I was a Reagan fanboy and your words left me conflicted.  I understand it better now.  My “big brain” has processed quite a bit more information since then and I’ve had opportunity to travel the globe learning some humility and maybe even grace.  Blessings to you wherever you are [3 words here].

Aaron

***

The Birth of Impressionism?

 

Having taken a few photos through my rain-soaked windshield this morning and run them through a paint app the thought struck me just now… what if the impressionist style of painting began in just such a way? It would have been a Bob Ross “happy accident” on steroids.

Stay with me. A glass maker who also happens to be an avid painter is carrying a pane of glass to fix a friend’s window. As he walks with it in hand and held in front of him an unexpected downpour hits and he finds himself in a so-called sunshower and the glass covered with water.

At first he is a little put off but then he sees the landscape before him through the glass in brilliant swirls and mottled colors that takes his breath away. The world and his perception of it has been utterly transformed and he is not sure that he’s ever seen something so beautiful!

He immediately turns himself around and hurries home in a kind of daze leaving the glass behind. At his house he begins dabbing heavy blotches of bright colored paint over a staid landscape he had been working on and transforms it into something never seen before.

Impressionism is born!

***

Blood Moon

 

Blood moon 

mood more

bleed soon

heart sore

sad tune

slam door

rock hewn

love poor

sand dune

far shore

never noon

night lore.

***

The Lonely Persimmon

 

It’s a lonely time of year

for unfallen persimmons.

I respect their tenacity

to ward off the inevitable

but it makes me sad none

theless, a spot of orange

against a gray & sullen sky.

***

Kevin’s Friends

 

I’ve had a large art folder with some of Kevin McCarty’s charcoal sketches stored away in a closet for over a decade and I’ve been meaning to pull them out and put them in their poster protectors. The few times I’ve stumbled upon this folder it has always seemed like there would be time at a later date to make it happen. Well, today is finally that day.

As I’ve handled them I realize the paper has thinned and dried out into a brittle dark beige that is turning brown in spots. The poster protectors that they were meant to be placed in have sat unused and still shrink-wrapped with the sketches all these years. None too soon I have unwrapped them and carefully slipped the large pieces of sketch paper between the thin particle board back and clear plastic cover.

The thing that stands out to me is that three of the four sketches are of one person. The remaining one is of three people in various stages of completion sitting in chairs and at a counter. I recognize the setting as The Country Shed which was a greasy spoon restaurant in Marion, Indiana where the locals hung out but was torn down when the bypass was expanded.

Initially I did not realize the three men in separate sketches were the same person, but then on closer inspection it became clear: beard, large glasses, baseball cap, dark sleeveless shirt, and coffee cup. The different iterations looked different to me because he is drawn from three different angles. This kind of sketching was typical for Kevin in preparing to create an oil painting. It allowed him to understand what he was seeing with his one weakened eye and lack of depth perception that most are afforded by virtue of having two eyes. Maybe even more important than the visual aspects was the process itself which gave him time to talk to his subjects and get to know them on a more personal level.

I’m sure for Kevin it was a win-win situation. He loved talking to people and could spend hours going back and forth about any number of topics though he had a preference for existential questions. I never specifically asked him about it but as someone who has knowledge about retinoblastoma and sarcomas from medical school I wondered if his elevated risk for cancer recurrence as an adult and related increase in mortality was always somewhere in the back of his mind.

And here I sit at this desk surrounded by his long hidden works trying to give them their due. His eye has become my eyes trying to understand this man from decades passed when The Country Shed was a place to experience the connections that bind us all together.

Kramer’s Kronicles and Kollege

 

When my son was in elementary school he liked to write stories from time to time in his school notebooks and even illustrate them with drawings.  Some were required for school but others were done just for fun.  Early on he would weave in elements of Minecraft that he played on my old iPad.  We still laugh about his main character charging into a cave of zombies sword-in-hand with the cry “FOR LIFE!” 

He drew ideas from TV, especially reality shows that would cut off at some particularly thrilling point for commercials in cliffhanger fashion.  He picked up on this notion and would end some of his chapters or sections of a story with an element of acute danger or excitement that forced the reader to pause but then continue on reading in anticipation of a resolution.

And as he went from grade to grade his tastes changed.  He had a scary story phase somewhere around 3^rd and 4^th grade and then was coming up with ideas for sports-related stories in 5^th and 6^th grade which reflected his experiences of competing on baseball and basketball teams.

To encourage this early on I created a blog site for him called “Kramer’s Kronicles” which was a riff on his middle name and Ray Bradbury’s “The Martian Chronicles”.  I would take his hand written stories and type them into the blog and then get his ideas about possible pictures to illustrate them if possible.  These stories became few and far between as he progressed into middle school despite my encouraging him to keep writing.

At some point I imagined he was done with all of that as a passing childhood fancy but it lingered in the form of high school writing assignments.  In this context he would sometimes come home excited about things his English teacher would say about things he’d written.  His attitude was always one of astonishment that he had the ability to create something compelling from the words he would write.  This recently found a kind of culmination in his personal essay for his college application.  It was well thought out and emotionally charged in a way that I can only imagine caught the attention of College Admissions and helped him get an early acceptance letter from his favorite college this past weekend.

And so here I am thinking of those early years of Kramer’s Kronicles and an idea has formed in my head of an image that combines a picture I took of him over the weekend at a college visit and a Martian landscape as imagined by the great SciFi artist Michael Whelan for Ray Bradbury’s “The Martian Chronicles”.  It is a visual “kronicle” of the journey my son has made over, around, and through many obstacles to find himself at a point that was hardly imaginable all those years ago.

***

The Fall King

 

I am the Fall King 

regal, autumnal 

covered in the 

reds and golds 

of sharp-shaped

leaves yet crowned

with rounded ones

that glow in 

the magic hour.

***

The Caves

In a cave I may already be dead,

prematurely placed under the 

earth to wander in darkness.

I’ve had a long held fear of

being buried alive, yet the 

cool silence called my name.

As a teen we explored one 

hidden under a tree on some

farmer’s land, lowered by a rope.

I wore snoopy sunglasses just

for fun, as if it wasn’t dark 

enough, proving nothing.

Another time it was water-

filled passageways, clinging

to the walls, my flashlight lost.

Yet we continued on with 

only one flashlight between us

suppressing a flickering fear.

And then that time of crawling

flat, the ceiling touching my back 

squeezing me out of existence.

But then in the end there was 

always the sun to return to 

and warm us back to life.

***

“Where the Ditches are Deep”

This was a fascinating case I saw in the hospital several years ago of a man in his 30’s who had no previous psychiatric diagnosis, but had likely suffered from a psychotic illness complicated by drug use for most of his adult life. He was unique in the sense that he used drugs to see “real things” which to me sounded like hallucinations and paranoid delusions. When these types of things occurred apart from drug use he took that as further proof of the objective existence of the things he was seeing and experiencing. It was enough that he was perceiving them for it to be true and in the story below he seemed to suggest that other people saw these things too.

***

In his own words: 

When I was a little boy my mother would invite people over and do drugs with them in our house. They would start acting weird. One guy would be peeking out through the curtains and say “there’s someone out there.” Another one would be on his hands and knees trying to pick things out of the carpet. I wanted to know if what they were seeing was real. So when I got the opportunity as I got older I started using all kinds of drugs to try and see what they saw. I was not trying to get high. I wanted to see for myself if what they were seeing and experiencing was real. I want to tell you about something that happened to me so you will understand.

I was in a barber shop with some friends, well it was a tattoo shop, and Homey had some spice. He took a hit and then passed it to me. I took a hit and then passed it to Walter who was applying a tattoo to a woman customer’s leg. He then passed it back to Homey. Something changed and I saw Walter’s face looking down in shock at the work he was doing as the tattoo lifted off her leg and evaporated like smoke. He was real shook up and laid down his inking gun. He left the shop quickly and I followed him because I had seen it too. It was real. I found myself outside in a dark place where the ditches are deep.

I walked down the street and turned right at the corner. From there I could see my Grandmother’s back porch and my uncle was sitting on it. As I approached he was looking at me but not saying a word. The door was open next to him as if he were waiting for me to go in. I walked into the house and it felt like a dark form had followed me in. My Grandmother became upset and said, “What did you bring in here with you?” I suddenly felt like I was a little boy again and was in trouble, like she was going to spank me or something.

Then I noticed her little dog and I saw it transform into a snake creature and rise up. It came at me and I put my hands together like a fist and smashed them down onto the floor. The mirror, a glass coffee table, and the picture frames on the walls shattered from the force. It was real. I saw it myself. My uncle grabbed me and tried to hold me, yelling “What is wrong with you?!”

***

The most striking thing for me in this story that he told was his description of the dark place where “the ditches are deep.” This seems to me to be a telling metaphor of someone struggling with mental illness - whether depression, anxiety, or the inability to distinguish reality from unreality. In my psychiatric residency at Walter Reed it was described to me by a young African-American woman on the inpatient psychiatric unit who said it was like being trapped in a nightmare where “I don’t know what is real and what is not real.” Everyone goes off the road at times but for some the consequences are significantly more catastrophic. The ditches are deep indeed.

Cries in the Library

 

The baying of a wounded beast 

is simply the peripatetic cries of

a child in this largish library.  It 

must be in the vaulted main hall

as it echoes and resonates then

winds through porous spaces of

of rows and rows of books lined

on metal and wooden shelves to

find me sitting at a table with a

copy of The Martian Chronicles.

I wonder at its wounding, what 

makes it cry so inconsolably.

Maybe a trip to Mars would set

the child at ease but I’ve heard

it’s not the kind of place to raise

your kids, in fact it’s cold as hell.

Well, maybe just a journey in the 

safety of one’s mind then, OK?

But the ability to read is still far

off in this unhappy child’s future.

***

Anne says “Write at least one page per day”.

A page of prose, just for practice.  Keep on writing, keep on writing, keep on writing.  Ok, that’s cheating but I’ve still got a long way to go.  Anne Lamott said I should do it and that’s enough for me, but she didn’t say how to do it exactly.  Well, she may have said something about using memories but I don’t remember exactly.  Ho boy, I’m in trouble.  

This brings to mind a line from STATION ELEVEN that I love dearly and hits deep: “I remember damage”.  By the way, I started a new paragraph and I’m not sure if that’s cheating because it creates a blank line with no words.  Oh well, on we go.  What damage can I remember?  

The first thing that comes to mind is when I was four years old and we were living in Knightstown, IN.  We had some people over from church and there was an adult male who I really adored for his warm smile and encouraging tone towards me.  I think he was a bit older than my Dad.  We were in the front living room on a couch with other kids, probably his kids, and I had the honor of sitting on his leg like a bench as funny things were being said, people were laughing,  and I was in the sweet spot of feeling loved and accepted.  And then it happened.

I unexpectedly let out a four year old’s fart which surprised me because I didn’t feel it coming.  This man’s expression went from warmth and humor to anger and disgust in a split second as he lifted me out of his lap, “Oh you stink!”.  It was so sudden and so shocking I felt tears welling up and I ran out of the room, devastated.  I just couldn’t believe he would respond like that.  I’d never even seen him frown before.

Maybe this was my first experience of the loss of innocence in a wider world.  Sure, I knew my Mom yelled and was upset with me A LOT, but this man was something different or so I’d believed.  Some time later as an adult I told this story to my Mom and she said “Well, you did fart in his lap”.  But even so, I think about how I would have handled that situation and I’d like to think I would have made it into something humorous; something that would not have embarrassed the child or made him feel bad about himself.  It’s important to keep in mind that young children are emotionally fragile to a great degree and look to us adults to embody a kind of goodness, positivity, and stability in the world, not going off half-cocked.

So that was a memory and one of several pre-kindergarten ones.  I’m still writing and the bottom of the page is getting closer but not as close as I thought it would be after sharing that memory.  Do I need to find a second memory?  How about the time I was three and our back yard flooded with about two inches of water?  The grass stood up straight with the  support of the water and made the most peculiar of sensations on my chubby little feet as I walk-waded through it.  I could see the sky and the trees reflected in it like a giant mirror laid out flat.  It was magical, but this was also the house that held a scene of horror and it was a house we did not live in very long.

It was a summer’s day and my Mom’s Mom was visiting us.  They were going to take my older sister to the store with them and I wanted to go as well.  I was at the end of the hall in the bathroom when I heard the front door close and realized I was being left behind.  I finished my business as quick as I could and then threw open the bathroom door and ran down the hall as fast as I could.  I made a hard left at the front living room and barreled towards the glass storm door.  I hit it hard with both hands and instead of it opening  the glass shattered and I flew through it and landed on the concrete porch.  They came running back to see what had happened and found me sitting there amongst the broken glass with my arms cut and bleeding.

So that was that and this is this: one full page of writing under my belt for today.  And now that I think of it there are numerous memories of me getting hurt growing up from any number of ill-conceived actions and misadventures, but that is writing for another day.  

One page!  Done!  Thanks to Anne Lamott and “Bird by Bird” for helping make it so.

***

The Pandemic Blues

 

September 2021

These are stressful times and people deal with stress in different ways.

For some it is basically intolerable and so denial is used in great measure to hide one’s self away.  “Ignore it and it will go away.”  The problem with this is that there are real dangers that will not disappear if we don’t look at them and pretend they do not exist.  This is how one potentially sleep walks off of a cliff.

With so much insecurity and uncertainty in times like these there are also those who look for absolute assurances and certainties to steady their boat (it’s very similar to denial in that they are mostly illusions we create).  Everything becomes black and white.  One must be all right while others are all wrong.  It is easy to become impervious to any counterargument or information that contradicts our chosen absolute narrative.  This seems to be particularly true when it comes to our present political divide.  

It can be reassuring, but it is also intellectually lazy and opens one up to being unnecessarily ignorant.  And in the case of a pandemic, possibly dead.

***

Reading Anne Lamott

 

The hat, the cup,

the letter to Mom

The iPad, the book,

the lack of some-

thing to say, can 

Anne lead the way?

“Bird by Bird”

that’s the word.

Something she said

or so I’ve heard.

***

Bradbury at the Library

 

I am sitting at a table on the second floor of Dublin’s main library.  It is a new building with an architectural flair that is futuristic in style.  Looking through the portals that pretend to be windows I see rooftops of houses and buildings that remind me of the ill-fated landings on Mars in Ray Bradbury’s “The Martian Chronicles”.

The rocket lands and the crew is shocked to find what looks to be a small American town with houses that are connected to their pasts.  It is familiar yet strange and wholly disconcerting considering this is what they left on Earth only to find mirrored on Mars.  It is one of several connected short stories that comprise the book.

And it is pure genius.  Never mind it envisions Mars as having a breathable atmosphere.  It is told in such a way that we gladly set aside our incredulity to be immersed in something so beautifully bizarre, so magnificently melancholy.  “They made their way to the outer rim of the dreaming dead city in the light of the racing twin moons.” 

As is the case repeatedly throughout human history we bring our sins with us and spoil what we touch.  It is the myth of the rugged individual which fails to understand we are persons fully and essentially interconnected.  It is the first murder when Cain kills his brother Abel and looks to blame God.  We are our brother’s keeper, even Martian ones.

***

Memories of Moscow

 

There was no one to go with me to Russia

so I flew alone on an Aeroflot flight at the

invitation of a Russian friend who was a 

choral conductor and fledgling composer.

He lived on the edge of Moscow in an old

apartment with high ceilings and a hallway

full of bookshelves on which I found a small

book of short stories by William Saroyan.

During the day he would go to his work and

school while I wandered the city with young

legs primed for exploration and a packed

lunch to walk the necessary paces.

***

There was a beautiful gate to Red Square that

incorporated a small chapel having services 

so I paused to pray and spied a young monk

making an exaggerated sign of the cross.

Our Lady of Kazan church sat just past the gate

on the square’s edge and I saw a young mother

use a McDonald’s napkin to cover her head in 

order to gain entrance to an unfolding liturgy.

The singing was transcendent, the iconography 

covered every conceivable surface, and a 

priest used a horsetail whip to sling holy

water through a crowd of mysterious smiles.

The Gospels were brought out bound in gold

and held aloft with the intoning of prayers 

while two elderly women stepped forward and

bowed to provide their backs as a living lectern.

***

St. Basil’s Cathedral sat at the far end 

of the square in light, opposing the grimness 

of Lenin’s tomb which was tucked up under 

the wall of the Kremlin hiding from the sun.

My Russian friend spoke fluent Spanish but 

was less confident in his English when he 

tried to describe St. Basil’s to me and asked 

if I knew what the word “milagro” meant.

***