Good morning August morning. At 7:15 AM it promises to be another impossibly hot and steamy day in Baton Rouge, Louisiana on August 18, 2005. Last evening at around eight I stood in my little patio and read the thermometer and it registered an impossible 98 degrees. How we survive this is amazing. My electricity bill was $744 last month for this office-home we live in, and I am having Entergy come out to check my meter, for this was a record bill in my recollection. How did we stand this before air conditioning?
Speaking of heat, when Tom (my youngest at 17 two years ago) went to Europe, there was a record heat wave. I took the picture above of Vesuvius from Pompeii.
Yesterday I wrote a lengthy Rant about life and livingness, when someone called and asked for me to check my mail. When I returned my Rant was gone! Obliviated! Kaput! Mort! Murdered by its silly thoughtless unsaving father! I would try to replicate but the mood is gone and I am on to something else right now.
All of my life I have tried to avoid "growing up"--firming up my world in a tight package of rightness and wrongness so that it's frequency would vibrate along the same wave-length of those around me. I visited the world of man any number of times, trying to understand and fit in, but each time found myself struggling for air like a drowning man, or an asthmatic, and had to come up for air. I know they, who live there, know I am not one of them and some tolerate me in their space and some want me out immediately, for I think I remind them of their lost childhood or what may be plain honesty. Straddling the two universes pulled me into man's world because I must feed myself, and where I prefer to be is where there are no true horizons but are where I, the child, return to know the joy of the moment rather than the concern for the future.
This thread developed this morning when I read the following poem. I get a daily poem from The Poem Hunter, and sometimes they ring a bell. So I am stealing it, hoarding it for myself, and now sharing it, dear reader.
Remember, I Remember
I Remember, I Remember
I remember, I remember
The house where I was born,
The little window where the sun
Came peeping in at morn;
He never came a wink too soon
Nor brought too long a day;
But now, I often wish the night
Had borne my breath away.
I remember, I remember
The roses red and white,
The violets and the lily cups--
Those flowers made of light!
The lilacs where the robin built,
And where my brother set
The laburnum on his birthday,--
The tree is living yet!
I remember, I remember
Where I was used to swing,
And thought the air must rush as fresh
To swallows on the wing;
My spirit flew in feathers then
That is so heavy now,
The summer pools could hardly cool
The fever on my brow.
I remember, I remember
The fir-trees dark and high;
I used to think their slender tops
Were close against the sky:
It was a childish ignorance,
But now 'tis little joy
To know I'm farther off from Heaven
Than when I was a boy.
Thomas Hood
I wrote one somewhat like that when I was 55, and it still applies today to me at 70.
A Boy Forever
He wakes
And there are
Things to do
And see and feel
And be and have
Oh yes, the morning rushes
At him and he tries
To take it all in
But he is disappointed
For he gets only some
And he wants it all
He hurls himself
Headlong into the day
With occasional total stops
To dawdle
And dream
And sense the fragrance
Of the moment
Or a leaf in the wind.
He wonders
At 70
If he will ever become a man
Grown
Doing man things
To detach himself
From these sorties
Into whimsy
To be satisfied
With serious solidity.
At seventy he wonders when he will
Create the thing
He is to create
Dream the perfect dream
To be the who, the what
To do that which
Is supposed to be done.
A boy forever?
What is real?
He questions the category.
He only wants to be himself
Whoever
Whatever that is
Yet the gnawing to do is there
To make something happen
To make the pictures
To sing the songs
To watch the very greatest bubble
Shimmer and iridesce
And explode into a zillion
Rainbow droplets of honeyed kisses
Is manhood when
The thing has been done
And one can quit
Or is it when
One has quit
From failure to do it
Or be it
Or have it?
To quit the game
Because of winning
Or losing it?
Is a boy to play
And a man to stop?
A boy to live
And a man to quit
And die.
Oh let me be a boy forever!
I have joined the world of man for a while, and yet hold a thin reed to the surface to occasionally suck in a little of that world I have abandoned to truck with economic need and also to see just how well I can play this game. I think perhaps the Supreme Court recognized me, an alien, a foreigner, a trespasser, in their midst; one who considers that every man is basically good---and a child too---but having abandoned and gone into treason on their own basicness, couldn't abide one who refuses to give in and give up. I grieve for them for their lost childhood that is still haunting them.
It it now 8:00 and I have missed my trip to the gym and that wonderful steam room that does such wonder to my body. But I have written something!!! And this trip back to my homeworld only let me view the outskirts, but it is still there. I crave to go back to the meadows and mountains and slopes and the cries of the loons on the lakes of my mind. It is always there, like the poem by my favorite poet,
Poem lyrics of The Lake Isle Of Innisfree by William Butler Yeats. I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,William Butler Yeats
The Lake Isle Of Innisfree
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the mourning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.
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