Rant Du Jour

Why I like some poetry

Poetry, so what?  Prose distillate, power packed words, words lying on the page in three dimension.

Command Influence and what really happened in real life

I wrote a novel, Command Influence,about a young First Lieutenant JAG officer who got in trouble from the first hour he appeared at his first assignment and stayed in trouble for his three year tour.  It is a fictionalization of a real trial and real incidents that happened to me in1961 when I was in JAG, and this Rant/blog tells what really happened.  Command Influence can be bought on Amazon.com.

Chess, Slidell, Fishing in the Rigolets

After getting out of the Army in 1963, we moved to Slidell, a little city on the "northshore" of Lake Pontchartrain, across the lake from New Orleans.  There I became immersed in playing chess and Fishing in the lake and in the Rigolets. The Rigolets is a narrow mile wide mouth of the lake that spills out into the marsh and Gulf.  My buddy Martin Smith and I fished there in a pirogue.  Not a good idea.

Give me the sea, poems, mouse god, etc.

In the original Rant I included this neat painting by James Christensen of an old man in a sailboat sitting high and dry on a rock beach overlooking the sea. Look online for fantasy pictures by Christensen and you will be delighted.  It generated this poem, Give Me The Sea.  It is followed by a piece called Dance Me To The End Of Love, inspired by a picture by Jack Vetterino, followed by several poems, MouseGod, Look in my eyes, Remembering a Dream, Had I been wise.

Recreating myself, hometown, music, art and dancing.

I have had to recreate myself at the age of 71. Here's a bit about my hometown, dancing, cajun dancing, wanting to be an artist.

Kindergarten, dead kids

Went to grandkids kindergarten graduation.  Who are these kids? What are they? Adults are dead and dying kids.  Listen to Christopher Robin.  Who am I?

A Boy Forever

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,

William Butler Yeats

The Lake Isle Of Innisfree

Poem lyrics of The Lake Isle Of Innisfree by William Butler Yeats.

I will arise and go now, and go to 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.

Resistance, drive Inn's,

Friends and Kin:

It's July 30, 2005. I sat in the patio briefly this morning, reading about all of the child abuse, child rapes, porn proliferation, my God!  An uncollectable eight million dollar award against the bureaucrats in our child protection agency, for ignoring months of pleas to help, resulting in the horrible death of a little girl. Those old frogs up there in those agencies whose work ethic consists of showing up and getting a check and ignoring facts. I know, I know, they are overworked, etc., but they are also abysmally stupid and mostly cretins who have been promoted far beyond their capabilities in their jobs. 

I was in an Administrative Law Hearing yesterday and realized something within me that has caused me untold worry and apprehension all of my life, but I had never realized what it was. It was resistance.  Any time I have encountered and confronted something that I disagreed with, I found myself tightening up inside, pushing away what was happening or being said, as if my internal shielding that was going up plate at a time was actually going to stop the onslaught of testimony, accusations, bad news, etc.  It was as if I was not just pushing the opposing views away but trying to destroy them with my internal resistance, squeezing myself down into a little knot, pushing, trying to make it go away---and all that did was to jam my viscera and bring all of my wards into red alert, with all the alarms jangling and cannons at ready.

Where did that get me?  Nowhere, really.  Maybe it is an atavistic survival mechanism to come screaming out of my comfort to arm myself against what may happen, but never has this knotted and clotted resistance gotten me anywhere.  Yesterday I realized the other guy is going to say what he is going to say, good or bad, and my resistance won't make a damn bit of difference out there, but on the other hand it stops my objectivity and stokes up the internal boilers to the point what I may even miss what he says.  I wish I had learned this forty three years ago before all of my many gut wrenching trials took their toll on my mind and body.

The way of Zen?  Just confronting, while being there comfortably. It was a revelation. I could actually do it! Took me seventy years to learn that little bit of technolgy, or philosophy, or whatever it is, for it is a marvelous tool.  Watch, don't flare, don't build a palisade with bolt holes and then stand there all armed and ready---reactive and hot.  I guess that is kind of good, for it does make you more alert, but why be that way when you are not having to do the fighting---just observing?  I kind of found peace. Perhaps if I was the lawyer I may have to get up on the point but I realized I did the same thing whether I was the point man or just a casual observer.  Like reading the paper, I see something like the child porn and rapists, or some obscene political corruption, or things I really disagree with and there leap the hounds from their kennels of my mind howling at this offensive excrement.  Hell, just let it be!  Didn't John Lennon write about that and, Buddha preach it?

Read in the paper this morning about building Drive Inns in Texas.  Texas is a fun place. It hasn't lost its sense of place and time and reason, and its people are proud of it.  I wish I was a Texan. I think I am really, being from the part of Louisiana I hailed from---which should have been given back to Texas long ago for it surely has no business being in the Louisiana mix.  Anglo and stiff as compared to South Louisiana which still has whiffs of the Latin lingering among the prairies and bayous.  But Texas took the Anglo and made it proud rather than redneck---moving it a notch above the gourd dipper mentality that exists in places in North Louisiana.  However, I have to say that my little community in Castor, during the time I was growing up, had a touch of class. I'm not kidding.  We had a Principal, E.R. Minchew, whose vision was outside of the community. He had a PHD in speech, and we went to speech tournaments at different colleges around and got a look at the outside world.  He had a big influence on a segment of our school that gave a broader vision---and a dream---that's all you need to do as a real teacher---build in a dream and those who can dream with it will carry the dream on to others.

There was a Drive-Inn in Minden, and we would drive up there, smooch, smoke cigarettes, watch the movies in the privacy of the car. No air conditioning anyway, so we were used to it, and there was nothing else but smooching and I remember one little girl who could hardly catch her breath during our great smooching episode, gasp "why don't you ever let go," and I was so stupid I had no idea what she was talking about.  When you remember such things much later on, realizing what she meant, you may hurt yourself. I heard the story of a guy who was working at home, upon a ladder, remembering his trip to Paris when the cute little maid keept asking, "Is there anything else you wish, Monsoir?" When he realized what she was asking, years later, he fell off the ladder.  And I remember how the windows were steamed and we had been kissing and kissing (not much tongue---we were from WASP country you know---just lips but bruised lips) And she breathed hot in my ear, "don't you ever let go?"  Later I realized she was begging me and I felt like such a fool. If I had let go right then, knowing what I know now about that stuff, and how addicted and crazy I was when I finally did let go, I may not have ever graduated from high school because I would have become a ravenous, prancing leering goat, bleating away, tapping on their windows at midnight, slipping away behind the gym at noon, grabbing moments in closets or back seats or front seats with her or whoever, as an insatiable beast. I am lucky I didn't let go.  When I did let go, I could never find peace, for there was none except a post amorous armistace before the blood of lust began clogging my synaptic interspaces for another  hunt, kill, eat, rest.  It was a well without a bottom I finally realized. The goat still prances, after all these years.  He still lives, and I wish he would take a rest.

Well, I have certifications this morning, and it is nearly ten.  Several people are coming to be certified with my company and they will be productive until around one. I have a big day. Today my grandson Jack has a birthday party at two and after that a meeting at the mission.  Maybe tomorrow I can take off for the first time in months and see War of the Worlds.

LDS

Dandelions, JSBach, man's wars, poem

Friends and Kin:

It's July 15, 2005.  A deluge this morning for three hours . Blew my router off line. Now, at ten, it's steaming up for a suffocating July Deep South Louisiana day.  It's been such a long time since I did a Rant I have to indulge myself today for a bit before getting on with the program.

My day consists of getting up around six thirty or seven, coming downstairs to get a cup of coffee--check my mail---stretch and exercise a few minutes to get the stuff running and then bathe---and send mail to my originators and people I feel should be informed of this business. Then I want to get out and see and be seen. It's interesting reinventing onesself at this age.  People see you as one thing and not as the new thing, so you have to re-sell yourself as that beingness and doingness.  I am hoping to have staying power to be able to last until this thing gets traction and takes off.  It will, just have to be plant the seeds, be patient, stay at it, and allow things to grow as I tend my business garden.  It is actually fun, and it will work. Anything that helps people like this and is this sweet a deal for them has to work.

I read Keillor's The Writer's Almanac every morning, and the little things he calls poems are more like prose written like poetry. They all have a little poignancy, a little thing that kind of burrows under the skin  just deep enough to itch my mind and they usually create a visual or sensual image of some kind, like a scent that follows you as you walk through a rose garden or the smell of peanut butter or popcorn or that perfume she used to wear that brings her back for a moment.

I steal these poems and put them in this blog, and maybe Keillor will hear about it and give me a phone call and tell me to stop. I would really like to talk to him---he is the master story teller---the Will Rogers of our day.  But he will probably have his lawyer's clerk call, if he notices at all, and the clerk will be a jerk about it and demand that I stop and I will tell him to screw himself---sue me, I need the publicity.  I can only hope.

So here's a great little poem about the spring and winter of our lives.  I just hope that any spoor or track I leave will make somebody smile either with or at me, whatever---. Anything is better than being forgotten, a part of the dumb down crowd---or mediocre.   Not having lived across a generation, able to see and remember the beginning and ending of any one's individual life, from early childhood through the passing of years watching the aging of the body and spirit until the wrinkled husk tumbles and becomes earth again---one can think in terms of Dandelions.

Poem: "Dandelions" by Howard Nemerov, from The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov. © University of Chicago Press. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

Dandelions

These golden heads, these common suns
Only less multitudinous
Than grass itself that gluts
The market of the world with green,
They shine as lovely as they're mean,
Fine as the daughters of the poor
Who go proudly in spangles of brass;
Light-headed, then headless, stalked for a salad.

Inside a week they will be seen
Stricken and old, ghosts in the field
To be picked up at the lightest breath,
With brazen tops all shrunken in
And swollen green gone withered white.
You'll say it's nature's price for beauty
That goes cheap; that being light
Is justly what makes girls grow heavy;
And that the wind, bearing their death,
Whispers the second kingdom come.
— You'll say, the fool of piety,
By resignations hanging on
Until, still justified, you drop.
But surely the thing is sorrowful,
At evening when the light goes out
Slowly, to see those ruined spinsters,
All down the field their ghostly hair,
Dry sinners waiting in the valley
For the last word and the next life
And the liberation from the lion's mouth.

-------------------------

And here's another that interested me because it heralded and biographed JS Bach.  If he drank 36 cups of coffee a day, no wonder his hair looked like that. And no wonder he stayed away from the house that much---just went home to eat and sleep with his wife long enough to make another baby and then back to the hide out with his organ or whatever and scribble notes as prolifically as his libido.

Poem: "At the Children's Violin Concert" by Susan Cataldo, from drenched: Selected Poems of Susan Cataldo 19791999. © Telephone Books. Reprinted with permission.

At the Children's Violin Concert

          Firmly bowed
strands of horse hair
          tightened or
gathered up by
          a small hand to play
          a piece by J.S. Bach
who drank 36 cups of coffee every day.

   I like him because he was
   inspired by his belief in God
    & he played the organ in a church
   in Leipzig & he walked on
   cobblestone streets to his home
   every evening where he fathered
   many children & wrote music
   for his wife to clean house by.
   He worked hard all his life
    & when he died, he left us
   all the little notes he made
   for himself while he was alone.

-------

The following is an exchange between brother Charles Hatcher, a great friend and soul mate. I had received a little video snippet from my bud Max LaBranche called "incredible shooting," which videoed a sniper---evidently somewhere in the Afghanistan (spelling?)  mountains, picking off guys at like a couple of miles with this incredible weapon that would simply send body parts flying a hundred feet in all directions. It was gruesome, and fortunately you couldn't see the details but you got the picture. One was of a body flipping high in the air,  like a rag doll, at two miles distance. With these people arming themselves with bombs to blow themselves up to kill babies, children, women, men, with the totally insane idea they are going to heaven for it, is just about the most perverted mentality I can imagine. So I have no quarrel with some of this, but how have we managed to find ourselves in this situation?  I sent this to Charles, he replied and I answered:

=======

----- Original Message -----

From: "Charles Hatcher" <CHatcher@osfa.state.la.us>

To: <ldsledgemortgage@bellsouth.net>

Sent: Thursday, July 14, 2005 8:28 AM

Subject: Re: Fw: some incredible shooting

> It is a sad commentary on the state of mankind when we have to perfect
> technology which enables us to destroy one another more effectively and
> efficiently.  It's ashame we can't utilize technology which would "set
> off" electronice explosive devices within a 10 mile radius...I actually
> read the treatise of a retired navy seal a few years ago and he said
> they had actually developed an electronic device (after so many of our
> Marines were killed in Beirut) which utilized a mechanism which
> alternated radio wave frequencies which would send out electronic pulses
> which would then 'trigger' electronic devices. In a nutshell, it would
> send out the same pulse as a signal to trigger a bomb like the terrorist
> use. It would just send out an alternating pulse at randsom rotating
> frequencies to set off the explosives before a terrorist could get close
> to their intended targets...Guess what, the technology was PANNED and
> taken off the proverbial table by US Beauracrats who said that the
> implementation of that technology would cause , and I quote, "innocent
> civilians to be harmed" ..by our randomly setting off radio controlled
> explosive devices before they could reach US Military Personnel...This
> was in a book by Capt (Retired) Richard Marcinko...I'm for the terrorist
> being foiled and "taken out" by any means necessary...
> "Brotha"  Chas

Chas

My answer:

The polarization of entire populations continues.  During my 69 years 357 days on this planet this round, I have witnessed nothing but plague, war, death and misery, and some peaceful moments in the country when I had no access to the news of the day and out of the mainstream of human misery. There was the depression, WWII, the cold war and the nuclear era (still is but muffled), Korea, Vietnam, AIDS, the Drug Culture (legal drugs) resulting in hypnotic populations, 9/11 and now terrorism.  That is nearly 70 years. There never has been anything else on this planet but this kind of news and livingness. Perhaps some quiet places were out of the loop, being away from areas where those who could create chaos felt were unworthy, but this has been the fare of humanity since time began.

Nothing happens by accident. There are men who want chaos for they operate and profit in the midst of confusion.  Follow the money. Follow the resulting power. Man is capable of creating exquisite beauty and still create horror.  Some of the most wonderful art came from those very men who are blowing themselves up, the Samauri had wondrous teaparties and quiet beauty in art and were the most brutal of warriors.  Man is not an animal. He is an immortal spiritual being with beauty and love in his heart, but a part of hismind operates reactively and he then becomes those images that lurk in there hidden away that some time take over and rule his actions. They become mob actions. The evil men in the east send their messengers out loaded with bombs with promises of heaven as reward, and man wants to believe something so strongly that he will fall for it and end his stupid life.  And the same kind of evil men stop what you were saying could have been used to detect and reduce the bombers and consequent damage. I am no longer nonplussed or mystified, just saddened.

These guys have been crazy for centuries, have been doing this to each other, bedouin tribe to tribe, killing each other, and now we have drawn their attention to us as the evil enemy and it seems to be no end. I wonder if Bush had not started his war if this would have happened, and what hismotivation was---I still think it was oil for his cronies---now gone totally awry.  I was guest on Louisiana Live, a state wide call in talk show many times before we invaded, and I questioned the WMD and where were they, and they had none and that was the justification in invasion---to stop these weapons.  I was reviled for having such a "liberal" and radical viewpoint as to question our need to invade.  I just wanted to know what we would be doing there, for stirring those guys up who loved to die was setting something in motion that would drain our money and kill our sons---and for what?  There was, and still is no answer. The party line is to stop terrorism here. Maybe so.  Maybe they have dispersed it to the extent is now only sporadic spots where these crazies blow themselves and others up. But we have relinquished our constitution and rights and still have the problem, and if it has reduced maybe it is worth it, but has it reduced it?

Anyway, this is almost a rant. Don't get me started.

ld

-------------------------------

On an up note, after all the gloom and crap,

Here's one of mine:

Living With The Shade

I looked the Shade

        Right in the eye

I said to him

        “I don’t care if I die.”

You’ll always be there

        right by my side

While on this earth

        I still abide.

And I’ll live right on

        Until it’s over

And I’ll laugh and hoot

        And roll in the clover

I know you are there

        All day long

But so is life

        And laugh and song

So I’ll play it out

        For a few more years

And you’ll have to wait

        I have no fears

For it’s a good old day

        And a good old night

I see you are laughing

        That I got it right

You know that I know

        It’s one and the same

Living and dying

        Are just part of the game

And  the one who wins

        When the time has run

Is the one who  has had

        The best and most fun.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Have a great, unserious day today and every day. It just ain't worth it to be serious.

LDS