There are two principles in Land Surveying that seem to contradict one another. And of course, as these serendipities go, they are two of the fundamental principles of the property surveyor.
1) Every measurement contains error. Or: No measurement is exact.
No matter how close you think you may be, you can always get closer. Pull a tape down a piece of wood and tell me the number. Pull it again. (Measure twice cut once?) Bounce a laser off the back wall and give me a distance. Turn an angle with a transit. The number you obtain will contain random errors. Tell me you can measure a piece of wood exactly and I will tell you that you can probably measure a piece of wood adequately. No matter how close you think you are, the temperature may be introducing sag in your tape. The standard steel tape, if it is correctly calibrated, is calibrated for a temperature of 68 degrees F at a tension of 15lbs. Chances are the tape you are using has not even been calibrated. Chances are you're not even using a steel tape. What's the distance? Twelve feet? Twelve feet four tenths? Twelve feet forty-four hundredths? Twelve feet four hundred forty two thousandths? The number can always get a little closer to what we might call the "true value." In adjustment computations--the art of adjusting measurements in accordance with the rules of statistics and probability to find what we might call "probable fit"--we say that the "true value" is never known. Only approximated.
2) There is no error in an original measurement that created the property line.
This was enacted by statute in the Land Act of 1805, which decreed that all of the original lines and distances in a survey are correct, and that no error exists in the original survey. Obviously, if you give this any thought, it makes sense, lest future surveys continually correct the error that will ALWAYS exist in the original survey. (See principle one.)
Hereupon we build all other principles of property surveying. We cannot get it exactly right, so we must enact legislation that decrees that on the original survey we got it exactly right. (Of course, any survey that comes after the original survey, the retracement surveys, are up for attack, which is exactly why surveyors the world over are generally grumpy and pissed off.)
This all brings to mind for me the great G.K. Chesterton's rather puzzling synopsis of things seen and unseen: The real problem with the world is not that it is reasonable, nor that it is unreasonable. The real problem with the world is that it is almost reasonable, but not quite. It is this--what Chesterton calls the "silent swerving" at the last minute--that is the unnerving thing about the rational world. The earth is very nearly a perfect sphere, but not quite. (It bulges 27 miles at the equator. Twenty-seven miles out of 7,900, which is pretty close.) The earth completes one revolution of the sun in a period of a year. Well, 365.2564 days: almost an exact year. Which of course introduces all sorts of problems regarding time. A sidereal day, for instance, or the time it takes for the earth to spin around once, turns out to be 3 minutes and 56 seconds shorter than a solar day, or the interval between two successive transits of the sun over the same meridian. (Which, if taken yet another step with regards to determining geographic position on the earth in the actual observance of the sun, introduces the problem of mean solar time and apparent solar time, giving rise to a beautiful correction called the equation of time.)
So that when I, several weeks ago--actually one week prior to the day when I spent the weekend with some friends in block 604 of the Rockbridge County Jail for drinking and driving (a charge I incurred back in March after a marvelous day on the river)--found a bottle of bourbon placed almost serendipitously on my porch, I took one step back out from under the porch roof and searched for concentric circles that I felt certain were at that moment dissipating into the shadowy clouds. I found Maker's Mark stuffed down in a gift bag with a box of six glasses and a letter. The glasses were of nice shape and size for bourbon on the rocks and three of them had been removed. The letter informed me that the missing glasses, lacking only the whiskey, belonged to the sender. My rather pedestrian pallet rates Maker's highly on the shelf of bourbon whiskeys, wedged in quality (though not in price) between the likes of Knob Creek and Woodford Reserve. I even enjoyed a glass, rocks, bourbon, while I read the letter and, to at least some small degree, traced the overlapping patterns of our lives that must always disappear ("like all good things, the best things") into mystery.
Monday, September 05, 2011
Sunday, May 29, 2011
While You Were Gone
I've returned to a book that Melissa picked up several years ago. I've been reading from it. And I like the way it ends. Not clean and tidy, but resolved enough to move on.
"My wish that they move away will, apparently, not be granted.
But perhaps this is all to the good. Perhaps it's best to live with the possibility that around any corner, at any time, may come the person who reminds you of your own capacity to surprise yourself, to put at risk everything that's dear to you. Who reminds you of the distances we have to bridge to begin to know anything about one another. Who reminds you that what seems to be--even about yourself--may not be. That like him, you need to be forgiven."
At one point in my life I would have talked about the rhythm of this paragraph, how much like music it is. How parallel structure is so beautifully employed and stretched and honed down to the period at the end. But today I read it and quote it here because it feels, in a rather simple-minded way, honest. I often tell myself, as well, that it is all to the good.
"My wish that they move away will, apparently, not be granted.
But perhaps this is all to the good. Perhaps it's best to live with the possibility that around any corner, at any time, may come the person who reminds you of your own capacity to surprise yourself, to put at risk everything that's dear to you. Who reminds you of the distances we have to bridge to begin to know anything about one another. Who reminds you that what seems to be--even about yourself--may not be. That like him, you need to be forgiven."
At one point in my life I would have talked about the rhythm of this paragraph, how much like music it is. How parallel structure is so beautifully employed and stretched and honed down to the period at the end. But today I read it and quote it here because it feels, in a rather simple-minded way, honest. I often tell myself, as well, that it is all to the good.
Saturday, February 05, 2011
The Formative Years: An Apology
BACKGROUND
It was brought to my attention last evening, while standing around with a small group of friends--within a larger group of strangers--that my high school years were a bit peculiar. I was a little rambunctious and spent a lot of time scrambling around searching for something in the rubble. Some sign of God, perhaps, or some such suitably unspeakable bootprint in the fallen bauble of the nineteen eighties. Then I moved to Lynchburg, and for whatever reason, here in the Burg people tend to take an odd sort of pride in their high school alma mater. I work in a building where half of everyone went to high school together. Have known each other a long time. Have deep and abiding memories of getting hammered and having sex with each other. And they talk about it. And it's weird. So inevitably, at some point in the course of polite conversation, the question arises: "So, Joe, where'd you go to school?" Meaning, of course, high school.
Now, unless the conversation explicitly dictates that I name my high school, I'll generally say Lynchburg College and hope to glance the direction of the eye away from the younger, more turbulent years and spotlight the more modest and well-dressed stages of my life. Forgive me, it's psychologically complicated. But often, in these odd social situations, I can't escape the question--as I said, high school is an important stage of development and high school in the Burg says a hell of a lot about who you are as a person--and I've taken to saying: "I went to school mostly up in D.C." Meaning, of course, I went to school up in the Metropolis away from Lynchburg and please don't bother me anymore about this question. Most of the time this works. So much so, in fact, that I haven't bothered to think about the answer much at all anymore.
Until last evening, when the issue was pressed a little further and my line--"mostly up in DC"--suddenly didn't make any sense. Anne kind of looked at me. "When did you move here?" Well, I did go to Brookville. Trish looked at me: "Didn't you go to LCA?" Well, yeah, I went there too. Anne got a confused look. "So you spent two years of high school here in Lynchburg but went to school mostly in D.C.?" Well, I spent three years in school away from here and two years here. So yes, mostly in D.C. Kelly attempted to come to my rescue: "Your formative years were not spent in Lynchburg." I took a big swig of Flying Dog ale, but the conversation didn't go away. Anne finally said, "Why are you making this so complicated?"
And of course I had no neat, simple, conversational answer. I suppose I might have said, To keep it from being complicated, but that probably wouldn't have made any sense either. So for the benefit of those who would genuinely like to know where I attended high school--and these people apparently do exist--I present my curriculum vitae, and trust that I will once again be welcomed at establishments serving only those patrons of orange, blue, and glass.
CURRICULUM VITAE
Lanham Christian School. (Also known as L.C.S., this academy should not be confused with L.C.A., another Christian school here in the Burg that gives birth to all sorts of illiterate Liberty students and of which it is perhaps best if you remove all affiliation from your docket.) I successfully attended my full ninth grade year at L.C.S., though upon returning later in my high school career I was expelled for some words I wrote in a notebook. The words were apparently quite powerful and I consider this experience perhaps the most telling and influential of my high school lessons. It was, for all intents and purposes, my graduation from high school.
Eleanor Roosevelt High School. I began my sophomore year at ERHS, a Science and Technology school outside my district, because I was apparently interested in learning Russian, and ERHS happened to be the only school in the area that taught Russian. So the administration accepted me and I attended for a semester or so. Fortunately for my adolescent development, ERHS turned out to be extremely large, thousands of students, and there existed no practical way to keep up with everyone. So I joined the marginally intelligent half of the student body (I'll let you decided whether the adverb "marginally" is being used with a negative or positive connotation), and we essentially, as a large group, strolled in the front door and out the back. This half of the population learned to wile away the long scholastic hours riding the metro into D.C., tripping out on LSD and wandering around Georgetown in combat boots. These were perhaps the most enjoyable days of my high school career. (Shh, don't tell your students.) Without a care of the future, with very little accountability, we would sit on the steps where the Exorcist was filmed--the tall narrow set of stairs leading up to the dark room in which the girl's head spun completely around; the stairs, in fact, down which the priest was hurled by the demon--and read On The Road, aloud, to each other. We had no idea what we were reading, but we liked the sounds and the shape of our mouths over the words.
Until two girls talked me into stealing my father's Starcraft conversion van and driving across the country. Which I did. They made up stories about abusive parents and angry mothers and I drove them away. Searching for bootprints. Searching for some sort of clue. As if Freedom was not quite enough, in itself. Searching for something out of place in the landscape. Some piece of evidence that God left behind. I never returned to ERHS.
Instead, I was arrested in Hollywood and charged with Grand Theft Auto (charges my father later dropped), where I went through a very brief, intense course of study in a Juvenile Detention Home in downtown Hollywood. They kept photo albums, in this home, of pictures taken of run-away children who were finally found. Their bodies, I mean. Mangled. Beaten. Torn apart by the evil of this world. Children. The pictures were the most gruesome pictures I have ever seen and I have never forgotten them. The old black man who was showing me the photo album snapped it shut and looked at me. "Go home," he said. And when my father showed up to take me home, I went.
Capital Christian Academy. It was all but impossible to walk away from C.C.A. So I began writing. Fantasy, mostly. Stories of imprisoned students fighting back against the overbearing arm of Authority. Poems about nothing. About searching for nothing. About finding nothing. My stories often took on a brutal and violent air, and there's a sense in me now, these many years later, that I was angry about those pictures. When you are young, forming, so much is impossible to express. Your facilities are perhaps incapable of articulating the kind of brutality the world so freely dishes out. If I traveled west in some sort of existential journey of a spiritual nature, what I returned with was evidence that the hand of God is a hateful, wrathful hand and the miracles in the sand of this planet are terrible miracles of destruction. My battle against this unseen God could only get more gruesome. So I left my words in a notebook on the bleachers of C.C.A. and I traveled north to a town I thought must surely hold some answers. Mystic, Connecticut.
We arrived in the early morning and I sat on a pier with my feet hanging off the edge and I stared out across the water. The friends traveling with me were silly and happy. I felt none of their joy. I felt only the slow slight movement of the pier and the unspeakable abyss of the ocean under my dangling feet. Where is this thing to which I run, which has no name, I may have said but did not. I only sat there sullenly in the damp gray air. We're leaving, I said. And got up to go. Someone flicked a cigarette into the ocean. "We just got here, man." Train's leaving with or without you, I said, and I left Mystic. Somewhere in New York City, in some tight dark tunnel, with my good friend driving so that I could doze in a sort of dreamy haze, the mirror on the passenger side of the van smacked the open door of an electrical cabinet and I was jarred awake.
The judge fined me $50 for driving without a license.
Hereford High School. I couldn't stay at home. I was agitated and confused. I looked over one night while climbing out the second-story window and someone was watching me go. I went to live with my Uncle and his family above Baltimore and attended the local high school. Nothing can be dispensed with. The students thought I was a narc sent to break up a big drug ring. Nothing can be deleted or left out. I had no motivation or passion for the silly tinkerings of public education. Tidbits and parcels that seemed wholly empty and without purpose. I quit school and worked full time at a local plant nursery. Potting plants, pulling orders together on the flatbed behind the tractor, getting my hands dirty in the greenhouse. I made $3.10 an hour. Searching for a seam in the fabric. Searching for the imperfections. But they are hidden from us. The places where the stories connect. They are not visible. So everything is necessary.
Joe Gibb's Youth for Tomorrow. I was accepted into a boy's home down in Gainsville, Virginia. At the time, the home sat in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by miles of pasture. It was plush and comfortable and Dexter Manley, a football player for the Redskins, would show up and join us for breakfast. I wasn't entirely sure what I was supposed to be doing. What I was supposed to be omitting. Or adding. My roommate showed me the scar from a knife wound. He was stabbed in the stomach and the knife went in a long way. How do we know that the world will continue standing if we remove this block, or that block, or this act or that one? The stitches are all of them hidden from us. But even here, I could not escape the classroom. Half of every day was spent at a desk in a classroom doing worksheets and taking tests. Always tests. The other half of the day we would pick up rocks from the fields. Mow the grass. Trim the hedges. Dig up stumps. Useful, beneficial tasks. Tasks that made sense. Hard work. I slept on the floor in my room to remind myself that not every bed is soft. And beyond the days, I later read in the endless music of Wallace Stevens, beyond the slow-foot litters of the nights, the actual, universal strength, without a word of rhetoric--there it is.
I had to leave Youth for Tomorrow. They spoke poorly of my father and they didn't even know him. I couldn't trust them. Couldn't trust what they were telling me. They assumed to know me because of a few psychological tests that I had learned to take. They assumed because of certain questions I had answered that I was this kind of person with these kinds of problems. And they were wrong. I was looking for something that has no name. That cannot be named. Or bought. Or seen. I played them as much as they me. I walked away and away across miles of fields in combat boots that had grown too small. I left my notebook of scribbles on the desk of my room. My test, I may have said, though of course I did not. I knew only to leave it behind. A calling card of where I had been. My feet hurt but I had a phone number and someone was waiting.
Walkersville Christian School / People's Supply. I studied from home after my father allowed me to return. Some sort of correspondence course based out of Pennsylvania. We visited the farm and shook hands with the designer of the curriculum and then I mailed my tests and papers to his house. Somehow he determined whether I passed or failed. I wanted to work and my father helped out with a job. People's Supply managed by a man named Oris Basinger. I remember his name because he was perhaps the first person in my life to take me seriously. He had work that needed to get done and I did it. I was making $5.50 an hour--a fortune!--working in the basement of a hardware store. I played with power tools, unpacked boxes of hardware, priced and shelved the stock, and enjoyed myself. I mostly worked alone and Oris respected my space. I studied on my own the other half of the day and took my studies, as far as I recall, seriously. I remember peace, a sort of organic consolation--
the complete society of the spirit when it is alone--
and I began to feel the truth. Or perhaps that is too strong. Perhaps only looking back now I can point to that time, to that period, and say Here, here I began to understand. That it is not so much the bootprint in the Nevada desert that is important. The piece of bone dusty in the trail. Not so much the railway station where the crying lover kisses her soldier goodbye. Not so much the pottery shards that link these people to this place. Not so much the broken down van in the bitter cold of Missouri and two young girls scared for the first time in their lives. But the notebook that stays behind when I leave.
Lanham Christian School (part II). I returned to school at the beginning of my junior year. As I apparently had no terminal problems on my previous stint, L.C.S. welcomed me (and the money my parents paid them) back. If I could have presented to them my final thesis I may have said, I am here because of a certain story. A tale wherein we are all, in our own tales, enjoined. All such smaller tales mirror the shape of the larger, but however hard you look and for however long you search, you will never find the seams. You will never know what must be added or omitted. We do because we must and that is all we can do.
In those final days of my education I wrote nearly every day, scrawling nonsense in a binder. I stormed through the halls in my stories, shooting teachers and jumping through windows. I traveled the world beyond the days, springing teenagers from a strength beyond the indifferent sound of these words. Their mangled bodies alive on the page, driving with wind-cracked whips the chariot of their youth through the incomplete and tragic tales of their lives. And lightening. Don't forget lightening.
When the administration found the notebook they expelled me, but it didn't really matter. I was finished. My high school thesis was complete. My father read through the words and then went before the board and argued my case. My father. He's fifteen, he said. He's writing words on a page. Let him. They expelled me and my father came to me with the news. You shook them up, he said. And I swear he was smirking.
The Lynchburg Years. The rest is, as they say, history. I attended school in Lynchburg to get a diploma. That is all. I was a model student. High grades. Stellar behavior. I did no administrative wrongs. I traveled to no distant lands. I kept my musings and notebooks to myself. And yet L.C.A. still informed my father, after my first year, that I was no longer welcome. That I simply didn't fit in. By then, of course, we could joke about such things, and I graduated the next year from Brookville High School.
THE VERY END
To say more than human things with human voice, that cannot be. And I still sometimes find myself kicking in the sand along the beaches of the New River Gorge, camping alone out of a boat, scanning the landscape for something unforeseen. Something out of place. Something untrue. But there is more to doing then simply searching, and I can easily and gratefully return home at journey's end. An old house half broken down. An imperfect family. A smile. The bootprints, the doll broken in the yard made of dirt, the safety pins punched through her ears, these are the world as we know it. The world made of flower and blood and steel. But they mean nothing--less than nothing--unless they are woven into a tale. It has become at long last the story that I seek. And the seams that stitch our tales together. And the places we have been and the horror and beauty to which we bear witness. What can be omitted? At what cost? Is not everything imaginable necessary? The tormented mothers the world over? My scrambled daughter? Who am I to say that this or that ought not be. I cannot. Neither can I bear witness to that which has no name. I am but a man. I am here because of a certain story. That is all I know.
And for this reason I often find myself saying, "I went to school mostly up in D.C."
It was brought to my attention last evening, while standing around with a small group of friends--within a larger group of strangers--that my high school years were a bit peculiar. I was a little rambunctious and spent a lot of time scrambling around searching for something in the rubble. Some sign of God, perhaps, or some such suitably unspeakable bootprint in the fallen bauble of the nineteen eighties. Then I moved to Lynchburg, and for whatever reason, here in the Burg people tend to take an odd sort of pride in their high school alma mater. I work in a building where half of everyone went to high school together. Have known each other a long time. Have deep and abiding memories of getting hammered and having sex with each other. And they talk about it. And it's weird. So inevitably, at some point in the course of polite conversation, the question arises: "So, Joe, where'd you go to school?" Meaning, of course, high school.
Now, unless the conversation explicitly dictates that I name my high school, I'll generally say Lynchburg College and hope to glance the direction of the eye away from the younger, more turbulent years and spotlight the more modest and well-dressed stages of my life. Forgive me, it's psychologically complicated. But often, in these odd social situations, I can't escape the question--as I said, high school is an important stage of development and high school in the Burg says a hell of a lot about who you are as a person--and I've taken to saying: "I went to school mostly up in D.C." Meaning, of course, I went to school up in the Metropolis away from Lynchburg and please don't bother me anymore about this question. Most of the time this works. So much so, in fact, that I haven't bothered to think about the answer much at all anymore.
Until last evening, when the issue was pressed a little further and my line--"mostly up in DC"--suddenly didn't make any sense. Anne kind of looked at me. "When did you move here?" Well, I did go to Brookville. Trish looked at me: "Didn't you go to LCA?" Well, yeah, I went there too. Anne got a confused look. "So you spent two years of high school here in Lynchburg but went to school mostly in D.C.?" Well, I spent three years in school away from here and two years here. So yes, mostly in D.C. Kelly attempted to come to my rescue: "Your formative years were not spent in Lynchburg." I took a big swig of Flying Dog ale, but the conversation didn't go away. Anne finally said, "Why are you making this so complicated?"
And of course I had no neat, simple, conversational answer. I suppose I might have said, To keep it from being complicated, but that probably wouldn't have made any sense either. So for the benefit of those who would genuinely like to know where I attended high school--and these people apparently do exist--I present my curriculum vitae, and trust that I will once again be welcomed at establishments serving only those patrons of orange, blue, and glass.
CURRICULUM VITAE
Lanham Christian School. (Also known as L.C.S., this academy should not be confused with L.C.A., another Christian school here in the Burg that gives birth to all sorts of illiterate Liberty students and of which it is perhaps best if you remove all affiliation from your docket.) I successfully attended my full ninth grade year at L.C.S., though upon returning later in my high school career I was expelled for some words I wrote in a notebook. The words were apparently quite powerful and I consider this experience perhaps the most telling and influential of my high school lessons. It was, for all intents and purposes, my graduation from high school.
Eleanor Roosevelt High School. I began my sophomore year at ERHS, a Science and Technology school outside my district, because I was apparently interested in learning Russian, and ERHS happened to be the only school in the area that taught Russian. So the administration accepted me and I attended for a semester or so. Fortunately for my adolescent development, ERHS turned out to be extremely large, thousands of students, and there existed no practical way to keep up with everyone. So I joined the marginally intelligent half of the student body (I'll let you decided whether the adverb "marginally" is being used with a negative or positive connotation), and we essentially, as a large group, strolled in the front door and out the back. This half of the population learned to wile away the long scholastic hours riding the metro into D.C., tripping out on LSD and wandering around Georgetown in combat boots. These were perhaps the most enjoyable days of my high school career. (Shh, don't tell your students.) Without a care of the future, with very little accountability, we would sit on the steps where the Exorcist was filmed--the tall narrow set of stairs leading up to the dark room in which the girl's head spun completely around; the stairs, in fact, down which the priest was hurled by the demon--and read On The Road, aloud, to each other. We had no idea what we were reading, but we liked the sounds and the shape of our mouths over the words.
Until two girls talked me into stealing my father's Starcraft conversion van and driving across the country. Which I did. They made up stories about abusive parents and angry mothers and I drove them away. Searching for bootprints. Searching for some sort of clue. As if Freedom was not quite enough, in itself. Searching for something out of place in the landscape. Some piece of evidence that God left behind. I never returned to ERHS.
Instead, I was arrested in Hollywood and charged with Grand Theft Auto (charges my father later dropped), where I went through a very brief, intense course of study in a Juvenile Detention Home in downtown Hollywood. They kept photo albums, in this home, of pictures taken of run-away children who were finally found. Their bodies, I mean. Mangled. Beaten. Torn apart by the evil of this world. Children. The pictures were the most gruesome pictures I have ever seen and I have never forgotten them. The old black man who was showing me the photo album snapped it shut and looked at me. "Go home," he said. And when my father showed up to take me home, I went.
Capital Christian Academy. It was all but impossible to walk away from C.C.A. So I began writing. Fantasy, mostly. Stories of imprisoned students fighting back against the overbearing arm of Authority. Poems about nothing. About searching for nothing. About finding nothing. My stories often took on a brutal and violent air, and there's a sense in me now, these many years later, that I was angry about those pictures. When you are young, forming, so much is impossible to express. Your facilities are perhaps incapable of articulating the kind of brutality the world so freely dishes out. If I traveled west in some sort of existential journey of a spiritual nature, what I returned with was evidence that the hand of God is a hateful, wrathful hand and the miracles in the sand of this planet are terrible miracles of destruction. My battle against this unseen God could only get more gruesome. So I left my words in a notebook on the bleachers of C.C.A. and I traveled north to a town I thought must surely hold some answers. Mystic, Connecticut.
We arrived in the early morning and I sat on a pier with my feet hanging off the edge and I stared out across the water. The friends traveling with me were silly and happy. I felt none of their joy. I felt only the slow slight movement of the pier and the unspeakable abyss of the ocean under my dangling feet. Where is this thing to which I run, which has no name, I may have said but did not. I only sat there sullenly in the damp gray air. We're leaving, I said. And got up to go. Someone flicked a cigarette into the ocean. "We just got here, man." Train's leaving with or without you, I said, and I left Mystic. Somewhere in New York City, in some tight dark tunnel, with my good friend driving so that I could doze in a sort of dreamy haze, the mirror on the passenger side of the van smacked the open door of an electrical cabinet and I was jarred awake.
The judge fined me $50 for driving without a license.
Hereford High School. I couldn't stay at home. I was agitated and confused. I looked over one night while climbing out the second-story window and someone was watching me go. I went to live with my Uncle and his family above Baltimore and attended the local high school. Nothing can be dispensed with. The students thought I was a narc sent to break up a big drug ring. Nothing can be deleted or left out. I had no motivation or passion for the silly tinkerings of public education. Tidbits and parcels that seemed wholly empty and without purpose. I quit school and worked full time at a local plant nursery. Potting plants, pulling orders together on the flatbed behind the tractor, getting my hands dirty in the greenhouse. I made $3.10 an hour. Searching for a seam in the fabric. Searching for the imperfections. But they are hidden from us. The places where the stories connect. They are not visible. So everything is necessary.
Joe Gibb's Youth for Tomorrow. I was accepted into a boy's home down in Gainsville, Virginia. At the time, the home sat in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by miles of pasture. It was plush and comfortable and Dexter Manley, a football player for the Redskins, would show up and join us for breakfast. I wasn't entirely sure what I was supposed to be doing. What I was supposed to be omitting. Or adding. My roommate showed me the scar from a knife wound. He was stabbed in the stomach and the knife went in a long way. How do we know that the world will continue standing if we remove this block, or that block, or this act or that one? The stitches are all of them hidden from us. But even here, I could not escape the classroom. Half of every day was spent at a desk in a classroom doing worksheets and taking tests. Always tests. The other half of the day we would pick up rocks from the fields. Mow the grass. Trim the hedges. Dig up stumps. Useful, beneficial tasks. Tasks that made sense. Hard work. I slept on the floor in my room to remind myself that not every bed is soft. And beyond the days, I later read in the endless music of Wallace Stevens, beyond the slow-foot litters of the nights, the actual, universal strength, without a word of rhetoric--there it is.
I had to leave Youth for Tomorrow. They spoke poorly of my father and they didn't even know him. I couldn't trust them. Couldn't trust what they were telling me. They assumed to know me because of a few psychological tests that I had learned to take. They assumed because of certain questions I had answered that I was this kind of person with these kinds of problems. And they were wrong. I was looking for something that has no name. That cannot be named. Or bought. Or seen. I played them as much as they me. I walked away and away across miles of fields in combat boots that had grown too small. I left my notebook of scribbles on the desk of my room. My test, I may have said, though of course I did not. I knew only to leave it behind. A calling card of where I had been. My feet hurt but I had a phone number and someone was waiting.
Walkersville Christian School / People's Supply. I studied from home after my father allowed me to return. Some sort of correspondence course based out of Pennsylvania. We visited the farm and shook hands with the designer of the curriculum and then I mailed my tests and papers to his house. Somehow he determined whether I passed or failed. I wanted to work and my father helped out with a job. People's Supply managed by a man named Oris Basinger. I remember his name because he was perhaps the first person in my life to take me seriously. He had work that needed to get done and I did it. I was making $5.50 an hour--a fortune!--working in the basement of a hardware store. I played with power tools, unpacked boxes of hardware, priced and shelved the stock, and enjoyed myself. I mostly worked alone and Oris respected my space. I studied on my own the other half of the day and took my studies, as far as I recall, seriously. I remember peace, a sort of organic consolation--
the complete society of the spirit when it is alone--
and I began to feel the truth. Or perhaps that is too strong. Perhaps only looking back now I can point to that time, to that period, and say Here, here I began to understand. That it is not so much the bootprint in the Nevada desert that is important. The piece of bone dusty in the trail. Not so much the railway station where the crying lover kisses her soldier goodbye. Not so much the pottery shards that link these people to this place. Not so much the broken down van in the bitter cold of Missouri and two young girls scared for the first time in their lives. But the notebook that stays behind when I leave.
Lanham Christian School (part II). I returned to school at the beginning of my junior year. As I apparently had no terminal problems on my previous stint, L.C.S. welcomed me (and the money my parents paid them) back. If I could have presented to them my final thesis I may have said, I am here because of a certain story. A tale wherein we are all, in our own tales, enjoined. All such smaller tales mirror the shape of the larger, but however hard you look and for however long you search, you will never find the seams. You will never know what must be added or omitted. We do because we must and that is all we can do.
In those final days of my education I wrote nearly every day, scrawling nonsense in a binder. I stormed through the halls in my stories, shooting teachers and jumping through windows. I traveled the world beyond the days, springing teenagers from a strength beyond the indifferent sound of these words. Their mangled bodies alive on the page, driving with wind-cracked whips the chariot of their youth through the incomplete and tragic tales of their lives. And lightening. Don't forget lightening.
When the administration found the notebook they expelled me, but it didn't really matter. I was finished. My high school thesis was complete. My father read through the words and then went before the board and argued my case. My father. He's fifteen, he said. He's writing words on a page. Let him. They expelled me and my father came to me with the news. You shook them up, he said. And I swear he was smirking.
The Lynchburg Years. The rest is, as they say, history. I attended school in Lynchburg to get a diploma. That is all. I was a model student. High grades. Stellar behavior. I did no administrative wrongs. I traveled to no distant lands. I kept my musings and notebooks to myself. And yet L.C.A. still informed my father, after my first year, that I was no longer welcome. That I simply didn't fit in. By then, of course, we could joke about such things, and I graduated the next year from Brookville High School.
THE VERY END
To say more than human things with human voice, that cannot be. And I still sometimes find myself kicking in the sand along the beaches of the New River Gorge, camping alone out of a boat, scanning the landscape for something unforeseen. Something out of place. Something untrue. But there is more to doing then simply searching, and I can easily and gratefully return home at journey's end. An old house half broken down. An imperfect family. A smile. The bootprints, the doll broken in the yard made of dirt, the safety pins punched through her ears, these are the world as we know it. The world made of flower and blood and steel. But they mean nothing--less than nothing--unless they are woven into a tale. It has become at long last the story that I seek. And the seams that stitch our tales together. And the places we have been and the horror and beauty to which we bear witness. What can be omitted? At what cost? Is not everything imaginable necessary? The tormented mothers the world over? My scrambled daughter? Who am I to say that this or that ought not be. I cannot. Neither can I bear witness to that which has no name. I am but a man. I am here because of a certain story. That is all I know.
And for this reason I often find myself saying, "I went to school mostly up in D.C."
Saturday, January 22, 2011
Nazim Hikmet
Nazim Hikmet (Turkish poet 1903-1961), spent some 15 years in prison for his political views. He wrote some poetry. Here's a piece dated February 1948:
On Living
I
Living is no laughing matter:
you must live with great seriousness
like a squirrel, for example--
I mean without looking for something beyond and above living,
I mean living must be your whole occupation.
Living is no laughing matter:
you must take it seriously,
so much so and to such a degree
that, for example, your hands tied behind your back,
your back to the wall,
or else in a laboratory
in your white coat and safety glasses,
you can die for people--
even for people whose faces you've never seen,
even though you know living
is the most real, the most beautiful thing.
I mean, you must take living so seriously
that even at seventy, for example, you'll plant olive trees--
and not for your children, either,
but because although you fear death you don't believe it,
because living, I mean, weighs heavier.
II
Let's say we're seriously ill, need surgery--
which is to say we might not get up
from the white table.
Even though it's impossible not to feel sad
about going a little too soon,
we'll still laugh at the jokes being told,
we'll look out the window to see if it's raining,
or wait anxiously
for the latest newscast...
Let's say we're at the front--
for something worth fighting for, say.
There, in the first offensive, on that very day,
we might fall on our face, dead.
We'll know this with a curious anger,
but we'll still worry ourselves to death
about the outcome of the war, which could last years.
Let's say we're in prison
and close to fifty,
and we have eighteen more years, say,
before the iron doors will open.
We'll still live with the outside,
with its people and animals, struggle and wind--
I mean with the outside beyond the walls.
I mean, however and wherever we are,
we must live as if we will never die.
III
This earth will grow cold,
a star among stars
and one of the smallest,
a gilded mote on blue velvet--
I mean THIS, our great earth.
This earth will grow cold one day,
not like a block of ice
or a dead cloud even
but like an empty walnut it will roll along
in pitch black space...
You must grieve for this right now
--you have to feel this sorrow now--
for the world must be loved this much
if you're going to say "I lived."
On Living
I
Living is no laughing matter:
you must live with great seriousness
like a squirrel, for example--
I mean without looking for something beyond and above living,
I mean living must be your whole occupation.
Living is no laughing matter:
you must take it seriously,
so much so and to such a degree
that, for example, your hands tied behind your back,
your back to the wall,
or else in a laboratory
in your white coat and safety glasses,
you can die for people--
even for people whose faces you've never seen,
even though you know living
is the most real, the most beautiful thing.
I mean, you must take living so seriously
that even at seventy, for example, you'll plant olive trees--
and not for your children, either,
but because although you fear death you don't believe it,
because living, I mean, weighs heavier.
II
Let's say we're seriously ill, need surgery--
which is to say we might not get up
from the white table.
Even though it's impossible not to feel sad
about going a little too soon,
we'll still laugh at the jokes being told,
we'll look out the window to see if it's raining,
or wait anxiously
for the latest newscast...
Let's say we're at the front--
for something worth fighting for, say.
There, in the first offensive, on that very day,
we might fall on our face, dead.
We'll know this with a curious anger,
but we'll still worry ourselves to death
about the outcome of the war, which could last years.
Let's say we're in prison
and close to fifty,
and we have eighteen more years, say,
before the iron doors will open.
We'll still live with the outside,
with its people and animals, struggle and wind--
I mean with the outside beyond the walls.
I mean, however and wherever we are,
we must live as if we will never die.
III
This earth will grow cold,
a star among stars
and one of the smallest,
a gilded mote on blue velvet--
I mean THIS, our great earth.
This earth will grow cold one day,
not like a block of ice
or a dead cloud even
but like an empty walnut it will roll along
in pitch black space...
You must grieve for this right now
--you have to feel this sorrow now--
for the world must be loved this much
if you're going to say "I lived."
Saturday, August 28, 2010
Professional Notes: Chaining the Land
Smith Mountain, when you’re driving beside the length of it, is a long mountain. With a summit elevation of 1,900 feet, it’s not a high mountain, even by Virginia standards, but for those of us who entered the profession of land surveying to get outside, to spend our days trudging through the woods searching for lost corners, to piece puzzling chunks of geometry together, Smith Mountain had all the makings of a good boundary survey.
There were overlaps and gaps, one of which ran the boundary line through the backside of a half-million dollar house overlooking Smith Mountain Lake. There were old country roads running beside open fields tended by old country farmers, places we heard stories of murder and intrigue and saw the creek were a woman once drowned her newborn baby. There were buried monuments and places where old buildings once stood and at least one old hunting lodge with a mirror still hanging from the wall and clothes still molding in the wardrobe. We stepped carefully across the rotten floorboards. There were unfriendly landowners suspicious of our presence who stared us down as we drove by. There were long walks back to the truck at the end of the day and then the length of the mountain, and our heads thrown back at the surprise of it.
For the better part of three weeks we enjoyed this mountain, digging up the concrete monuments set more than half a century ago, hearing the stories, scratching around for copper plugs driven into rock outcrops, unraveling the beauty and mystery that come from 90,000 feet of boundary. I promised the surveyor to whom I answer that after this job, I would sit dutifully back in my cubicle and not go outside for a year. Just let me out for this one. This is my kind of boundary. And this: being able to hold in the back of our minds the notion of a conservation easement, the notion that we were surveying this land to protect it for public use.
So when Governor Tim Kaine--yes, Governor Tim Kaine was still manning the helm back then--made the official announcement at an annual AEP shareholder’s meeting on April 21, and the easement of 5,000 acres became public, we smiled along with him, as did, perhaps, the old country farmers on the gravel roads, and the old timers eating breakfast at Blairs Country Store, and anyone who knows the mountain and her stories as well as they do. This survey then would not be the last chance to see the mountain unspoiled. And for those of us who treasure public lands, who understand the value of setting aside and protecting a portion of what we own for the aesthetic and recreational enjoyment of the Public, the Smith Mountain Conservation Easement is like a gift. And being able to run the boundary and put it back together might be likened to wrapping the gift and presenting it to anyone who will step out onto the land and enjoy it.
There were overlaps and gaps, one of which ran the boundary line through the backside of a half-million dollar house overlooking Smith Mountain Lake. There were old country roads running beside open fields tended by old country farmers, places we heard stories of murder and intrigue and saw the creek were a woman once drowned her newborn baby. There were buried monuments and places where old buildings once stood and at least one old hunting lodge with a mirror still hanging from the wall and clothes still molding in the wardrobe. We stepped carefully across the rotten floorboards. There were unfriendly landowners suspicious of our presence who stared us down as we drove by. There were long walks back to the truck at the end of the day and then the length of the mountain, and our heads thrown back at the surprise of it.For the better part of three weeks we enjoyed this mountain, digging up the concrete monuments set more than half a century ago, hearing the stories, scratching around for copper plugs driven into rock outcrops, unraveling the beauty and mystery that come from 90,000 feet of boundary. I promised the surveyor to whom I answer that after this job, I would sit dutifully back in my cubicle and not go outside for a year. Just let me out for this one. This is my kind of boundary. And this: being able to hold in the back of our minds the notion of a conservation easement, the notion that we were surveying this land to protect it for public use.
So when Governor Tim Kaine--yes, Governor Tim Kaine was still manning the helm back then--made the official announcement at an annual AEP shareholder’s meeting on April 21, and the easement of 5,000 acres became public, we smiled along with him, as did, perhaps, the old country farmers on the gravel roads, and the old timers eating breakfast at Blairs Country Store, and anyone who knows the mountain and her stories as well as they do. This survey then would not be the last chance to see the mountain unspoiled. And for those of us who treasure public lands, who understand the value of setting aside and protecting a portion of what we own for the aesthetic and recreational enjoyment of the Public, the Smith Mountain Conservation Easement is like a gift. And being able to run the boundary and put it back together might be likened to wrapping the gift and presenting it to anyone who will step out onto the land and enjoy it.
Friday, August 27, 2010
The Letter Writer
There was a time I wrote letters with decent frequency. I used to be so tidy! Decisively not emails. Letters that were sometimes—not often due to my propensity for editing—but sometimes written in pen on college ruled paper. Downtown. Beneath the yellow lights on the courthouse steps. Stuffed into large yellow envelopes and hand addressed.
Y.Lenips—an artist’s artist—would write on blank white paper without lines because he preferred ink and thought the natural bend of the written sentence when unencumbered by artificial rulers offered an aesthetic that was not unlike the natural roll and dip of the earth. As if reading a letter might somehow be compared to taking a walk across an open meadow when the grass gets tall in early autumn and the ponds turn over and the air thickens and the river starts to turn green.
(Richard Hugo would argue there is no need to create the entire world before inhabiting it with people. Write on lined paper, for god’s sake. With a pencil. And cross out mistakes violently. Y.Lenips was more concerned with creating the entire world than inhabiting the world with people.)
We would even send directions with our letters. Instructions for how to read them. At least two beers away from the center of the bar. Best in a dark corner. Take a walk down a city street at night and read aloud. One paragraph at a time, please. Record page two and play back while driving at night. Stupid stuff that never got followed, except maybe one Christmas Eve when I drove my car up 501 toward Big Island at night—sweeping around that final bend down toward the river and watching the approaching lights of the factory get closer and fuller through the trees—listening to myself read Lawrence Raab underneath spooky keyboard noises floating from my car speakers. The river black and still beside me. But I was following my own instructions and reading my own letter.
The only way to make art, Miles Davis said, is to forget what is unimportant.
Y.Lenips sent the grand finale, which was a letter on some sort of foam board cut into jigsaw pieces and mailed to three different people. Three people taking part in a little writing circle that came about after an assignment in grad school into which I naturally invited several letter writers. The series of papers becoming a series of letters. The professor said he’d play along once he had time. Like after he retired. Time. I might respond to this, he wrote back, once I'm done teaching. We had to meet and put the grand finale Lenips letter together before we could even read it. Which of course brought the whole circle to a grinding halt. I passed the class.
Which was genius, on his part. Genius. Later, teaching a class on MEDIA LITERACY, I thought about that puzzle, and how to assign such a task to a room full of people who hated me. But then why? Instead I turned in my keys and drove to the mountains and sat down beside the river.
Back in the day, I even mailed those letters with a stamp. Through the mail.
The elevator, at first, seemed merely helpful, and the high-rise splendid against the night sky—what you could see of it. Recordings allow us to hear a few elevating strains from the “Ode to Joy” several times a day, the genius long ago beat out of it.
How often I write letters now is a question of time. How much or how little. Time. It takes time to write and mail a letter. Far quicker to email, which will be written, read, and zapped out of existence before the thought can even be said to stand up on the page. Time.
And those miracles of modern electronics that have allowed us to communicate quickly, easily, cheaply, gracelessly with every part of the world permit us to do so in private and in every remove from face to face. Air travel is comfortable, affordable, and swift and enables us to ignore geography, just as we ignore climate, because we have HVAC and, in addition, can purchase terrible tomatoes any season of the year from stores that are open all night.
All night. And the others—the several who wrote and responded—the several who took the time, had the time, they all moved away. Their times had come. No more time for that. They left their wives, their apartments, their jobs. They migrated like zombies to the next station. North. West. Gone. A blessing, perhaps, but no forwarding addresses. No contact information. Chasing dreams held by ships on distant horizons. No goodbyes. Getting away from this puzzle. This headache. This town.
I saw one of the letter writers once at a funeral and his hair was long and he nodded his head. It was a funeral for someone we loved. Nothing was said.
Y.Lenips—an artist’s artist—would write on blank white paper without lines because he preferred ink and thought the natural bend of the written sentence when unencumbered by artificial rulers offered an aesthetic that was not unlike the natural roll and dip of the earth. As if reading a letter might somehow be compared to taking a walk across an open meadow when the grass gets tall in early autumn and the ponds turn over and the air thickens and the river starts to turn green.
(Richard Hugo would argue there is no need to create the entire world before inhabiting it with people. Write on lined paper, for god’s sake. With a pencil. And cross out mistakes violently. Y.Lenips was more concerned with creating the entire world than inhabiting the world with people.)
We would even send directions with our letters. Instructions for how to read them. At least two beers away from the center of the bar. Best in a dark corner. Take a walk down a city street at night and read aloud. One paragraph at a time, please. Record page two and play back while driving at night. Stupid stuff that never got followed, except maybe one Christmas Eve when I drove my car up 501 toward Big Island at night—sweeping around that final bend down toward the river and watching the approaching lights of the factory get closer and fuller through the trees—listening to myself read Lawrence Raab underneath spooky keyboard noises floating from my car speakers. The river black and still beside me. But I was following my own instructions and reading my own letter.
The only way to make art, Miles Davis said, is to forget what is unimportant.
Y.Lenips sent the grand finale, which was a letter on some sort of foam board cut into jigsaw pieces and mailed to three different people. Three people taking part in a little writing circle that came about after an assignment in grad school into which I naturally invited several letter writers. The series of papers becoming a series of letters. The professor said he’d play along once he had time. Like after he retired. Time. I might respond to this, he wrote back, once I'm done teaching. We had to meet and put the grand finale Lenips letter together before we could even read it. Which of course brought the whole circle to a grinding halt. I passed the class.
Which was genius, on his part. Genius. Later, teaching a class on MEDIA LITERACY, I thought about that puzzle, and how to assign such a task to a room full of people who hated me. But then why? Instead I turned in my keys and drove to the mountains and sat down beside the river.
Back in the day, I even mailed those letters with a stamp. Through the mail.
The elevator, at first, seemed merely helpful, and the high-rise splendid against the night sky—what you could see of it. Recordings allow us to hear a few elevating strains from the “Ode to Joy” several times a day, the genius long ago beat out of it.
How often I write letters now is a question of time. How much or how little. Time. It takes time to write and mail a letter. Far quicker to email, which will be written, read, and zapped out of existence before the thought can even be said to stand up on the page. Time.
And those miracles of modern electronics that have allowed us to communicate quickly, easily, cheaply, gracelessly with every part of the world permit us to do so in private and in every remove from face to face. Air travel is comfortable, affordable, and swift and enables us to ignore geography, just as we ignore climate, because we have HVAC and, in addition, can purchase terrible tomatoes any season of the year from stores that are open all night.
All night. And the others—the several who wrote and responded—the several who took the time, had the time, they all moved away. Their times had come. No more time for that. They left their wives, their apartments, their jobs. They migrated like zombies to the next station. North. West. Gone. A blessing, perhaps, but no forwarding addresses. No contact information. Chasing dreams held by ships on distant horizons. No goodbyes. Getting away from this puzzle. This headache. This town.
I saw one of the letter writers once at a funeral and his hair was long and he nodded his head. It was a funeral for someone we loved. Nothing was said.
Sunday, August 22, 2010
Community
Today I take the boys out--Jeremiah & Ezra--for one last excursion before the start of school. To the water, since it will be about 90 degrees and since they've both assured me that whatever we do, they would like to leap from great heights. Thunderstorms are expected. Tomorrow Jeremiah starts high school. Ezra enters his final year of middle school. And my mind returns to Madison and Kacey, who used to be almost inseparable, my daughter and her best friend--having grown up as next door neighbors--drifting apart when they began high school. They began--as teenagers often do--running with different groups and moving in different directions. Before long Kacey was no longer coming around, though of course I sometimes pass her when picking up Jeremiah, her brother. "Kacey!" I say. "Hi Joe," she says.
And then comes the parade of faces now gone, as if somehow I have made my home in a train depot, destined to watch as people come and go. And I am reminded of how ambulatory we have become: this globetrotting generation of people. And how little, comparatively speaking, family and community now mean. Now we go where our careers take us, carve out our initials on the tree of history, visit our parents, if they're lucky, a few times a year. Our encounters with one another are brief, squeezed in between this and that.
So we will go to the mountains, we three. We will scramble to find cover when the thunderstorms come. We will leap from high places. We will return this evening tired and amazed and perhaps finish with a shared meal. And then we will strike out tomorrow across another year of middle school, across our first year of high school, across the weekday job we may or may not enjoy, across the sad and secret chambers of the human heart.
And then comes the parade of faces now gone, as if somehow I have made my home in a train depot, destined to watch as people come and go. And I am reminded of how ambulatory we have become: this globetrotting generation of people. And how little, comparatively speaking, family and community now mean. Now we go where our careers take us, carve out our initials on the tree of history, visit our parents, if they're lucky, a few times a year. Our encounters with one another are brief, squeezed in between this and that.
So we will go to the mountains, we three. We will scramble to find cover when the thunderstorms come. We will leap from high places. We will return this evening tired and amazed and perhaps finish with a shared meal. And then we will strike out tomorrow across another year of middle school, across our first year of high school, across the weekday job we may or may not enjoy, across the sad and secret chambers of the human heart.
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