Esther Press

In the Poetry Magazine poem,


About right here we get the first bit of weather,
overstrung, like a 13-string guitar, and that
vapid act of soulful queasy grace, blackening,
always blackening, like a caged rabbit, the page.

At some point, too, we must insert some Greek,
because the author is not, nor is anything in
the author's immediate perview (a good Poetry
word, btw). Or the modern way is to place a

Bit of casual colloquial tones inside the halls
of a classical thing, and so bewitch us! with
the teasing voyeurism of advertisements. Have I
alluded to my aches? Have I mentioned that something

sings? I always just barely hear, due to the
requisite plot filters of a Poetry poem. Life is
soft and quiet and hardly seen. There are dreams
in the trees, over a marriage, which is forever

ending. Loss is key to any piece. In mittens,
in baby boomer vacations, reconsidered over a name
brand table and a name brand tea. The teahouse
is run by blind Haitians, and they are winking

and waving, to please come again. The universe
is as warm as a nuzzling goat, suckling on the
grassfed, full udders of its mother, while the white
milk will remind us of egg paintings in the Uffizi.

MOUNT SHASTA DISPATCH



I have been asked to write a bit about my initial attempt and upcoming second attempt to summit Mount Shasta, a 14,169 ft volcanic mountain located about two and a half hours north of Chico, California. Some may remember that I tried last year to summit via Avalance Gulch, but failed (at 12,100 ft) due to a mixture of altitude sickness (a feeling of being sleepy and drunk at the same time), the wrong kind of training, and improper dietary considerations. Sheer will will not overcome these things.

The hike in from the Bunny Flat trailhead gets progressively steeper, and really starts to increase on Olbermann's Causeway (Olbermann was a caretaker) (perhaps 8000 ft). Most climbers will stay overnight on a tarny flat outcrop called Helen Lake, which is at 10,300 ft. From here, most will begin their summit bids in the very early morning, in the dark, usually around 1-3 a.m. It was an interesting experience to be in the huge quiet of a mountain, in a kind of belly of one side, with chilly night air (22 degrees), eating oatmeal quickly, and seeing the dots of LED headlamps in the distance, some just beginning the grind in the first real test of the mountain, the part that is called The Heart.

It's called The Heart because it looks like one. There are steep climbing zones on each side of the breast-like portion of The Heart. These are two different routes. Left of the Heart is a steeper climb than Right of the Heart. Last year, due to rockfall on the right side, we took the Left of the Heart route.

Last year, I felt very good when I awoke at 1:30 a.m. to begin the summit attempt. I remember thinking, I can do this. I felt strong and limber, and my breathing felt fine. I didn't really have any difficulty taking in oxygen.

At around 2 a.m., everyone was ready to start the climb. We were harnessed to one another, with a metal loop holding the rope between each climber's legs, right through the groin. Slowly, in the dark, with cumbersome, inflexible double-plastic mountaineering boots, we gingerly stepped on to boulders and talus and scree. It was very difficult to keep one's balance, especially since we were not using our hiking poles any longer but the much shorter ice-ax. In fact one of the climbers turned his ankle on these rocks before we even really got going.

At the foot of the long trudge up the side of the Heart, we received instructions on various matters--how to keep warm (keep moving), what to do if one starts sweating inside one's jacket (ventilate the jacket--you don't want trapped sweat), and to watch how you climb. We would be doing the classic French step, with a stab of the ice-ax into the mountain, a step, and then a resting step. Repeat this again and again and again. We talked briefly again about self-arresting procedures in case one of us fell and began to slide or tumble down the side of the mountain. We would go at a pace that wouldn't cause us to continually rest, which wastes time, but to find a pace where we continued moving, however slow it may seem.

I still felt in good spirits, and soon we were climbing up the The Heart. After about 10,800 ft, I began to feel the first signs of altitude sickness. I kept it to myself, however. I was roped in with two other climbers. Now was not the time to mention anything. I didn't want to really believe it was happening to me so soon. I tried to concentrate on French stepping, while the grade of the mountain got even steeper--easily at the 35 degree slope level. I was beginning to feel a bit funny in my head the higher we went. First I noticed a kind of carelessness in my manner, a sloppiness. Then I noticed I was tripping on the shared rope, as we zigzagged our way up.

MORE TO FOLLOW

Pierre, South Dakota

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REDUCED TO CONDENSITY 3


Has there ever been a more joykilling title than Delmore Schwartz's "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities"?

Fitzcarraldo is the greatest movie of all time.

In Dreams Begin Digital Assets Managers.

People remark on a time before air conditioners, and I tell them that that never happened. Or they weren't people. Or they were "people" who had better venting.

In the future everyone will be a digital assets manager.

Celery Twig paint color by [manufacturer] is a dream color, and I've now put it in two of our rooms.

In the other rooms, you can feel reality coming at you violently like an MFA student in need of a recommendation.

Savage Grace, directed by Tom Kalin. Starring Julianne Moore, Stephen Dillane, and Eddie Redmayne. 2007.

After a string of incredibly mediocre films at the manse here in Chico, gold was struck with this beauty. This film follows the personal lives of the heirs of Leo Hendrik Baekeland, of Bakelite plastic fame. Leo invented the first true plastic, and became incredibly wealthy. The casting is excellent. The photography is excellent. The dialog is raw, urbane, and powerful. The narrative is mysterious, sexual, poetic, and direct. Julianne Moore, as the mother, Barbara Baekeland, goes to some aggressive lengths to "cure" her homosexual son. Tom Kalin previously directed Swoon, many years ago.

In the above video, you will witness a scripted speech meant to give the sense of unscriptedness. There's a shoehorned looseness within, a desire to make a privately scripted speech seem publicly casual. It is the reverse of what usually happens. But, here, we get both.

Apart from the queasiness one has watching two people play at being casual, with all of the scripted--yet still dull--jokes, in public, we are also treated to a numbing restatement of a sentiment most children understand. And, yes, even the adult speakers here understand it as well. When this usually happens, the speakers realize that there is nothing new being said, and they then usually will stop there. Most people do this. But, here, remarkably, the commonplace sentiment continues unabated, including a tone that suggests there is some outstretched risk in doing so.

In addition, there is the hammering of the "use your words" philosophy. As stated in the speech, there is a belief that our emotions can be articulated by language. This is not even disputed by the speakers. Emotions can be captured, displayed, placed in logical sentences, and then expressed. In this mode—with syntax, grammar, and diction—we carry our burdensome feelings directly to the sentence structure and watch as our mingling, conflicting emotions disappear into linear sense, presto chango—birthed by language. It’s a magic act.

Beneath all of this Age of Reason simplicity, we are really witnessing, like always, a dualism of presumptions, with one presumption taken as the protagonist—the driving presumption, let’s say—and the other taking the role of the antagonist—what the speakers don’t want. This is an argument about values.

In this speech, articulated emotions and thoughts, through the sense-making capacity of language, is the protagonist. This is what is desired.

However, this desire comes freighted with unending tonnage of bad faith.

It’s believed that through the sound logic of sense-making language that there will be, ipso facto, no rocks thrown in the world. Rocks are thrown, you see, when inarticulate monkeys cannot manage themselves to fully assess the confusion of the outer reality and one’s inner pinball game of thoughts and feelings and all the contradictions that move between.

It’s not mentioned here that the most learned and intelligent men and women, speaking in full, complete sentences, full of sense, are the ones who usually do cause the most strategic rock throwing. That is to say, that it takes an enormously complicated mind to rationally pursue and articulate the making of an atomic bomb. (That’s just a tossed off for instance. Am I being too casual?)

The antagonist in this is simply the sign for wildness, thoughtlessness, unbridled, raw paroxysms of guiltless abandon. This is what leads to wars, we learn. This unchecked randomness, this conflicted, unlocateable, unpronounceable, unexplainable interiority is what we must worry most about, we learn.

It’s not the systemic machines, the precise blueprints, or the purposeful uniformity of military identities that must be feared. We must worry about the stray cat. The mysterious house. The unknown feelings.

One would hope that given the enormity of a chance of speaking at the White House, two published authors might be able to think these things through a little better than what’s replicating here. This is a cliché of a speech passed off as profundity—and what’s worse, the authors actually admit to it. They know it is. They know it’s a cliché. And if they had spent any time at all looking deeper into the pivot places that the argument is moving from, upon, against, they would also know, on top of it all, that the cliché is also a lie.

Includes eye-to-eye reading of SPD's Worst Postmodern Lyric, "Scepter, Of the Autodidact (Recalcitrant Mode).

YUKO NASU