The Road Less Understood

The title to this blog alludes to one of America's most well-known and most misunderstood poems. Contrary to popular belief, the poem is not a paean to counter-culture and non-conformity, to alternate lifestyles and to getting off the beaten path. Not that those are bad things. Karpe Diem, I say, and I think Robert Frost would agree with me; getting out into nature, stopping and smelling the roses and all that hippie love stuff, or jesus love stuff if you want go back to the source, is a good thing. It's just not what the poem is about, and giving the text a careful reading and lexical analysis will show you what I mean...

In the first stanza we meet the poem's protagonist, a primal projection of the young poet, the everyman, standing in a yellow wood and faced with a choice between two paths.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

The first thing to note is that the traveler is already in a yellow wood. So we are already talking about a walk through the woods, not a decision to leave some urban or other lifestyle in preference for the "green" way of the backwoods.

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

In this second stanza, the traveler decides to take the other path, describing it as "just as fair" and "perhaps" having a better claim because it is "grassy and wanted wear". Aha, you say. I told you so. It's all about taking the road less traveled, forging through uncharted territory, being different etc. etc. But the very next couplet belies this attempt to differentiate the two paths telling us that they were worn "really about the same".

At this point, the two paths have been described as "just as fair" and "about the same" with one of them "perhaps" having a "better claim". Not quite the rallying cry of the non-conformist that you'd expect, right? Well if you aren't convinced yet, the next stanza pretty much puts the metaphorical nail in the biodegradable coffin with the unequivocal description "equally lay".

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

So far we've got a poem about a traveler standing in the woods trying to pick between to almost equally trodden paths. The traveler tries to look down the road and presumably picks the "nicer" or "better" path, but readily admits that there isn't really a discernible difference. Then the traveler sort of reluctantly chooses one, knowing that they will more than likely never go back and try the other.

At this point, the poem is starting to look a bit more nihilistic. What's the point of picking if we can't see the ends, if we can't distinguish the difference? The key comes in the final stanza, when the traveler is looking back in retrospect on their life.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

We now envision the traveler in some smokey and nostalgic roadside inn, no doubt with a wooden sign hanging askew over the door and an old-fashioned "Olde" in the title. The traveler is perhaps sitting in a rocking chair by the hearth, tamping out his aromatic pipe. What we know is that he or she is addressing an unseen audience. Who are they? Perhaps fellow travelers? Perhaps a circle of knock-kneed and wide-eyed children?

And what is the traveler saying? That that one decision, that one small decision between two nearly identical paths in a yellow wood has made all the difference. Basically the traveler is attributing a great importance to a decision that at the time was almost a flip of a coin. And this is what the poem is really about, the unreliability of memory and man's helplessness in the events of life.

The traveler believes that a choice between two indistinguishable paths was a key turning point in their life. The way they remember it, that one choice made all the difference. Maybe they don't really remember how the paths were basically the same, or maybe they have an elevated opinion of their abilities and believe that even in this minutest of moments they were charging towards self-made greatness.

It kind of depends on how you read the "sigh". Is it a sigh of regret and loss or puritanical pride in a job well done? Has the traveler become a prince or a pauper in the years following that fateful frolick in the forest? We are clearly in the presence of nostalgia, but is it a nostalgia born of myopia or hubris? Is man to believe that he is the master of his fate and that decisions, even admittedly haphazard ones like the choice between following two equally trodden paths, make a difference? Or is this a lesson on the unreliability of memory and man's tendency, or perhaps need, to attribute agency and meaning to the chaos and randomness of life?

Whether you believe in pulling yourself up by your bootstraps or the inexorable wheel of fate winding out your life, the song remains the same. Frost is reminding us that each moment is precious and rarely can be saved for another day. And that as the shadows lengthen and fall upon us, we will perforce look back at the rise and fall of our days and know with certainty that our lives are precisely as they are and could be no other way. Otherwise they would not be ours to remember. We will have the choice to look back and sigh with joy or regret for the paths we chose and never chose to take, and together these will be the paths of our life lying just so, diverging in the woods of our soul. And we can be sure that the paths we trod have made all the difference, because our dusty and fading footprints are no doubt the legacy we leave behind to those who follow...

One final point about how memory diverges from life (like two roads in a wood) and how, willfully or not, this leads us to misunderstand: the Robert Frost poem is titled The Road Not Taken, not as most people will remember The Road Less Traveled. And that, to paraphrase Robert Frost, not only makes all the difference, but is exactly what he's talking about.

Read More...

Summary only...

Twittering away the hours

Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
You twitter and waste the hours in an offhand way.
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way...


[start message thread]
Jl: Nespee nespee nespee nespee

Kl: What's up random guy? No time?

Jl: I have new self imposed phone rules

Kl: But that don't include standards of quality?
--
Kl: About to jam with Nada Surf?

Jb: How did that end up happening?

Kl: Just lucky, I guess

Jb: Holy smokes you can say that again

Kl: Just lucky, I guess

Jb: I would expect nothing less
--
Kl: Let's stop by Hershe park on our way to Sasquatch.

Jl: Where is that?

Jb: What is Hershe park? A place or a band?

Kl: It's the sweetest place in the world.

Jb: Well who can say no to that?
--
Jb: Guess who gets to see Dr. Brian Greene lecture on the importance of science tomorrow?

Kl: Me?

Jb: Not unless you have plans to be at pierce college tomorrow. I do have an extra ticket if you decide to go though. :)

Kl: OMG, pierce through the fabric of the cosmos.

Jb: Word!
--
Dg: At your place - relaxing with a glass of wine. Have fund and don't rush or worry about me.

Kl: You always know just what to say.

[message forward]

Ko: Who's that?

Kl: My gf

Js: I'm so jealous!
--
Kl: Good times last night

Js: Indeed. Still jealous though

Ko: Haha, totally. Sorry for being the token lush.

Kl: You were token?

Ko: no.
--
Jl: Did u see the movie le haine?

Kl: Oui, La haine: ce n'est pas la chute qui compte, c'est l'atterrissage.

Jl: Arash ta mere

Kl: It's too late to lose the weight you use to need to throw around.

Jl: Sortie...
[end thread]

Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain.
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today.
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you.
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.

So you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again.
The sun is the same in a relative way but you're older,
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death.

Every year is getting shorter never seem to find the time.
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
The time is gone, the song is over,
Thought I'd something more to say.

Read More...

Summary only...

Poet predicts end of science - Universe answers

In 1915, Einstein publishes his general theory of relativity. It's a simple idea that creates a big bang in the world of physics. When, or perhaps more appropriately if, fully understood, the theory describes a world where space and time evolve dynamically: no longer absolute and eternal, but relative, no longer a fixed stage on which the great dramas of life play out, but non-Euclidean and non-Newtonian sets constantly changing and being changed by the actors and their actions inside them. Man, no longer a play thing to immutable and inscrutable fate, has cut the strings and is executing a mathematical and cosmic dance with the gods. Le point fixe qui bouge, in Lecoq terms.

Perhaps you are thinking that this is a bit dramatic or poetic for a description of modern physics, but then you would be forgetting that Einstein himself was a dreamer. In fact, he describes a vivid dream involving cows, a farmer and an electric fence as the inspiration for his special theory of relativity. "Science does not know its debt to imagination," writes Emmerson, and so it is that we owe a debt to the artists, to the writers and dreamers who travel and trade in the land of imagination, for nothing can be theorized or studied that hasn't first been imagined.

Beyond the big bang (tautology? is there anything before the big bang?), Einstein's theory creates the theoretical and mathematical framework which predicts and describes black holes, gravitational lensing and much more. In terms of gravity as geometry, people offer the image of a rubber sheet stretched out with bowling balls and other balls rolling around on it. If you visualize how each ball would create it's own dip and pull in the rubber sheet around it and what effect that might have on a nearby object, then all you have to do is add two more dimensions (one in space and one in time) to understand general relativity's description of the world.

Though it may be hard to understand now, one of the most revolutionary ideas inherent in general relativity was that the universe (space and time) might not be fixed and eternal. When you start plugging in the numbers out pops a picture of the universe which includes a big bang, i.e. a beginning, as well as expansion. And this beginning and expansion leads to an obvious question. If the universe starts at the big bang, 'how does it end?'

Remember that people have been burned at the stake, or worse, for asking similar questions, or worse, proposing answers to them. Take Giordano Bruno for example. He was burned just for suggesting that the earth rotated around the sun and not the other way around (thus displacing man from the center of the universe). Even at the late date of 1915, and to a man of logic and reason like Einstein, the idea that the universe could have a beginning and an end is quite inelegant, frightening even. You have to be a real sensitive type or extremely paranoid to worry about a problem that is, by all reasonable calculations, billions of years in the future!

But worry he does, until finally he is led to commit what he considered the biggest blunder of his career. In order make the equations of general relativity describe a static world where the universe isn't expanding or contracting at the drop of a photon, Einstein inserts into them what he calls the Cosmological Constant. As it turns out, the universe is expanding and this has repeatedly been confirmed by observation. Moreover, the Cosmological Constant is not even mathematically very, well, constant, as it still tends to result in descriptions of an expanding or contracting universe when you start adding it all up.

In a further twist, it turns out that an accurate mathematical model of the universe, i.e. general relativity, may need a cosmological constant, not for aesthetic reasons about whether we think it makes sense for the universe to be able to expand or not, but in order to take into account the effects of the vacuum, or ground-state energy, which act to push against the pull of all the matter. Although this isn't what Einstein had in mind, it does sort of mitigate the blunder. In fact, it might make it one of the more inspired, and dare we say, creative acts of theoretical legerdemain in the history of physics. It was certainly a leap of faith. But, wait, we're talking about science! Next thing you know you are going to be telling me that Darwin was an intelligent designer...

So, did general relativity change the world? One might say that it didn't change it at all, just our fundamental understanding of everything in it and how it all works. And that, as the poem goes, has made all the difference. To continue the Frosty metaphor, it's two roads diverging not just in a wood but because of the wood and by your traveling there (and let's not forget the effect that roads and the wood have on you either).

But the whole sha-big-bang does leave one wondering, how is it all going to end? Well theoretically speaking there are basically two possibilities: continuing expansion or contraction. Either there is not enough matter and energy, and therefore gravitational pull, to stop the expansion of the universe and it keeps on going until there are nothing but vast distances between every soon to be cold and extinct particle, or there is enough and the universe's expansion is eventually slowed down and stopped, at which point it begins to contract back in on itself into a final fiery and dense singularity (aka big bang bis or part deux).

Interestingly, a year after Einstein publishes his theory, our friend Robert Frost publishes the following poem:

Fire and Ice

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Did Frost subscribe to scientific journals? Did he somehow understand Einstein's general relativity (before anyone else) and what it implied about the beginning and end of the universe? Probably not, but actually that is what makes this poem even more prescient (as in preceding science as imagination always must), Frost has correctly described the two possible ends of the universe, fire and ice, and their anthropomorphic equivalents, desire and hate. So which is it?

Well in 1998, observations of supernovas have shown us that the universe is not just expanding, it's accelerating! More precisely the rate of its expansion is accelerating. While there is still room for new discoveries or understandings, like the effect of quantum gravity on these calculations or the whole dark matter thing, this acceleration pretty much tells us how it's all going to end, I'm talking about life, the universe and everything. In the words of that immortal poet Robert Van Winkle, it's going to be "ice, ice, baby."

Read More...

Summary only...

Eat, Love, Pray!

I've just updated my facebook status to read, "Kevin is eating, loving and praying!" because that is that exactly what I have been doing recently along with reading the Elizabeth Gilbert book by almost the same name.

The joy I am feeling to be eating, loving and praying with this new awareness is well captured by the exclamation point that I generously append to my new electronic face--it's nothing less than my typographical being, the 'i' in me, doing a handstand!

Gilbert writes that "when you sense a faint potentiality for happiness after such dark times you must grab onto the ankles of that happiness and not let go until it drags you face-first out of the dirt--this is not selfishness, but obligation."

As much as I malign facebook, it does serve its purpose. It's the face you decide to share with your not-so-virtual friends. So today I've decided to put on a happy, dirt caked face. It's not selfishness or an obligation to share this light of joy, and we are not diminished by the giving of it. On the contrary, the light bulb does not decide where or on whom to shine, it just shines in every direction. So here is my ray of the day:

Today I open wide the doors
rejoicing the sun in flight
singing A bas les abat-jours !
bowing as day to night
praying hey-hey, ho-ho,
these bulbs of joy have got to grow.

Yes this little light of mine, I'm gonna let it...

Read More...

Summary only...

The Man Watching

The Man Watching, by Rainer Maria Rilke

I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can't bear without a friend,
I can't love without a sister

The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.

What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.

When we win it's with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestler's sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.

Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.

Read More...

Summary only...

The Path With Heart

The Path With A Heart, from 'Don Juan A Yaqui Warrior'

Anything is one of a million paths. Therefore you must always keep in mind that a path is only a path; if you feel you should not follow it, you must not stay with it under any condition. To have such clarity you must lead a disciplined life. Only then will you know that any path is only a path, and there is no affront, to oneself or to others in dropping it if that is what your heart tells you to do. But your decision to keep on the path or to leave it must be free of fear or ambition.

I warn you. Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary. Then ask yourself, and yourself alone, one question. This question is one that only a very old man asks. My benefactor told me about it once when I was young, and my blood was too vigorous for me to understand it. Now I do understand it. I will tell you what it is: Does this path have a heart?

All paths are the same: they lead nowhere. There are paths going through the bush, or into the bush. In my own life I could say I have traversed long, long paths, but I am not anywhere. My benefactor's question has meaning now. Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn't, it is of no use.

Both paths lead nowhere; but one has a heart, the other doesn't. One makes for a joyful journey; as long as you follow it, you are one with it. The other will make you curse your life. One makes you strong; the other weakens you.

The trouble is that nobody asks the question; and when a man finally realizes that he has taken a path without a heart, the path is ready to kill him. At that point very few men can stop to deliberate, and leave the path.

A path without heart is never enjoyable. You have to work hard even to take it. On the other hand, a path with heart is easy; it does not make you work at liking it.

For me there is only the traveling on paths that have heart, on any path that may have heart. There I travel, and the only worthwhile challenge is to traverse its full length.

And there I travel looking, looking breathlessly.

Read More...

Summary only...

Life is a page

Life is a page
And I am a word

Life is a cage
And I am a bird

Life is a field
And I am a crop

Life is a stream
And I am a drop

--Iqbal

Read More...

Summary only...

Kurt and Rebecca

From the Commitment Reading of the Pueblo Indian and a slam poem by Michael Cirelli
(arranged for Kurt and Rebecca’s wedding, July 27, 2008.)

Before we met, you and I were halves un-joined except in the wide river of our minds, where each other's distant shore, the opposite wings of a bird, the other half of a seashell, curled and stripped to fine perfection. We did not know each other then, did not know our determination to keep alive the cry of one riverbank to the other. We were apart, yet together in ignorance of one another, like two apples falling from a common tree. I knew you existed as a memory, long before you understood my desire to join my freedom to yours and yours to mine. I will remember.

Our paths collided long enough for our indecision to be swallowed up by a greater need of love. When you came to me, the sun surged towards the earth and the moon escaped from the darkness to bless the union of our two spirits, so alike that the creator designed them for life's endless dance, a circle K and R, spinning in the middle and where they join is us, because I am your Parker painter, your supplier of, and you, you are my beloved partner, keeper of my heart's odd secrets, clothed in summer blossoms so the icy hand of winter never touches us. I thank your patience. And trust our joining is like a tree to earth, a cloud to sky and even more, for richer or poor, in sickness and in health, we are the reason the world can laugh on its battlefields and rise from the ashes of its selfishness to hear me say, in this time, in this place, in this way - I loved you best of all.

From the first moment that our eyes set on each other like the dust, our hearts melted like wax that turned to vinyl and the albums turned, degrees upon degrees upon degrees. Our chests opened up like the sky playing the music of a land of showers translated into living for bread, mind became tongues as the summer melted like butter and leaves slowly roasted on trees.

Somehow we had remembered that we used to love each other, but couldn't recall where or when or why. Our hearts were like wax, and the vinyl rotated like it had never turned before till our souls spun around the sun and you became my earth. That's when we first met.

Then I walked the streets of Japan for thirty days, six hours, five-and-a-quarter minutes, it seemed like a year with new eyes swinging low trying to pick up rhymes for you on concrete and neon bustle that reminded me of you until we met again. You said, "yes," and then we found ourselves outside under a ripe moon, our candle constructed of the excess wax from my heart, exchanging wine and optimisms, but the album turned degrees, upon degrees of romanticism, I said "I guess I'll see you next lifetime," which was ironic because my lifeline was entwined with another, I used to love her, until I met you.

So I jumped in your car with P-town plates to go skiing on mountains with the thrust of plate-tectonics, and with you. Through bumps and trees, we followed each other up and down until the snow settled on our hoods. We packed lunches of bread and cheese and drank the breeze blowing off the slopes of Mt. Hood. And there was no need for a car radio, because my heart spun the wax which was the vinyl which turned those degrees times three, and this time I thought to myself, "love me, love me, say that you love me."

We made our love ceramic. It was so fragile that our heads began to spin like clay on a wheel, scriptures flipped, pieces chipped, words fell off as the album turned, throwing degrees upon themselves like neither one of us wanted to be the first to say goodbye, so we said I do. And by degrees our does become deeds where we will sign our names with greed with the excess wax from our melted hearts now tripped and tied in a frieze, and all we need is one witness, as we sign our intentions to become anew. Will you say I do?

So we can return to the same Dalles that we said "I love you" in for forty days and thirty-nine nights and it will be fire, and we’ll melt our albums back into a new heart, forget where they came from, return our records, so they can play a new composition, like a beat.

Read More...

Summary only...

Friends Haiku

old friends play then part
like dolphins, swoosh
so long and thanks for all the fish

Read More...

Summary only...

Love and Hate (after Robert Frost's Fire and Ice)

Love and Hate

Some say it's best to rule with love
Some say with hate.
If there's truth in life above
I hold with those who favor love.
But in our present state
I think I know enough of fear
To say that for ruling hate
Though no more dear
May be our fate.

Read More...

Summary only...

Rough Cut

Stonefence

What I remember most about working on my college’s literary magazine The Stonefence Review is warmth and laughter. In the late spring and summer, a certain easy, languid light would stream in and warm us from the outside; the rest of the year, steam heat and tea would warm us from the inside. Monday afternoons, we would meet in Sanborn library, surrounded by shelves of old books and sitting in big comfy chairs, to read and discuss the latest batch of poems and stories that had been submitted to us. This cozy atmosphere created a literary and critical mood that made us more prone to jocularity than to passionate debate, or any other emotions you might associate with working on a literary magazine.

After we had read and discussed a piece we would vote on whether to hold it over or not. Since every piece, which remained anonymous until publication, would be reviewed and voted on a second time before making it into an issue of the Stonefence, the whole thing remained a pretty easy-going affair. The focus and discussion was always on the text at hand, never on the author or on The Stonefence Review as a magazine. And the discussion, though critical, was usually pretty good-natured.

I think we were all a little wary of becoming some sort of pretentious literary clique; the result being that we probably often fell short of hypocrisy, landing instead on the fartsy side of artsy-fartsy. For example, it never failed to get a giggle from us when Giano Cromley would finish reading another of the 'you broke my heart and left me love rants' and announce, "a poem, by Chris Ferry" or insert one of the other editor's names who happened to be present.

We weren't (overly) unkind, and we weren’t elitist about our 'art'; although that was something of the reputation that the Stonefence had inherited, and this despite the fact that the submissions and weekly meetings had always been open to anyone in the community and that everyone attending could vote. Quite the opposite, if some of the laughter was directed at, rather than with, the poems we were considering for publication, it is not that we were being snobbish, we had all written and would probably write several hundred kilobytes more of similar "angst" ridden love poems ourselves, so it was wise to have a sense of humor about it.

Everyone knows that one of the Ten Commandments of writing is "write what you know", and, frankly, what else did we know about life at that point. I mean we were all sitting there in the safe and warm comfy chairs of an Ivy League library working on a literary magazine 'fer goddsakes', right?

I shouldn't give the impression that the poems and stories were all terrible or that we were really that jaded. We took the Stonefence Review seriously; we just didn’t take ourselves too seriously. And most of the submissions had at least a glimmer of quality. If they lacked the same polish and perspective that we as writers and college students lacked, what could you expect?

The whole process of selecting pieces and publishing them was a little like going to skip rocks at the beach. There was never a shortage of rocks (submissions) from which to choose, but no matter how hard you looked, you could never quite find the perfect one. Like most rocks you find at the beach, the majority of submissions were rough or uncut, and generally unsuitable for skipping, or publishing. The really raw and uncut poems, intensely felt and written during a late night burst of creative inspiration, tended to fall short of the mark the morning after, making a dull, failing impression (kerplop!) when they were read aloud (perhaps for the first time) at one of our Stonefence meetings.

Many poems, or some, had different aspects of a good skipping rock: a phrase here, an image there, but most, as I said before, just hadn't been refined enough to go the distance (…across the great and timeless seas of literature and art…). The end result, though, after a bit of enjoyable searching and digging, was a handful of rocks of varying qualities that taken as a whole made for a good hour of skipping--or in our case, reading.

Basically, we were a group of people who got together once a week who truly enjoyed reading, listening to, discussing and finally publishing a journal of poetry and prose. Perhaps that warm light that in my memory (I'm trying to forget the longs weeks of waiting for winter to pass and spring to break) was always streaming in the windows mellowed our moods a little and helped us to take the Stonefence Review with pleasure and a certain healthy lightness. In the end, I think I got more from those meetings in the way of learning to enjoy and to appreciate language and literature than I got from any 'lit' class I took in college.

Stonewall
So except for one notable exception, I remember Stonefence meetings as being a good time and worth a guffaw or two.

That exception came about while we were working on putting together our summer issue. We were all sophomores (perhaps in more ways than one) on the editorial board at the time, and someone had submitted to us a short story that by all accounts was, well, rock solid. If most of what we read wasn't perfect, or far from it, this story certainly came the closest in my book. It had all the elements of great art: it was entertaining, beautiful and thought provoking.

It was the story of a college guy just like you or me (or James Joyce) out walking on Friday night, checking out the 'frat scene'. The whole story was basically a recreation or retextualization of a chapter of Joyce's "Ulysses". It was written in perfect Joycean style and in a setting that all of our readers were sure to recognize. In fact, if you had been to almost any college campus or fraternity row in America, you could have read and enjoyed this story.

I was told later, after we had read the story and voted to hold it over for publication in the forthcoming issue, that the author had submitted the story as a paper in an English class on Joyce and had been given a rare and coveted citation for it. So for what it was worth, a literature professor and Joyce scholar had apparently thought the story was pretty good too.

During a meeting of just the managing editors, I learned that not everyone shared this rosy opinion of the story. I can't remember exactly how it was brought up, but a couple of the editors questioned whether we, The Stonefence Review, should publish such a story?

This took me by surprise, as I saw no reason why we would even be discussing such a question. First, it would probably be the strongest piece of writing in the whole issue and I was proud of it. Second, the story had already been voted on and accepted during the regular review process. Third, we had made a clear editorial policy that the Stonefence would be a magazine that was open to all types of content and styles, and that we would publish submissions based solely on aesthetic and qualitative considerations, not political or other.

The story was at its core a satire of the college fraternity and social scene. Although the account was fictional and no real names were used, it had clearly been based on the writer's experiences and observations at Dartmouth. The geographic layout of the fictionalized 'frat row' was recognizably Dartmouth’s, and apparently the description of one of the fraternal songs overheard by the protagonist could be identified as belonging to one specific fraternity. Dare I even now mention which one?

As it turned out, the two most vocal proponents for not publishing the story were brothers of that same fraternity. Surprise?!? That being said, all the members of the editorial board, including myself, belonged to one fraternity or another.

The two editors in question felt the story was unfair and was a personal attack against them, or at least their fraternity. They even suggested that the story could be considered slander or libel and that we could be opening ourselves to a lot of trouble by publishing it. I believed the story, to its credit, exceeded the particular details of which ‘house’ it may have been based on and was at once describing and being critical of the fraternity system in general, and from there the college social scene as a whole.

I did some research and found that for something to be legally defined as libel or slander it had to be knowingly untrue and created with the express purpose to harm the reputation of a specific person or organization. I showed this to the editorial board and argued that the story failed to pass the test on both accounts, and that given our editorial policy we had no right to stop a story from being published that had already been properly and democratically voted on and accepted. This lead to some long discussions about whether a fictional story could be considered libelous and whether we would be effectively taking a political stance by allowing the story to be published.

The two opponents of the story made some good arguments about needing to be responsible for the content of our magazine and any harm that it could cause. What if it was a fascist oriented tract, or had been critical of Jews on campus? They also made some arguments that were not as good, like threatening to quit working on the magazine if we published the story.

I felt that the story was good and moreover that the criticisms leveled against the fraternity system or college social life were accurate. Although I was sort of the de facto editor-in-chief of the issue for having been doing most of the work on it, the decision was clearly going to be decided by the group, and the other three members of the editorial board were sort of divided or unclear about what they wanted. It seemed, as the meeting carried on, that the majority was swaying towards the path of least resistance, which would be not to publish the story.

The situation was made more difficult by the fact that I had known all of the other editors since our freshman (first) year, one since elementary school, even. I didn't want to disagree or be disagreeable and found it hard being the only one arguing in the story's favor. Even if I had had the ability or authority to just make the decision, I'm not sure it would have been the right way of dealing with the situation. Mostly, I guess, I wanted the other editors to like me and didn’t want to appear to be an asshole. I was trying to be reasonable.

We went back and forth for a couple of hours and finally left without coming to a resolution. I was confused and nervous. I couldn't believe that it would even be a question of whether we should publish the story in the first place, but now I didn't know what to do or what would happen. I was angry that I hadn't been able to convince the others that we should publish the story and felt I would be doing something wrong if I let the story be censored.

It was a true moral dilemma for me: I felt that I had to choose between hurting and possibly losing friends and doing what I thought was right. And all of this heavy stuff, over a short story that someone had submitted to our funny little campus literary magazine. Ha!

Back in my dorm room I started crying as I tried to explain the situation to my roommate, Blake. Blake was one of the all around smartest and coolest guys I knew, and I felt stupid to be crying in front of him. I wondered what he would think of me, but he listened carefully and didn't try to tell me what he thought was right or what he thought I should do. What he said was simply, "Kevin, I think you know what's right and what you have to do."

It was so simple, and it was exactly what I needed to hear at that moment. It was empowerment. When I thought about it, or perhaps more accurately, when I felt about it, I realized he was right, I did know what I had to do, I was just scared to do it.

I regret that I cannot do the story or the situation justice in my describing it here. I also regret that I was not able to give the story the full justice that I felt it deserved at the time, because although I took Blake's advice and did what I felt I had to do, which was face the editors again and fight for the story to be published, I did compromise in the end, agreeing to ask the author to change the passages describing the location of the fraternity house and the words to the ritual song to make them less recognizable.

When I explained the situation, the author willingly made the changes (it wasn't a big deal to him) and the story was published without further ado, except that the two editors who had been most opposed to the story's publication slowly stopped coming to meetings.

Looking back, I think we found the best possible compromise to our problem, but I was and am still not completely happy when I think about it. I had always thought that compromise was desirable and ideal only in the world of politics, not in principles. Until then, however, I had never been forced to test my principles in the 'real world' where every decision has consequences and even something as seemingly harmless as working on a literary magazine can force you to choose between friendships and moral integrity.

Between A Broken Wall & Fallen Curtain -- A Post Script
I wrote this piece in November of 2000 while I was traveling with longtime friend and (rogue) photographer Jesse Long. I had received a forwarded email about the possibility of submitting something for an upcoming anniversary issue of the Stonefence. Apparently, they were inviting past editors and contributors to send something as part of a big issue they were trying to put together.

We were in Egypt at the time and were about to move on to Kenya where we were going to work a school and then take a week or so off to do some safari-ing. So I banged off a rough draft and sent it to the co-editors with a note explaining to them that I was traveling abroad and would be not be in radio contact for about a week, but would definitely send them a final draft when I got back into Nairobi.

Well, the next time I checked my email there was a message waiting for me from them saying that they were under deadline and had gone ahead and edited my story because they were trying to get the issue out before Christmas break. I was not happy to hear this. I felt my rough draft was just that, rough, and, what's more, I didn't like the way that they had edited it either. Hadn't I made it clear that I was going to send them a final draft? I had it right there, ready to go. I mean, had they even read my submission, couldn't they see the deontological irony in it all?

Anyway, I wrote them a very curt (maybe even nasty) email saying that I would rather have the whole thing pulled if they could not print my final edited draft. I had learned my lesson: "Once shame on you. Twice shame on me", right? This time I was making a stand for what I thought was right, no compromises.

As it turned out, they had some other printing or editing delays (blame it on the bluelines) and were able to make the changes for me, although I think a couple of errata still crept into the final version. The issue ended up coming out during the winter of 2001.<>

The Great Wall And Beyond – A Post, Post Script
This story took another bizarre (and perhaps final) twist this past summer when I was recounting it to my roommate at the Green Gulch Zen Center one day while we were seeding trays for the nursery. It turns out that this guy had been friends since high school with the author who had originally submitted the story to us in the first place. In fact, he had just gone on a road trip with him to a wedding in Arizona or something, and he was studying to become a rabbi. My roommate called and asked him about the story, but he also didn't remember thinking it was that big of a deal at the time.

It's funny how all these paths have diverged, submerged and then reconverged. And like the seminally misunderstood poem about the two roads that diverged in a wood, by Dartmouth's adopted great woods poet Robert Frost, this whole story may be more of a lesson about the way memory works then which path I took and why.

The Road Not Taken, by Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Read More...

Summary only...

J'aimerais bien

J'aimerais bien

J'aimerais bien ne pas tomber amoureux de toi,
Toi qui m'intrigue et qui me hante
même dans mes pensées les plus refoulées.

Je voudrais éviter tous ces sentiments
ordinaires qui font la béquille, le sel
de nos vies trop ordinaires (quotidinnes).

Otons le filet de sécurité,
cette emblème d'un jeu trop peu osé
qui berce les relations habituelles.

Tends-moi la main,
Fais-moi confiance;
N'hésitons pas devant l'impossible.

Figeons nos pas basculants
au bord du précipice qui souffle
la sensation foudroyante du vertige.

Etreignons nos corps
balançant un instant
entre la vie et la mort.

Ne saute pas dans le gouffre noir
né de l'oubli
et nourri de l'amer ennui.

Laisse plutôt voltiger nos esprits
dans l'éther trop léger
pour la matière terrestre.

Là, dans les astres,
nos émotions pures peuvent
s'éclater dans le paroxysme amoureux,

Espèce de douce folie
qui étouffe la voix
dans une marée de tendresse.

Emparons-nous de l'un et l'autre
sans question et sans pudeur.
Mets à côté les masques qui nous cachent.

Mais ne retire pas le voile du mystère
qui nous aveugle de la réalité
trop désespérante sous nos pieds.

J'aimerais bien
ne pas lâcher ce rêve trompeur,
narcotique, plein d'attraction.

J'aimerais bien garder cette aspiration,
fécond grain d'inspiration
qui éveille ma pauvre imagination.

J'aimerais bien ne pas tomber amoureux de toi,
Toi qui me mets mal à l'aise
qui me noies sans gilet de sauvetage,

Et de qui devant les yeux perspicaces
toute parole semble ridicule,
toute comédie inutile.

Rien n'est assez profond
pour sonder tes yeux,
tourbillons à surface blasée.

Ta beauté infranchissable
se moque de la banalité
et fait une platitude de la logique.

J'aimerais bien ne pas tomber amoureux toi
pour au moins un instant, et garder un peu
l'empreinte de ce songe sur mes lèvres.

Read More...

Summary only...

Heading to Dammam (Dishtar Aramco Rock Version)

Heading to Dammam
(Dishtar Aramco Rock Version)

Head out on the highway
Driving to Dammam today.
Driving through the desert
You gotta pray five times a day
No way, no way,
No way, no way.

If you're a woman in Saudi
Then you've gotta wear a veil.
When you're driving through the desert
The weather's never cloudy, oh well.

All the men, so sheik,
Ya' know they pray five times a day
Better get down on your knees for Allah
Or you know you're goin' to hell.

Head out on the highway
Heading to Dammam.
Driving through the desert,
The cradle of Islam.
Dammam (4x).

Camels to the left,
Camels to the right,
Sleeping with bedouins
Gives me such a fright.

No alcohol, no bourbon
Hide, hide, hide it
Under your turban.
Bet you didn't know that the Kingdom's kind of urban.
(triple rhyme)

In the desert dry of water
Mint tea in my eye (ouch).
Is this Arab guy offering me a camel or his daughter.

chorus

Mostly sand, not much soil,
Katsudon lots of oil.
All the princes, oh so many
Ruling country
Petrolled hands clenched so tight.
The Koran says if you're riding a camel you ain't Shi'ite.
(go Sunnis)

That's the way it goes in Saudi of Arabia (ah, ah).
I say, maybe, oh maybe
I'll get back some day (eh, eh).
There's just ain't much social life
And it's hard to have fun and play (hey, hey)
When all the parties you go to are BYOW (Bring Your Own Wife),
Ya' know it's true-oooh.

chorus (2x)



Hope you enjoyed and keep it Pretty Simple,
Kevin & Jesse

PS email us if you are interested in the tab for the sung version.

Read More...

Summary only...

Michelle

Michelle

Michelle, my shell
my conch
I hear the sea
slipping through your whispery lips,
waves of softening sound
undulating over the crests
and the troughs of your skin.
Your alluring humidity
utterly delicious
right down to your foamy
crushing mound.

You lay
under the moon
drawing you to me
waves of emotion wash over me
mounting and receding
swelling and sinking;
drinking from
your lips,
amaretto
sweet.

We frollick
and thrash
and pound
and polish
until there is nothing left
but a saltbed tideline of our love.

Michelle, my shell
my conch
I hear your calls
ringing from your unadorned
and alabaster ears
coddled and cockled,
labial folds of skin
spiralling into night.

I find my echo
in those pearls
I find my own loneliness
and strength
and determination
curling into the walls
of your inner most
Michelle ears.

Michelle, ma belle
let us be old
and young
and forever.
Let us be free
and savor life;
committing to each moment
and to each other,
each hello
each goodbye
each bitter-sweet parting
and forever rejoining.

Michelle, my shell
my conch
How I can float by you,
in your suits and booties
dark and sweet, like the coffee you drink.

You were a gentle and bright eyed
tyrant to see
How dare I
the soft world you held,
tending patiently
inside your baby wiped shell.

I want to hold and coddle you
and know you perfectly;
know your secret grottos
of desire
and passion
of love
and life.
Michelle let me hold thee free.

I want to peel away
your shells Michelle.
My shell,
my me.
And your shell Michelle
silently to see,
to see what we can see.

Come let us see
see what shells we can shed
and set a sullen drift
undressed in the bed,
Michelle O sully vain
just you and me.

A great drifting sea
Michelle, my shell
just you and me.

Where are you taking me
Michelle, my shell?
We’ll just wait and see.

We’ll see what's to see
beyond the shell of your shell, Michelle
just you and me.

Michelle my me
Just you shall see
Just you Michelle
Just you and me.

Read More...

Summary only...

Grandmother

Grandmother

Grandmother, you gave so well, much better than you received
Keeping the happiness that behind you leave
To your sad parting we give this final plea,
May you rest in peace this night

Good sister, mother, friend and wife
In your fierce strength we all believed
You gave so well, much better than you received

Frail life, when last I saw you lay, without gown of lustful light
Too late for tears or sorrow, or talk of would or might or morrow
Though we stay on and wake to fight, you go where we must follow
May you rest in peace this night

Your spirit’s flight
Leaves us in the wake of the bereaved
For you have gone to your final retreat
Where nevermore your eyes shall burn so bright
From when you gave so well, much better than you received

Your life was not a sonnet, though no less beautiful or brief
You never cut words to form or fashion, not even in the least
You held your pains in check of silence
Refusing all but grief
You always did what you knew was right
May you rest in peace this night

But hark Grandmother I will remember thee
Your clock, your candles, pale pictures and Paris scene
Indeed I've held your hands in mine
Like great and fallen trees of knotted branch and bark
Frail legacy of touch whispering of a time I shall not grieve
When you gave so well, much better than you received

Grandmother, you gave so well, much better than you received
Now bless our tears, our feast of life, from that far off distant height
And let us all pray together Grandma
That you rest in peace this night

Read More...

Summary only...

Au Coeur de Paris

Au Coeur de Paris

Ma fenêtre donne sur une petite cour
Au coeur de Paris
A deux pas tourne le Moulin Rouge
Qui mélange et confond à juste titre
Touristes, voyeurs et pervers.

Comme la vitrine d'un grand magasin
Au coeur de Paris
Le monde s'étale devant ma fenêtre
Toutes les langues et tous les goûts à prix unique.

Toute l'humanité passera tâtonnant devant ma fenêtre
Le coeur grand ouvert sur Paris.
C'est un défilé d'amour et de dégoût
Le désir et la déception à chaque tournant de rue.

Ma fenêtre donne un regard
Au coeur de Paris
Et je n'y vois ai-je peur
Que mon propre reflet.

Read More...

Summary only...

When You've Lost That Something

When You've Lost That Something
(Bob Dylan Friends)

When you've lost that something
That ace in the hole
That snap-crackle pop in your breakfast bowl
That well worn lucky charm rattlin' round in your pocket
That extra jolt of juice that a rainy day won't stiffle
And that you thought you could pull from an ordinary socket
Or from the King James version bible
And when you've searched and sought
In every crease and closet
For that something that you had but later lent or lost it
Or maybe you never owned 'cause it wasn't to be bought

When that yellow brick road you were runnin
Is losing it technicolor glow
Like the patent of a tan after a long summer sunnin
And you've chased the end of the rainbow
To find it ain't got no pot
Or maybe the glitter you were chasin just ain't what you thought

When you've cooked up your last deal
Cause you lost that secret ingredient
The thing that makes Coke real
And that Pepsi wants to steal
That final powdery pinch
That culinary expedient
That special sauce and feel
That G-Love's music's got
That little extra something that turned your life from bland to hot

When you can't find that extra pound
To go overtime one last round
When your everyready isn't
And your meter's running low
And your stuck in pedestrian traffic
And the fast lane's moving slow

When your loafers have lost their penny
And your bounce has left you static
When your get-up and go is gone
And you know you're lost and done
If you don't find it fast
And do it all over again
for a quarter
And inflation's got you down

And you can't find it at the bottom of a beer
that you bought for the price of four
And you don't overhear it in that pub
Or in some pep-rally cheer
You can't sweat out in a club
Or read it in a book up on a shelf
No, you just can't find that thing
No matter where you look

When life has turned Picasso
And the Grand Master's lost it too
And all you see is stalemate
Cause you and the red-headed Swede are thru
And when that moveable feast that you're livin
Is come to an end and done
And the day is no longer driven
By joy and laughter and fun
Then I say the only place you can turn
Is to two guys named Jeff and J
And maybe I've got it all wrong
But it seems that this is true
That friends are the best and only way
To keep from turnin blue

Read More...

Summary only...

Frida

Frida

I find myself best in you Frida
And so I pledge my allegiance
to your patriotic beauty:
to your harvest hair falling
to your fair features white
And to your shy in the sky eyes
holding back but the weakest shade.
Frida, my beautiful baltic affirmation,
you fly the colors of my desire.

It began as a piece of cake
Too present perfect, like your icy accent
(I never thought I would have you too).
You were à la mode after dinner
A sweetness that lingered till morning
A pie I was willing to have in my face.

Smoking into my pores;
At work I sweat with your memory
Absently dropping cups and glasses
Losing myself in your bouquet.

We have a few laughs
Then you play Humpty Dumpty on my heart
In a country without queen.
I lay and wait for a young Saint Nick
Fat on Swedish meatballs
To go back north,
So I can put the pieces back together.

Now I sit doubled over in love
Committing romantic Hari Kari;
Like a peddler of cheap clichés
Trying to sell you my pain.
And all I can do is reach for you
Through these bars of broken verse
Trying vainly to span the distance
to overcome the balance of injustice
and Saint Nick’s perfect part.

Doing time in a café outside your flat
I hope to catch a glimpse of you on the way to the metro;
My whisky blind eyes read hope
Like sunlight waiting behind clouds.

In the morning I awake shivering in wait
For this frigid front to blow over.
I'm not sure who is more puzzled,
You or I
Whose heart breaks again every day
Yet still joins you every night.

I’ll believe for the both of us.
It's not the same old music,
It's Ave Maria.
And whatever the song
I'm ready to sing.

Read More...

Summary only...

Tu es toujours là

Tu es toujours là

J'ai tant rêvé de toi
Que je ne veux plus me coucher.
Je n'en veux plus de ces réveils déçus,
Etreints par ton esprit fuyant et impénétrable.

Les jours s'en vont
Seuls dans le temps;
Tantôt à une lenteur grisâtre
Qui présagent la longue nuit à venir
Tantôt allègrement vite,
Mais jamais sans que je ne songe à toi.

Comme l'ombre d'un albatros,
Indolent compagnon de voyage
Ton souvenir me suit partout.
Je sens ta présence sous mes pas.
Je vois ton image dans les regards des passants.
Tu es toujours là,
Je te devine près de moi.

Mais je suis las de te chercher.
Je m'enfuis sûr de te retrouver
Dans la solitude intime de ma chambre
Et dans la poésie que tu hantes.

Read More...

Summary only...

Three Card Monte

Three Card Monte
(a rookie error)

Of course you see
the pitches are tempting,
but you've been scouting,
Waiting, watching,
Eyeing the field.
Strong and sure
You step up to bat.

This is the Bigs,
Hardball the game.
Bets are on,
The action,
fast,
And the odds,
Never even.

There's your enemy,
The pitcher on high,
Home on his mound
With his supporting team.
You, wood in hand,
stand alone.
No hope of relief.

He watches the signs,
Takes you in.
Motions,
Then Stretches,
And languidly steps in.
The wind up, like Tai-Chi movement,
Native dance in crescendo,
A leopard in motion,
stills the air, mesmerizes.
The crowd leans with you.

Come on now boy,
Be ready. Stand firm.
We're counting on you.
Beware the curve ball.
Now don't get caught watching,
He'll slide one by?

Yes, be ready, stand tall,
For many a mighty Casey with ego in hand
Has stood where you are now,
Daring to play ball,
And with equal dismay
Has paid the price,
Learned to rue the day
Fell prey to the heist.

Read More...

Summary only...