Fewer Branches on the Future Tree

It seems to me that I probably belong to the last American generation that will accumulate more stuff than those that preceded it. Peak oil, peak build-out, peak pile of junk in the garage.



My family does not have a garage. And no, we don't rent any self-storage units, either. We were afraid that if we had the space provided by these, we'd fill them up with stuff.

Our neighbor next door has a two-car garage, but he has to leave his vehicles in the driveway. There are too many plastic paint cans, boxes, plumbing supplies, and rubber chickens cluttering it up so there's no room in there for his Beamer.



As availability of cheap fossil fuels declines, our piles of stuff will get smaller. It'll be too expensive to make some things; many things. And it will become too costly to make things in far-off places where cheap labor (another kind of energy) can be exploited and goods can be shipped profitably halfway across the globe. The "warehouse on wheels" will fail as a business model.

Manufacturing may return to our United States. It'll be cheaper to just make stuff here again, to avoid high transportation costs.

Anyways, my feeling is that the future will look more like the past than the present. Our sons and daughters will have to work harder for less.

Sunday Plath: The Fragment

This is why I feel that I must occasionally try to bring attention to the poetry of Sylvia Plath; not the entire poem Lady Lazarus, but only a few lines from it:

Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I've a call.

Written in the third week of October 1962. Not a great time in her life; marriage collapsing, alone with young children in need, uncertain recognition as an author (her famous novel The Bell Jar had been published under a pseudonym and most people were unaware of this,) and of course her dangerous emotional deterioration.

So all that showed in her poetry sometimes.

Just sometimes.

The Bee poems, her poems about her babies, and the poems inspired by the landscapes around Devon, for example, all seem relatively neglected compared to the sensation that has accrued around those six lines above. And I just don't think that's fair.



It's a great poem, by the way.

Napkin Rings

When the Bubble Bursts

When he was a boy his older brother and sister told him to stay inside because it was too windy. His ears were so big, they explained, that if a strong gust caught him it would lift him away and he'd never see home again.

As they walked away outside he pressed his forlorn face up against the window.

At our home-owners' association meetings he was always the funny guy.

Another time they told him that a fairie had buried pennies beneath a bush by the front of their house. His younger sister was also told this. She went to the kitchen and got a spoon so she could dig. He, instead, went to the shed and got a huge crowbar. Accidentally, he drove it down upon her pinky finger.

His big brother heard the cries and came out and picked up the little girl in his arms and she quieted down. Then he told his little brother that he'd just killed his sister, which he believed for a while. The parents came along. The little sister got a couple stitches and she was just fine.

Whenever I took our household trash out to the dumpster there were always lots of empty beer cans in it. Coors Lite. Fucking awful plonky swill, that shit.

He grew up and married, had a daughter that he loved more than anything in the entire world, but things didn't work out and after the divorce he rarely saw her.

He was dogless, except for that time he took care of a poor shy little abused black Labrador Retriever that one of our other neighbors found out on the streets. We took her in, and now she's a big healthy strapping lass.

When we dog people were out and about he was there with us too. Sometimes, if his gate and door were open when it was nice, the dogs would run into his place and sniff around.

His little custom construction business failed. He had to let his workers go and he felt like he'd let them down.

About one-third of all the money generated by the Valley economy comes from the housing business, and that has been sliding into recession due to defaults. A lot of his work came from people buying, remodeling, and flipping houses. The market for that has cooled. Home sales are down 19% compared to a year ago.

Last Sunday his brother-in-law broke into his home through the back door. They hadn't heard from him in a few days, he wasn't answering calls, and his truck hadn't moved from its parking spot.

"Don't come in here," he said to his wife, the sister who dug for phantom pennies with him long ago. She knew.

He was shirtless, the room was littered with empty beer cans ankle-deep, and he had put a pistol in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Probably the Thursday before, the police estimated.



We're memorializing him by putting in a tree. A lemon tree.

Sunday Plath: May 1958

Poems, Potatoes

The word, defining, muzzles; the drawn line
Ousts mistier peers and thrives, murderous,
In establishments which imagined lines

Can only haunt. Sturdy as potatoes,
Stones, without conscience, word and line endure,
Given an inch. Not that they're gross (although

Afterthought often would have them alter
To delicacy, to poise) but that they
Shortchange me continuously: whether

More or other, they still dissatisfy.
Unpoemed, unpictured, the potato
Bunches its knobby browns on a vastly
Superior page; the blunt stone also.

Sylvia Plath

Plath taught at Smith College in the fall of 1957 and spring of 1958. She found this to be more difficult than she had presumed, but then she tended to be rather harsh with herself. Her students and the college people thought very highly of her.



Except for a flurry of eight poems in as many days written during the spring break in classes, she didn't write very much duting her time spent teaching. From her unabridged journals:

Saturday: May 3rd [1958]... Tomorrow I must correct all my exams which I should do in one day- they're short and all on the same subject. Then a close outline of The Wasteland which should take all week. I pick up my ms. of poetry & leaf through it, unable to invent, to create- all my projected nostalgia for my students can't shake the conviction that teaching is a smiling public-service vampire that drinks blood and brain without a thank you.

So she quit teaching.

Her mother was a little disappointed and fearful for her daughter's financial security, but Plath sold two poems to The New Yorker and received enough money from that to pay for several months' rent in Boston where she and husband Ted lived as freelance writers.

I think this is another transitional poem; it's a sonnet but loosened up a bit. Like many of her poems, its subject revolves around inchoate creativity. This theme arose at various times in her life, such as at Yaddo, and later back in England then her "Ariel" voice bashed its way to the surface.

Soap Dish

How Insurance Companies Save You Money

The patient had a chronic problem that would continue to cause their health to deteriorate, eventually killing them. Perhaps in just a year or two, or maybe sooner if a nasty infectious process should take hold of them.

The doctors, nurses, and ancillary staff at The Great Muffin Factory are rather good at helping to fix problems like the one this patient has, but it requires specialty surgery. The patient's insurance company would even pay for said surgery...

But not at Muffin Central. We are not one of their preferred providers. So the plan now is to "stabilize" the patient, then ship them off to California.

Sunday Plath: the Plathiest of Them All

Elm

For Ruth Fainlight

I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root:
It is what you fear.
I do not fear it: I have been there.

Is it the sea you hear in me,
Its dissatisfactions?
Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness?

Love is a shadow.
How you lie and cry after it
Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse.

All night I shall gallop thus, impetuously,
Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf,
Echoing, echoing.

Or shall I bring you the sound of poisons?
This is rain now, this big hush.
And this is the fruit of it: tin-white, like arsenic.

I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.
Scorched to the root
My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires.

Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs.
A wind of such violence
Will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek.

The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me
Cruelly, being barren.
Her radiance scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her.

I let her go. I let her go
Diminished and flat, as after radical surgery.
How your bad dreams possess and endow me.

I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.

I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.

Clouds pass and disperse.
Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?
Is it for such I agitate my heart?

I am incapable of more knowledge.
What is this, this face
So murderous in its strangle of branches? -

Its snaky acids hiss.
It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults
That kill, that kill, that kill.

Sylvia Plath

19 April 1962

Like Plath, Ruth Fainlight was an American poet living in England and married to a successful writer; Allan Sillitoe, who wrote one of my favorite short stories: "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner."



Fainlight got to hear Plath read this poem to her personally at their last meeting, when they also compared and contrasted their new-born baby boys.

Fainlight wrote in an essay:

And there was the one long weekend (how could we know it would be our last meeting?), about a month after David was born and a few weeks before leaving for Tangier, when we made the eight-hour drive—those pre-motorway days—down the old coach road west to Devon, to inspect the new house and each other's babies. The house had all the necessary etceteras of the ideal poetic country retreat, and Sylvia had already begun painting hearts and flowers on the backs of wooden chairs and cupboard doors, which gave it a slightly more New rather than an Old England feel. There is a two and a half month difference in age between the boys, and to my inexperienced eyes, Nicky appeared alarmingly advanced. Sylvia and I sat in her workroom one afternoon, nursing them while she read me her latest poems—one of which was "Elm."

Plath did not include this poem in her original Ariel manuscript. It was added along with some other late poems by Ted, and it had already been magazine published in The New Yorker.

This is my favorite Plath poem.