Moving Day!

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My Day at the Airport

My body embraced by a cushy, blue-leather chair, I found myself in the silent center of a thousand comings and goings. Any one of these passing individuals, carting children, hauling luggage, clutching tickets, could have been an entire study in human behavior — not because of oddity but because of apparent normalcy. These were human beings going about their affairs, oblivious to one reticent but very interested observer seated in a cushy, blue-leather chair.

Their kisses good-bye always touched me. Lovers would part ways, families would be momentarily divided, but only temporarily. They must have known, as I knew, that their separation would be ephemeral. Before long, they would be reunited.

I couldn’t help but see comparisons to death. As a literature student, I often read that death is an end, a finality. But such a view is hardly consistent with physics, logic, and the stirrings of the human heart: Anyone who has peered in a coffin has noticed the difference. The body seems so hollow. Something seems missing. And if something is missing, where does it go? Why do we treat death so differently from airport departures?

For many, death is treated like tragedy.

Noticing the time, losing my thoughts, I wearily pulled myself to my feet. My cousin, who was returning from missionary service for the LDS church in Ohio, would arrive any minute. Joining his family and mine at the arrival gate, we stood with a throng of others and chatted impatiently, monitoring the rolling flight schedules.

More than once, an old woman ventured past a bold-lettered “Do Not Enter” sign. Lights flashed, alarms whirred, and TSA agents raised their hands in warning and blocked her further passage. This woman was obviously eager to greet some long expected loved ones. We could only guess for whom she waited. She seemed to be trying, somehow, to reach out to them.

I don’t know if there’s a post-mortal TSA, but I wondered if the dead try reaching out to their living loved ones. And I wonder still.

After several more long minutes passed, a familiar face appeared. I stepped back, allowing his siblings and parents their right of greeting him first. Closer to the “Do Not Enter” sign, I noticed that the old woman, too, was excitedly greeting a middle-aged man and his long-haired daughter.

Then came my turn.

“Hey, stranger,” I said, snubbing my cousin’s proffered handshake for a hug. Although we hadn’t seen each other in four years, the separation had seemed ephemeral indeed.

I can only imagine how much life — even at the airport — can teach us about death.

A Strangely Specific Memory

The space-time continuum is more than an abstract vagary. Though seldom mentioned outside of physics, this union of basic elements constitutes a tangible, concrete reality of daily existence. At least for me.

Yesterday, I was listening to early-morning radio. I had spent Sunday afternoon napping, so I spent much of the night staring at my ceiling. My thoughts drifted between work and friends while the station broadcasted some snappy techno tune.

Then a synthesizer struck a note.

I had heard that note before.

I knew I had.

But where?

Almost instantly, my mind teleported me thousands of miles from my bed and years from the present. I was standing near a familiar skywalk that bridges Wan Chai’s Gloucester Avenue. It was about seven thirty in the warm, tropical morning, and I could taste the muggy streets, which were beginning to swell with red taxis, double-decker buses, and hurried pedestrians. Vendors were just beginning to open their sidewalk shops, selling everything from newspapers and comic books to jade daggers and opium pipes.

As I pondered this strangely specific memory, I realized that a California Fitness Center was located nearby. I once held a membership there, and when would I jog back to my flat — at about seven thirty in the morning — the gym’s percussive dance music was still jumping in my head.

This memory, of course, is just one of many in which my personal space-time continuum has made itself felt.

More thoughts to come…

Greetings from Afar

Yesterday, a new email arrived in my business inbox. My arm went numb. With poetry and short stories on submission, I thought that email could only be a rejection notice. It had arrived much too soon for an acceptance.

I was wrong.

When my circulation resumed, I noticed that the sender’s name was unfamiliar. It wasn’t associated with any of the publications I had submitted to. In fact, the name seemed downright strange, a confused jumble of letters with too many consonants and not enough nouns. Or vice versa.

It came from Bulgaria.

“Dear Sir Michael Madson,” it began, detailing a request for correspondence. As I read, I realized the man had confused me for Michael Madsen, the actor of Kill Bill and Sin City notoriety. He would be honored, he said, to receive photos of me or material from my recent films.

I couldn’t help but chuckle. Earlier today, I finally replied to the email, explaining the mix up and providing a link to the official website of all things Madsen. Hopefully, my Bulgarian friend won’t be too disappointed. (Photos of the brawny-voiced actor start at $40.00).

Though misdirected, this email provided a welcome reprieve from my daily routine. As I grow older, I find that little oddities, like this unexpected greetings from afar, are the salt of daily existence.

Breaking the Cycle

Lately, this blog has welcomed a steady plateau of daily readers. However, I wonder how many of these readers are repelled by the absence of personal voice. Too often, perhaps, quotations dominate my new posts, and if readers were seeking quotations, they’d likely look elsewhere. I haven’t written a personal post in some time, so today, I break the cycle:

Nothing frustrates me more than writing.

Something about writing bores me, bedevils me, and utterly exhausts me. Yet, for whatever reason, I just can’t stop putting words to paper. Some people have an obsessive penchant for composition, outputting thousands of words each day. But I’m not like that.

My love abides in the sound of language and the ideas behind a written word, rather than in composition itself. Currently, I’m toiling over a one-act play, two short stories, the sequel to Lady in White, and a small slew of poetry. I need variety to help soften the dolors of literary creation — a quasi-deistic, ex-nihilo act. But when a work finally reaches completion, the dolors endured become an almost narcotic satisfaction.

Poetry has provided a nice balance to fiction. When I was younger, particularly when I was composing Lady in White, my word choice was based more on feeling than on meaning. Struggling to capture the right emotional resonance, I at times fell into the trap of purple prose. Now, with a poetic outlet, I have a mushrooming collection of unpublished verse, and my fiction has become tighter, crisper, decidedly less purple. In many of my poems, however, the meaning still eludes me. Perhaps Garcia Lorca was right to call poetry anti-intellectual.

Nothing frustrates me more than writing.

“One minute I held the key

Next the walls were closed on me
And I discovered that my castles stand
Upon pillars of salt and pillars of sand”

-Coldplay, “Viva la Vida”

Full lyrics here.

“Our feet on the torrent’s brink,

Our eyes on the clouds afar,
We fear the things we think,
Instead of the things that are…”

-Sean Tyrrell

“Instead of reading in the real sense of the word,

our students today are often distracted by the fragmented knowledge available on the Internet and in the mass media.

“Worse yet, education is threatened by nationalist and religious orthodoxies often disseminated by the mass media as they focus ahistorically and sensationally on the distant electronic wars that give viewers the sense of surgical precision, but in fact obscure the terrible suffering and destruction produced by modern warfare. In the demonization of an unknown enemy for whom the label “terrorist” serves the general purpose of keeping people stirred up and angry, media images command too much attention and can be exploited at times of crisis and insecurity of the kind that the post-9/11 period has produced.

“Speaking both as an American and as an Arab I must ask my reader not to underestimate the kind of simplified view of the world that a relative handful of Pentagon civilian elites have formulated for US policy in the entire Arab and Islamic worlds, a view in which terror, pre-emptive war, and unilateral regime change–backed up by the most bloated military budget in history–are the main ideas debated endlessly and impoverishingly by a media that assigns itself the role of producing so-called “experts” who validate the government’s general line. Reflection, debate, rational argument, moral principle based on a secular notion that human beings must create their own history have been replaced by abstract ideas that celebrate American or Western exceptionalism, denigrate the relevance of context, and regard other cultures with contempt.”

-Edward Said, Orientalism

Les aveugles by Baudelaire

Today I’m christening a new category on the blog: Translations. This past semester, I took a class on transferring meaning between French and English, English and French. Ever since, I’ve been entranced by translation’s melange of science, skill, chance, and art.

In “Les aveugles,” I struggled to maintain semantic accuracy within Baudelaire’s poetic form. Yet, because the poet, at times, deviated from the sonnet’s regular rhythm, I did too. All in all, what follows should be considered a rough draft. See the original poem, along with translations from writers who abandoned Baudelaire’s meter and rhymescheme, here.

THE BLIND FELLOWS

Do ponder them, my soul; they truly be a fright!
Resembling mannequins, they somewhat ludicrous,
And dreadful, curious as like somnambulists,
For from within their darkly globes beams unknown light.

Their eyes, from whence the holy flickering has fled,
Appear to gaze at distant places, lifted lone
To God-ward; never low to streets of cobbled stone
Will bow in wistful dreams their heavy-ladened head.

They thus traverse across the black infinity,
That brother of eternal silence. O city!
For while encircling us you sing, laugh and bellow,

Besotted by my pleasure till atrocity,
See, I too am trudging! But past perplexity,
I ask: What seek they from the Sky, these blind fellows?

“You have noticed

that the truth comes into this world with two faces. One is sad with suffering, and the other laughs; but it is the same face, laughing or weeping. When people are already in despair, maybe the laughing face is better for them; and when they feel too good and are too sure of being safe, maybe the weeping face is better for them to see.”

-Black Elk