Yesterday afternoon - my orangey iridescent-glazed Czech vase, beaded flowers, dried flowers, on the dresser of my 30's bedroom set (painted green in a green room) and late afternoon sun from the west.

pearlbamboo

copyright  e. p. hodges

A protected post follows.

if you think you should be on my protected list and don't appear to be, please leave me a comment here or email.  

meanwhile, rock and roll.

                     Pearlbamboo Finally Meets Acie Cargill, 
                            of the three word emails and lots of songs.

Those of you around for a while know that I encountered Acie last winter, Februrary to be exact, when he appeared in my inbox in a singles site.   Acie is truly an original, and is as terse and laconic in written language as he is poetic in his many, many songs.  (you can hear snippits and find out more about his take on music and the Kentucky balladeer tradition that informs it at www.aciecargill.com)

Acie was in want of electronics for his recording endeavors.  I helped him acquire them and they were misdelivered to my place.   Eager for his new toy, he volunteered to drive up and pick it up.   K.

As he rounded the last of the 4 flights of stairs to my apartment, he looked up, didn't lower his eyes, although he was nonconfrontational, and as he hit the landing, said, "You're beautiful.  You are truly beautiful....."  his voice touched with a little bit of wonder.   I do think it was the light from the skylight in the hall on my hair, but will not reject the compliment. 

While he was here, I played two of my pieces on soundclick for him, as he was thinking of using me as a reader on the current cd.   He's a quiet man unless he's singing and just looked at me after PSTD was over, then burbled, "You're amazing, you are amazing... you are Amazing!!!" and added a wish that I would allow him to set some of my poems to music or write background music for them.   K.

He's playing a concert tomorrow afternoon in northern Indiana.  I'm taking the south shore line rail line there (built originally to connect Chicago with the Indiana Dunes State Park and its beaches) and will hang out with his manager who has become a friend, although we will not meet for the first time until she pulls up at the train station.

Adventures, Lily is having a little adventure.

For new readers, here's a piece about Acie, written last February or March.  Hypersexuality is often a part of his persona, but by always focusing on his music when we converse, it no longer interferes as I've described here.......

"Only connect. That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect." E.M. Forrester. Howard's End


Pearl Negotiates With the Songwriter
Who Tries To Change the Parameters

Peeved by her talk of the music, her refusal to engage in one way cyber sex play, he goes off to do something more useful, feed the dogs, write a song, shuck corn, whistle in the dark, the list could go on. He's walked away from reciprocity, exchange, giving self with no expectation, the gift that flows back covered in love, insisting on reducing her to p--sy, himself to dick, a reduction that in the heat of passion can turn two into essence of human as pure and rich as boiled down stock for French soup with fine herbs, but doesn't work well in instant messenger, never.

And there he goes, singing that one note tune the dear man hides behind, the dick song, laaaaaaaaa, never moving from the fifth above the tonic, leaving her with really great feelings, yeah - fury, bewilderment, amusement, rage - and this laaaaaaaaa in her ear. Especially that laaaaaaaaa in her ear.

How can she hold all this at once? I'll tell you this much. The combination makes her want to reach through this f-----g little box and put her hand over his mouth and hold his wrists in her other hand and pin him with her green-rimmed eyes and say firmly in a strident voice, "TWO. Two. There are two of us here and as hard as it is for you to grasp this, take it in! I'm not just pussy! I'm your effing muse!" then kiss the son of a bitch... . 

Once.

Me.

And I'm never attracted to blondes...

And so he takes this in another form and pastes it into his website, in disregard of its revelations, telling her that the words are too good to waste, and not one word more.

Only connect."



pearlbamboo

copyright    e.p.hodges

"I would like to beg you to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language... Live the questions now. Perhaps, then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into an answer." (Rainer Maria Rilke)

still another really really rough draft....

you say you want eternal love and no romance, not trusting the heart, yet craving me forever..... 

Where would you have
The rest of me go?
Match dot com? or Mexico?
The neighborhood bar?
Looking for the man
Who holds me
Soft and easy, 
Through my dark nights,
Singing me far from origins.

He wines me and dines me
This man from Match,
And knows
My deepest soul
Is with another,
Though I do not speak.
And so he goes,
Waving goodby 
Wishing me luck,
Hitching a ride
On the back of a truck
Out of town.  

Beyond night's cold empty spaces
You are tall grass,
Concealing me from judges,
Sisters who stab maps
For yesterday
Into my back. 
You are rain
Cooling fires,
Filling the well,
Drowning the snakes
Raking my face
With their tongues 
Just before morning. 

You meet me
Beyond the edges
Of the plains,
Feed me with flowers
Replacing bitter weeds
Eaten to become invisible
In the flames
I walked through  
On my way to here.

All those times I've cried,
Falling tears
Hammering my songs
Of jubilation
Into flat tin cans, 
Songs full of broken glass
Contained in small boxes 
Of your design,
Packed for a long shelf life, 
You do not hear,
Or know I'm short of air.  

This space holds
All childhood dreams.
You seek elsewhere
And do not understand
Its full dimension,
Or you would open boxes,
Free the songs.   

 pearlbamboo

copyright e. p. hodges

Provocative Professor 
Mike A Levine on Globalization and the US

From the blog of Mike A. Levine, now a professor at the University of California Irvine. I really like how he approaches such things as the middle east and globalization, and so offer you these quotes. (biography here)

"The Middle East has largely avoided the poverty and inequality levels of Africa and southeast Asia in good measure because the countries of the region have refused to buy into the mythical panacea of the World Bank and IMF's economic growth discourse (and so-called "radical Islam" is one of the methods that have been adopted to ensure governments won't enact such privatization and liberalizing reforms, even when they've signed agreements to do so). Yet as America, with five percent of the world's population, continues to consume twenty-five percent of its resources, India and China, with forty percent of the world's population are racing to consume apace with us. The problem is, that would mean using 200 percent of the earth's resources. Can world war three--a mad scramble for the remaining petroleum, fresh water and other irreplaceable resources of the earth--be far behind? [italics added for emphasis.]

The Times argues that politicians "should be ashamed of themselves" for the policies that have gotten us into this mess. The truth is, we should all be ashamed, and we better change our ways soon, or the news is only going to get worse"

"Across the world, especially in developing countries such as Brasil or India, the poor and rich have most often lived in close proximity to each other (although this is changing with the arrival of gated communities a l'americaine). When tragedy strikes they've all been in the same boat, and despite incredible disparities of wealth, have had no choice but to help each other for all to survive. In America—and in the rest of the neoliberalized world—the rich increasingly have no need for the poor aside from their inexpensive and easily replaceable labor. From education to healthcare to infrastructure to wars, Americans today live in at least two very different, separate and unequal societies. Katrina laid this fact bare for all the world to see. The question is, What are we going to do about it."

                         Actions of Conscience

      

The EPA is considering comments on their proposal

TO ALLOW PESTICIDE TESTING ON ORPHANS & MENTALLY HANDICAPPED CHILDREN.

No, this is not a scary scenario for the future, nor a replay of Japanese and German war crimes by pretend scientists run amok.  It is now.  In Washington, DC, brought to you by a US government agency ultimately responsible to our president, George W. Bush.

Earlier this year, Congress had mandated the EPA create a rule that permanently bans chemical testing on pregnant women and children, but the EPA's newly proposed rule actually creates gaping loopholes for the chemical industry. The rule allows for government and industry scientists to treat children as human guinea pigs in chemical experiments in the following situations:

1) Children who "cannot be reasonably consulted," such as those that are mentally handicapped or orphaned newborns may be tested on. With permission from the institution or guardian in charge of the individual, the child may be exposed to chemicals for the sake of research.

2) Parental consent forms are not necessary for testing on children who have been neglected or abused.

3) Chemical studies on any children outside of the U.S. are acceptable

The proposed regulations also allow the EPA to waive all requirements that testing done outside the US be "humane," exposing third and forth world citizens to potentially deadly experiments, the same way they are already used as a dumping ground by the pharmeceutical industry for medicines that are forbidden to sell in the US because of dangerous side effects.

YOU CAN SEND A PROTEST LETTER (using a draft already prepared if you wish) and read the actual text of the proposed regulations here

This is horrific, displaying a sensibility even worse than those responsible for torturing US-held prisoners have revealed. 

These proposals have been drafted by our fellow citizens and if there was ever a time for the public to speak up against the acts of government, this is it.

Please send a letter and forward the information to your friends. 

thanks,

pearlbamboo

thanks to dingus6 for reminding me about A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Smith and to wallyfu for the heads up on his blog. . 

                   The World As A Reasonably Safe Place

I had occasion this past week to write to a friend about the differences between his sense of safety, that the world is a reasonably safe place, which he has had since childhood, and mine, as I have this only as a construct added laboriously as an adult.  It is in the bonds of early infancy and early childhood where this is created - this knowing/faith/trust that whatever befalls us, it has at least an even chance of working out without disaster.  

"The difference between you and me, the difference,  the big difference, is that your mother loved you and you felt that, even as other things were difficult, while my mother was both psychotic and depressed.  Her task was to annihilate my sense of a good self and replace it with negatives (you are ugly, stupid, never ever enough, etc...) embroidering at times with physical abuse.

There was never anyone for me, never felt loved except with my high school sweetheart and that carried its own bomb.  I never ever felt safe.  My father gave me my only sense of safety, and that was not reliable.  When I was five, hands bruised from being hit, I counted the days until he would be home from a business trip so I could ask him to tell mom not to hit me like that again.  She countered with, "You are away leaving me with two very difficult children and I know what to do, I know what's best."  He was raised by a sadistic step-mother and I suspect that my mom looked positively benign in comparison.

Even that illusion of safety shattered  in high school when he began on occasion to partake of her violence and joined her when she would start to hit me around the head when I was studying, usually after I would plead for her to leave me alone so I could study.  His death from a heart attack when I had just turned 17 swept away the last shreds of the illusion that he was a source of safetly. 

The moment I found out he was dead, I ran to the back of our one acre, climbed up on my retreat, the old hen house roof, and screamed and screamed in fear, for there was now no one between me and mom.

So this feeling of trust and faith that comes to you, even if you struggle for it at times, is truly an integral part of you.  I must constantly try to create this for myself.  It is fragile, it is ephermeral.  It takes very little to knock it out of me.  Bump.  Oh,  excuse me, I just lost my sense that the world can be a safe place, my sense of a good self, cobbled together in adulthood, just fell on the floor and broke.  Sometimes I'm too tired to try to find it right away, paste and glue and tack it back together.  And sometimes, for a while, it is just too hard to care that it's gone.

The dark side, sadness, feelings of loss, knowing that things never will be truly OK, is familiar, what I've known since I was a child.  It doesn't really go.  It's stubborn, it lurks and will always come in underneath the good the minute there is a crack in the structure to leave it room. Celexa slows that down, closes off the cracks, or almost does, enough so that I can push the dark away and reclaim some light, but not always.  Love slows it down too, but I trust that less...

pearlbamboo

copyright.  e.p. hodges

                                  Too Many Silences
                              Someone Else's Problem?

Yes, I'm still here, having yoda-ed myself through something difficult in my own life over the past month, finding some truth and resolution and some happiness.

About "too many silences" - to me it was not only that no one tried to call the cops, or tried to stop the fight; these were two big men.  The biggest silence of all has to do with the America's refusal to deal fully at the state and national level with the poverty and outright racism that produced those two men, the complete failure to understand the historical devastation of family structure that underlies some of this behavior.  

Questions.  I'm starting with the premise that the family is where one learns the world is a safe place, is loved - the things that allow a person to grow up healthy and emotionally stable - focusing on that alone, for the moment. . 

Given that, has anyone out there ever tried to think through the implications of the slave system on the destruction of family bonds?   How we know now that something like being sold into slavery, the actual experience, the dreadful trip and witnessing the accompanying loss of life, living through terror and threats, constituted a trauma, the likes of which a person would now be treated by a specialist in trauma were it to occur today?  Tried to imagine the effects of that on an individual?  Tried to think through the devastation of being sold from one plantation to another, pulled away forcibly from one's tenuous family?  Then tried to figure how many generations down the road this destruction lingers or echoes, compounded by things like I see all the time, men rousted at my streetcorner by the cops who are looking for an  hispanic and decide to take in the black man I'm talking to just because he's there?  What a lifetime of that does to a man's soul?

The aftermath of Katrina brought America's ignored people into our homes on the TV screen.   Is it someone else's problem?  

I've a young black woman living with me now, from a relatively well to do family, but one in which she was both sexually and emotionally abused.   She's a treasure, seeking to learn, to understand new things, to find her way into a non-abusive relationship.  Given my own personal limits, that is all I can do, yoda her, give her shelter.  But it's something.....

pearlbamboo

copyright  e.p. hodges

                             Pearlbamboo's Adventures in the Big City VIII
                                 Too Many Silences

I'm waiting by the El stop for the bus, crowded in by university students of priviledge and South Asian immigrants on their way to Chicago's vibrant South Asian community just a ways on down the road.  I hear rage behind me and turn to see a large man trying to beat up another tall man, more frail in build, with crutches and a turned out foot.  One screams  he'd been hit with the crutch.  The other shouts that he got smacked first, that he was trying to fight back, then took a blow that landed him on his face staring at concrete.   

All the bystanders carefully avert their eyes, suddenly interested in cracks in the sidewalk or the lack of action across the street, anything at all except looking at the nakedness of two men fighting.  No one reaches for a cell phone to call the cops, despite the fighters' inequality.  People step way to the outside of the wide sidewalk or cross the street, disgust and fear on their faces.  Everyone is white or Asian.  The fighters are black.

A tall young fellow, six feet or more and well-muscled, his bearing that of the many Bosnians in my neighborhood, walks past with his two friends.    Calculations made, he whirls back towards the fighters.  He shouts at them to stop, grabs the agressor and pulls him off the man with crutches, barking at him to move on down the road when he tries to start things up again.  Slowly, shouting back, the man starts to move, finally retreating towards the end of the block.   Finding the man with crutches unhurt, insisting he didn't want further assistance, the young man moves back into the stream of people just passing by.  

In the midst of the roars and bleats of the wounded, there are too many silences. 

pearlbamboo

copyright e.p. hodges