A simple Question

why is it that humans feel the need to dress, or camouflage, themselves to mirror the seasons. As soon as the trees start to change color, we immediately start wearing deeper shades of yellow and orange and red, imitating the trees. All winter clothes seem to have snowflakes on them. Is this a cry to be closer to nature? or merely some fashion designer's joke? The saying goes that one should not wear white after Labor Day, but is it only so that we don't clash with the snow, or is it because of the more practical reason, you might get lost in it?

Still sleepless in Essex

The funny thing is that the night after I wrote the first draft of this poem, i had a horrible nightmare about dieing. I dreamt that the grim reaper was chasing me. Spooky enough, but then I awoke, stumbling around me room to find him in my doorway. As he caught hold of me I was able to wake up for real. This is the first time I ever had a wake-up-in-my-sleep dream. It was the scariest dream experience I had ever had. Amazingly, my dream room was exactly the same as me real room, right down to the pile of clothes that needs mending. My sleep has gotten better ever since I read a passage from Doctor Zhivago on consciousness and sleep. Apparently all I needed was to be talked into letting myself just fall asleep and not trying to talk myself into falling asleep. Here's a second draft of the poem:

Finding Sleep (A.K.A Battling Insomnia)

When my heart is broken
and you are not there,
where can I find my solace?

Left alone, I am sleepless
with restless dreams and a tiredness
that will not subside.

I think of my world
and the golden strings
wondering what will become of them next.

Three sisters, sharing one sight,
three minds with the same conclusion.
They have no sleep, for there is work to be done.

They work while I await my rest.

Insomnia

For the past week or more, I have been having a horrible case of insomnia. It has been a problem before, but has never bothered me too much since I never had things to do in the morning. Now I have to be at work by 9, and it isn't good at all to take sleeping pills at 2:30AM. (not that I want to take them at all.) I even have trouble sleeping after having taken something for it. Tonight, after having such a battle, a poem came into my head about insomnia. Here it is in a very early stage:

Finding Sleep (A.K.A Battling Insomnia)

When my heart is broken
and you are not there,
where can I find my solace?
Left alone, sleepless
with restless dreams and a tiredness
that will not subside,
I think of my world
and the golden strings, wondering
what will become of them next.
There are three sisters, sharing one sight,
Three minds with the same conclusions.
They sleep not, for there is work to be done,
Whilst I await my rest.


While dealing with insomnia, as I'm sure many people well know, the mind races. I had so many amazing and interesting things pop into my mind only tonight, that seem unrelated but are interconnected merely through the colors which they share. My mind has been too much awake, and I am going to try to fall asleep again. Good night.

Comic: “The Lockhorns” by Bill and Bunny Hoest

Celebrities

The other day I was in the restroom at a local restaurant and when I came out a guy was waiting to go in. I gave him a quick glance; a simple acknowledgment that a person was there, but I was quick to go to my table. I thought that somehow I knew him; perhaps he was in school with me, went to the same parties, or was a regular at the store that I work at. Apparently I was looking right at Elijah Wood. It's strange how we become so familiar with the people we see on TV that we feel as though we have developed some sort of bond or relationship with them. It really was Elijah Wood, the fact was confirmed many times, and yet I never had the urge to run up to him and beg his autograph. What I found, after some contemplation, that is even more strange is how little I cared about his celebrity status and much I wanted to say "hi" like he was an old friend from years back. Maybe it's because I'm not that great a fan of his, but maybe there really isn't that much to the glamor of celebrities than that fact that he has millions of "old acquaintances".

Subreption in Slavery as seen in the Novel Obi, or The History of Three-Fingered Jack

" William Earle’s novel Obi or, the History of Three-Fingered Jack is an important literary text for its cultural treatment of Obi religious practices found in the British colony of Jamaica. Influenced by the Enlightened thinkers of the Eighteenth Century, and the Romantics who stemmed from their philosophies, Earle’s novel reflects the conflicts of a nation torn between ideologies. The concept of slavery was difficult for the Protestant British to digest and therefore they altered their perception of African slaves in ways that allowed them to feel comfortable with enslaving a whole race in accordance to their own theological views. The treatment of their slaves, as well as the religious practices of the slaves, by the British varied as they struggled to make peace with it. This struggle is a psychological process closely related to Kant’s discourse on the Sublime. The British fell into the trap of subreption, causing them to inaccurately portray African-slave practices in their literature as reflected in Obi.

In Kant’s discourse on the Sublime[1], the human mind can only handle certain things that are within the parameter of the Reason[2] that we have accumulated from our experiences and ideologies.
But because there is in our Imagination a strive towards infinite progress, and in our Reason a claim for absolute totality, regarded as a real Ideal in our faculty for estimating the magnitude of things of sense, excites in us the feeling of a supersensible faculty. And it is not the object of sense, but the use which the Judgment naturally makes of certain objects on behalf of this latter feeling, that is absolutely great; and in comparison every other use is small. (109-110)

It is not the institution of slavery that the British of the late Eighteenth Century had a difficult time apprehending—they were very comfortable with it decades before—it is the institution of slavering as it affects the Enlightened mind that caused the alteration in slavery interpretation: “the sublime is not to be sought in the things of nature, but only in our Ideas” (109). Apprehending animal-like treatment of human beings was beyond the ability of people who thought that humanity existed in all races; therefore it was natural to Romanticize the Africans and distort their religious practices in ways that legitimizes the continuation of slavery.

The early eighteenth-century saw a large change in the use of slaves. Plantation farming began to grow as an economical source for Britain during the “sugar revolution” and as a result their demand for workers increased. Originally, the desire was to employ lower class Europeans, but their death rates were too high and as an alternative African slavery was utilized.[3] With the body of slaves reaching high percentages of the work force on plantations, and the French Revolution bringing socialism into British philosophies, keeping the old view of slavery was near impossible.

Savages, having no civilized society, might be taken to be “natural men” and thus “uncorrupted men” or even “good men.” This was, perhaps, more a part of the romantic movement than of the Enlightenment in its earlier phases, bit it led Europeans to weaken their natural Xenophobia. (Curtian, page 150)

Before the Enlightenment and discourse on social change, the British did not have ad open struggle on the topic of slavery. As this struggle grew, British literature began to reflect these thoughts, and the Romanic Slave was born.

Earle’s novel Obi is a book filled with Enlightenment jargon, and consequently his imagery of slavery is Romanticized. The argument that Captain Harrop gives for enslaving Makro and Amri is that they are savages and it would be better for them to live a life of servitude under an Enlightened Empire than to live their lives in ignorance in the wild:

He soon have me to understand that I worshiped a false god…He told me the glorious sun was but a substance created by his God …He told me of the enlivening power of the sun, ‘I’ cried he ‘feel its warmth in my heart…You yourself’ applying to me, ‘feel the same influence…So the charitable man spreads his kindly rays around, revives the depressed, becomes a father to the orphan, a husband to the widow; by him are the afflicted comforted, the ignorant enlightened, and the poor relieved. Oh! Amri, a charitable man is the noblest work of God. (77)

Harrop’s speech to Amri was given before he knew that he was ever going to find a way back home and therefore has an air of his genuine personality. Though his ideas do not follow the concept of native Africans being a uncorrupted and pure people, as Curtain states was a popular theory, his believe is that the Africans are naïve and since they do not worship the correct god he therefore, as if they were orphaned children, acts as a father and educator. As a merchant in the slave trade, Captain Harrop could not afford to feel much mercy for those whom he enslaved, but Earle gives him moments of tenderness towards Amri and Makro that shows that he too is touched by the Enlightenment.

Earle’s development of the slave characters owes much to Aphra Behn’s novel Oroonoko, written more than a century earlier during the Restoration period. Behn was writing during a period when xenophobia was very much a part of British ideologies; therefore, in order to convey her hero, Oroonoko the African slave, Behn was forced to westernize his character:

His nose was rising and Roman, instead of African and flat; his mouth the finest shaped that could be seen, far from the great turned lips which are so natural to the rest of the Negroes. The whole proportion and air of his face was so noble and exactly formed that, bating his color, there could be nothing in nature more beautiful, agreeable, and handsome. (2187).

In everything except color, Oroonoko is the greatest embodiment of Western hero. To set him about other Africans, his is a prince of an African nation. With royal blood and Roman features, Behn was satisfied that her audience would be able to find some way to connect with her African hero. Earle did the same, although his audience did not require as much convincing to read a story about a slave: “His face was rather long; his eyes black and fierce; his nose was not like the generality of blacks, squat and flat, but rather aquiline, and his skin remarkably clear” (72). What makes Earle’s novel so different in the treatment of slaves from Behn’s is Enlightenment jargon the discussion of the religious practice of Obi.

Behn’s novel follows the stoic Hero through his Romeo and Juliet love story and his failed rebellion. The stoicism that Jack shares with Oroonoko is noticeable, but Jack is not stoic purely because of his inner greatness, as Oroonoko is, but because of his powerful Obi. The foreign practices are how the British view and separate themselves from the slaves. Earle’s aim is not to put Jack on the same level as the Europeans, but to see his differences as a way to understand his enslavement. Because of Earle’s desire to reconcile what he wants with what he actually exists. Subreption caused the British to falsely report encounters of Obi to each other on the plantations and consequently back in Britain to gain legal and moral support. Such practices were used in all slave -holding societies that did not use pure human degradation in order to oppress people into servitude. Orlando Patterson in his book Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study:

The slaveholder camouflaged his dependence, his parasitism, by various ideological strategies. Paradoxically, he defined the slave as dependant. This is consistent with the distinctively human technique of camouflaging a relation by defining it as the opposite of what it really is…The slaveholder retaliated ideologically by stereotyping the slave as a lying, cowardly, lazy buffoon devoid of courage and manliness: the slave became, in his slave holder’s mind, the “Graeculus” of ancient Rome…the “Quashee” of eighteen-century Jamaica. (337-338)

Patterson, a pioneer in the study of slavery, calls the transition from a “free” person to a slave “Social Death”, the slave does not stop breathing, his heart does not stop beating, but who he is becomes lost in a new reality found in the slaveholder’s hands. The formula that Patterson is referring to in the previous quote is the generic style for a society transforming into a slave-holding society. When Britain reached the end of the eighteenth century they were attempting to work their way through the stereotypes, which can be found with Earle’s character Quashee.

Though not a large character, Quashee holds great significance for Earle because, when he becomes Christian, he changes his name to James Reader. Before he became Reeder, Quashee was merely another African slave of minor worth to the story. His indicated that he was a stereotype of the disgruntled slave. He was no match for Jack and Jack’s Obi, and his determination seems purely stubborn and selfish. As a Maroon, it was necessary for Quashee to capture Jack to maintain his freedom. But as a Christian, Reeder was bound by theological duty to quell the unrest that was caused by an unnatural “Black Magic”. Earle, though clearly interested in the reaction that the Obi had on the slaves, did not bring his story to a battle of religions. The Christian symbol that Reader wore around his neck was more powerful than Jack’s Obi, and Earle’s Jack instinctively knew it: “Jack started back in dismay; he was cowed; for he had prophesied that White Obi should overcome him, and he knew the charm, in Reeder’s hands, would lose none of its virtue or power.” (156) To Earle, it is almost as if he does not believe that the Obi holds any truth for Jack or any of the other slaves.

The choice not to recognize the full beliefs that the slave had in their religions was part of the alteration the British created in their perception of the slaves. Earle gives Amri and Jack British idiolects—they speech in perfect Enlightened terms and as if they were Europeans masked with black skin—while at the same time calls them unenlightened:

Oh! Thou great Creator, look down upon those unenlightened savages! see them entwined within each other’s arms, while the mingled tear of friendship, the grateful effusion of two noble hearts, deprives each of the power of speech. But these are savages and worship an imaginary god; they are black men, and slaves, unworthy of the appellation of men. (146)

It is evident in this soliloquy that Earle deeply wants to be on the side of Jack, but that his inability to allow a rational being to be a slave deters him from allowing Jack to be a full hero. In the following lines, Earle begs for some kind of reconciliation to be made by his fellow enlightened thinkers:

Ye sons of Christianity, versed in enlightened schools, that teach you to distinguish and to adore the great Creator, emulate their great example, for ye have no such heroes among you. (146)

The encounter between Jack and Mahali, to which Earle is referring, happens in the forest and during the night, both are settings for mystical and non-Christian practices to take place. By admitting to the greatness of Jack and Mahali under the guise of the dark and wild, it is almost like not admitting to anything at all.

To the British, Obi was not real, and they tried not to allow people to think of it as real. They hid by saying that the slaves “seemed” to be afraid of it. An article from the New York Times published in 1912 recalls a story from a plantation in the West Indies that the plantation owner ignored the “local superstitions and act[ed] according to the mandates of a white man’s nature.” Since the owner ignored the woman’s cries of the woman and uproar occurred among his field hands—which he refers to as “Quashees”. The solution was to get rid of the woman, which eventually allowed the owner to calm the rest of his workers. Earle treats Jack’s Obi as a tool to inspire fear into Jack’s naïve enemies, but his real power comes from what Patterson calls “zest for life and fellowship”. (337) Since most real relationships are taken away by the institute of slavery the bond between mother is child is extraordinarily strong: “The fierce love of the slave mother for her child is attested in every slaveholding society”. (337) Jack becomes enraged towards his rebellion because of the story Amri tells him of the betrayal of her and Makro by Harrop. The Obi came later in the story, as an attempt to understand the psychology of the slaves.

The encounter with Obi in the book is with Jack’s grandfather, Feruarue, who was charged with stirring up the slaves against their masters:

I was brought to their market, and sold. In my heart I secretly vowed revenge, and for that purpose, studied Obi.

I acknowledge I spirited up he slaves to rebellion; I acknowledge I struck terror to the hearts of many that refuse their aid, but how I effected this remains with me, and with me shall expire. (99)

The settlers on the plantation were unnerved by Feruarue’s statements; they determined that he was using some form of witchcraft on their slaves. But just as the Sambo Amri presents Harrop with in token of friendship and good health, the Obi charm is part of the religion practiced by the slaves in Jamaica. Obi is still believed and practiced today by descendants of slaves from the Caribbean:

One such tradition is that of obeah, a magico-religious practice representing a synthesis of African spirit worship and European Christian principles. Obeah is widely known and, at least so some degree, continues to be believed and practiced by Canadians tracing their origins to Trinidad and Jamaica. (Butler, 155)[4]

The continuation of Obi into the twenty-first century clarified Earle’s misrepresentation that Obi was not completely believed in by the slaves. Earle does not allow the African slave characters to be fully integrated in their own religious practices because he must maintain that Africans are not fully Enlightened and therefore easing his mind to the concept of slavery.

Earle’s struggle with Jack is that he wants to view him as a man under the ideologies of the Enlightenment, but cannot do so comfortably because the institution of slavery is legalized in his country, and thus he must try to find some kind of rationalization for it. Because Earle cannot smoothly rectify the slavery under the social ideals of the Enlightenment he: “finds the whole power of the imagination inadequate to its Ideas” (Kant, 118). In his mind, as well as other people in Britain, he creates for himself a tangible, but wavering, concept that can be worked through using his Sense and Reason. The concept is still wavering for Earle because it is the object of slavery as an institution that he is struggling with, but how the humane person can forcefully control another rational being. The struggle that is present in Obi is the same struggle that Kant says is the process of experiencing the Sublime. As Earle tries harder and harder to reconcile his opposing beliefs, he alters the reality of them creating an alter reality that he relays to his readers. The misrepresentation by the recorders of plantation history caused a great falsification in the treatment of African’s as people with their own beliefs and matured in their own ideologies.


Works Cited

Behn, Aphra. Oronooko. 1688 The Norton Anthology: English Literature eighth edition, Ed. Stephan Greenblatt. New York: W. W. W. Norton and Company, 2006.

Butler, Gary. “Personal Experience Narratives and the Social Construction of Meaning in Confrontational Discourse” The Journal of American Folklore Vol 115, No. 456 (2002) pp. 154-174.

Curtain, Philip D. The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex Second edtion. New York: Cambridge Unversity Press, 1998.

Earle, William. Obi or the history of Three-fingered Jack. Ed L. W. Conolly. Broadview Editions, 2005.

Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. USA: Harvard University Press, 1982.

“Witchcraft in the West Indies” in The New York Times (1857-current file); Feb 4, 1912 ; ProQuest Historical Newspapers The New York Times.



[1] Kant, Emmanuel. The Critique on Judgement

[2] All terms used come surrounding Kant’s philosophy come from his definition, as he uses them in his writings.

[3] Curtain, Philip D. The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex. Second edtion. New York: Cambridge Unversity Press, 1998. Chapter 6.

[4] Butler, Gary. “Personal Experience Narratives and the Social Construction of Meaning in Confrontational Discourse” in The Journal of American Folklore, Vol 115, No"

My Reactions or Reading Wyn Cooper's book "Postcards From the Interior"

Review: Wyn Cooper Postcards from the Interior

Wyn Cooper’s latest collection of poetry, Postcards from the Interior, is motionless and frozen like a postcard from which the title gets its name. Cooper’s poems capture singular moments of emotions or people with suggestions of contemplation. But they lack the language that creates depth and imagery. The only distinguishing feature between his prose poetry and verse poetry is the alignment of the words on the page.

His title poem “Postcards from the Interior” frames a house the speaker found while hiking. The last lines are full of consonance that cause the reader to trip while rolling over an awkward line break:

Somehow the wallpaper matches it all,

yellow-brown, dust grey, content

turning to form from floor to ceiling,

a sight to behold on this bring spring day.

Simply listing a few colors with grade-school precision does not constitute imagery that can give birth to sights in the imagination. The house still remains a pile of formless nothings that Wyn may or may not have seen. Ending the line with “content” is ambiguous as to which line it belongs to and is has a harsh repetition of “t” quickly followed by “f”s with “form”, “from” and “floor”, blending all of the words into each other with more of a disruptive sensation than a literary illusion to the idea of formation.

Cooper writes his lines as if he has never seen any of the things he writes about. His removal from the subjects is suggested by his inability to relate them in his lines. Why does he decide to pick on hunters in “Postcard Recipe form Hunting Season”? Who would cook their venison in Ketchup and not butter? In Sprite and not wine? The only uneven heat would possibly be due to campfire flames, and even they bring a glorious flavor to foods they touch.

The slow pace which the poetry moves and the lack of imagery makes his poems dull and ineffectual. It is easy to read one poem and jump to the next without noticing that you have actually completed one thought. What is noticed are the poor line breaks and out of place rhymes, not what you want your poetry remembered for. I haven’t read any other poetry by Cooper, so I don’t know if he is trying something new—attempting to capture the singularity of postcards in his writing, but if he is then he should revisit the power of still-life art. Just because there isn’t any motion doesn’t mean that art doesn’t move.

If you are interested in looking into Cooper's works, he also writes songs, please go to his website: www.wyncooper.com

Spring

Spring is here--at least the weather is finally starting to resemble spring. Many of my posts have been writing assignments for my classes, and i have to admit that i have been having fun doing them. I greatly look forward to graduating in a few weeks, but lament over the fact that I will be out of the world of academia for a while. My only hope is that I will be able to read more books and increase my poetry writing; which has been very slow as of late. Perhaps with the warm weather the muses will dance towards the Northern Hemisphere and become one with me again. But for now, I have sapling thoughts on the character of Victor Frankenstein...this weeks forecasted rain may help them grow.

Some thoughts on Kant: Critique of Judgement

To Kant, Sense gets in the way of human understanding in so much that it tries to force people to have a relationship of familiarity with new experiences causing them to be incapable of accepting something that is genuine and/or abstract. While reading Kant’s philosophy, one must put aside their Sense, enough so that they might see the argument as a whole, for seeing only small pieces, as with the Egyptian pyramids (112), the meaning of his argument cannot easily be determined. Alternately, if we completely remove our Sense and take in the whole of The Critique without considering each section of the argument, then the details that are most artistic will also be lost. With either situation in place, the writing will fail to perform its task of inspiring mental growth.

This concept is what, according to Kant, allows people to experience the Sublime. I agree with Kant that the Sublime is not the object itself, but the subjective and psychological “state of mind produced by a certain representation with which the reflective Judgment is occupied, and not the Object” (110). Sense strongly encourages the mind to rationalize all that it sees, and can even discard the unusual for being irrational and irrelevant. The sheer awe created when the mind attempts to comprehend what it has just apprehended is what is painful because we use our Sense during the process of comprehension, creating a state of conflict within the mind.

Kant says that, since we have a difficult time processing the sensation of the Sublime, we conceal some of the truths of it (subreption) because it “finds the whole power of the imagination inadequate to its Ideas” (118) and therefore we label the Sublime as “an Object of Nature” (119). In doing this, we create for ourselves a tangible concept that can be worked through with our Sense, and neatly understood. The Sublime cannot be neatly understood because it is not the object, but the state of mind. It is the pain that the human mind undergoes when it cannot neatly understand the observed, and it stays with us and works through us, just as reading Kant’s philosophy works through our minds while we attempt to understand. When easily we understand, we loose the Sublime feeling and all that we are left with is the object, be it the mountain or a body of writing.

A recent book review

Oni Buchanan: “What Animal”

In her first book, What Animal, Oni Buchanan masterfully expresses the grief that is harbored deep down in the soul of the animal spirit, silenced to the human ear by the animal’s inability to talk, and the human inability to recognize these pains in themselves. Buchanan sees the world as an alien place, that we have tainted the purity of nature and lost our innocence with our cultures and practices. Right in the very first poem “’The Ducks and the Bicycle” Buchanan mixes man-made machines with nature and animals. All at once, the sky and the ducks were torn, violated and destroyed.

Buchanan’s language is beautiful as if a eulogy written on behalf of the poor animals in her poetry. The recognition of the ducks’ impending death is innocent and real that the motion of the bicycle can truly be felt, as well as the stillness of the ducks’ fate:

And left us tucked together on the green, but frozen one and one and one
As if winter swimming in formation on the pond
An instant ice no warning spread between us, held,

All our bodies caught apart—no matter
For the moment—since then, apart. (xi)

It is seen to them as if nature could have done it, but nature would not have because they would have instinctually foreseen its coming.

In all of her poems, Buchanan wraps her words around a carefully laid out scene dissecting conflict of human kind’s tendency to warp the natural world so that we no longer know ourselves. In “The Only Yak in Batesville, Virginia” the Yak is first desirous of the black and white horse, and then imagines a field full of yaks, only to realize that he does not even remember what yaks look like: “and I knew that I had forgotten/ what a yak looks like, though I am a yak,/ and I knew then that I had been away for a long time.” (9). The yak tells us that it is not enough to be the creature that you are if you no longer live as that creature or interact with other creatures. It is all too easy to become enamored with something other than your kind when you forget even what your kind is.

The isolation that Oni talks about is brought upon us by our own actions as individuals as well the larger events from civilization. We work and we work to reach some arbitrary goal that we set up for ourselves until we finally have to put what is natural in an unnatural place, in a zoo perhaps as in “Rent” were the animals are all injured:

..one limping.
One with mange. Others you could not tell
what was wrong exactly, but then,

there they were. (68)

We put the animals in the cages as we put ourselves in apartments and categorize and recategorize the “shelves of everything shelved” (69), but was she says “It was time not/ to alphabetize the shelves again”, we must do something to tell the world maintain its natural state.

Buchanan’s poetry flows smoothly as a well-developed train of thought. The precision that enables her to play music also aids her in writing her poetry. Not one stanza is uttered before the emotion of the next is considered. Sometimes she places in abrupt phrases, short clauses that call attention to what the speaker wants to say but hasn’t quite been able to say. These are moments when the pain the animal’s loneliness has passed the need for descriptive language and an exclamatory utterance is the only thing that will convey the emotion, the only thing that will really break the silence.

I really enjoyed What Animal and see it as a wonderful beginning for her poetical work. Speaking through the animals is a wonderful tool for investigating the natural world that concerns itself on so many levels, and as her poetry says, we forget that much of this pain is caused by humans and it is nice to have us recognize this so that perhaps we can rectify it.

If you want more information about Oni and her work, please look at her website http://www.onibuchanan.com/.

The Histories; the US

Book One

1. I, Heather of Vermont, am here setting forth my history, that time may not forget the doings of men and women, the deeds of our fore parents that are noteworthy, magnanimous, and both their benefits to the world and, in the case of some, devastating to humanity, and by above all, why our nation fought one another.
2. I have styled my story after Herodotus, and did my best to begin with his likeness so that the correlation may easily be noticed. As Virgil modeled The Iliad after Homer in style and context but forming the story into twice as many books, I too changed the number of books of my story to twice that of Herodotus. I drew great pleasure in seeking the material for my stories, but because of the nature of the research (i.e. former knowledge and the stories told to be by some very interesting people who have a great fondness for folklore and history) I am not able to put forth a great list of references, especially since I had to piece together from everything that I had learned to draw my own conclusion as to what the true stories are.


Book Sixteen

1. By this time, the Confederate army was devastated by its depleted treasury, and depreciation of soldiers. A plot, by the Confederate soldier, Bennett H. Young, who managed, through deceit and cruelty, to escape a Union Prison, brought the war to its northern most front, Saint Albans, Vermont. The C.S.A Secretary James Seddon tried to take all of the credit for it, but I shall tell it as it happened, and of the real people that were involved.
2. The Vermonters were always considered to be a very hardy stock, ever since the territory was declared a state in the early year of 1791, making it the first new state of the Nation, which brought the number of states to fourteen, which, in my opinion was a blessing on the Nation as before the states created an unlucky number. I said that Vermonters are known to be a hardy stock; I shall now relate some stories that have been told to me as I visited the area in search for the greatest understanding of our Nation's people.
3. The first thing that one notices when meeting with a Vermonter for the first time is that they will notice that your status as a Vermonter is determined by how many generations your family has been in Vermont. They are a very self secluding people and therefore believe in staying in Vermont, and as much as possible, in the same town in which you were born. When you go to a Vermont town or city you will notice that there will be about three different sire names that they all share, right away, just by giving your full name, a Vermonter can tell whether you are a “True Vermonter” or what they like to call a flat-lander. A flat-lander is anyone who is not from Vermont as they assume that their Mountains are the largest a greatest in the Nation, and since they pride themselves on being so self-secluded and sufficient, they have no way of knowing otherwise. In order to be considered a true Vermonter, one must be at least the third generation born in Vermont, in any other case they find the person to be of less political value and some even refuse to speak to someone who is not considered a “True Vermonter”. Vary rarely do they make exceptions , though in 1864 they were a little more friendly towards new comers as Vermont was still young.
4. It is common knowledge among Vermonters that their cows are very precious creatures. They provided most means of survival, cheese, meat, milk, leather for clothes and shoes, ice cream, yogurt, and some farmers even keep their farms attached to their houses for warmth in the winter. But the people are not the only ones who find comfort in their cows. I have been told, though I never saw any proof of it, though I think that it is worth mentioning just because so many people in the area believe it, that the moose, native to the land, a creature of great stature, standing at around seven feet at the shoulders and weighing up to 1,300 pounds, often has romantic feelings for particular cows. There is one particular story of a young bull moose who fell in love with a Hereford cow, a red and white beef cattle, named Jessica. This bull moose would stomp his hooves and not let the other cows in the herd eat until Jessica ate. Passerby could see the cow in the field being groomed by the moose or napping together. Some say that they had offspring and that the offspring created a new breed of cross cow and moose and that they live deep in the forests of Vermont creating their own herds, steeling cows from farmers and joining them to their herd, but I don’t find this to be very credible.
5. A custom that I heard from what the Vermonters call a Yankee Yarn Spinner, or local storyteller, is how they managed their elderly and weak through their grueling winters. According to the Spinner, some Vermonters learned how to make an elixir that could put these people into a kind of hibernation, similar to a bear, where they would sleep through the entire winter. When spring finally arrives, which takes six to nine months; they use yet another elixir which wakes them up. During this time of hibernation, the weak or elderly don’t age, and sometimes the long rest cures the weak’s ailment. When I asked the Spinner to share the instructions for how to make the elixir so that it may be used to help others he just smiled at me and placed his finger to the side of his nose and walked back into his cottage. Indeed such an elixir sounds fantastical, but the idea does seem implausible, as I have seen many people in Vermont that are much older than the people I have seen elsewhere.
more to come next week...

I began Eleutherios (The Liberator) while I was working third shift in the office. Feeling very much like I needed something more in my life than a desk job and a social life that seems as though it has gone on a vacation without me, I was praying to the god one god I thought might aid me while increases my relationships with the divine. I wonder though, is Bacchus just called the Liberator because of the freedom from social rules that comes from having too much to drink? Or is he really that great a god? The last line is in conversation with John Donne’s Holy Sonnet XIV.

Eleutherios (The Liberator)

I have heard of the tantric spell of heated flesh,
the mist of ancient perfumes floating in the air,
fire blazing, dancing, reaching to the heavens

as if it could speak to Zeus himself.
His Ladies sing a wine flavored tune,
it is the harvest flare of Bacchus' life,

a party wild and shimmering in the night;
it is so easy to get lost on this night,
to feel love on this night.

I want to feel the magic of the Bacchant's chant,
the wonder of their dance.
Alone, I feel, and sober,

I long for the kiss of an immortal god.
Bacchus roar your mighty song,
a bride of yours I long to be,

find me, ravish me, enter me.

revised 2/15/08

A Dream: short story

I wondered why? They told me that we were to be married. Me, a 23 year old woman, young, attractive, educated, and I was already in a relationship with a different man. He was 64, short for a man, wrinkles, white hair, but his jaw was firm and his body upright. The weight of his years had not yet made his figure into the burdened mass of geriatric life. He was wealthy, but our marriage wasn’t about a late life crisis, it wasn’t about and old man using money to buy a trophy wife, or to capture a wild bird and to put it in a pretty cage. He had to marry me, it was an obligation. I didn’t understand it, but he had a social contract with my family to marry me and to take care of me; I was obliged to marry him and be taken care of.

I don’t remember when I was approached with the betrothal, and the wedding happened immediately following. My gown, my maids, the hall, everything was taken care of. He bought me a beautiful ring, a diamond that any girl would be proud of. I wore my ring and moved into his illustrious home, modest in decoration, but wealthy in architecture. Walking around, I could not believe the exquisite taste of this man, my husband. If in a room the wallpaper was patterned, the furniture was of a softer nature, accenting the light and darks that danced from the walls. The shadows from the tables didn’t linger, but complemented the curves of the wood casings. Everything was as beautiful as a painting that you can look at for hours everyday and still feel inspiration glow from the brushstrokes. Around these rooms I walked alone, every day, too afraid to leave, and too shy to talk to my husband.

On occasion we did speak. It was something like a passing conversation that two mild acquaintances would make when meeting on the way to work on the metro. After breakfast he would do his business, and I would contemplate the new turn in my life. I was free to roam around the town at my will, shop for whatever I liked, and come home at my leisure. I wasn’t expected to cook or clean or mend or to do any of the traditional wifely duties as we had people to take of those things; my chief obligation was to be his wife and to be taken care of. It was so simple and yet so horrible. The death of my emotional core, the stillness of my passions, the coldness of my being were all results of my marriage and being taken away from the life I knew. All I wanted was to be with the man I loved. What were clothing, jewelry and cars without the deep passion of a lover’s arms? The warmth that travels circularly from my body through his and back to mine is enough to keep anybody warm even during an arctic freeze.

As the days dragged on I could not stop thinking about the man I loved. I was living in a dream-like state. The distance from my husband spread to incorporate everything else in the world. I had no care to eat, to sleep, to do anything, so after a few months I finally broke. I have never been the kind of person to go against my word. A promise was something to keep, and the bond that a marriage holds I have always felt to be so important that even faced with death I would not be unfaithful. But then I had always thought of marrying for love, not because of an obligation. I had begun to rationalize that the bond of marriage was not as important as I had believed it to be; the bond of love was worth more than any legal document, and besides, I had already fulfilled my duty by going through with the wedding. As long as I didn’t seem to the world an adulteress, I was performing my duty with all supposed diligence. I had decided to go to my love.

We began to see each other sparingly. Both of us were nervous of the situation and how my husband would react if he were to suspect. After all, the normal reaction of a husband would be rage. In many cases, even if the wife did promise to break all ties with her lover, jealousy would undoubtedly follow and the wife’s luxury of her husband’s wallet would be dismissed, and the adorning home would inevitably turn into the elusive tower of isolation accompanied only by eternal suspicion.

After I had been married almost a year, I had resolved myself to spending the rest of my life married to a man and loving another. The love I felt for my bedroom companion was worth the lies I told my husband. I barely touch the old man, but once in a while he would put his arms around me and try to hold me and I could feel his warmth. He was tender and yet held me with enough strength to remind me that he, too, was a man. It wasn’t so much his advanced ages that I resented, it was the lack of love I felt for him. How could he, with the blank emotions I gave him, continue to show me love with every movement of his body and glance of his soul?

One day I came home very late. It was raining and my clothes were wet. I was glad for the rain, it washed off the smell of sex from my person, and I felt that in a way it could cleanse any guilt I might be harboring. I rushed into the house, expecting my husband to be asleep in his own room (we, like family sitcoms from the fifties had our own “chambers” for personal space and rarely needed to present ourselves in the other’s room) when I almost bumped into him as he was leaving the den, glasses in one hand and a leather bound book in the other. We didn’t speak, but each knew where I had been and to what purpose. He told me with his eyes the he was sorry our obligation made me feel like I was forced into doing what I was doing. Without words he made it clear that he wouldn’t say anything on the subject, but would still have loved me without the bond of marriage. That moment, while clutching my shawl close to my body for warmth, the guilt that I should have been feeling during my affair pierced my heart and I apologized to him with the words that could only be expressed in our silent conversation.

With a new feeling surging through my body, I could not help but to doubt if what I was doing were right. But how could it not be? My husband understood that I was in love with someone; he understood the importance of following that love. One night, as I was re-dressing after an evening of passion and guilt, I asked my lover if he were alright with what we were doing, if he could handle not being the one married to me but being my adulterous companion. I asked if he would continue to love me the way he had been loving me in the years to come. Was our love strong enough to justify adultery?

Sliding his hand across my collarbone and up my neck, my lover looked me deep in the eyes and asked me why I should have such childish worries. Of course he had no intention of leaving me. We were together first and would never let a contracted marriage end our relationship. Besides, he thought that I was sexier as a married woman, the wedding ring and late night rendezvous added such an allure to my already lustful body that he could never end the affair. I was so relieved. I knew, though his manner was slightly superficial, he was only trying to be coy, and playful, setting me at ease. He reassured me in the affirmative everything that I wanted to be reassured of. I asked him why he loved me so much, I didn’t deserve this amount of happiness.

He didn’t love me. I don’t remember exactly what he said; I stopped listening after only a few words, but he told me that he didn’t love me and never had. I walked home that night, in high heels, a dress, diamonds glittering around my neck and down my ears, a perfect target for some hard-off mugger. But in the late night air, still crisp with the bite that winter had brought, a mugging had never crossed my mind. I doubt if I could have even felt anything from it. I even avoided the light cast off by the flickering street lamps. The dull illumination they created reminded me of an interrogator’s lamp breaking me down, one adulterous flaw after the other, leaving me naked and exposing my sins to the world. I felt most comfortable in the shadows for in the shadows I knew that nothing was to be trusted; everything was a lie; just as my life was a lie.

How could I have been so foolish? I believed so much in our love. What was love if what I had felt for him wasn’t? Could it have been love, just an unwise or immature love? Is it possible to love someone when they don’t love you back? When I got home my husband was waiting for me. He asked if I were alright, it was very late and he was worried and that something had happened. I apologized for making him worry and said that I needed to go to bed, I was foolish and thought that a walk would be much better than a taxi ride, obviously I was wrong and my bed was the only thing for me.

He walked towards me as if to try to comfort me, but I drew back, not so much because I didn’t want to be touched by him, but more because I felt too miserable to be touched. The idea of being comforted, of being told sweet nothings or given hope of tenderness was too much to bear. I was learning a lesson that the world was cruel, men were incapable of anything more than lust, and women were romantic children wishing for impossibilities. I realized, then, that I was lucky. I might have been married to an old man, but he was a rich old man and didn’t demand much, if anything from me. My only jobs were to spend his money and look the loving wife when in public.

I spent about two weeks trying to act like things were normal. My logic was that if I spent time out of the house as usual he would never notice a change in me, for there was nothing that he knew of that could have changed. I never really expected to fool him over my break-up, just as I never expected to fool him over my affair. He knew, and just as my eyes were heavy, so were his. I never talked about my lover and therefore never told him why it ended; my husband must have assumed something like he had broken it off and that I were mourning my lover’s absence. In truth I broke it off, he was still willing to remain passive and continue with the affair, forsaking love and the prospect of a happy life together. Whatever choices I made, for good or for ill, I wanted them to be in pursuit of a higher state of being, for whatever that thing is that we call love and happiness. I ended my love affair.

One day in late spring, when the earth was warmed but the air still breathed a cool breeze across your face; I was walking along the dock down by the lake. They sky was a soft blue, the water a sweet blue-green; clear in spots to the point that one could see the minnows swimming close to the wood. I walked up slowly to where our boat was docked and put my hand in my husband’s and whispered, “I’m sorry”. Without looking at me, but holding my entire body in his presence, he said for the first time aloud: “I love you”, and I understood right there what real love was. For the rest of our lives together I never felt safe except for in his arms, and I never felt as much trust as I did in his eyes.