TWO THINGS

Marched through many views of the world,
through We and You and I
yet everything's been spoiled
by the eternal question, why?

Such questions do not survive youth.
There's just one thing--you learned late--
endure, mind, madness or myth,
your "you must" determined by fate.

Whether roses, dahlias, snow--yes,
it all washed away with the rain.
Two things remain: emptiness
and your cursed self, branded like Cain.


Gottfried Benn

Translated from the German by
Thomas Dorsett

D0T AND DAZY

May I introduce you
to a summer grain?
This is Dot. (Molecules:
What seems small is huge.)

There are, no doubt, millions of us
in this Midwestern field
as there are millions of failed
troubled sprouts in Minnesota.

Wind is thought. We are tongues.
The whole room is talking at once!
Please, one sprig at a time.
Spikelet, what would you say

if gusts used a tongue to reveal
I am the last grain you'll have?
Glad to meet you.
I'm headed for a hidden star--

Silence is my rocket.
Appointed grain, I'm
tired of living as used
misanthropic molecules.

We're not misanthropic.
We just don't care. I do.
I, dew, pronounce you man and life--
Sir Dazius and Mrs. Seed,

tomorrow you'll be breakfast. Yet
Death is a persistent farmer--
Dot and Dazy will spring back,
howdier right here.

THOMAS DORSETT, THOMAS SCHWARZ

The person I was in my previous life
happens to speak German.
So I learned that tongue.

(At the time I didn't know
I was an Anglo marionette
with Thomas Schwarz pulling the strings.)

I said, "Daddy, I've got to
learn German." And I did.
The carnage was recent

and Daddy resisted, but
not like England resisted--
This war I won.

Lots of coincidences (proofs?)
over the next sixty years
which are too prosy to list here

(these lines are plain enough)
Now (2011) what does Thomas want?
May I use an English word?

(I'm translating) reincarnation--
I didn't believe it either
until that day in 1947 when

I saw your face. Where did I go?
I was eighteen years old
when I perished in Dresden

Why did I become a toddler
in a soulless house? Jersey City
would not have been my first choice;

um ehrlich zu sein, it wouldn't
have even made the first hundred--
I was a poet.

I am a poet.
I played Chopin well
I play Chopin, well,

so what? Dieter's name
on the Internet (I was
half Jewish and passed

--forged papers--until
that last year of hell)
convinced me: your awful legacy

was the reason I lived long
not far from the Jersey shore
as a pearlless clam.

"Es gibt nur zwei Dinge,
die Leere, und das gezeichnete Ich"
Don't be so sure.  We want peace;

though after the fire-bombing
we went through terror together,
it's not too late. We're still intact.

Stirb und werde--Yes! The horror has
finally come to an end. We smile.
Why has it taken us sixty odd years?

A CALL FOR REGULATION II

That stuff about derivatives
gave me a case of shiveris

("To shiver" is, of course, a verbal
way of indicating chills)

Too too too bad, the Congress is
bought off by Big Businesses--

Thus a few are jeters--Whee!
while the rest are jittery

because they pay the bills.
Will regulation cure her ills?

No, but our country would improve whose
health is getting poor, a lack;

the best treatment for shivers is:
Citizens, fight back!

A CALL FOR REGULATION

Who have made so many poor?
Bankers who want more and more.

What is their plan for redress?
Paying workers even less.

That's a very vicious circle.
Where are you when we need you, Terkel?

Where are you when we need you, Day?
Honest work for honest pay

is what we want. That's what we'll get;
we'll regulate those bastards yet!

WE'RE OCCUPYING WALL STREET

Chorus

We're occupying Wall Street
and we are not alone;
they took away our paychecks,
they took away our homes;
we're earned our bread and butter
and they give us chicken bones;
Wall Street, we're not going home.

First Stanza

I worked my entire life
and I have a son;
Wall Street took my job away
now he's the only one--
I pleaded, Son, help me,
they're turning off the lights--
Wall Street, that isn't right.

Repeat Chorus

Second Stanza

We bailed you out with money
that was difficult to earn--
You paid yourselves big bonuses
that make the decent squirm--
We're not jealous, oligarchs,
it's OK that you're rich,
we just want some fairness, a house and not a ditch--

Repeat Chorus

Third Stanza

Wall Street has been cheating us
but we have not lost hope;
our message to the people is:
STAND UP AND TAKE NOTE:
Cheaters won't be cheating us
if all the cheated vote--
Wall Street, we can't go home.

Repeat Chorus

--Words and Music by Thomas Dorsett

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdZlplhbBI8&list=FL6FwjBfMjjzES-WXyzvwRKg&fea

HOW PAINFUL! MY OWN MOTHER TEARS ME DOWN

I added to myself, stone upon stone
and stood already like a little house
around which greatly day moves, even alone--
Then Mother comes, comes and tears me down.

She tears me down by giving me a stare;
she doesn't see that someone's building there.
She walks directly through my wall of stone--
How painful! My own mother tears me down.

Birds fly with greater ease around my home.
Every stray dog in town knows: that's the one--
Only she is able to ignore
my face's gradually becoming more.

From her to me good weather never came.
She doesn't live where gentle breezes reign.
She stays in her heart's remote hideaway
where Jesus comes to wash her every day.

HOW PAINFUL! MY OWN MOTHER TEARS ME DOWN

-----Original Message-----
From: Thomas Dorsett
To: Jgratz
Sent: Sat, Oct 15, 2011 5:00 am
Subject: Rilke


Ach wehe, meine Mutter reißt mich ein.
Da hab ich Stein auf Stein zu mir gelegt,
und stand schon wie ein kleines Haus,
um das sich groß der Tag bewegt,sogar allein.
Nun kommt die Mutter, kommt und reißt mich ein.

Sie reißt mich ein, indem sie kommt und schaut.
Sie sieht es nicht, daß einer baut.
Sie geht mir mitten durch die Wand von Stein.
Ach wehe, meine Mutter reißt mich ein.

Die Vögel fliegen leichter um mich her.
Die fremden Hunde wissen: das ist der.
Nur einzig meine Mutter kennt es nicht,
mein langsam mehr gewordenes Gesicht.

Von ihr zu mir war nie ein warmer Wind.
Sie lebt nicht dorten, wo die Lüfte sind.
Sie liegt in einem hohen Herz-Verschlag
und Christus kommt und wäscht sie jeden Tag.

Aus: Die Gedichte 1910 bis 1922 (München, 14.10.1915)

How painful! My own mother tears me down.

I added to myself, stone upon stone
and stood already like a little house
around which greatly day moves, even alone--
Then Mother comes, comes and tears me down.

She tears me down by giving me a stare;
she doesn't see that someone's building there.
She walks directly through my wall of stone--
How painful! My own mother tears me down.

Birds fly with greater ease around my home.
Every stray dog in town knows: that's the one--
Only she is able to ignore
my face's gradually becoming more.

From her to me good weather never came.
She doesn't live where gentle breezes reign.
She stays in her heart's refined hideaway
where Christ comes to wash her every day.

AGING WITH SPIRIT

I belong to a group of friends that has been called "Modern Mystics," for many years before I joined. We meet every six weeks or so, and discuss a book with a religious theme, in the broadest sense of that word. I didn't name the group; I never refer to myself as a mystic. The term seems a bit wooly to me; I am also very much interested in science and physics.(I am a physican.) But as a poet and musician, I live a good deal in a transverbal world, (poets must use words not just as conveyors of meaning but also as musicians use notes), and thus very much have a spiritual side. I certainly do not object to be called religious, an adjective that very much applies to me; the way I use it is, however, completely non-dogmatic and can only be hinted at with words.
After a rough start, I am now older and wiser, and would like to share with you two poems of mine as illustrations of a type of spiritual wisdom that comes with age.
First a little background about the relationship of age to wisdom. According to Jaques's famous speech in Shakespeare's As You Like It, there are seven stages of life, the last one characterized by "Second childishness and mere (complete) oblivion,/Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything." This is a powerfully expressed yet rather gloomy view of life, appropriate for the Jaques of the play who is very pessimistic. (Shakespeare, the greatest and most subtle creator of fictional characters who ever lived, wrote what the character thinks, and not necessarily what Shakespeare believed.) There is no mention of increasing wisdom as the stages progress; Jaques may have a dark view of life, but my knees constantly remind me that he has a point: the body wears down. Some of us are still quite vigorous at 80, but if we're lucky to live to 100, well, running a marathon, to say the least, is no longer possible. Even worse, the mind can break down too. Body and mind, of course, can be assailed at an earlier age from all those troubles flesh is heir to. This article assumes a healthy mind in an aging body, examples of which are increasingly numerous. (I, for one, intend to belong to this group for as long as possible.)

For a more positive view of aging, one which emphasizes an increase of spiritual development, we turn to classical Hinduism and a twentieth century Irish poet.
In Hinduism--at least for the Brahmin caste--there are five stages of life. The first is the child, followed by the student, the householder, the retired person and the ascetic. The first three stages need no explanation. Let us now discuss the last two which apply to the old. In retirement, one passes on household responsibilities to younger members of the family. Work to financially support others ends; spiritual work, for which the householder lacks time to devote himself, begins. The retired person contemplates the spiritual side of life, and often performs bhakti, devotional rituals. There is an abrupt change when one enters the final stage, that of the ascetic. The ascetic is now wisdom personified and doesn't need any religious trappings anymore--there is a ceremony during which the ascetic burns the sacred texts. This stage is beautifully expressed by one of my favorite Hindu sayings:
It is sad when a young man doesn't go to temple; it is even sadder when an old man does.

Perhaps, if you are a Westerner, you might think that this applies only to Eastern religions--mentioning sanyassins, the Hindu word for ascetics, might turn off those with a more practical bent. (There is no requirement to give up doing good deeds!) Recently I came across a striking statement form a Catholic monk that says the exact same thing, though expressed somewhat differently.
During our last meeting of "Modern Mystics" we watched a CD. In this CD the monk was asked what the stages of the religious life are. This is what he said:
"At the first stage, you believe in The Other. In the second stage, you imitate the Other and try to come as close to It as you can. At the final stage, you realize that there is no Other, or in other words, that you are the Other." So even in the West, wise, religious people realize that dogma and worship do not belong to the highest final spiritual stage.

We thus have an alternative view to Jaques's pessimism, the realization that increasing strength in the "soul" can--and should-- more than compensate for increasing weakness in the knees. Yeats summed up this dichotomy best with the following lines from his great poem, Sailing to Byzantium;

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
a tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and louder sing
for every tatter in its mortal dress

Well said, Mr. Yeats!


ll.

Inchworms are curious little animals. After hatching, often on the dark forest floor, they must climb a tree trunk to find the leaves that are their food. This works well, unless they happen to be born near a tree stump. They are programmed to climb it; at the top, of course, they will find no leaves; in desperation, they writhe and writhe. They do not have the intelligence to climb down and start over again and find a trunk of a live tree. So they starve. I often think that many human beings get stuck on a tree stump, as it were, and starve psychologically. Erik Erikson's theory of the stages of life illustrates this beautifully. If an infant doesn't learn trust in the first year of life, he or she is stuck at this level for life and will also most likely fail at later stages. This is a sad truth, but true nevertheless.
I want to illustrate this with the case of an acquaintance of mine, also a member of the "Modern Mystics" group. Although older than I by over a decade, he has not reached the third stage that the Catholic contemplative outlined; the Hindu proverb about the cessation of the need to go the temple in old age probably will never apply to him. He is still searching for God as if he were an "I" here searching for an "Other" outside himself. He only reads spiritual books, which I find incredible. (A Buddhist sage once said that American intellectuals who are trying to become Buddhists should read a lot less and practice a lot more.) Other factors are contributing to his emotional state; his unfruitful spiritual quest has left him bitter. He reminds me of one of those inchworms; writhing in a barren place is not the way to find peace. This frustration has made him even more obsessive in his search; just like an adult who had never mastered, through no fault of her one, the first task of life, trust, will have an obsessive lack of trust for the rest of her life.
I wrote a poem about this frustrated search and the obsession to continue on a path bound to lead nowhere. It is called "Hamstring's Profession", indicating that the person is hamstrung by his search. I have immense sympathy for such people; their difficulty is palpable. And, as Buddha said, sad people are sometimes closer to the truth than happy ones, since they haven't escaped from the fact that life is so difficult for so many of us. Jaques would probably have appreciated this poem which follows:

HAMSTRING’S PROFESSION

My pride is a stamp
on a desperate letter;
it has been canceled;
still no reply.

What is the lost’s definition of Sky?
The dead letter office above broken eyes.
Aldebaran. Betelgeuse.
A lonely man dying

many light-years away--
You can be at all these places at once?
That is amazing and I am amazed.
But the greater mystery is that You aren’t here.

How to approach God's invisible Hand?
Step one: admit it,
rationality and need
are a teardown combination.

Step two: give up. No!
Though I've been scarred like a failed son
in a burned story by Kafka,
I’ll serve, I’ll wait. The Emperor of Jelly Beans

is likelier to save you--
Why still seek light
behind clouds of semantics?
That’s what I do.


111,

We will leave Jaques's view and consider Yeats's now. (Yeats's lines contain a crucial "unless"--unless the Soul clap and sing, etc.--This section deals with actual clapping and singing done by one who has aged successfully.) The protagonist of this poem--he doesn't even mention his own existence in the poem, having largely gone beyond it--no longer seeks to solve the problem of life by imagining he is a "I" here searching for an answer "there." He has simply joined the river of life, which is a source of great delight which more than compensates for bodily decline. His is neither an intellectual answer nor an emotional one; it transcends both. Notice that this poem doesn't mention any dogma; there is absolutely no conflict with science. The protagonist of the poem still lives in the practical sense as a separate individual, but on the inside he realizes that ultimately there is no separation--a very joyous realization. The only thing odd about the poem for me is that I wrote this, the wisdom poem, over thirty years ago--and wrote the bitter poem last week. I suppose it's not that odd; the wisdom poem was more of an indication of the direction I wanted to take, while the bitter poem is a character study of someone stuck in the tar pit of his own obsessions. If you are very happy and old, you will understand the meaning of this poem without any difficulty:

STONE AND RIVER

Metaphors that help us live here
are chiefly two: stone and river.
Aware of change, afraid to be alone,
most opt for the permanence of stone.

"A boulder at the center reigns;
however fast the current, it remains;
countless unique pebbles at each side
retain their shapes, even if dislodged."

I, I, this is the language of rock.
But everything is swirl and flux:
despite appearance all is sea;
no Me. Fluid all reality.

Nothing to transcend our going?
Everything is water flowing?
Nothing but fate, nothing but chance,
nothing but change? And ecstasy: dance!



1V.

This article can be summarized with one word: dance! You have always been dancing that dance, of course, but you haven't always been aware of this, having been distracted by all the tasks of life's earlier stages. Now you are able to join the dance wholeheartedly. This is called wisdom, which can and should increase with age. No dancing shoes required.

TAMMY AND THE MASS MAN

No gluons in this cosmic town
could keep her breasts from pointing down.
Her cheeks are like enormous figs!
Have you no standards, Mr. Higgs?



Thomas Dorsett
October 11, 2011

I WISH I COULD SEND HIM BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD

"Death is very likely the single best
invention of life." --Steve Jobs, 1955-2011

(Warning: don't listen to me--
I've been in mourning
since Spots my guinea pig died
unexpectedly in 1950.)

I wonder what Steve Jobs would say
now that he's tried it? Dying's
a wonderful part of life.
How pseudo-Zen can you get?

"Do you ever think of death?"
Rooney, 92, smiled. "Often. Every day."
"What do you have to say to the viewers?"
"I don't like it, " he replied.

I happen not to like it either.
Mozart at 35, Steve Jobs at 56--
Today a gorgeous sixteen-year-old
cheerleading her schoolmates to victory

collapsed. Zero, how dare you do that?
Somebody's daughter soon some body's dust.
I cannot accept cold, indifferent ash--
You'd better; you have no choice.


Thomas Dorsett, October 6, 2011

THE ROSENTHALS OF PASSAU

sashayed and lockstepped
in halls across Europe;

they charlstonned like Schwarzen--
At first this was a compliment--

How things changed. Where
have they spent their second sixty years?

Open the window and take a deep breath;
then stop what you're doing and turn.






Note: "Schwarzen" is German for "Blacks."








First appeared in
Visions International

THE MAYFLY

He was almost one day old
(both of us were past our prime)

After one exceptional look
at his diaphanous wings

just seconds before he took off
and disappeared into the woods,

I stared from pond grass and understood.
(He never had one, and I'm too old

to have a taut illusion in a suit
demand I stop commerce with insects)

It took years and years of saving
spiders from a biped's shoe

(I'd take a cup from the cooler
and let my distant eight-eyed cousins go)

Took years of saving night crawlers
upon asphalt after rain to figure out

every mayfly knows what I knew
for nine months before my first cry

THAT combined with life and love
is all we need know. Fungus,

locusts, dung, cyanobacteria
--all fit in at last--lichen, trees,

bees; a mayfly; a man, fire
ants crossing a river of mulch.

First appeared in
Tribeca Poetry Review

MY EARLY YEARS IN JERSEY CITY

I jogged across a housefly's eye
until I reached the Sorbonne.

Paris was a vacant lot.
On the dais of a wrapper,

Derrida Centipede
praised The Great Midge

(While he lectured, I imagined Chopin legs
weaving music in a spider's braille)

On the left wing of a gnat
I, too, studied deconstruction--

Forgive me, I was only one day old.
Disbelief becomes invertebrates;

Faith pulls up a rock and finds Jesus--
Who can blame doubt for throwing it down?


First published in Spring, Number 27,October 2010

LOVE

May I have a plate
of bituminous coal?

Are you a devil?
No, I'm your soul.

Then pray to Lord Jesus
to send you some meat--

I'd feel like a millipede
quoting George Herbert.

An insect in an iron cage
does not deserve redemption--

Hell's my address. Jesus Christ!
Give the young man a briquette.

(This poem first appeared in Spring, The Journal of the E.E. Cummings Society, 2010)

Interpretation: Some have considered my poetry to be a little difficult, so I'm including an interpretation of this poem. (As for the problem of difficulty, I refer to the renowned critic Helen Vendler who once stated that the best poetry is sometimes hard to understand at first reading, since musicality and understatement often hide the meaning, which is subtle. In other words, the appreciation of good poetry deepens with multiple readings. I'm not claiming that this poem is great, but if Vendler's words apply here, I certainly take it as a compliment.)
The title "Love" and the reference to George Herbert is a givaway, albeit a hidden one. This poem is a companion piece to Herbert's great poem, "Love." (If you don't know it, google it--you will never forget it. This was the favorite poem of Simone Weil, who, I've read, some consider to have been the greatest female philosopher that ever lived.)
Herbert's poem uses--he was the parish priest of Bemerton--Christian symbolism, so my companion poem does too. Herbert presents in his poem the great banquet of redemption, but the guilty protagonist feels too unworthy to participate. Love, who is none other than Jesus Christ, reminds him that his sins have been removed by His act of redemption, and the poem ends with, "'You must sit down, sayes Love, and taste my meat:/ so I did sit and eat." Ah, the simplicity, profundity and music of that last line!
This poem presents a different situation. We are at the same banquet, but the person feels so far from redemption, that he anticipates God's anger and asks for coal. I like to think of this poem as a dialogue between a tortured young man and a wise elder. The old man ironically asks, "Are you a devil?"--The implication is that he is a human being like everybody else and deserves a place at the table. The youth replies, "No, I'm you're soul." Here we learn that the young man and the old man are one and the same. One can interpret this as sort of a split-screen dialogue between the same person at two different stages of life, or a reference to the one soul of a common humanity. (Since the two speakers are really one, I eschewed the use of quotes or italics, which would separate them more than I want.) The old man replies that the young man should pray to God for food--the irony is that it's all around him--since he is as deserving of it as anyone else. But the young man thinks he's beyond redemption, while the other man knows this not to be true. (I have long since been convinced that guilt, except in cases where it leads us to become more human, is very frequently pathological. Some who should be guilty aren't, etc. I remember when a colleague told me about an eight year old boy in his practice who hanged himself. Why? Because he had been pulling the wings and legs off several bugs that he found in his garden.) At the invitation to feel worthy, the youth then quotes my favorite lines of this poem, "I'd feel like a millipede/ quoting George Herbert." Similar to Kafka's human cockroach, there is no hope for a human millipede--so the young man feels. He follows with two lines of self-excoriation, and ends with the belief that he is already in hell. The old man is exasperated and realizes that nobody can reach the young man at this time. Perhaps he is saying to himself the following: "He wants coal, all right give him coal. But he will figure out, after much suffering and many difficulties, that he is deserving, too--after all, he is no different from me." I like to think of the old man telling the angels to keep a seat vacant--even if it lies vacant for years. "He'll be back," the old man says, "and will be a good guest at this great feast. Now, thank God! I am ready to eat!"

THE SPIDER'S DEFENSE

His life was pure honey
and now he is dead--
I still hold the crab spider innocent.

Who the devil has a choice
among a hundred reprobates
dropped from a sticky cocoon?

Even as spiderlings,
arthropods are always hungry.
Are you so different, judge?

I wish I could shrink and tell
beetles about Jack the Ripper
and Mary Magdalene;

kindly shut up, Insect Watts,
if God protected honeybees
why did he make fangs?

Swarmy Ladybugs for Justice
want to see him crushed in sepals;
Jesus, let him go.


First published in Spring, The Journal of the E.E. Cummings Society
New Series Number 17