Triptych 1: There Are Ghosts on Cherry St.

First ghost. Evidence, 3/19/2009. John K.

Second ghost. Evidence, 5/22/2009. John K.

Third ghost. Evidence, 9/28/2009. John K.

Darwin's Finches (Elegy 1)

Come unseen

the birds, the birds

in great black clouds

over highways and rail

to eat our toes

bluejay croaks

birdsong dissonant

more of the pulse

of wings,

laughter flapping

at wax and planes

they eat our toes

and think the trees inviolate

until the saw

and great black clouds

hover and spiral

must come down

must land

we will eat their wings

eat their wings

to learn to fly

away and over unseen

to peck at worms

in apples

spit out the seeds

of pomegranates

that fall on the the floor

of cavernous womb

cannibal

suck out the marrow

the glistening fat

in chasmic mouths

spit out the cracked

bones, talons

to pick out the mud

of our creation

and we will come down

as before

naked tremulous thieves

but we have the saw

John K., 2/22/2008, greatly revised 9/25/2009

Most of All, Time (Eclogue 4)

If we could account

for each raindrop,

for each hair on a lover's head,

for each scruple of dust, or

if we could account

for each scintilla of

blank noise and electric snow

adrift amid the empty

channels of our radios

and our televisions,

each pointed by their

very natures, as our

hearts and heads—

these, too, are made of

raindrops, static, dust,

and left-behind hairs—

antennae in each dimension

pointed towards the cosmic background;

in each dimension, but most

of all, in time.

Most of all, in time,

because if we could account

for these, then we must

count each second

before the heart gives out,

or the lungs; a slight twitch

unregistered in our ledgers,

not noted in our death certificates,

but registered somewhere

in blue stars, noted somehow

in the flight of birds

over red canyons;

and we must count, too,

each half-second,

each quarter, each eighth,

the subdivisions onward

towards the infinity

where the heart never

stops at all, still an infinitesimal

particle of life left behind in the lungs;

and count, too,

the second before the last,

minutes, millennia prior, and

light-years, pulled out backwards

through time as a loose thread

until we discover there is

but one thread, connected to itself

and connecting the infinities

where the edge of the universe

must be measured in the riotous haze

of a single electron, maybe the first

that tipped the scales of nothing to something.

If we account

for most of all time,

then so each final time,

each final transaction

between the eye and the world

as the eyelids, not heavy

with sleep but heavy

from life, narrow sight

to a thin sliver,

the last bar of light

between the curtains or

between the blinds

receding into an impression

of light behind the lids,

pulled over the eyes as the blanket

tucks in our chests,

and the last light

of our eyes, the thin membrane

to protect it, to seal it in

for as long as the light

can illuminate our dreams;

surely this is why

it is best to die

in our sleep,

not because of the morphine

of unconsciousness,

not because of the freedom

from pain,

but because of the thin sliver

of possibility

that we might go

in the middle of a dream,

to wander immortal

as an eye between the worlds,

seeing the beyond

that was our life

as the outlines of buildings

shrouded in mist after rain,

as silhouettes that shuffle

behind closed curtains at night;

but then we could not account

for the gamble:

the silhouette, your lover

leaving behind new hairs,

the city, hell.

To risk heaven,

if the light burns through

the mist, radiant towers;

or the silhouette, your

lover, radiant breast

and hips, in waiting, as if able

to see through to you

from the world

on the other side of the eye.

Best, then, to die

in the midst of life,

for to account

for each raindrop,

for each hair on a lover's head,

for each scruple of dust, or

each mote of static

would be to count to

infinity, stuck eternal

in the subdivisions

trying to stave off

the inevitable last twitch

of the heart, knowing not when

but knowing that it will come,

so preoccupied with the accounts

that for each raindrop

we miss the

hush of the rain.

John K., 9/20/2009

Housework, 9PM (Eclogue 3)

Could it be this time of night,

when from the kitchen window

the edges of the trees fall into the sky,

the air condenses into wood,

leaves evaporate.

Not 4AM, believable in its abject

stillness, around which dreams are spun,

stillness even of the crickets, and the last light

of the moon reflected off the eyes of the invisible

predators, off the vanishing wings of moths.

Not even of midnight, still sticky in its residues, ruffled

with agitations of the in-between, tossings, turnings,

working-outs of the wrinkles of work clothes and skins.

This time of night, it could be 9PM, when the world starts

closing in on us sooner this time of year. Housework.

Tidy up the frays with washings of

water glasses, and the knives that carve out

tomorrow in leftovers, yesterdays reheated;

the coffee ground, counters wiped,

the matching of socks, the laying-outs of

blouses and uniforms and button-downs,

weather forecasts: these are preparations,

libations for ghosts. Our own. Prayers, really,

because of the certainty that tomorrow

can go on without us, will go on, if. Our hearts:

choking up, choking down, choking on all

that occupies them, the ever-expanding pericardium

to accommodate ourselves, tailored to ill-

fit our beautiful bodies, stopped for a moment

at this time of night before the kitchen window,

where outside hover golden rectangles, the outlines

of buildings without which it would be too unbearable to

see the trees. The trees, unnameable in the dark;

we thought they strain to reach the sky, to pull

themselves out of the ground and become

of the air, of the wind; to lift the burden

of the lightness of birds on their branches

heavy with envy. No, it is the trees hungry

for the sky, for the wind, for this time of night.

To pull it into themselves, breathe in its particles

as they suck up the rain, so expansive their appetite

that the surfeit films their green. Hungry for

to swell, broaden, to take in more as our

occupied hearts, to hold eternal

that which it cannot possess—certainty

that tomorrow will go on with us,

that housework is no entropy,

that our weather forecasts can approximate

against the asymptote of September, 9PM—

that, could it be, this time of night,

we can be like moons to eclipse the sun,

like buildings to eclipse the stars,

and trees to eclipse the sky as a canopy

under which we can all sleep, assured

of our waking in the morning.

John K., 9/14 & 9/15/2009

Bed: The Essay, Part I

Now that "Bed: The Etymology" and "Bed: The Painting" have primed and prepped our thoughts and imaginations, I will open our more global discussion of the bed by mapping out the various valences of symbolism and signification of this primal and principal piece of furniture. Consider the order relative, though I think that it roughly obeys some kind of logic.

Valence 1: Sleep, or The Biological Self

At its most apparent, the bed is pure organismic functionality. As organisms of Kingdom Animalia, and especially as organisms in Class Mammalia, we need significant amounts of sleep. While the science of sleep still remains shrouded in much mystery, scientists have amply observed that organisms deprived of sleep become sick and eventually die. Whether we sleep to conserve energy or to "recharge our batteries," the bed serves and is reserved for this most basic of man's biological needs. As such, the bed first and foremost represents our identity as biological creatures with immediate, habitual requirements.

Valence 2: Others, or The Cultural Self

As organisms with complex societal structure, technology, and language, we have ritualized sleep. Humans have largely and historically slept in a common area with their tribal or familial units. And this behavior is not confined to early humans, as a number of modern, especially non-industrialized, cultures share sleeping space with kith and kin. The modern, industrialized human exhibits these customs for newborns and for siblings. And of course, the modern couple typically shares its bed. One of the signatures of the emergence of a serious modern relationship occurs when the couple decides to move in with each other; they thusly sleep in the same bed. One of the signatures of the dissolution of a modern relationship occurs when the couple can no longer sleep under the same sheets. Young children often experience significant anxiety when they begin to learn to sleep alone. Many of us can recall slipping into our parents' or parent's bedroom when the terrifying mysteries of the night, of dreams, of being alone overwhelm us. Many of us can recall the youthful dread of bedtime as we stalled to perform our nighttime routines when older siblings and parents continued their evenings. And more generally, each culture has developed its more global ritual of working hours and sleeping hours. The bed, therefore, signifies our cultural selves—that we live with and rely upon others in necessarily organized structures.

Valence 3: Sex, or The Sexual Self

This valence needs little explanation, though it warrants much discussion, which I will tend to in "Bed: The Essay, Part II." Nearly as primal as sleep is sex, and so the bed is the domain of intimacy and situs of sexual union. To enter "a woman's bedchamber", "to lie down with" another, "to bed" another, to "get laid"—all are common phrases directly conjoining the bed and sex. The bed thus literally and figuratively signifies the sexual self.

Valence 4: Privacy, or The Discovered Self

Perhaps this valence is mostly indicative of a modern Western, perhaps even American, household, but I believe it is present and pervasive enough to merit its own category.

During adolescence, the youth begins to undertake the project of individuation, through which the youth starts to assert himself or herself as an individual separate and distinct from his or her parents. We thus have the common yearning of the young adult who shares a bedroom with a sibling for his or her own room. The adolescent bedroom provides the physical boundaries for the individuation project. The teenager decorates and arranges his or her room with their own symbols of individual identity; the teenager seeks out his or her room to achieve the solitude from the rest of the family necessary to fulfill the project. The privacy of the bedroom thus provides the teenager with the environment and the materials to promote and assert their self-discovery.

While adults may have lost or outgrown the initial individuation or angst that drives teenagers into their bedrooms, the bedroom is equally their province of privacy. Most obviously, the bedroom provides the privacy requisite for sexual activity. But the adult (and adult couple) craves privacy in non-sexual manners as well. I have observed two common phenomena of the master bedroom in the modern American household. First, the bedroom is frequently set off from the rest of the house, and often set off from the other bedrooms. Second, the master bedroom is frequently minimal and simple in its decor. Both of these phenomena I believe are explainable in terms of the adult's need for solitude and separation from the demands of adult life. The first phenomena achieves the physical separation. The second phenomena, I think, is the attempt of the adult to construct one environment relatively free from the constant bombardments of adult responsibility, from the constant torrent of distractions and noise of modern life. This provides the adult with a stripped-down, noiseless, stuff-less, information-less psychic clarity.

Whatever the case, the bedroom—and its focal bed—makes possible some kind of sanctuary, refuge, or den of privacy that the individual, self-aware of himself or herself as an individual, needs for psychic health. In this capacity does the bed serve as a symbol of our selves as discovered individuals who require privacy, temporary separation, temporary solitude from others, from the world.

Valence 5: Purpose, or The Transactional Self

I think this valence can best be summed up in the almost truistic question: What makes us get out of bed in the morning? In other words, what purpose drives us to be, in Heideggerian language, a "self-in-the-world"? For most of us, I believe this purpose takes the form of work. First, work furnishes us with the monetary means, in our modern era, to obtain the food and shelter in order to secure our basic, organismic needs. Second, work furnishes us with the means to partake of man's diverse manifold of cultural creations, to partake of the world as self-aware beings who can marvel at the miracle of being alive and at the miracle of the universe. Third, and ideally, work furnishes us with the answer to the question rankling in all our breasts: Why am I here? A profession, a vocation, work—no matter how humble or how noble—forms that (sense of) meaning, mattering, purpose that fuels us to go to sleep in order to rest up, leave our tiredness behind, and get out of bed to be a self-in-the-world. In order for our lives to be for something. Perhaps this valence is most romantically apparent in the lives of artists, teachers, agents of social justice, doctors, and all of those workers guided by the purpose to create and change.

Nevertheless, the bed in this valence serves as a kind of symbol "in the negative," as we are defined by what compels us to rise from it to interact with the world, with existence. And this is why I have termed its corollary aspect of selfhood the "transactional self," an emendation from my original "economical self." We leave bed in order to pursue that transaction of purpose between the world and our selves-in-the-world.

Valence 6: Illness, or The Vulnerable Self

What happens when we cannot get out of bed? We have fallen prey to some kind of illness. Physically sick, from a common flu to terminal cancer, we are in many ways reduced to supine bodies, sometimes with lucid consciousness, sometimes not, confined to our beds. In the extreme scenario, we are condemned to the miserable strangeness and alienness of a hospital bed. And physically ill, too, when we are the victim of personal injury, of sheer accidents, of being thrown into a world of violence and war, of being born into a life of indigence.

When we are psychically ill—I intend no judgement or derogation in my use of the work "ill"; I use the word literally to convey the sense of being in some way removed from what is considered the norm—when we are psychically ill, it is as if we are reduced to supine minds confined in a body confined to a bed. Psychically sick, too, when we are born into traumatic childhoods of abuse and neglect, into the arbitrary cultural psychoses of racism and social inequality.

Demoralized by worklessness, dehumanized by grief or guilt, depressed, overwhelmed by dread of life or of death, adrift, lost, wandering aimlessly as ghosts of our selves, or the victims of senseless, impersonal chaos, we see no reason and feel we have no purpose to get out of bed in the morning. In its valence of illness, the bed is a symbol of our bodily and mental imperfections, our brokenness, our fallibility. In its valence of illness, the bed reveals our vulnerable selves—selves vulnerable to a world teeming with randomness, uncertainty, and inexplicability.

Valence 7: Death, or The Mortal Self

Finally we arrive at the valence lurking spectrally behind all the valences: the bed as a symbol of death and a reminder of our mortality. I think we can read each valence through the lens of this death valence. Utter deprivation of sleep and complete isolation from others lead to death. The denial of sexual expressiveness, "bed death," the unhealthy repression of sexuality, impotence, infertility, the overgrowth or perversion of sexuality—when our sexual (and procreative) selves confront significant distortion, it is as if a vital part of us dies. The loss of individuality and obstruction to healthy solitude and distance from others and the world, along with the absence of purpose and meaning in our transactions with the world, can render us symbolically dead to the world.

"Deathbeds," "final repose," "resting in peace," "the big sleep," "eternal rest, "laid to rest," "requiem": the language of the bed, implied through the register of sleep and rest, is here intertwined with the often euphemistic language of death. Then there is the appearance of the corpse prepared to look peacefully asleep in the final bed that is the coffin. And, lastly and morbidly, there is the most frightening fact we all face: What is to guarantee that when I go to sleep tonight I will wake up in the morning?

Bed: The Essay Preview

For my upcoming post, "Bed: The Essay, Part I," I have mapped out the most prominent significations and symbols of the bed that I have detected. I organized them into seven major categories, which I call "valences." Each of these valences, furthermore, I have correlated to the underlying dimension of selfhood that I believe they represent. I am nearly half-finished with my initial or introductory remarks on each of these valences, but decided to preview them by list in the meantime. Anticipate the remarks this weekend. Without further ado:

Valence 1: Sleep, or The Biological Self

Valence 2: Others, or The Cultural Self

Valence 3: Sex, or The Sexual Self

Valence 4: Privacy, or The Discovered Self

Valence 5: Purpose, or The Economical Self

Valence 6: Illness, or The Fallible Self

Valence 7: Death, or The Mortal Self

Some of these valences are more primal than others. Some of the valences exhibit a more modern character. I encourage you to unpack each of these valences before I post my own interpretations, and, if you feel so inclined or inspired, offer in a comment any valences or aspects of self that you feel I have overlooked.

Bed: The Painting

Andrew K., oil on canvas, some time around the early 2000's.

My brother's painterly aesthetic sought to capture human subjects in their most natural, candid, habitual, and quotidian postures. And his process was central, deliberate: use the camera to photograph a kind of human still life; use the photograph as the sketch of the inspired painting; and use the paintbrush to interpret, modulate, recast, or heighten the psychology of the shape, color, and composition.

One morning, or, more likely, early afternoon, as I was slowly emerging from sleep, I felt a presence in my doorway, which faced my bed in that abode at the time. I recall thinking of sleep itself a doorway, where the dream-people are ghosts of the world of wakefulness, and the real people are ghosts of the world of sleep. It turned out, of course, to be the presence of my brother wielding a camera and an idea to elevate something as mundane as his kin asleep into the subject of art. I now hang this painting in whatever bedroom wherever I dwell.

The painting has always fascinated me. No, not because I am its subject, though, indeed I have to admit that it is flattering. The painting has captivated me because my brother focused his composition and color on the blanket. The sinuous folds of the blanket are multiply suggestive to me: blue sand dunes, the surface of water, intestinal rugae, the "oceanic feeling" of which psychologists speak, and a whorling, amorphous, subsuming, inexorable mass of death.

I leave you with these images until my next post, for I think the rich, complex symbolism that I discover in the blanket anticipates my upcoming discussion on the literal and figurative dimensions of the bed in our lives and psyches.

Bed: The Etymology

Bed is an ostensibly innocuous word. For me, the monosyllable initially evokes sensations of rest, sleep, and comfort. Yet, as soon as I peel back the first layer of connotation, a torrent of complex symbols breaks through. But before I discuss these symbols, I will let the etymology—my first entry not wholly Latinate—speak for itself.

Bed has remained unchanged in form and meaning through English's history: the word is identical in Middle English while the variants bed and bedd exist in Old English. A bed for sleeping and a garden bed are present in all three major periods of the English language. The form of the word, moreover, has stayed essentially intact from its Proto-Indo-European base: *bhedh-. The meaning of this base, however, reveals bed has indeed travelled—though not as far as we may suspect at first blush. *Bhedh-, classified in the semantic field of agriculture and vegetation, denotes "to dig, pierce, or stab." One of the original senses of the word, we can see, is the sense of a ditch, pit, or hole dug in the earth.

Perhaps the cognates can reveal bed's curious itinerary to its present signification, or at least its various interrelated meanings:

• In the Celtic family, we have the Gaulish bedo-, meaning "canal" or "ditch" and the Welsh bedd, meaning "grave."
  
• In the Germanic family, we have the West Germanic betti, denoting "bed" in the sleeping sense, the North Germanic Boðvarr, which serves as the proper masculine noun "Bothvar" but also signifies "battle." In this secondary meaning, we may witness a preservation of the Proto-Indo-Eurpoean sense of "to stab." Proto-Germanic has the root baðja-, which, from my research, signifies "bed" in the agricultural sense. I have also come across the Proto-Germanic baðjam, which apparently signifies "a sleeping place dug in the ground." If this signification could be confirmed, then we might have a clearer understanding of the historical and anthropological development of the bed, which meaning could most effectively unite both the somnial and agricultural senses of the word.
  
• In the Italic family, we have the Latin verb fodio, fodere, fodi, fossus, meaning primarily "to dig, to dig (up or out)" and secondarily "to stab, pierce," just like the Proto-Indo-European base. From the verb is derived the noun fossa, meaning a "ditch, canal, moat, trench," as well as other nouns and adjectives related to digging. From these words we get the English fossa, fosse, fossil, fossorial, and perhaps fossick.
• In the Greek family, I can verify no cognates. Etymonline.com reports bothyros, meaning "pit," but I cannot locate the word in Greek dictionaries. I did find barathon, meaning "pit," and famously the pit behind the Acropolis in Athens into which convicted criminals were thrown to death. Rome had its equivalent, the Tarpeian Rock.
• The Baltic family's Lithuanian has bedù and bèsti, signifying "to dig" and "to bury"; badau and badýti, denoting "to pierce" and "to gore"; and, very interestingly, bãdas, a noun meaning "starvation."
• Old Church Slavonic in the Slavic family has bodo and bosti, "to stick" and "to prick."
• Lastly, the Anatolian family has the Hittite pád-da-i and píd-da-i, which means "to dig."

We can thusly see in the etymology of bed four major classes of meaning: 1) a hole dug in the ground for agricultural purposes; 2) the more violent act of stabbing or piercing; 3) graves and burial; and 4) a place for sleeping. My next entry on the topic of bed will assay these meanings, as well as unpack the complex symbolism of bed in the broader sense.

For specific cognates, thanks to etymonline.com, the University of Texas at Austin's Indo-European lexicon, my AMSCO Latin dictionary (2nd ed.), and S.C. Woodhouse's 1910 Greek dictionary via The University of Chicago Library's online format of it.

Garden, At Night (Eclogue 2)

We are in a garden, at night.

Corollas heavy with condensed 

moonlight. Maybe each is a moon,

and that seems as natural as 

the statues here. They are missing heads,

arms. Naked torsos, breasts and thighs

perfumed with hyacinth.

Their feet grafted into the soil, and 

below the whorl of bats we can just make out 

statues that have fallen over. Hands are appearing

out of the shoulders, eyes starting to grow

from the neck. We now see by the light of the corollas

they are statues of us, the hands, the eyes are ours,

emerging from stone which has emerged

from the soil. The eyes reaching, the hands seeing

past this garden—a shimmering line,

symbols improbable but just as natural

as anything else: lines, light—

where the horizontal afterglow of a twilight

caught in its own regression, and it begins

to make sense, now, surely as infinity. 

It begins to make sense of infinity. We are not

oblivious, because we can pretend

not to see these buildings at our backs.

We thought they were painted black, but that is

just the night. We thought we could even see

them if we turned around fast enough. No.

Only the fallen statues of us. And the dread

that maybe we are the buildings, too.

A city of bodies, built out of bodies, great towers

of flesh, that disappear each time we try

to see them. Left only with the afterimage,

which, of course, are ghosts. As real

as a line, as light, as real as the hyacinths

even though we can't see them, because they are

moons. And why shouldn't they be,

because there is death and

death is a body.

Not a symbol of death, but

death—the line shooting outwards at both ends

to infinity; and light, carrying with it time

outwards to make the edges of everything. 

We are lucky to be statues, buildings, and

it is miracle to be at all.

This is when we fall over, and hands, eyes

emerging from the torsos, in which

there is a heart, truly beating.

We are lucky, for the bats whorl over our heads

in this garden, at night.

John K., 9/3/2009, 10:47-11:33PM

Bed: An Introduction

My latest idée fixe is one of the earliest yet most primal words we learn, one of the simplest yet most taken-for-granted routines we perform, one of the most comforting yet complex symbols we possess: bed. In my next posts, I will be offering the etymology of this seemingly straightforward but startlingly sinister syllable, a poetic sequence (if it will so permit me) on this most basic of phenomena, and some essays on what the bed signifies in our existence. The topics will be manifold. Childhood, entropy, sex, and, among others, death, will be my fodder. In the meantime, as I tuck in my sheets and prop my pillows, good night.