Three years ago, almost to the day, I started The Bewildered Eye. But recently three people I love and trust have suggested that the energy I'm directing here might be better directed toward other, more urgent work.
And in truth my heart's not in it anymore. I've grown tired of this voice—of its possibilities; I no longer require the man who made it. All literary voices are inventions: The Bewildered Eye's invented voice is mercifully obsolete.
Obama's re-election now nailed the Eye's coffin closed.
Over the coming months I'll revisit what I've made here, and I'll probably refine some of the posts a little bit, and I might create some kind of "Selected Works" label for the writing I continue to approve of. But I won't add to it; I consider it complete—finished—
But for this: Thank you for listening.
Sunday, November 11, 2012
Saturday, November 3, 2012
Yes, Please
A note to friends & family who are California voters:
A couple of weeks ago my dean at Chabot College informed me that my classes are on the chopping block if Prop. 30 doesn't pass. The district will be eliminating classes for over 2000 students, which means it will be eliminating the teachers who teach them. In all likelihood, I will be one of those teachers.
A week ago, Lincoln applied to Cal-Poly. But if Prop. 30 doesn't pass, the CA State schools will cut the number of incoming freshmen that they'll be accepting by 20,000 students—which might include him.
No, I don't want to pay an extra quarter of a percent in sales taxes for four years. But the long-term cost to the state—and to my family—will be far higher if we allow six billion dollars in cuts to education THIS YEAR ALONE.
We can debate how we got here until we're blue in the face. But the public education system in our state is in crisis. I urge you to help save it. Please join me in voting YES on Prop. 30.
A couple of weeks ago my dean at Chabot College informed me that my classes are on the chopping block if Prop. 30 doesn't pass. The district will be eliminating classes for over 2000 students, which means it will be eliminating the teachers who teach them. In all likelihood, I will be one of those teachers.
A week ago, Lincoln applied to Cal-Poly. But if Prop. 30 doesn't pass, the CA State schools will cut the number of incoming freshmen that they'll be accepting by 20,000 students—which might include him.
No, I don't want to pay an extra quarter of a percent in sales taxes for four years. But the long-term cost to the state—and to my family—will be far higher if we allow six billion dollars in cuts to education THIS YEAR ALONE.
We can debate how we got here until we're blue in the face. But the public education system in our state is in crisis. I urge you to help save it. Please join me in voting YES on Prop. 30.
Tuesday, October 16, 2012
Monday, October 15, 2012
On Bitterness
An aqueduct runs through the trees behind the house. A few years ago, county workers landscaped the aqueduct's banks, and it's now populated by ducks and drakes. During these hot October nights I keep the bedroom window open to hear their squawks. I find their calls for midnight company pacifying. Listening to them, they become extensions of my own yearning—or I become an extension of theirs.
The house in Costa Rica, where I discovered the depth of my wife's unhappiness, also had a waterway behind it, bordered along its edges by lots of trash and by towering, orange-blossomed trees. In the evening, the sky above the creek's trees swarmed with bats. Sometimes I'd sit in our little backyard drinking a beer and watch them feed. The backyard was surrounded by high fences, which were topped with razor wire and the upturned edges of broken bottles. In the middle of the yard there was a small concrete manhole cover. It permitted access to the home's drainage system, which carried our sink water to the creek.
For many months we had no trouble with the drains. But one evening, after hours of torrential rain, water from the creek surged up through the pipes, lifted the manhole cover off its place, and flooded our backyard. Soon the floodwaters came across the patio and under our back door. I put a towel against the door, but it proved useless: the creek, roaring through the trees behind the house, was now pouring through our kitchen. Soon the house was flooded. We put the boys on the kitchen counter, where they could watch the flood without, we hoped, being injured. I opened the front door and attempted to direct the water from the back door to the front door. If I could get it out the door, I thought, it would roll down our driveway, into the street.
After a while the rain stopped, and soon the flooding stopped, and by nightfall we'd swept most of the water, which stunk of sewage, out of the house. The two older boys helped us clean the mud off the floors.
The bases of my bookshelves, which were made of cheap particle board, had absorbed water, and over time they rotted. But I'd managed to save the music speakers and the throw rugs. So we still had music when we wanted it, and a place to dance. But music and dancing, at least with each other, was rare then. I guess we'd had our share of it during the early years of our marriage, in Utah. Maybe the Costa Rican tropics—torrential sunlight, torrential rain—overwhelmed us, to such a degree that we became unrecognizable to ourselves, and, as a consequence, to each other.
This summer, one of my dearest friends, who lives in Boise, let me tell him about a more recent flood. He's been through a few of his own; after a long weekend he gave me a broad-chested hug and said, "Be patient, Eric. Most of all, with yourself."
Maybe I'll manage to take his advice. Tonight, the October breeze is unseasonably warm, and I've got the window open. The ducks have resumed their noisy yearning. Soon, November rain will bring new floods. They're counting on it. So am I.
The house in Costa Rica, where I discovered the depth of my wife's unhappiness, also had a waterway behind it, bordered along its edges by lots of trash and by towering, orange-blossomed trees. In the evening, the sky above the creek's trees swarmed with bats. Sometimes I'd sit in our little backyard drinking a beer and watch them feed. The backyard was surrounded by high fences, which were topped with razor wire and the upturned edges of broken bottles. In the middle of the yard there was a small concrete manhole cover. It permitted access to the home's drainage system, which carried our sink water to the creek.
For many months we had no trouble with the drains. But one evening, after hours of torrential rain, water from the creek surged up through the pipes, lifted the manhole cover off its place, and flooded our backyard. Soon the floodwaters came across the patio and under our back door. I put a towel against the door, but it proved useless: the creek, roaring through the trees behind the house, was now pouring through our kitchen. Soon the house was flooded. We put the boys on the kitchen counter, where they could watch the flood without, we hoped, being injured. I opened the front door and attempted to direct the water from the back door to the front door. If I could get it out the door, I thought, it would roll down our driveway, into the street.
After a while the rain stopped, and soon the flooding stopped, and by nightfall we'd swept most of the water, which stunk of sewage, out of the house. The two older boys helped us clean the mud off the floors.
The bases of my bookshelves, which were made of cheap particle board, had absorbed water, and over time they rotted. But I'd managed to save the music speakers and the throw rugs. So we still had music when we wanted it, and a place to dance. But music and dancing, at least with each other, was rare then. I guess we'd had our share of it during the early years of our marriage, in Utah. Maybe the Costa Rican tropics—torrential sunlight, torrential rain—overwhelmed us, to such a degree that we became unrecognizable to ourselves, and, as a consequence, to each other.
~
This summer, one of my dearest friends, who lives in Boise, let me tell him about a more recent flood. He's been through a few of his own; after a long weekend he gave me a broad-chested hug and said, "Be patient, Eric. Most of all, with yourself."
Maybe I'll manage to take his advice. Tonight, the October breeze is unseasonably warm, and I've got the window open. The ducks have resumed their noisy yearning. Soon, November rain will bring new floods. They're counting on it. So am I.
Labels:
Eric,
Miscellaneous
Saturday, October 6, 2012
Kabul
Your ochre heart
Your heart lit up in blossoms
A plum tree’s bark
Funneling rain
Water to its roots
Your fig lips
Almond eyes
Your persimmon thighs
The body both student and teacher
Wisdom’s carnage
Scented with cinnamon
Carved by youth’s eviscerating scimitar
Romance does not belong
To the sea
Romance is what happens
When we cease to be
The split seeds of a pomegranate
Love an opiate breeze
Carrying the scent of apricots
Into the strewn sheets
Of delight
Labels:
Poetry
Tuesday, October 2, 2012
Saturday, September 29, 2012
Sunday, September 23, 2012
TFTD
Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose. Not when they are escaping to some wild west. The most unfree souls go west, and shout of freedom. Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains, always was.
— D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature
— D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature
Tuesday, September 18, 2012
Four More Years
A little over four years ago, I sat on the edge of a bed in a Guadalajara hotel room and watched John McCain introduce Sarah Palin as his running mate. Less than a minute into her thank-you speech, I said aloud, to the TV, "Barack Obama just won the election."
In light of the videos that came to light last night, in which Mitt Romney speaks disdainfully of half the people he aspires to govern, I say, with even greater confidence, the same thing: "Barack Obama just won the election."
I say this with a degree of sadness. This country desperately needs a serious, intelligent debate about its future, about the various roles of the federal government, about taxation and debt, about foreign policy.
With many conservatives, I'd hoped that both Romney and Paul Ryan would elevate the quality of our national conversation.
Sadly, Ryan, for his part, at 42 years old, with an opportunity to explain to the nation how conservatives see the world, opted instead to structure his entire Convention speech around what he knew to be a gross distortion of Obama's (utterly correct) "you didn't build that."
Romney's incompetently run campaign has been equally disappointing. He has combined miscues with evasiveness and left many of the voters he hopes to persuade convinced of little but that he's an unreliable cipher.
From the beginning of this election cycle we've been treated to a parade of Republican fatuousness: Rick Perry, Michelle Bachmann, Herman Cain, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich. That's to be expected: every village has its loudmouthed fools. In Mitt Romney I hoped for—frankly, I anticipated—a legitimate candidate. But Romney's most recent comments—which, at some level, take that parade to its apotheosis—have no basis in fact, grossly misrepresent both liberalism and the dynamic between individuals and their government, and, worst of all, show a frightening degree of contempt for nearly half his fellow citizens. They end my hope for a real debate.
Like McCain, Romney won't win the election because he doesn't deserve to. Democracy—speaking generally, generously—works.
In light of the videos that came to light last night, in which Mitt Romney speaks disdainfully of half the people he aspires to govern, I say, with even greater confidence, the same thing: "Barack Obama just won the election."
I say this with a degree of sadness. This country desperately needs a serious, intelligent debate about its future, about the various roles of the federal government, about taxation and debt, about foreign policy.
With many conservatives, I'd hoped that both Romney and Paul Ryan would elevate the quality of our national conversation.
Sadly, Ryan, for his part, at 42 years old, with an opportunity to explain to the nation how conservatives see the world, opted instead to structure his entire Convention speech around what he knew to be a gross distortion of Obama's (utterly correct) "you didn't build that."
Romney's incompetently run campaign has been equally disappointing. He has combined miscues with evasiveness and left many of the voters he hopes to persuade convinced of little but that he's an unreliable cipher.
From the beginning of this election cycle we've been treated to a parade of Republican fatuousness: Rick Perry, Michelle Bachmann, Herman Cain, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich. That's to be expected: every village has its loudmouthed fools. In Mitt Romney I hoped for—frankly, I anticipated—a legitimate candidate. But Romney's most recent comments—which, at some level, take that parade to its apotheosis—have no basis in fact, grossly misrepresent both liberalism and the dynamic between individuals and their government, and, worst of all, show a frightening degree of contempt for nearly half his fellow citizens. They end my hope for a real debate.
Like McCain, Romney won't win the election because he doesn't deserve to. Democracy—speaking generally, generously—works.
Labels:
Politics
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)