The Next Ten Thousand Years
on gratitude, family, connection, and moving forward
I am grateful for what I am and have. My thanksgiving is perpetual. It is surprising how contented one can be with nothing definite - only a sense of existence.
- Henry David Thoreau
[Note: I meant to write this Friday, the day after Thanksgiving; but the holiday weekend took over. Apologies; I am planning at least two public posts a week and at least one additional one for paid subscribers. Although I’m moving away from posting poetry either here or on my blog at rivercitymick.com for the time being, I will be posting short videos. I’m hoping that seeing me, probably in the basement, reading poems, from my published works will suffice as I start to redirect how I push my work into the world. More on this … now. Love, M]
And for some of us, it’s never loud or quiet enough, so we have to go find the noise so that we can truly understand the silence.
Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. I’m not traditionally good at holiday celebrations; there’s not any one reason, and it’s got nothing to do with my family. I get along pretty well with my immediate family and that’s really all that matters. I can’t remember the last time my family had an extended family holiday; we had them when my brother and I were kids. But relatives die, the kids grow up and get families of their own. There’s a natural diaspora that happens as families grow that shifted into hyperdrive when I was a kid and hasn’t really slowed down. Actually, it started before that, but maybe I’ll write about the history and economics of diaspora another time.
Whoa! That almost sounded like the title of one of those books they might deign to write about in the New York Times Book Review. The point is this: connections matter, maybe more because they’re so damned hard to sustain, especially when life takes you places other than where you were born. And when you’re not naturally good at connections, sometimes they matter even more.
I chose to make my own associations with this holiday, because everything associated with it as a public holiday is steeped in colonialism and all of its requisite ills. Once you get over the bedtime story we’re all told as children about the kind natives and the pilgrims patently ill-suited for survival, you have to decide what to do with it all. And the only thing that works for me is to focus on the people I love and on gratitude. I also focus on the fact that I really like to eat. The ability to eat at Thanksgiving is one of those marks of the passage of time. When I was much younger, and probably as wide as I was tall, I could put away three or four plates, take a three hour nap, then want to eat more. Now, I have to make sure I leave room for a piece of the amazing coconut cream pie Amanda made and eat a conservatively chosen SINGLE plate of food.
And of course, nap afterwards.
Mostly lately, I’ve been focused on NOT eating my feelings because historically and especially since I quit drinking, it’s something I have been known to do. I’ve been allowing myself to process: which is therapy-speak for feeling and thinking about my feelings. You’d think there was nothing revolutionary in allowing yourself to feel your feelings, but that’s where we are as a species. We have to justify the fact that we are alive in order to be alive. You’d also think that because I’ve been writing poetry for 40 years, seriously for 30 years, and at a fever pitch for 25 years, that I’d be ok with my feelings. We’re supposed to be soft, gushy critters, we poets. And I think most of us start out that way; the world is too loud for some of us. And for some of us, it’s never loud or quiet enough, so we have to go find the noise so that we can truly understand the silence. If these are two types of poet-critters, I am the latter. But this has made me not nearly as soft and maybe not as hard as people think I’m supposed to be.
Hemingway is one of those writers people alternately praise and shit on, mostly because of the myth he built around himself and arguably got lost in. But when people try and shit on his writing, all they end up doing is trying to suggest that his nuts were shot off in World War I. Locker room jabs are not literary critique.
I am learning to relax on holidays. This learning is a gradual process. I enjoy getting to see my brother, and being the age we are, we are in the process of becoming the elders of our families. My daughter is married with a family of her own. My brother is seeing a great lady. My nephew is getting ready to marry a great young woman and my niece has a colorful and full life in New York City. My wife Amanda and my daughter Stella pretty much carried the feast; this year I was able to help out because I’m not tied to the swing watch schedule down at the land between the bridges, Mile Marker 604. My brother and I are in the advice-giving, joke telling, history reminding portion of our lives. Mostly my brother likes to remind me of how humorless I was as a kid, which is fine. Which is to say, we are moving headlong at high speed towards our inevitable irrelevance; but the food is good and there are worse situations to be in.
I’m damned fortunate and I know it. And I’m damned grateful for it.
When I’ve been in the position of having to, let’s call it, return to factory settings, I inevitably end up returning to writers whose work has spoken to me consistently and differently over the years. Lately I’ve been reading Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos, and I started to read Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, his novel about the Spanish Civil War, which I admit I hadn’t read before. Hemingway is one of those writers people alternately praise and shit on, mostly because of the myth he built around himself and arguably got lost in. But when people try and shit on his writing, all they end up doing is trying to suggest that his nuts were shot off in World War I. Locker room jabs are not literary critique.
I also find myself drifting towards Henry David Thoreau and Batman comics in equal measure. I know how the mash up seems, but if I had the space here, I’d go into more detail about why I think all of these things are connected. It could be a book, maybe called Batman’s Walden: The Batcave, Hemingway’s Florida, and Thoreau’s Cabin as Symbols of Regeneration and Rebirth.
Whoa! I did it again. In this case, the colon is a dead giveaway. Colons in titles almost always means the writing is going to be a super academic read or extremely ego-maniacal. Or both. Almost always both. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile.
One Thoreau quote, from his personal letters, stands out to me:
I am grateful for what I am and have. My thanksgiving is perpetual. It is surprising how contented one can be with nothing definite - only a sense of existence. Well, anything for variety. I am ready to try this for the next ten thousand years, and exhaust it. How sweet to think of! my extremities well charred, and my intellectual part too, so that there is no danger of worm or rot for a long while. My breath is sweet to me. O how I laugh when I think of my vague indefinite riches. No run on my bank can drain it, for my wealth is not possession but enjoyment.1
I am grateful for my lot in life. My current setbacks notwithstanding, I am still standing. I am still writing. I am surrounded by love and by language and by a world that I can still find beauty in, regardless of powermongers and middle-managers who think it belongs to them alone.
Note: Unless otherwise cited, all thoughts thunk, notions noted, and opinions pinioned are the author’s and beholden to no one.
The Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau. Written December 1856 to his friend Harrison Gray Otis Blake.
A lot for me to pause here in my read, but I'll single out Dos Passos. My dad was not one to spend much time on literary pursuits, but someone had convinved him to read the USA trilogy, probably before I was born. He often suggested I pick it up. Once I did, I was grateful. Today is the 47th anniversary of his passing, which indicates to me that there are only 25-30 relatives that remain under his relevence, diminishing rapidly. "...but the food is good and there are worse situations to be in."
I worked with a woman when I lived in New Orleans, Sue. She talked to me once about the Jewish tradition of memory... about how remembering our loved ones who have died is part of keeping their spirits alive. For her, this was a tragedy because she'd been in a car accident that essentially erased a decade of her life. She had to meet her husband and son as strangers. And once she was able to get some of the old her back, she was left with the fact that there was a lot that was just... gone. Her parents. Their parents. Relatives who died in German death camps. It drove home the importance of rememberance. We honor our fathers by remembering them and talking about them. Yours sounds like an interesting man.