Faluja

All day yesterday I kept wondering, is this Bush's Somalia moment? What event will it take to turn the tide of public opinion firmly against him? When knowledge that the rationale for war was without merit and intentionally spun combines with the visceral repulsion we feel at the resulting acts of barbarity and the waste of innocent lives, is there a point at which everything crystalizes? One need not be a member of the opposition to realize that this is an administration whose failures, both internationally and domestically, are of such magnitude that it must be turned out.

But more immediately, how can we possibly expect to turn governance over to a provisional authority in a mere three months? No security force, either Iraqi or from the coalition, dared show its face to quell the violence, stop the cruelty. We should be ashamed. What must the victim's families think of our government now? These are not the actions of a people ready for democracy. And who are we to think it suits them?

Bush said he would not engage in nation building. Thus far he has kept his promise.

Morning verses

First thing, check the scores
from overnight: two
black cats and two
dead roaches. Not bad,
though the thinner one
claims both trophies.

Morning verses

A perfect sight--
bright red cardinal
on a new-leafed branch

The persistence of memory

The old cherry tree's
final blossoms are her last
cherished memory


Between our two lives
there is also the life of
the cherry blossom

                     --Basho

Close by the house, outside my daughter's window, we have a weeping cherry. I was delighted to see its blossoms come this year. Last year, our first full year in this house, they were a surprise. But this year they did not last long. The temperatures rose quickly, between unusual spring storms, and the blossoms strew the driveway. This morning the tree is green with thin, bright leaves. We had perhaps two weeks of blossoms. Last year, from the front of the house, they rose above the roof like a white fountain against a backdrop of greenery from other, taller trees. My daughter called it the wedding tree.

So it is when I conceive an object. My ideas about the cherry tree include not only whatever perceptions I have of it in the present, but also whatever recollections I have of it from the past: my daughter budding in adolescence, the cherry blossoms along the Tidal Basin of the Potomac where I grew up, playing drums and marching in Washington's Cherry Blossom Parade, these lovely poems by Basho. It is impossible for me to conceive of the idea of cherry blossoms without summoning all these other associations. My idea of cherry trees is a grand and romantic conception fueled by memory. Such in the contingent nature of thought.

I'm thinking about this because last night I saw Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a film also about memory, about its frightening and beautiful persistence. In separate moments of romantic pain, the film's protagonists decide to have their memories of their romance erased. But in the process of encountering these memories, they change their minds. The dramatic tension derives from the race to redeem their relationship before the erasers can wipe any recollection of it away.

Thankfully, the film's director and screenwriter, Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman, give Joel and Clementine a second chance. They decide to take this chance, knowing full well that their future may be fraught with unpleasantnesses. It's as though they realize that the weight of shared memory has a value of its own which supercedes the flawed nature of any one partner. The memories we make in association with others matter more than who we are as individuals. Such is the contingent nature of life.

Whether I am viewing this cherry tree, or thinking of one I love, whatever disappointments I may have in either of them, I'm left with the conclusion that my relationship to them, to anything, is memory unfolding, blossoming in each present moment before returning to the fertile ground. And I think, too, that the word revelation begins with the word revel.

Anne Carson

I was intrigued by a couple of the ideas in Dinitia Smith's article on Anne Carson in yesterday's Times. The first had to with her definition of herself with regard to poetry.

For all this, Ms. Carson said, she is not a poet. "Homer's a poet," she said. "I would say I make things."

The second idea had to do with loneliness:

Today Ms. Carson lives by herself most of the time, but says she does not mind loneliness: "Loneliness is not an important form of suffering," Ms. Carson said. "It's undeniable, but it's just not significant."

On the one hand, you have the humility of the artist before the craft she serves. On the other, you have the acknowledgment that that craft demands that the artist pay a price.

Blogging in my dreams

I dreamed that for months I'd been having lunch with a fellow blogger. We ate each day in a local diner, the type of place with regulars. And then one day a fellow stopped by our table to say something. After he was gone my buddy said, "You know, he's the guy who does Whiskey River." Boy was I pissed. He'd been there all along.