Meditation 23

2/16/2020

We walked past the biker bar in Hilo; a white bearded guy in leather was huddled with an Asian woman in leather. I stopped to take a photo of the Trump sticker on a bike, American flag in the shape of a menacing helmet placed neatly on a shiny bumper. “The owner of that bike is right here. He’s a Marine!” the woman called out to me. “Take his photo!” I turned to look at them, smiling on the sidewalk. “I’m a Warren woman,” I said. They went back in the bar, the woman yelling "four more years." Later, as we sat at the Conscious Cafe, they screamed away on their bikes. I noticed she had her own. Pat, who told us about the five hindrances, started to cry after loving kindness meditation. I couldn’t know why. The woman who hadn’t been there remembered last week’s self-consuming sentence about knowing oneself as god, before god fell away, then knowing. She talked about the problem of self-judgment. On a well-worn facebook thread, one woman said we should not judge the dead; only god can do that. And so we purify our grief, spill turpentine on it, pluck up the pesky patches of rust. Complexity would wreck our grief. I found a slip of paper with his name on it. In pencil were directions to the correct train, given me by a woman who spoke English. The young woman in a Yankees dress laughed at our inability to communicate. Sonnet 130 in ASL reminds a student of how his roommate dances. It’s translation back to movement from the word, the beat, effect of the affect spilling from his flowering hands. What do we do with the beauty of these images, the stable climate they assume? How might we say her teeth were bleached coral, her cheeks burned in the Antarctic sun? If we know our history, which moment do we live in? The character’s itinerary was abrupt. Each time he traveled, he lost his clothes and had to steal more on the other side. He aged; he grew younger. He met his wife as a child, then saw her after he died, the victim of her father’s gun (which none but us will never know). His mother sat on the Chicago train, young again. There are advantages to his condition, he says. Correspondance à Paris reminded me of Baudelaire, and Baudelaire reminds me of prose. In the middle of his sonnet, my student said he was writing prose, then failed to decipher my handwriting, when I replaced it with “verse.” Association involves images disguised as words, their surfaces burning like plastic in a new toaster oven. The president’s limo drove once around the Daytona track. It was illegal, but he called them all patriots. Our new cast iron frying pan came dangling an American flag.

--Volcano