Chapter 1 Needs Work, Boring in Parts
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(CBS4) BOSTON In a show of solidarity, a poster of kidnapped reporter Jill Carroll is hanging from a balcony at city hall in Rome.

A Man and His Newspaper


The pain of the world is right here before my face, but I cannot put it into words. I struggle with the idea that someway it is possible; however, the lines grow deep in our faces, we age gradually into silence, and although we can look into each others faces and understand, we scarcely speak of it for fear that our words will fall flat. I feel pain. It is so wrenching a pain that I write late into the night, searching for the phrase that could reveal it to me once and for all - the psychotic trance of emotional knowledge, the sensation of explosions like light into my brain, eyes wide with horror, a broken-open body from which spills a torrent of dead souls, faint and unconscious, lingering, whispering, swaying in the trees when the night wind lifts, in the underbrush with eyes like cats, in the steel, lamp-post streets abandoned to silence, in the eyes of strangers, in the oaths of violins, in the burnt-blood pages of books, in the terrible fury of longing that propels young men and women into an unknown sea, a month of days underneath the Antarctic sun followed by a hundred thousand nights of strange dreams.

The pain I feel is the pain of ages left unspoken, ages that make up a lifetime and ages that make up an epoch. We are silent because we are too small, far too frail and far too limited to be able to grasp the darkness that from time to time comes within our vision. Certainly, we are all open mouthed and crying into the dark. Just behind the mask of our cheerfulness, we might find the brusque features of our worn out faces, we might find the real men and women with quiet demeanors that cower and hide from the world in shame. We are weak in the face of eternity.

Our pain is our immortal incomprehension of just what it is that we are feeling, that listless grasp into the night around us, finding nothing but the strangest sensation of a great fireball in the soul, if there were a soul, if there were a substance underneath our molecular disorganization, our fallen ember of flesh; a force like a corporeal undertow sucking us away, pulling us deep into the furthest reaches of the most unexplored woodland of the psyche, the places left unhindered by comprehension; forcing us into contact with the fierce, subconscious, remorseless being within which we are digested, that simultaneously demonic and holy beast, that gruesome and paradoxically beautiful behemoth that devours all days, all nights, all ages, all millennia, all infinite eternal universes, and all of our small, poor, unstable hearts, our finite-seeming bodies, into one crunched speck of timelessness. We are face to face with a god who gives birth to night after night with the certainty of a scientist, and we sense an existence far greater than imagining, a sensation that is left in our emotions like a touch of twilight soaring into the startled sky with a brilliant, crystal teardrop from the tragedy of our blinded eyes - and every moment we hear the news reports of political and religious murders, bodies dropping like flies in deserts of vicious heat, humanity against humanity, the madness of our world revolving around the sun like a comet. Our ungrateful earth is replete with self-mutilation.

The night is long. For every one of us, the night is long.

Cholera, cancer, leukemia. The death of a woman, the death of a sparrow, the death of a worm. This mortal coil, like so many summer flowers, falls back to earth, becoming mulch for another generation. Disentanglement. A final, lasting harmony. A feast for bacteria. Death.

In the wet cobblestone street, a sewer drain devours a flood of memory, even as the yellow sunlight drifts across the wide windows of the houses facing east. In from the rain, an American tailor mends a coat. Somewhere in Western Europe, a man puts on his polished shoes. In Asia, a woman wakes to the sound of her newborn child, the father already cooking breakfast. Morning, waking, fresh air. Anima Mundi all across the open landscape. A sunrise scattering high, glorious light.

The world has almost forgotten the dead. The day grows around a bustling street and the lights point ever forward, evermore towards the furthest point. We are weary of reflection when reflection brings us pain. We cannot stomach another word from the philosopher caught up in despair. We will not listen to the madman leaning out of his window, calling downward to the street where a man buys a newspaper: “Nothing will come of tomorrow!” He is a madman. Madmen are not to be listened to, nor answered. The man in the street does not hesitate to pick up the news, for his world is alive. As long as he rises in the morning with his health and a cup of coffee, tea, or orange juice, we can expect that he will look out upon the world as being nothing worse than an old familiar wound, perhaps scarred, perhaps longing to be healed, but not as the ten-centuries-old pustule that aggravates the animosity of our ascetics, our escapists, our theorists of doom. This man picking up his newspaper, he knows differently. The brightness of daylight surrounds him, the light that will give birth to a thousand living tomorrows, because they are beautiful and because he loves them.

The dawn comes. After the night has passed with its mist and its danger, the bright glow of a single fleck of dust settling there on the windowpane, all alight and joyous, which we observe as we eat our breakfast, inspires our love. And a few of the loving, like trenchant bodhisattvas, give their beauty to the world, spending their wakeful moments concerned for all things, animate and inanimate, that which gives rise to life as well as that which houses life, a body and a stone, a sea-rose and a teardrop; the sort of concern that we attribute to saints, to martyrs. Even now, reverent doctors work to heal the huddled bodies of refugees amidst an unavoidable spray of bullets. Humanitarian aid workers die at gunpoint in Angola, Sudan, Rwanda, Afghanistan, Somalia, Burundi, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Indonesia, Kosovo. Who can say that they have not loved?

When the morning comes, bodies lie strewn across the landscapes of the world. The night is long; the night is very long. But in the morning, a man still picks up the newspaper, keeping himself posted - the old familiar wound, a world that he loves nevertheless.

Tennyson: the Christ to Be


The field beside my childhood home was filled with corn or tomatoes depending on the time of year. Often in the spring, when the cornstalks were thick, gold, and tall, I tucked my pants into my scuffed boots and meandered through the field until finding a scenic area, pressed it flat as if to make a bed, and lay on my back in the middle to watch the sky - the stars, the sunrise, the sunset, or simply the deep, impenetrable blue of midday. The breeze would come softly through the cornstalks. The spring air would be heavily laden with pollen, and its various scents would drift in waves across the field, smells common to the area that I can still remember but that I cannot identify. Farther away, Mt. Diablo cut an eternally dark profile in the sky, the jagged point of which rose up over the field, suggestive of a great many things.

Any mountain is a windswept place. In a small town, that place invariably signifies the expansiveness of the world that is just beyond, down that long road, somewhere past all the dark hillsides. It provides an indication of things to come, other ways of being in places other than this, and therefore change, metamorphoses, transfiguration. It suggests the possibility of what might be phrased as a New Day of the Soul, one that is coming shortly, when the fated journey is made into the world just beyond that great mountain of hillsides that lay listless in the dark. The bildungsroman. Every tale of that archetypical period of adolescence when a young adult is forced to confront the realities, the sometimes terrorizing realities, of the greater world; forced to grow psychologically from innocence to adulthood; that period which is sometimes referred to as the Dark Night of the Soul; that period which puts to an end all pastoral reflections upon life and brings to the fore such horrors as the violence adults inflict upon each other and the violence one finds within oneself, and such disappointments as the widespread corruption of leaders, the corruption of the very leaders of humanity, and the corruption one finds within oneself; in essence, adulthood offering the hard lesson of disillusionment and the option to take the responsibility of insuring that the next generation does not have to fall into that same brand of disillusionment. That responsibility undertaken gives birth to a New Day of the Soul, as it were.

I am reminded of The Salmon Boy, that story with many variants detailing the life of a boy who became a salmon as punishment for refusing his moldy-salmon dinner. Taken into the depths of the sea by the Salmon People, he learned that he could be anything, everything, even a salmon. He swam and swam in hunger and ecstasy, “I am Everything!” he said. Then, in order to feed his village, his father struck him with a spear, speared his own son for food. It is a message of respect for the source of food provided by The Salmon People, their sacrifice. It is also a lesson on taking responsibility; in this case, the responsibility to feed his people. It is suggested in one sense that a sacrifice of oneself may be required to metaphorically feed one’s people, and in another sense that a sacrifice of oneself may be required to sustain the entire world - a life of service as it were. This is what I gather from The Salmon Boy.

Regarding this New Day of the Soul, this accepted responsibility, this self-sacrifice for the greater good, Lord Tennyson’s new year comes immediately to mind. I will leave you to draw the comparison between The Salmon Boy and his poem, Ring Out, Wild Bells. But a few lines from this poem should suffice to terminate as abruptly as possible my rather lengthy conversation - and I mince words far too much, I must apologize; I have such a desire to speak that I can barely contain myself; I am like the drunken man in a lonely bar given the opportunity to discuss his grief.


Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,

The flying cloud, the frosty light;

The year is dying in the night;

Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.


…


Ring in the valiant man and free,

The larger heart, the kindlier hand;

Ring out the darkness of the land,

Ring in the Christ that is to be.


Any mountain is a windswept place, tempting the desire to journey. But returning to myself, as I promised myself that I would not allow my digressions to overshadow my presence entirely: At the time, this is during my adolescence, I led a life of naiveté. Not to say that I managed to outgrow it sufficiently; rather, after all these years, my resignation has become far easier: I am not clever enough to figure out the secret of living. I could say it numerous times, because the sound is like a crescendo. After questing for the miraculous for too long, what I long for is the inevitable, the far more ordinary, the common. I am not clever enough to figure out the secret of living. I am not clever enough. Detestation overwhelms me when I encounter disdain for the common. What good does it do to elevate oneself above the general clamor of humanity? It is not egocentricity that prompts a desire for superiority so much as it is a fear within oneself of one’s own lack of worth. It is the outcome of self-loathing, the Freudian outcome, the Inferiority Complex wherein the afflicted continuously competes for a higher position relative to others, a place to exist liberated from the misgivings and the dread of an underlying sense of inferiority, one that is almost physical in its veracity. Cum tacent, clamant. As for me, I maintaining a basic longing to devote myself to a life of sservice. The character of this place demands thati forgo sleep on occasion, eat sparingly so as to conserve my pittance, prolong my days to fulfill the quota of a few pages, which I require hours to write. I would take pleasure in being considered The Salmon Boy’s eventuality. A life of social work agrees with me. I have long considered the available options.

But despite the direction taken, the overarching purpose in my saying that I am not clever enough to figure out the secret of living is to at last state that I am not writing what can be considered an autobiography. I prefer instead to bring news of other, far more delightful men and women whom I have met along the journey that led me to where I find myself presently. Although the complicated puzzle of life can be in all probability viewed over one’s shoulder with a knowledgeable, unproblematic gaze at, say, seventy, I am thirty. That vantage point is beyond me; and, probably, it always will be - I am nothing if not average. Looking over my shoulder, what appears is reminiscent of a bright, long plateau painted by Salvador Dali, populated by strange beasts of unnatural proportion, nightmarish memories of a past that never happened exactly like that, a past that is indescribable all the same. If I could make sense of what I have lived, in all likelihood I would be very wise.

I suggest that there is no beauty or honor in the universe without the substance of thought, my Itsebum, and conversely that there is no substantive thought without the beauty of honor. Itsebum, let’s drink to our marvelous potential, until we are unhinged! Let’s unravel the thread, at least until morning. Come with me! I can see the creeping of unknown bodies, like black seraphim or dizzy somnambulists, thoughts and feelings fleeing into the night. O Itsebum, wild Itsebum, let’s unravel the thread!

Tenderness and fury. These are the main themes in my composition. Here is my argument, my opus, my raison d’etre - this primitive piece of writing, this plundering manifesto against repugnant political and social tendencies, a . a prediction that arrives on a bird’s wing…The dawn of tranquility is upon our nations, the earliest years in an age of human affinity, wherein leaderships terminate hostilities…wherein weapons designed for self-assassination, for slaughtering the dragon stumbled upon late at night when taking a piss and glancing into the mirror, are disposed of post-haste. You and I both know it, Itsebum; that visage in the mirror, it produces a remarkable feeling of pain. It’s fierce talons encrusted with dried blood and the filth of bad dreams. Nightmares that have proliferated in the sort of law-abiding criminalists whose minds once resembled fauns: The spirits of all young men and women were once fresh, graceful, and loving. It is life that misuses the guiltless captives of our city-zoos, altering them from A to Z. From a loving source, humanity is uprooted, lifted away from the gentlest existence and placed in desolation. The world is desirous of ten summers’ worth of languid warmth; more, the world is desirous of an unending warmth, such that does not contain contempt between men, the sneering machinery of man against man; Gotterdammerung, the twilight of the gods. There is my tenderness. But the world is also suffocating in a bloodbath of privation and adversity, like a nude woman washing her pale body with blood. There is my fury. Ad maiorem Dei gloria.

Lesson 0: The Very Basics
Nouns = He, Him, It, They, Chair, Hat, Balloon, etc.
Verbs = walk, run, sit, stand falling, jumping, gasped, croaked
Predicate = the thing that the Verb acts upon.
For example: He walked the street.
He is the Noun.
Walked is the Verb.
The street is the Predicate.
He "acted upon" the street.
He "walked" the street.


Lesson 1: Prepositions and Prepositional Phrases
Prepositions connect a noun with another word. A prepositional phrase is a phrase introduced by a preposition. For example: "about to throw the ball." About is the preposition that introduces the prepositional phrase "about to throw the ball."

Common Prepositions
about, above, along, among
at, before, behind, below
beneath, beside, between, by
down, during, except, for
from, in, like, near
past, of, off, on
out, over, that, through, to
under, up, which, whichever, who, whoever,
with, without

Example
To write elaborate sentences, string a series of words together with prepositions. For example: Three cowboys strolled down the avenue that was paved with brick, the shortest of them picking up a cigarette butt off the ground and placing it to his dirty lips, sucking with fervor, and exhaling a long stream of gray smoke without regard for the woman's face before him.
In that sentence, the prepositional phrases are as follows:
down the avenue
that was paved
with brick
of them
off the ground
to his dirty lips
with fervor
of gray smoke
without regard
for the woman's face
before him

Lesson 2: Sentence Complexity
There are a few basic archetypes for sentences: The Simple Sentence, The Compound Sentence, The Complex Sentence, The Simple-Complex Sentence, and The Complex-Complex Sentence.

The Simple Sentence
Subject, Verb, Predicate
He walked the street.
He is the subject.
Walked is the verb.
The street is the predicate.

The Compound Sentence
This is essentially two Simple Sentences joined by a coordinating conjunction.
Example: He walked the street, and he smoked a cigarette.
Coordinating Conjunctions: and, but, for, nor, or, yet
Another Example: He shot a gun but he didn't aim.
Compound Sentences are used when two sentences are related and have equal value.

The Complex Sentence
This is the most useful lesson regarding sentences.
A Complex Sentence is a sentence containing two parts. 1) A subordinate clause, and 2) A main clause.
Complex Sentences are used when one sentence has lesser value than the other.
Subordinate Clause: A clause introduced by a Subordinating Conjunction, which is minor information in relation to the main clause, which is the essential information.
Main Clause: A normal Simple Sentence.
Example: As the sun was setting, he walked the street.
As is the subordinating conjunction.
As the sun was setting is the subordinate clause.
He walked the street is the main clause.
Example: He walked the street as the sun was setting. (Notice that there's no comma when the subordinate clause follows the main clause. This is not always the case. It's a matter of preference.)
Some Examples of Subordinate Conjunctions: as, because, although, while, if, unless, as if, where, wherever, so that, that, after, before, since, till, until, when
More Sentence Examples:
Because the heat was intense, they turned on the air conditioning.
While they were good students, they were fiesty.
If you go through that door, you will encounter a dragon.
He followed her wherever she happened to go.
Her dream was to play the violin until she died of overexposure.
The composer made one crucial mistake after he had cleaned up the scene of the murder.

The Simple-Complex Sentence
This is like a Compound Sentence. A Simple Sentence is joined to a Complex Sentence via a Coordinating Conjunction.
Simple-Complex Sentences are used in order to create variation in sentence lengths and in order to create a sense of elegance. They are the most important sentences of all the types.
Example: He was tall, but, since Mary had Bigfoot genes, she was taller.
He was tall is the Simple Sentence.
But is the Coordinating Conjuntion.
Since is the Subordinating Conjunction.
Since Mary had Bigfoot genes is the Subordinate Clause.
She as taller is the main clause. He was tall is equal to the main clause.


The Complex-Complex Sentence
Now, if you put everything together, including the prepositional phrases from way above, you can create quite a complex sentence that will flow from the page as if made of silk.
Example: The three friends walked along the railroad tracks slowly, but while they did not speak and they did not look at each other, there was an inherent understanding that what they had seen was a bad omen. It was definitely bad.
The Complex-Complex Sentence is just two complex sentences connected by a coordinating conjunction; in this case, the coordinating conjunction is "but."
Here's an analysis:
"The three friends walked" is the simple sentence.
Along the railroad tracks slowly is the prepositional phrase, which goes along with the nonfinite -ed verb walked: something we will get to further below.
But is the coordinating conjunction.
While is the subordinating conjunction.
While they did not speak is the subordinate clause.
[While] And they did not look at each other is also a subordinate clause.
There was an inherent understanding is one of the main clauses.
That is a preposition.
What is a preposition.
What they had seen is a subordinate clause.
Was a bad omen is the main clause, with the subject "What they had seen" suggested, left out, which gets more complex than is neccessary to explain here - you will feel it and understand it on your own when actually writing.
Another Example:
When the three of them wandered too far into the darkness of the woods, there was a crow perched on a pine tree, calling out to them as if to say, "Caw! Caw! I love! I love!" And slowly they turned back, unwilling to venture further into such a forest that had taught it's creatures how to speak like humans.

Lesson 3
Nonfinite and Verbless Clauses
These are subordinate clauses with a special twist. They are introduced by a nonfinite verb or have no verb at all. This is very easy to understand just by looking at a few examples, and harder to understand by trying to write about it.
Nonfinite Verbs in most instances end with -ing and -ed.
Walking to the grocery store, he spotted a penny.
Walking is the Nonfinite Verb.
Walking to the grocery store is considered a Subordinate Clause.
Dressed up like a dame, the man visited the corner bar called affectionately, Stud Tavern.
You can reverse it:
He spotted a penning while walking to the grocery store.
The man visited the corner bar, dressed up like a dame.
Now, Infinitive Clauses, another form of Nonfinite Clauses. There are two types: "with to" and "without to."
In the "with to" form, they're introduced by a verb in the infinitive form. The infinitive form of a verb is the "to" form. To walk. To eat. To stop. To sit. To talk. To faint. To jump.
Examples: They wanted to pay for their meal.
They wanted is the main clause.
To pay for their meal is the Verbless Clause while simultaneously a Subordinate Clause.
In the "without to" form, it's the same but without the "to." Grammatically speaking, this is the imperative form, which means that they are like commands: Walk! Eat! Stop! Sit! Talk!
Examples: We helped unload the car.
This "without to" form is difficult and it doesn't require much teaching because it comes automatically when writing.
Verbless Clauses
Verbless Clauses are easy to describe. They are Adjective Phrases. Much like an adjective, these phrases describe a noun in the main clause.
Example: Weary and almost out of money, we drove home.
The Verbless Clause describes "we," just like an adjective.
Look at it this way: A weary, penniless man. Essentially the same thing.

Lesson 4
The last important thing to understand is the Noun Phrase.
Typically, a Noun Phrase will look something like this: The harried man of unusual proportions.
Or: A bottle of beer.
Or: A small rock by the ocean that smelled of salt.
Or: The elongated face in the mirror.
The most common format of a Noun Phrase is: "the" or "a" and "of." For example: The man of wealth. A man of wealth. The daughter of destiny. A daughter of destiny. The fragment of canvas. A fragment of canvas. A piece of his dinner.
Those are all Noun Phrases.
Now, understanding the parts of a sentence: Subject, Verb, Predicate.
The subject is a noun. Thus, a Noun Phrase can be used as the subject of a sentence.
Example: The fragment of canvas lay sideways on the countertop.
The fragment of canvas is the Subject of the sentence and is a Noun Phrase.
The countertop is also a relatively shorter Noun Phrase.

"There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing. There is the silence that comes with morning in a forest, and this is different from the silence of a sleeping city. There is silence after a rainstorm, and before a rainstorm, and these are not the same. There is the silence of emptiness, the silence of fear, the silence of doubt. There is a certain silence that can emanate from a lifeless object as from a chair lately used, or from a piano with old dust upon its keys, or from anything that has answered to the need of a man, for pleasure or for work. This kind of silence can speak. Its voice may be melancholy, but it is not always so; for the chair may have been left by a laughing child or the last notes of the piano may have been raucous and gay. Whatever the mood or the circumstance, the essence of its quality may linger in the silence that follows. It is a soundless echo." - Beryl Markham

I went grocery shopping for magnificent pickled carrots and tofu, twelve jars of pickled carrots and twelve tubs of tofu. Soy sauce as well. And the essential thing: celery.

Remembrance. Years spent writing of locales as varied as the late, gray nights, of thoughts that occur after the world has closed its curtains for the evening. I began to write of these people when I was fourteen years old, in the autumn of 1982, after Helen’s flight. At this moment, it is January 3rd, 2007, after midnight, and I am in a strange land. I live in a dimly lit shack with a single light bulb on the ceiling. The shadows grow around me after sunset; the light in here needs fixing. I have made my home beside the crushed velvet waves of the sea. Outside, the rain reminds me of people whispering. The wind carries seagulls along throughout the sky. Despite the winter, a few people walk along the shoreline. Even in storms, they can be seen alone by the sea. I wonder what they are thinking, but I imagine the sound of the surf and the salty air does a great deal to ease them into peacefulness. In such a landscape, I can hardly imagine the troubles of life being so relentless as to linger; although, there is trouble here. “A man may stand there and put all America behind him,” Thoreau wrote of the sea. Had I a touch of the sea in my adolescence, I suppose that I would have been happier for it. But we are given what we are given. We may make of our past something of worth or else abandon ourselves to bitterness. Out here among the seagulls and the surf, it is not difficult to find the meaning of life. I prefer to look for it where it may be found. Here, it becomes obvious that existence is much more than an unimportant spasm of the universe. If nothing else, we may choose to live by our appreciation for the human spirit. Our love for the human spirit.

Recipe for Sushi

Avacado
Carrot
1 tsp Sugar
3 tbl Rice Vinegar or White Vinegar
Cucumber
Ginger = Boil for a few minutes
Powdered Wasabi
Eggs = Cooked & Cut into Strips
Tofu