My Own Private Tsunami, 2004 (revisited)

I was thinking about this tsunami while working on my wife’s van in the parking lot next to our apartment.  In the [now seven] years since that pondering, up till now, I’d forgotten about the tsunami and the 230,000 people it washed away.  It’s amazing how quickly time passes.  Every day I forget another tragedy where thousands upon thousands of families like mine are rubbed out in earthquakes, floods, civil wars and plagues.

Last week [I wrote a year ago], I was looking through my unfinished stuff to find something to work on.  A friend and I regularly attend a philosophic discussion group, M&M Philosophy in Wheeling and we made a 2010 New Year’s pact.  He’s an artist and I want to write, so we said we’d bring new work in every Tuesday meeting evening to show each other.

This accountability arrangement has so far prompted me to return to and finish things that may not have ever been touched again—things  I’d begun while self-employed contracting for a living.  Years pass.  I put something on my desktop, and then put it aside, then file it away.  Not returning to things is a constant threat and theme.

Forward from, "Portrait of a Seeker", my book-in-the-works

June 2011, in Saint-Médard sur Ille, Brittany, France

I am an artist, standing with raised brush and tilted head in front of my portrait, adding another stroke to my signature.  I have mixed paints, picked colors, followed feelings, left alone some things and painted over others.  Now I am signing my name on the lower right-hand corner: Seeker. 

Life comes in order, but is it orderly?  I’ve painted my sandcastle in one eternal summer day, the surf whispering its commentary into my ears while I added turrets and moats, destroyed bridges, improved walls and changed my mind. 

Some artists draw “studies” of the work they are going to feature on a canvas or ceiling, carefully considering composition and changing things until settling on how they are going to begin.  Other painters simply begin, following an impulse, adapting and improving as they work.  Another type, artist savant, lays down, intact, what was already there; a seeming instrument for the eternal creation.

This book is my painting of me and the world as I see it—maybe they’re the same.

You may search for an orderly structure within the following pages.  You may yearn for a chronological timeline or a developed context.  You can find them; they’re there. 

A person’s whole self, imbedded in the context of their life-as-lived, is impossible to hold within any frame; it would be a black canvas.  The whole “me” is best undiluted by description.  I have created this work, in this time in my life, and have stopped adding paint because it’s my soul, after all, and I don’t want to cover it up completely.

Our lives stop at the end of our day, and I wanted to say something before my sunset came because I have witnessed others, unwritten and unread, falling into their graves, to be covered by dirt. 

Here is a portrait of my fall.

 

  

—David Weimer, Flushing, Ohio, January 7, 2011.

One written in March 1999 in Memphis.

Taking on

The banana spider finds time to consider;

May humbleness be learned from a humble fly?

It spider-sips each precious drop, 

drinking humble bodies whole.

May humbleness be learned

through liquefaction?

The spider glows with the memory

of two icicles melting through a fly’s humbled thoughts.

This warm recollection summons it

from its humble questioning,

beckons,

with a silent spider tune:

A grounded spider is a humble spider,

and little will he do,

so lasso silk in humble breeze

and fasten tightly to

the joints in a corner of the sky

that a spider covers with his eyes

and a senseful touch

on a leeside thread

that sways and sighs with a thrumming web,

and the softest lies

whispered to all flies:

Here,

here lie,

in this invisible bed...

The spider

lets an empty fly fall

and re-traces his name

in the margins of a broken window.

© 1999 David W. Weimer

Book Done

New.

Shoe.

Blue.

Nothing

More.

Well a little more.  I have finished my 'book-in-the-works.'  I wrote the words "The End" on the last page last week.  I'm making the first edit pass.  It's over four hundred unedited pages.  It will probably swell and shrink repeatedly as I add photos, cut text, add more, etc.  It's currently in a swelling phase.  I'm on page 25.

A lot of the excerpts in this blog from my 'upcoming book' are old and unedited.  That means they'll either change or disappear from the eventual finished product.

This five-line poem, however, is brand new!

Portrait of a Seeker: Born to Wonder (upcoming book excerpt)

Screen and stage actors get awards for loosing themselves in a role, by becoming another person by walking and thinking with that person’s thoughts.  We’re all doing that now, for God’s viewing pleasure.  To be “me,” this method actor or specialist would have to put in the real time that I’ve lived to date.  They’d have to experience each single event that happened in my life and react to all the happenings exactly as I have reacted.

Pigeons I have known in Memphis and Pittsburgh--upcoming book excerpt

1998, Train track intersection, University of Memphis, Tennessee.

I kick at the pigeon.  He dodges.  I nudge at him.  Doesn’t do any good.  Now he’s poking around the road sign.  Seems as though we traded spots.  He keeps one eye on me.  I was trying to shoo him into the grass alongside the tracks.  There is a lot of traffic; a train might be coming. 

It’s not the only time this has happened.  In Pittsburgh, I was walking home after work.  It was raining, kind of cold, and I had a backpack on under a green rain poncho.  I was just enjoying the rainy day and

I wish I was a cat.

I wish I was my cat.

Any one of them; I’ve got two. 

I walk by and one is lying on the couch, curled up next to a small pillow.  Wall clocks are ticking, making it sound quiet.  The cat’s eyes are closed in dedicated rest.

Another one just batted at the end of a yo-yo string (my six-year-old is ‘into’ yo-yo’s now) over there on the hardwood floor at the edge of an area rug where my wife and sons have a piece of plywood holding a mostly-completed puzzle of New Harbor in Copenhagen, Denmark that they picked up yesterday at the dollar store.

Just Waving

A guy recently told me he liked my writing.  It was unexpected.  Maybe he talked to someone who said I didn’t think anyone listened or read what I put ‘out there.’  Maybe he did like what he read.  I do this blog occasionally.  Very occasionally, lately.  His comments came unexpectedly during lunch and I was surprised to hear that someone, anyone, was out there.  “Keep it up,” he said.  “You’ve got readers.”  Well.

I took a walk with another guy during this same recent weekend retreat.  The organization that hosted the metaphysically-focused event is soon going to hold its quarterly meetings further away and I said I wasn’t sure I’d be attending them.  “I talk and people just think I’m crazy,” I said.  Or irrevelant.  I say stuff about this search-for-truth-thing that people say they’re on, and I don’t get any feedback.  They stare at me blankly.  That’s my perception.  Me, I’m talking on the one subject I feel qualified to talk about—the search for ultimate meaning, ultimate reality, God.  It seems I’m talking gibberish.  Maybe I’m talking in the wrong setting, to the wrong people.  Are there any right people out there?

This friend told me that the group needed people like me and another ‘crazy’ member, an older guy I keep meaning to visit in the care facility.  “You guys say stuff that no one else says.  You shake things up a bit.  Your irrelevant comments add spice.”  I explained that my comments were utterly relevant to me, that I only paid attention to things that interested me, and that I only followed the threads which I felt intuitively were the most interesting and that rang closest to the profound.  I don’t remember if he answered me.  We had a nice walk.

I’m writing a book, Born to Wonder.  This January and February I took a break from contracting to work on it.  I’ve got a last few chapters, the other ‘bookend’ for this memoir of a curious soul’s adventures.  It bothers me that I haven’t finished it.  I’m busy now painting houses, building decks, installing toilets, putting up drywall.  It’s what I do.  I have the best family on the planet.  My wife and sons are magical.  This is my life, this thing that I am living and moving inside.  But I am bothered by not working on my book.  Maybe I need to say something.

This entry is my first step up this hill, against the biting wind in the blizzard, in the jungles of Panama through heat so oppressive and bush so heavy that I can’t see further than my machete through the stinging sweat in my eyes (places I’ve been).  I have this hill that I am dying to climb.  Maybe literally.  Fair readers, wish me luck—or just wave.

Excerpt from upcoming book "Born to Wonder"

Here's what I wrote on the S-Bahn on the way to work in 2001.  I worked at a German warehouse, shipping and receiving for a designer office furniture firm, Lampert & Sudrow. 

From the Hauptbahnhof underground station beneath the Königstraße in Stuttgart, I'd board the S-4 and ride forty minutes to Benningen, one stop before Marbach.  This town was fascinating to me, in particular, for one reason.  If I went down a set of stairs and walked through a tunnel under the tracks and then, after passing through a park, walked a few minutes, I'd find myself at an oddly cobbled patch of ground about fifteen feet wide and roughly seventy feet long.  It was the understructure of a section of Roman highway.  While renovating an adjacent office building, the Germans found these odd stones and someone was eventually called in who recognized their significance.  So they made it into a little outdoor museum park-like place, with an information plaque.  Putting myself on that road, two millennia ago, always struck me.  The juxtaposition with the setting I saw around me, which, to me, was a foreign, aged, historied place. 

On the way to the warehouse, the countryside would flow by and I'd find myself on a train that grew less and less peopled.  I liked the journey to my job there.  I worked for Lampert until Andrée and I left for France in October of that year.  I never thought of writing a book of this sort, but I did think it was valuable, to me, to write down what had happened to me—now that there were a few years between then and now.

Ohgod

This is an excerpt from my short story Ohgod written in 1994 as a senior at the University of Pittsburgh.

I’d tandem skydived before, twice, and had the unexpected experience of becoming bored while free-falling from 14,200 feet for a mile or so at 120 miles-per-hour.  After a terrifying leap into the void, I found myself looking around, bored.  I  became irritated at my painfully popping ears.  I wasn’t able to bring in my hand to plug my nose and blow.  I yawned constantly.  It didn’t help.

Later, I thought about the momentary times where I’d felt more alive than ever.  They were usually when I had experienced a ‘warm fuzzy’ moment, as my former framing carpenter boss called those almost-incidents where you almost died falling off the edge of a roof or something like that.  In those times when I pushed the limits of comfort and safety; the first jump out the turboprop’s door, climbing too high, driving too fast, diving too deep for too long–that kind of thing.

And then I thought about the search for ultimate meaning in one’s life.  How could you really, really live that ‘super real living’ for more than a few seconds?  Men in battle, who have lived through battle with mortal fear, talk about that time as having been the most real time in their lives.  Not enjoyable necessarily.  Real.  And if you didn’t want to fight in a war?  What could you do to put yourself in a position where you couldn’t possibly become complacent?  What about a suicide with some time to think?  Okay.  So I wrote this one about a girl jumping into a volcano on Mars.  The full-length story has a longer lead-in and a more… developed ending.  I plan to have it appear in my upcoming book, Born to Wonder.

Well, I’ve recently returned from several weeks overseas visiting my wife’s family and country.   Now, back in the saddle again, I’ll be more of a consistent presence on this site, posting about once a week.   –D.W.

Ohgod

  It is the largest known shield volcano in the solar system.  Its summit caldera, from which the magma last poured, is 70 kilometers across.  The volcano rises 27 kilometers from the surface, and was last active 200 million years ago.  For reasons not understood, Olympus Mons is surrounded by a cliff that is several kilometers high.

Below her, an almost solid haze.  Aura backed several steps from the edge.       

        Hyperventilating, her heart pounded in her head and an electric tingling ran over her body in a wave.  Light-headed, she took deep breaths behind her face shield.  Despite the special coating, the clear oval fogged briefly with each breath.  Aura ran.

        With her fingers spread wide, her arms reaching forward, she leaped, pushing off with her right toe, the last part of her body to leave.

          This is what it was like: 

        There were no aerodynamics— she was a dropped rock in a low-g vacuum.  She had jumped out as far from the edge as she could.  Now falling head-first and sideways, out of control, listing, turning over in a slow flip on her back.  No glide-plane surfaces to ease her through the Martian air.  No conscious thoughts, but a single-minded concentration, Aura stretched out her arms and legs to form an "X" shape, looking down, arching her back.  She was assuming the position necessary for a controlled fall.