THE SPOKEN FEAST

"Everyone all the time is in the act of composition, our experience is an ongoing narrative within each of us."
- E.L. Doctorow, from "The Passion of Our Calling"


Ta-da. My new blog....a repository of words, sentences, declarations, exclamations, lamentations, ruminations, poetry, lyrics etc., heard by me in my home, on the streets, in the pubs, restaurants, shops, inside cars, the open market, the closed rooms too private or secret to be revealed. A torrent of mostly other peoples' self-expressions. All my life I have been mad in pursuit of story, of oral and written narrative, of the line between actual and fabulous in the everyday radiance and the dark paradox of language. Found in a list. Found in a lyric. Found in my grandson's voice. Found in my childrens' and friends' and patients' quiet noticings, found in truth, found in lies, found in the junkyards of oral traditions, the drunkard's clattered song, the felons' whispers.

Today is Saturday, May 8th, 2010. I have just returned to my Bainbridge home after picking up my grandson Aleister and driving him to the nearby swimming pool where we swam for an hour and then drove back to Silverdale's Kitsap Mall where we stopped to meet up with Aleister's Mom, Angela, and each eat a pretzel dog. Today Aleister was entranced with the word "consumed".

"Mama Kay. What if aliens with dog heads blasted down and consumed us? Or, worse, aliens with dinosaur heads? Although, no, the dog heads would be worse because we would be less suspicious and they would be able to consume many more of us."

In the Mall, we sit with a father and his young son, who are both eating ice cream cones. Aleister looks at them, smiles broadly, nods and says, "Ah, yes. I myself have consumed many an ice cream cone. Including one double scoop. It was GOOD." Aleister's "good" rhymnes with "should". I love to hear him say his own special "good".

After listening to Eric Clapton's song about the death of his young son, Aleister says, "I miss Grandpa. I miss him every day. It is so sad to miss someone every day of your life."

This is the first time Aleister has ever brought up how much he misses Jim. I feel the tears well up beneath my eyelids. "I miss him too, Aleister," I say. This, for me, is one of those moments when I want to drink my own blood. One of those momentous moments cloaked in a car on the highway to the Silverdale Mall. And all I can say is those five words: "I miss him, too, ALeister." Three-fourths of my life lives inside those words.

Aleister. He was called Allie in Kindergarten, and is now called Alex by his home-family and school friends, but I am allowed to call him ALeister. I say his name with reverence. Each time I see him I feel as if I am collapsing beneath a weight of roses.

More? Last week's male client from Olympia who was speaking of his ex-wife and her mother. "In the buffet of my suffering, those two can split the bill. As for me, I'm still letting them both rent space inside my head."

"I am a mystery wrapped in an enigma."


A female friend says to me, "Now that we know how vast the universe is, we've just got to ask ourselves...where IS heaven? I know where it is. It is one block after infinity."

I am in L.A., at a famous restaurant in an infamous L.A. canyon. The restaurant's name is THE INN OF THE SEVENTH RAY. This restaurant only serves organic food and organic wine. A waitress says to a young couple, "Are you sensitive to meatlike consistencies?"

The person with me whispers, "You know, there are certain things that happen to vegetarians. They just seem to fall off...they just start to fall in on themselves and a certain blandness overcomes them, don't you think?"

Several of my dearest friends are vegetarians, so, no, I don't necessarily think that, but I can't help it, I love this guy's language. Is this one of my major or minor flaws? That I can love someone for saying something I basically disagree with but it's is said so well I applaud the sentences?

From my own diary, years ago: "Everything old turns new again. Today I am fifty. I didn't think I would live this long. I didn't think I would stay so short. I didn't think I'd own so many earrings or books. I didn't think my need for love would form such a sustaining theme in my one hundred or so diaries, in what Thomas Mann called, "The prayer'like communication of the diary-story."

See? I can even include myself!

On the phone just now with my friend Katy Warner, I heard about how she and Steve took their granddaughter Bailey to see the Brementown Musicians and how, in the car on the way home, Katy or Steve mentioned to Bailey that "in the end they all lived happily ever after" , to which Bailey replied something like, "I don't think so, I mean, didn't they all "pass on"? To which Steve or Katie persisted in their fairy-tale ending of "well, yes...BUT...they all DID live happily ever after," , to which Bailey backed up her original statement/question and repeated, "yes, but.....I believe they ALL PASSED ON?"

What does one do when a child comes up with a favorite concept or phrase and wants to use it, wants to carve it, wants to encode it into everybody's soul? Today, Aleister's word was "consumed". With Bailey, the lingo/concept was "Passed on". Whad'ya'do?

Yesterday I saw a woman I'll call Camille (but remember, this is all confidential, and Camille could well be a man)..... Camille is in her eighties, mother of five, grandmother of seventeen, great-grandmother of four. Camille has cancer of the thorax, so we work our sessions around her chemo and radiation treatments and side-effects. Yesterday we talked about religion. "You know," said Camille, "Jesus never said He was GOD. In fact, it wasn't until He came out of that cave that....." she paused, then began again. "I hope you won't be offended, but what if there had been a really big snow storm the day Jesus was crucified, and He froze. He just...froze. One of those cryogenic things. And they dragged Him off the cross and plunked Him in the cave and when He thawed and came back out to get warm, everybody sort of went.... nuts?"

"I ate, drunk, and was hairy!"

"Giraffe born to a farm family."

"Brainy, widowed sexpot, raises hell, kids."


Okay. You get the idea. The deep seriousness and astonishing versatility of language. It's free. It's gorgeous. It's stuff that humankind always has had difficulty noticing and putting a value on.

SMITH MAGAZINE writes, "When Ernest Hemingway famously wrote, 'For Sale, baby shoes, never worn,' he proved than an entire story can be told using a half-dozen words." My own experience backs this up.

"The great thing about human language," Lewis Thomas said, "is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand."