💥 Explosion-Powered Chariots

Sunday, January 1, 2023

It's 2023. Bit by bit, the days are getting longer again. Welcome to winter's issue of This Mortal Portal, and Happy New Year!

I've been living, even more than usual, in the land of poetry.

The third volume of HUM poems is so close to ready that I dragged my feet sending this newsletter, hoping to include the buy link. [Update: it's now live.] I'm the editor of the series, and I feel a kind of fatherly pride about it. It gives me great joy to encourage a "tough guy," fresh off the streets, to put his heart on a page.

I've also found myself writing in verse more often, about anything and everything. To wit: my latest poem is a meditation on car wrecks.

Last month, a car struck a light pole on Cold Spring, the major artery that runs along the south edge of our block. They were going so fast, they went right through the pole and demolished our neighbor's yard and porch. It got me reflecting on my conflicted relationship with our explosion-powered chariots.

On the one hand, I enjoy driving. There's a distinct pleasure in downshifting, punching the gas pedal, and accelerating out of a curve on an open country road. (My current chariot is a five-speed manual Mazda3.) But on the other hand, there's stop-and-go traffic, ugh. And exhaust fumes, blech. And road deaths: 1.3 million last year.

The May before last, a driver swerved across a double yellow line, losing his life and nearly taking my little brother's in the process. You may have a similar story, perhaps an even more tragic one. But all of us are only a double yellow line away from disaster. This risk is the trade we've made in our quest to increase our speed and extend our range.

My great grandpa Harry and my grandpa Amos lived through the first wave of automobiles: 15 million Model Ts. They say we're at the start of a new wave of electric, and increasingly self-driving, cars. My grandkids may inherit a world where it's cheaper to schedule rides in self-driving cabs than to buy and maintain a car. I have mixed feelings about this scenario; too many to unravel here.

But as I considered our Faustian bargain and its possible futures, an image came to me from an ancient Greek myth. Icarus, the boy built wings of wax and feathers. Warned by his father to fly neither to low nor too high, he flew closer and closer to the sun. Wax dripped, feathers fled, and Icarus plummeted to his doom.

Like Icarus, we risk a fall
To fly up closer to the sun
We fling ourselves on wings and wheels
Then gape aghast when Reaper comes

No melting wax, no feather trail
To warn us of our overreach
A thunderclap, and metal bent
And blood and oil in puddles each

The breath of death, a willing trade
To sail us faster to and fro
To hurtle through the life we’ve made
Until our time has come to go

My father’s father walked before
The Model T subdued the streets
My daughters’ daughters will not drive
They’ll hitch a ride with robot fleets

Or maybe we will walk it back
To human pace, with foot and hoof
And greet our neighbors as we pass
Beneath the heavens’ radiant roof

A poem to ring in the new year

This one is by John O'Donohue, titled For a New Beginning:

In out-of-the-way places of the heart,
Where your thoughts never think to wander,
This beginning has been quietly forming,
Waiting until you were ready to emerge.

For a long time it has watched your desire,
Feeling the emptiness growing inside you,
Noticing how you willed yourself on,
Still unable to leave what you had outgrown.

It watched you play with the seduction of safety
And the gray promises that sameness whispered,
Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent,
Wondered would you always live like this.

Then the delight, when your courage kindled,
And out you stepped onto new ground,
Your eyes young again with energy and dream,
A path of plenitude opening before you.

Though your destination is not yet clear
You can trust the promise of this opening;
Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning
That is at one with your life’s desire.

Awaken your spirit to adventure;
Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk;
Soon you will be home in a new rhythm,
For your soul senses the world that awaits you.

Gratitude for what I've enjoyed this fall:

Book: Watch With Me by Wendell Berry

I've been getting back into Berry, and there are other books of his worth mentioning... his poems are vivid and his essays are strong. Years ago I rode my Subaru chariot with "What are people for?" stuck on the back with mailbox letters like some Mad Farmer. But this collection of short stories is my favorite of his writings. Each of the seven stories is a vignette of the long, happy marriage between two peculiar people.

Music: Breakmaster Cylinder

This anonymous DJ set Bach to breakbeats, mashed up Blake Shelton with rap from central Asia, and remixed Britney Spears' Toxic into a xylophone house of mirrors... and that's just the first three tracks on one album. You'll love it or hate it. I love it, and I'm currently commissioning this audiomixologist to do something special with my fave Chopin prelude.

Food: The Smashed Meatball Sandwich by Ovenbird

Nihil obstat,

Vic

#Longer