TODAY, HAIKU HOTEL'S THEME WAS MEMORIAL DAY

So these were my attempts for better or worse:

Old standard bearer —
the flag droops lower
as the years go by.

These old soldiers
tramping by — if only
war grew old and died.

These old soldiers
passing in review — their march
has lost the drummer.

The living and the
dead — elms in this graveyard
are deeply rooted.

The scent of lilies
drifts from Mother's to
Memorial Day.

Ravens in the willow
above the quiet stones
crow about their day.

DON'T GO ANY FARTHER IF YOU'RE OFFENDED BY
HALF-NAKED, BEAUTIFUL 47 YEAR OLD WOMEN:

I fell in love with Julianne Moore when I first saw her in a very interesting movie called, Safe. Since then she has aged most gracefully and beautifully. I got to tell you, she takes my breath away still. Look for yourself, men. The photo is from a spread in the Paris Vogue:

5/14/2008:For some reason, the photo disappeared from this blog. Magic? Witches? Anyhow, if you click on her name down at the labels, she'll pop up again. I'm truly puzzled. [Minutes later.] What? Now it's back again. I give up. Here she is OR here she isn't........ [Scratch head.]




Today's kigo was "make up", the verb as well as the noun "makeup". Here's a couple of my haiku:

Tattooed lady
on a slab — all made up
nowhere to go.

Divorce —
the failure
of make up.

HARPER'S IS A GOOD MAGAZINE

It's been awhile since I've looked into a Harper's Magazine. One day while I was at Barnes & Noble having a latte at their Starbucks, I decided to pick up this Harper's (April 2008) because they had a cover story about "contagious cancer". That got my attention, but once into reading, I came across an informative piece of writing from Iraq via a woman who lives in Syria about all the Iraqis who are refugees in the world, millions of them. Their stories made me cry. I was surprised at myself. And there is also this biting story by artist John Berger (p.46) about the Mexican Zapatistas in which this piece about Maria Concepcion appears. So read it, and buy a Harper's if you get a chance. It's a damn fine magazine. Did I get the name in often enough? Maybe you already know that.

(SNIP)
Speaking of sincerity makes me suddenly think of a photo of a woman who is not wearing a mask. I cut the photo out of the daily newspaper La Jornada. Her name is Maria Concepcion Moreno Arteaga. Mother of six boys, whom she brought up alone. Forty-seven years old, living in a village 200 kilometers north of Mexico City, she earned her living as a washerwoman. Three years ago she was arrested by the Mexican government security forces and thrown into jail on the totally false charge of being involved in the traffic of illegal immigrants. One day Maria Concepcion found herself before six such migrants in rags, who had made it across more than half the country and were pleading for water. So she gave them water and a wedge of something to eat because, given their plight, "there was no way possible to say no”.

After being falsely charged she spent more than two years in prison. Her work in prison was the making of logos, labels for free-market clothes. With the few pesos handed over to her for this forced labor, she bought soap and toilet paper to keep clean.

The message of her eyes in the photo is: There was no way possible to say No.
(PASTE)

Photo credit to Marco Pelaez/La Jornada, Mexico

TODAY'S HAIKU: too true too

Spring birdbath:
the crows leave sparrow skulls
in the rainwater.

Frightened by the
old man in the mirror,
my hair retreats.

My bathroom reading is May Sarton's Journal of a Solitude. She must have been in her sixties when she wrote it. And I get this picture of a crabby, pissed old biddy whose religion has made her narrow, but she has openings too, like when she enjoys the musical in New York with the kids in it. I feel the same way about Walt Whitman as I plow through Reynolds' cultural biography of Whitman—crabby and narrow. Suffering individuals who roll in their suffering to prove their worth or mettle. Or their patience with those of us less cultured than they are. These two were very much like I was in my depressed, drinking years.

Now, on the other hand, there's Hass's book on The Essential Haiku. According to him, three of the basics of life for the Japanese sensibility are impermanence, suffering and contingency. Yes suffering, suffering for all of us as a regular condition of life, but there is a difference, I think, in the emphasis that a Japanese haiku writer and these two Americans (and O so many others) place on suffering. To the American Christian, mired in his lot, suffering is a way of earning his place in letters or, in the church, in God's eye. To the Zen master (and I know very little here), suffering is a condition, not to be employed to one's benefit, but to be observed, and when possible, transcended.

At my own age of 70, I'm moving into this acceptance of suffering as a natural condition, not to be endured to prove one's worth and artistic value, but just to be observed and accepted. Quite a difference between east and west, and, believe it or not, an acceptance that yields quite a bit of tranquility. Below, you'll find a little haiku I've come up with that I think meets the essentials of the haiku.

Garden party —
the slugs getting drunk
in the beer saucers.*

*Putting out saucers of beer is supposed to be an environmentally friendly way to kill the slugs who so love one's hostas. All those years in Spokane, toiling in my flower garden, is paying off in some haiku.

HERE’S MY SCIENCE HAIKU FOR THE DAY

Following, you’ll find a hiaku, seventeen syllables, but broken into the two contrasting thoughts or images. Then comes a quote from a current book I’m reading. It’s my fourth Steven Pinker book and he’s always as interesting as hell:

computational neuroscience:
Tinkertoy chickens cross the road

“The idea that shapes can be cognitively melted down into schematic blobs—skewered on axes originally came from a theory of shape recognition by the computational neuroscientist David Marr. Marr noted how easily people recognize stick figures and animals made from pipe cleaners or twisted balloons, despite their dissimilarity from real objects in their arrangement of pixels. He proposed that we actually represent shapes in the mind in blob-and-axis models rather than in raw images, because such a model is stable as the object moves relative to the viewer, while the pixels in the image are all over the place…. Not only do nouns for shapes (like ribbon, layer, crust, hunk, and groove) get their definitions from this world of pipe cleaners, cutouts, and balloons, but we seem to conceive of the objects around us in these terms. Few people think of a wire as a very very skinny cylinder and of a CD as a very short one, though technically that’s what they are. We conceive of them as having only one or two primary dimensions, respectively. Nor do we ordinarily imagine a lake as a translucent chunk with a flat top, sharp edges, and numerous bulges molded to the shape of the lake bottom. We think of it as a 2-D[imensional] surface.” Steven Pinker, The Stuff Of Thought, (pp. 181-82)