Tom Turner at Home in Seattle (In his notes, I came across a Kierkegaard quote, which I used to start the following three-fragment poem, which reflects Tom’s philosophy.)
I
The whole of my being shrieks in contradiction. To live is to suffer this clash of opposites— to despair is to forget it.
II
I am the tension: finite and infinite, time and eternity. If I dissolve it, I lose myself.
III
The contradiction is not my enemy— it is my teacher. Through it, I hear the Spirit whisper, though I only answer in silence.
Much has happened since going to Memphis to attend the International Blues Challenge. For starters, the NY Times Travel section was two weeks late in providing a good article, “Roll Over, Elvis. Meet Indie Memphis.” We now know we missed a lot.
While in Memphis, the US Supreme Court decision involving the Fair Elections Now Act works against the continued corporate takeover of our government. Are corporations evil? No! Neither are the people who work within their controlling environments. However, with the Supreme Court’s recent decision, it is becoming even more convincing that we need to redesign a poorly designed invention of our culture (corporations). I know this will not be an easy task since most of us are products of the corporate mentality and lifestyle. Still, if we value the mystery and categories of human enterprise, we must find ways to level the playing field. It is important to remember that there is nothing more unequal than the equal treatment of unequals.
Is This A Good Year To Be Born — Newsweek, 1967
The great US historian and activist Howard Zinn, who helped change many Americans’ conscience, passed away this week at age 87. I first learned about Howard Zinn in the late sixties while still in the Army. During this time, frustrated by our continued involvement in Vietnam, I began keeping a scrapbook of articles, opt-ad columns, political cartoons, and photos. During this time, I first read the Zinn quote, “Dissent is the highest form of patriotism,” which has since been carved into my very being. Although many have read his book, The People’s History of the United States, which gives voice to Native Americans, Blacks, women, immigrants, poor laborers, and others not covered in mainstream history, still many only got to know of him through the recent History Channel, The People Speak. A believer in democracy by the people, and in light of the above mentioned US Supreme Court decision, I share this Zinn quote: “If those in charge of our society – politicians, corporate executives, and owners of press and television – can dominate our ideas, they will be secure in their power. They will not need soldiers patrolling the streets. We will control ourselves.”
This past week witnessed two examples of a great leader in action: President Barak Obama’s State of the Union speech and, two days later, his appearance before and discussion with the Republican Caucus. I urge you to make your own judgment by viewing the videos on YouTube.
Lastly, this past week also so the death of J.D. Salinger. Not being a “reader” as a child and young adult, one of the first novels I read (all-be-it because I had to in senior English) in the late ’50s was Catcher In The Rye, and like so many young people of the time, it had a lasting impression. So many of us share a kinship with Holden and the phony world we live in.
“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it if you want to know the truth.” Tom TurnerThe opening line from Catcher in The Rye.
I will end this posting by sharing an email from my brother Tom:
The cat and I were laughing ( As in J.D. Salinger’s story. “The Laughing Man” ) about persons who repeatedly speak of “coming-out” with their BOOK explaining “IT” all….. And we thought of Theroux’s quote :
“A person becomes a writer because they are DEFICIENT. They have problems; They are “crazy”; They have unhappy families… They are “eccentric” and… Not because they read a LOT of books; but on the contrary… Maybe they haven’t read enough books!!!!!!!! There is a strong irrationality about THE WRITING LIFE… Often a writer writes to maintain a need to be HUGGED and told that she is loved.”
t.
Thanks, Tom. We may be far from one another, but we remain on the same wave link.
‘As we grow older, the world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated . . .’ Complications, ambiguities, nonsequiturs. I keep searching for clarity . . . lucidity; and I know each time I seek that I’ll become more entangled. No, I’m not bored — just scared.”
Tom Turner (Sometime In The Late 1960s) — Image Created with the Help of Technology and AI
Afternoons in the backyard, our lives like photographs Yellowing elsewhere, in somebody else’s album, In secret, January south winds Ungathering easily through the black limbs of the fruit trees.
What was it we never had to say?
Who can remember now- Something about the world’s wrongs, Something about the way we shuddered them off like rain in an open field, convinced that lightning would not strike.
We’re arm in arm with regret, now left foot, now right foot. We give the devil his due. We walk up and down in the earth, we take our flesh in our teeth. When we die, we die. The wind blows away our footprints.
Some years ago, I was at a conference in Portland and contacted brother Tom who lived in Seattle, to meet me at the conference hotel. Tom drove down in his old VW with a Grateful Dead logo on the side window. We had planned to drive in his old VW along the Columbia River, then to Mt Hood. To drive the historic highway in his car, which didn’t have a clutch, therefore, requiring Tom to shift by jamming into each gear was more than I could take. So, I rented a car for our day excursion.
Because of my past experience with my brother, when planning the drive from Portland to Seattle included enough time for Joy and I to drive the Historic Columbia River Highway.
The Highway is a beautiful, twisting highway that Joy insists on driving since she says I drive too fast.
Joy driving gave me plenty of opportunities to take photos and videos.
This clip has a couple of sharp 90-degree turns.
Looking west along the Columbia River from The Vista House.
Looking east from the Vista House.
A Vista House Video Clip.
A video clip from inside the Vista House.
A Gallery of Some of the Falls Along Scenic the Historic Columbia River Highway.
Before leaving the scenic Columbia area, I got a couple images of the beautiful snow-covered Mt. Hood.
We spent some brief moments with brother Tom during our trip to Seattle for Lisa’s and Mike’s wedding on Lummi Island (August 29, 2009).
It’s never been easy for anyone to figure out the Turner boys, let alone one to the other. In some ways, however, if you know one of us, then you know the other. We are very much alike, but selectively taking some similarities to an extreme (by choice and personality), which appear different.
This video is about my brother; therefore, it’s about me.
“The cat’s in the well and grief is showing its face The world’s being slaughtered and it’s such a bloody disgrace.”
— kenne
For Crying Out Loud (September 2009)
(The video can be enlarged by clicking on HD at the top right and the four arrows in the the lower right corner.)
My brother Tom shared this Galway Kinnell with me in 2010 with the note: “Years ago I copied [sic] this poem down . . . something about it grabbed me. Perhaps, just perhaps, the ARBITRARINESS of it all.”
Hitchhiker
After a moment, the driver, a salesman for Travelers Insurance heading for Topeka, said, “What was that?” I, in my Navy uniform, still useful for hitchhiking though the war was over, said, “I think you hit somebody.” I knew he had. The round face, opening in surprise as the man bounced off the fender, had given me a look as he swept past. “Why didn’t you say something?” The salesman stepped hard on the brakes. “I thought you saw,” I said. I didn’t know why. It came to me I could have sat next to this man all the way to Topeka without saying a word about it. he opened the car door and looked back. I did the same. At the roadside, in the glow of a streetlight, was a body. A man was bending over it. For an instant it was myself, in a time to come, bending over the body of my father. The man stood and shouted at us, “Forget it! He gets hit all the time!” Oh. A bum. We were happy to forget it. The rest of the way, into dawn in Kansas, when the salesman dropped me off, we did not speak, except, as I got out, I said, “Thanks,” and he said, “Don’t mention it.”
Thomas R. Turner, May 23, 1942 – November 13, 2014 — Image by kenne
Standing above me in Smith’s Awkwardly looking down through a clipped hesitancy Our lives came together.
From within, mutually canceling Vignettes of naturalness and gender-cliche.’ She kissed through closed lips of Pristine openness. Innocently I loved.
After my return from the war I stepped into a world of Kafkaesque embraces; yearning . . . Paled with particular sensations I was momentarily blinded.
I could taste the t.s. eliot peach that I dared to eat. Looking at you the way you love the first person Whoever touched you And never quite that way again I savored my idea of you but missed the obvious.
Paradoxes betray the limits of logic Not of the reality, we shared. Your “passion” was stillborn through so dame necessary.
The aesthetics of my artifice went against the grain: Recreation, utilitarian achievements, and another sexuality Were hidden karmas of your soul. My recondite preoccupations rung up as No sale.
But let’s Skip the arguments. I already know how the story ends: A not so cryptic message – Don’t be naive You could only gaze into the distance at my life.
— from 24 to Harwood and Cropsey — No Road Back Home by Tom Turner
######
A Brother Lost
Now that it’s daylight at five, I am awakened by the Soft sounds of morning doves,
Delaying for a moment My feet hitting the floor — Just long enough
To think about my brother Who no longer writes, Calls or returns mine.
There’s no reason. He has never needed A reason to not call —
For him, calls need a reason, even made up ones —
Sharing a quote, Name now forgotten, Need to reach out.
Now lost in the northwest, Imprisoned by his mind, Lacking courage to create.
Now each day, I live with Words no longer spoken, Words no longer written.
With so much of my knowledge of literature I was taught by my brother, Tom. In an April 26, 2003 note from him, he wrote:
“Hey . . . you Metaphysical degenerates . . . Bantered alone by impulse . . . Here I am attempting to essay a few coherent thoughts . . . God it’s risky! ‘God and the imagination are one.’
I am in the midst of trying to memorize a poem . . . ‘Final Soliloquy of The Interior Paramour’ by Wallace Stevens . . . never mind why.”
Tom goes on to write about a piece by George Steiner on memorization amid the technological revolution where media is ubiquitous:
“The danger is that the text or music will lose what physics calls its ‘critical mass,’ its implosive powers within the echo chambers of the self.”
He continued — “I can really be in awe of Shakespearean stage people in recitation of exact lines!! Read closely . . .”
Our wills and fates do so contrary run that our devices still are overthrown: our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own. (The Player King’s Crucial Speech in the Play Within the Play — Act 3, Scene 2, 183-209-Hamlet)
I probably don’t need to tell you that Tom never memorized the Wallace poem.
Final Soliloquy Of The Interior Paramour
Light the first light of evening, as in a room In which we rest and, for small reason, think The world imagined is the ultimate good.
This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous. It is in that thought that we collect ourselves, Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:
Within a single thing, a single shawl Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth, A light, a power, the miraculous influence.
Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves. We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole, A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.
Within its vital boundary, in the mind. We say God and the imagination are one… How high that highest candle lights the dark.
Out of this same light, out of the central mind, We make a dwelling in the evening air, In which being there together is enough.
In my beginning is my end. Now the light falls Across the open field, leaving the deep lane Shuttered with branches, dark in the afternoon, Where you lean against a bank while a van passes, And the deep lane insists on the direction Into the village, in the electric heat Hypnotised.
— from Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot
Tom’s Signature
Eliot’s Four Quartets rests on my desk not only because I love his poetic masterpiece but because my first copy was given to me by my brother, Tom, who wrote “. . . I’ve become obsessed with it . . . with time . . . with memory . . . with language, all of which are concentrated in this work. It has become such a part of me.”
Tom went on to write — “To use a few of Eliot’s words; ‘As we grow older the world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated . . . ‘ Complications, ambiguities, non sequitur I keep searching for clarity . . . lucidity, and I know each time I seek that, I’ll become more entangled. No. I’m not bored—just Scarred. I’m moving toward a sort-of silence . . . I know what you’re thinking: ‘Bull-shit!’ Since the significant things, I want to say have the wrong inflections, intonations for most arenas of conversation; I ramble on into oblivion. A series of non sequitur.” (7/27/84)
