Visit to Warrensburg MO and KC

Just a shout-out here to Wayne Miller, the editors of PLEIADES magazine, and all I met during this recent reading trip to the University of  Central Missouri. The food in KC is enough on its own to justify such a journey, but my conversations with Wayne, with his charming wife Jeanne, with PLEIADES founding editor Rose Marie Kinder, with U of M/KC poet Michelle Boisseau, with UCM writing faculty members Phong Nguyen and Kate Nuernberger– all those encounters steel me in my long-held conviction that a lot, if not most, of the brains and talent in my world exist in places that certain Ivied snobs and east- or west- coast chauvinists might archly describe as the provinces.

What a lively scene I walked into out there! I am grateful beyond description.

It felt timely too to be in KC just as I was finishing KANSAS CITY LIGHTNING, Stanley Crouch's much lauded book on native son Charlie Parker. I wish I thought better of that volume myself. Crouch is obviously a learned, passionate, and very bright man; but I'm constantly put off by his --what?-- "novelistic" strategies in the account of Bird's early career. He seems able, for example, to know just how Parker's first wife, Rebecca, felt upon seeing Charlie at the beginning. He knows that she had goose bumps, and knows just what was running through her mind. Touches like this, and they abound throughout, detract from his portrayal of one of American music's most gifted,compelling, and troubled figures. One can't, or at least I can't, keep from shouting out loud: How in hell can you know that, looking back from well into the 21st century? I long to suspend disbelief, but I'm simply unable.

double laureate team-up

A while ago, the fabulously talented and bright Vermont Cartoonist Laureate James Kochalka (since succeeded by Ed Koren) collaborated with me on a book of– what? Graphic poetry? Sure, why not?

First, James drew cartoon illustrations of a poem by my hand, "Garnett and Leon in December," reproduced below. (You may have to use your Zoom command to read the text.)

Then he sent me four uncaptioned panels, featuring a strange little character named Squiggle, and I composed a poem in response, also reproduced below.

I'd never have dreamed that such a collaboration –sponsored by the Vermont Arts Council and the Vermont Center for Cartoon Studies– would eventuate. I am very glad it did!

Two New Poems

After the holidays, and after the funeral of my wife's wonderful brother, to whom I referred in my last post, my wife and I took advantage of my retirement and of her having a week's reprieve from her duties as a law professor and mediator. We headed for our remote cabin on the New Brunswick border in Maine.

The weather there was affected by the polar vortex (pace that blowhard Rush Limbaugh– wonder where he got his scientific training?). That is to say, it was downright frigid. We did manage to get outdoors every day, but not for very long. Nesting in the wood-warmed cabin, however, we were able to lick our wounds and to spend wonderful time together, so the trip was well worthwhile.

Back in Vermont, we are experiencing yet a third cold snap, and, largely house-bound, I have (I hope) completed two poems I roughed out to our north. They follow.

               Zero Farhenheit

Tugged by the notion of strong black coffee,

I get out of bed and embrace my wife.

About time. The dogs lie so tight to the stove

All three look eager to climb right inside.

She has walked them already and dished their food.

I hear the whisper of kindling cedar:

She revived the fire as well while I clove

To my quilts, a common, self-seeking behavior.

Together we study an upriver eagle,

Backlit, unmoving, on a dark arm of pine.

The stream whispers too. But for red squirrels’ scribblings,

The snow shows pluperfectly blank. Yet it shines.

The woman glows also, even the lines

Between eyebrows. Those tracings– she’s earned every one,

Having stood close beside me no matter my failings,

Having borne and instructed daughters and sons.

Yes, I know that today is all anyone owns,

None of us leaving the planet alive.

No matter, I fantasize some guarantees

Beyond logic: our eagle will pose against sky

On that pine bough forever, the three dogs will lie

By the hearth, and I’ll be able to cherish

My wife as I do, but perennially.

The woods drizzle powder. That bright white won’t perish.

                          He Risks a Walk 

Between two pock-marked beech, a strand of wire 

For cows he recalls from his childhood. The cruel barbs shine,

Small blooms of brightness. When darkness stoops, Orion

Will glow as he’s always glowed among the stars.

He’ll nock his arrow, as if he meant to stir mayhem

Below.  For now, the old man thinks of the house,

Where his wife may still feel disquieted. The weather scared them

Last night with its sideways brute rain. And then it froze.

When he comes upon a winter-kill, he wonders,

Did he read at some point of a people who buried their dead

As this poor ruffed grouse is buried, neck and head 

Alone protruding, or was that just some old torture?

The grouse’s stiffened crest is lustrous with frost.

The bird had hidden in powder. When it turned to ice,

It sealed the body in. So peculiar a sight

Has stopped the old man cold in his foolish walk.

Today’s no day for wandering under trees

That go off around him everywhere louder than guns–

The clap and crack of bursting limb and trunk.

Sunbeams garland the forest in silvery beads,

Every branch and bole, both shattered and whole,

A radiant filament.  He can’t see why

Death should be brilliant. Ice in its sightless eyes,

The head might be a flower, or maybe some jewel

Carelessly dropped by somebody roaming where

The old walker feels his way, his trail so sheer.

RIP, Amico J. ("Chip") Barone

Just before Christmas, there were two events that needed our family's notice. One was pretty minor: I turned 71 on December 22nd.

The other was seismic. Our holiday had its bright side, certainly, mostly because of a clatter of five children (including the oldest daughter, mother already of three-year-old twin boy and girl, who delighted us by announcing she was with child again) and a larger clatter of grandchildren; but the joy was marred by the death at 55 of my wife's good and valiant brother (and one of my dearest friends), who, after a twelve-year battle with cancer that can only be called heroic, at last passed peacefully on the night of the 21st. 

We buried Chip two Saturdays back, after a Catholic wake on Friday evening that. despite frigid weather, saw 600 people file through the funeral home, everyone from all his doctors and nurses to the entire police department he served to the local firefighters, his barber, his auto mechanic, and the man who picked up his trash.

Chip was just a town cop who never sought to impress anyone, but merely to do the little things that helped others with their daily lives. His wonderful young daughter described her father's many acts of kindness and patience to her, for instance: sitting with her in the car after ballet class and playing Barbies with her until a torrential rainstorm let up; lying with her on his chest so as to warm up her winter bed before he put her into it; that sort of gesture. And as she said in her eulogy, "It turns out these little things were actually the big things." 

There's surely a salutary lesson there. It is not, of course, only poets and writers who want to extend ego into its widest possible domain. As a culture, we are schooled in thinking we must do extraordinary things or gather great riches or start great movements in order to lead worthy lives. My brother-in-law's example suggests that a far more humble sort of aspiration is what really makes an existence meaningful.

I was asked by my beloved friend's widow to compose a poem for his memorial. I didn't have much time to do that, but I dispatched the job quickly, largely, I suspect, because I had been doing "research" on it for the full three decades and more that I knew and loved Chip. It is not, I believe, a good poem, or at least not one whose quality would be obvious to a reader unacquainted with its honoree. I quote it below as further argument in favor of the self-effacing mode that he so nobly personified.

                  What It Boils Down To

                                                         –for Chip Barone, RIP

It boils down to this: you will always be young and handsome

And strong in our hearts– but above all kind, concerned

For how those around you felt, and this even when

You fought a war that few can so much as imagine.

We two were different: I’ve lived my life in the mind,

And although you were scarcely less bright, you were more the doer.

And you were my hero, still are. There seem fewer and fewer

Like you in whose person ethic and deed are combined.

Thought, no matter how lofty, seems duller than lead,

Without heart to match, just as faith without works is dead.

You said, no matter how terribly you were tried,

You felt a lucky man. I remember you said

As well– though we all must meet with pain and dread–

The world’s best things are happening every day.

You made that clear by the way you smiled on your wife,

On your children, and with pure joy on your two grandchildren.

That’s one example. If there’s some grand kingdom called heaven,

As I believe there may be, it will echo life

In what you showed to be its most loving hours.

And those of us who loved you –we are scores and scores–

Will take those moments you cherished and make them ours.

What it boils down to, though I say as much in tears,

Is that your valor and goodness will light our years.

On "Cultural Studies"

Though I ought to avoid self-advertisement, here’s the title poem of my most recent poetry collection. I hope I can quickly explain my motives for quoting it.

                        I Was Thinking of Beauty

            I’ve surrendered myself to Mingus’s Tijuana Moods

            on my obsolete record machine, sitting quiet as I sat last night.

            I was thinking of beauty then, how it’s faced grief since the day

            that somebody named it. Plato; Aquinas; the grim rock tablets

            that were handed down to Moses by Yahweh, with His famous stricture

            on the graven image. Last evening, I was there when some noted professor 

            in a campus town to southward addressed what he called, precisely,

            The Issue of Beauty. Here was a person who seemed to believe

            his learned jargon might help the poor because his lecture

            would help to end the exploitations of capitalism --

            which pays his wage at the ivied college through which he leads

            the impressionable young, soon to be managers, brokers, bankers.

            He was hard above all on poems, though after a brief appearance

            poetry seemed to vanish. It was gone before I knew it.

            The professor quoted,  Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty, then chuckled.

            He explained that such a claim led to loathsome politics.   

            I’m afraid he lost me. Outside, the incandescent snow

            of February sifted through the quad’s tall elm trees,

            hypnotic. Tonight as I sit alone and listen, the trumpet

            on Tijuana Gift Shop lurches my heart wih its syncopations.

            That’s the rare Clarence Shaw, who vanished one day, though Mingus heard

            he was teaching hypnosis somewhere. But back again to last evening: 

            I got thinking of Keats composing and coughing, of Abby Lincoln,

            of Lorrain and Petrarch, of Callas and Isaac Stern.  I was lost

            in memory and delight, terms without doubt nostalgic.

            I summoned a dead logger friend’s description of cedar waxwings

            on the bright mountain ash outside his door come middle autumn.

            I remembered how Earl at ninety had called those verdigris birds

            well groomed little folks. Which wasn’t eloquent, no,

            but passion showed in the way Earl waved his workworn hands

            as he thought of beauty, which, according to our guest,

            was opiate. Perhaps. And yet I went on for no reason

            to consider Maori tattoos: elaborate  and splendid,

            Jamaicans shaping Big Oil’s rusty abandoned barrels

            to play on with makeshift mallets, toxic junk turning tuneful.

            The poor you have always with you, said an even more famous speaker,

            supreme narcotic dealer no doubt in our speaker’s eyes  --

            eyes that must never once have paused to behold a bird,

            ears that deafened themselves to the song of that bird or any.

            Beauty’s a drug, he insisted, from which we must wean the poor, 

            indeed must wean ourselves. But I was thinking of beauty

            as something that will return -- here’s Curtis Porter’s sweet horn  --

            outlasting our disputations. I was thinking it never had gone.

Now as I have gotten older, I have more and more sensed the inutility, and even the inhumanity, of polemic. So although at some level, the poem above suggests my skepticism of what has passed for literary study in the past generation (and not coincidentally abetted the precipitous decline in college English majors), I trust it does so by indirection.

If literary study was once devoted to aesthetics (which I acknowledge as itself a reductive perspective), it has lately been transformed into a facet of what’s called “cultural studies.” And a recurring theme in those studies is that “established” authors, past and present, have tended to be mouthpieces for racism, sexism, economic repression, and all the other usual suspects. The poem notes with some irony that, although capital-C capitalism tends to be a major villain in such trendy theory, the majority of its most radical critics seem to work not in community colleges or in impoverished public school districts. No, they preach at places like Harvard, Yale, Brown, Stanford, or Duke. (To which I respond by thinking, well, talk, no matter how high-minded or “progressive,” is as cheap as ever).

Conversely, isn’t it strange that so many of our canonical writers, those reactionaries and repressors, seem to have been very ill served by what they allegedly championed? I think, for example, of the older Melville, for all intents and purposes chalking Xes on travelers’ bags at the custom house he manned, and in the end being called Henry Melville in his Times obituary; of writers from Hart Crane to Ernest Hemingway to John Berryman taking their own lives, many besieged by alcoholic despair; and the list could be almost infinitely protracted.

But having dispensed with such oddities, and too quickly, I concede, I need to consider something more central: namely, that I have yet to meet a single cultural-studies theorist who had even a faint clue about what goes into the actual composition of poem, story, novel or even non-academic essay. How, then, can they so confidently discuss a process that’s utterly foreign to them?

In order to make such an observation, however, I’m merely reversing the microscope through which the trendy critics look at us. Essentially, as the brilliant Marilynne Robinson has pointed out, their assumption is that we don’t know what we are doing, that we are somehow mindless serfs in service to great cultural forces that we can’t grasp. (Isn’t it curious how the most brilliant of our artists remains unaware of his or her intentions, while the theorists are so sharp that their own are based on full and infallible consciousness?)

To be fair, there is some truth to one part of that notion of artistic unawareness. In my own case, at all events, I never know where a piece of writing is going, at least at the outset. In that sense I am, yes, unaware. Or I’d better be: if I’m too clear on where I’m headed, I will experience no discovery in whatever I fashion; I will simply have illustrated ideas or convictions I already knew I owned.

A more serious charge from the hip professoriat is that some of us artists know damned well that we are promoting ideology, of a sort that by the theorists’ lights must inevitably be ugly. And yet, no matter I’ll grant that some writers are ambitious to illustrate “political” ideas acceptable to their constituencies, that some do have agendas and theories of their own, the work that results is almost without exception as dreary as you might expect. This is not a matter of left or right, reactionary or progressive. Check the annals of Soviet socialist realism if you doubt me, or the work of Hitler’s small but slavish cadre of artists.

I would insist that few truly memorable pieces of writing have ever derived exclusively, or even primarily, from  theoretical premises or from ideology. Writers may, of course, generate theories and even elaborate them into the ideological; but I think such theoretical postulation tends to arrive ex post facto. I’d claim that Ezra Pound’s “imagism,” for example, ensued upon his writing a broad range of lyrics in an instinctive way, and then erecting his manifestos based on what they showed him. I bet even he was surprised.

I know, of course, that any modish theorist who reads this will instantly charge me, again, with not knowing what I am up to. I number quite a few such folks among my friends, after all, and I’ve learned that for me to deny their aspersions is merely to convince them further of my ignorance. That’s a frustrating experience, a bit like denying your Oedipal instincts in a Freudian’s presence. He (Freudians are all but inevitably male) will attribute your denials to repression... which of course owes itself to your Oedipal anxieties.

The final irony: all those “progressives” behave (in word if not deed) as if they were champions of the downtrodden and the oppressed. But, to repeat myself, they spend virtually all of their time in one another’s company. Though I won’t for a single embarrassing minute pretend to be a worker-poet, I have spent a lot of my life, for reasons I needn’t go into, in the presence of the dispossessed, especially of people who –talk about downtrodden!–  are illiterate or subliterate. It’s telling to me that, like the African-Americans in our own south who picked up the musical instruments jettisoned by retreating British military bands and produced music that’s the jewel in America’s cultural crown; like the Jamaicans in my poem, who took the rusted barrels left behind in the wake of Big Oil’s Caribbean exploitations and turned them into steel drums: like these other oppressed people, our contemporary society’s most destitute and most “culturally deprived” seem perennially to treasure story, song, lyric.

They cherish beauty, that shibboleth of reactionaries.

But of course, I guess, they incline to the beautiful, or to rich narrative, or to memorable character, simply because they have not had their eyes opened by the ones who speak for them so gallantly, from behind the ivy.

Ellen Bryant Voigt's LessonI(s)

In the community library presentations I’ve been giving since my appointment as state poet, I’m frequently asked which contemporary poets I like to read. It’s a funny thing how that question –obliquely akin, say, to what is my favorite Robert Frost or Elizabeth Bishop or Emily Dickinson poem– seems to tie my tongue. Garrulous by nature, I get over that quickly enough to rattle off a half-dozen names. The program over, I hop into my car and, within seconds of leaving this or that library, I begin to wonder why on earth I didn’t also mention X or Y or Z?

I don’t really have any especial interest, though, in choosing up an A team. My tastes are eclectic enough, for instance, as to let me savor the best of Allen Ginsberg and the best of Donald Justice. I have noted, however, that a name I tend to mention belongs to one of my predecessors as Vermont poet laureate: Ellen Bryant Voigt. Many readers of this blog will know, or at least know of, her superb work. This is meant to remind them of what a local treasure she is, but even more to urge those to whom she remains unknown to dig into that treasure.

Ms. Voigt’s newest collection, just out in October, is Headwaters. Run. Yet I mean to consider an earlier poem here, for no particular reason save that it so lodged itself in my mind when I first came upon it. This was owing in part, no doubt, to the fact that a good friend was just then recovering –successfully, I’m delighted to say– from a full mastectomy. Like the speaker here too, I’m the child of a strongly authoritative female parent.

But the poem, on its intrinsic strengths, would have stuck with me even in the absence of all that:

            Lesson

            Whenever my mother, who taught
            small children forty years,
            already knew the answer.
            "Would you like to" meant
            you would. "Shall we" was
            another, and "Don't you think."
            As in "Don't you think
            it's time you cut your hair."

            So when, in the bare room,
            in the strict bed, she said,
            "You want to see?" her hands
            were busy at her neckline,
            untying the robe, not looking
            down at it, stitches
            bristling where the breast
            had been, but straight at me.

            I did what I always did:
            not weep --she never wept--
            and made my face a kindly
            whitewashed wall, so she
            could write, again, whatever
            she wanted there.

When I talk about poetry in my visits (and have talked in these posts now and then), I contend that what lyric can accomplish – in a way perhaps other modes of discourse ordinarily cannot– is the simultaneous dramatization of a number of emotions, thoughts, and impulses, in one frame, no matter some are flatly contradictory of one another. To that extent, though of course as a practitioner I am biased, the lyric poem seems to me our most effective mode of demonstrating how the mind actually works.

That mind, after all, does not always operate in an entirely consecutive manner. Logic and ratiocination are cultivated skills, and although they do serve us well in many instances, they are helpless, I think, to render that simultaneity and often that contradictoriness in deep human response. Note in “Lesson,” for example, the inevitably mixed feelings one might harbor with respect to so strong a mother as the one in “Lesson.” Again the feelings are contemporaneous.

In Voigt’s account, I’d suggest, we are called upon to admire the sturdiness and lack of self-pity on the part of the recuperating parent, even as we may feel the degree to which those very qualities might have constituted longtime burdens for her child to bear. In our age, when the forthright expression of feeling seems to be all but sacred, the woman in the “strict bed” (how deftly Voigt chooses that figure!) appears to dissuade the speaker from it. And yet is not the mother’s undauntedness at least an equally important value to her daughter’s self-voicing? And mustn’t we, like the writer, acknowledge authority in a woman who “taught small children/forty years” even as one can feel the discomfiture here in the poet’s continuing to be treated in some respects as a small child herself? There may be a degree of condescension in the lesson the older woman passes on, but I sense something exemplary in it too.

Further: when Voigt refers to her mother’s “strict bed,” can’t we recognize that that mother is now enduring her own set of strictures, her disease being no respecter of personality or accomplishment and old habits of mind dying hard in any event? These things alone should allow us to cut her some slack, as the saying goes. Don’t we likewise have more than one understanding of the speaker’s face when she describes it as “a kindly/whitewashed wall...”? We may regret that the speaker feels the need to put on a mask, to be less than “genuine”; on the other hand. there is genuine kindness in her very act of self-disguise.

Needless to say, as in all my commentaries, I here share only my own responses and values. I don’t presume to speak for others, nor to tell them how to read this or any other poetic utterance, all poems of quality being open-ended ones. I mean only to demonstrate how one person’s mind may be moved in that direction of multivalence upon encountering so good a piece of writing as this.

The first Vermont poet laureate once answered a question concerning the "message" of one of his poems rather wryly: “If you’re looking for a message, call Western Union.” Another great American poet of the twentieth century, Wallace Stevens, described the modern poem as one of “the mind in the act of finding/ what will suffice.” In our searches for sufficiency, for what may sustain us, even, say, when facing dreadful disease, I submit that we rarely resort to dialectical thought or settle for simplistic message. No, our paths meander, are omni-inclusive, resist reduction to anything so simple as what we call “meaning.” They are, exactly, acts of the back-and-forthing mind, not essays in disguise. “Lesson” strikes me as making all this clear– marvelously, movingly.

What's the Story?

The following is the prologue (for now at least) and the title essay of the work in progress, from which I excerpted a post late last month. It may get at some of the challenges we humans have, not merely as poets, in trying to be both truthful and coherent in our discourse. I hope, that is, it may do so at least obliquely.

What’s the Story?

You learn a thing or two by getting along in years, or so it’s said. My poor, cursed friend Mike, dead so young, didn’t get a chance to test that claim. He crashed his motorcycle, or rather, someone in a car smashed it for him. That, I suppose, is another story.

But Mike may belong in this one after all, because, after all, he was my dearest friend back then. He was also and always his doting grandmother’s pet. I knew the old woman well, a sweet-as-pie lady if ever there was one. Is that another story too, or stories, plural? Anyone’s personal history doubtless comprises subplots galore; who can be sure which is impertinent?  

In any case, I’m sitting here just now, waiting to see a doctor for minor emotional problems. I’ve visited him with some frequency over time, though never for anything that made him or me or anyone believe I was on the cusp of true crisis. Just a little unease, that’s all. You could roughly liken this appointment to an oil check, I guess.

The waiting room’s walls are yellow, so that may be what’s going on inside me just now. Despite the flowers on their corner tables, that color invades me. It brings a solo hunting trip rocketing out of my far past, because on my way home, all but out of gasoline near midnight and nowhere open to replenish the tank, I spent some doleful hours in a motel in Maine, whose walls were of this same pale hue. 

I’m sure the building was something much different, back when the town thrived. The white clapboard frame house may have taken boarders, but now a flat-roofed row of rooms jutted out from its rear side into a  former pasture. I wouldn’t be surprised if that extension were razed by now, the place turned into a Bed and Breakfast, as has been happening for some time to so many of these old New England home places, so grand and so tired. An out-of-towner buys one, spruces it up, then hangs out a quaintly lettered sign, usually with some name designed to be evocative but in fact absurd: “Quail Acres” maybe, in a part of the world where quail never existed, or, likewise, “Elk Meadow.”

But back to the year I recall here, when the town had little left but a paper mill, itself close to extinction, the industry having moved south to places with cheaper labor: Arkansas, Mississippi, what have you?  I took the room –there was really no choice– though I knew it would be full of an unmistakable mill-stench. Almost fifty years later, merely to think of that sulfurous reek makes me queasy, not to mention actually smelling it as I pass through the few towns where mills have somehow survived, however shakily.

Here is the odd part: that night in the motel I felt I was doomed. Nothing would ever come to good for me. Why such melodrama? I couldn’t and can’t make sense of it, because in fact my life was pretty average at twenty-five, neither particularly good nor bad. In any case, the restless tick-tick-tick of my young dog’s paws  on the scuffed linoleum floor made it seem ten years until morning broke and I could go find fuel at a station down by the tracks. That clatter from my nervous pointer sounded like a prelude to judgment.

As it happens, when I first sat down in the doctor’s office a few minutes ago, I took Psychology Today from a table, finding an article there by a certain Dr. Silver. The doctor opined that a person normally mourns a dog for three weeks. Well, I’ve buried too many dogs since that night I speak of, and whenever I think of one, no matter how long he or she has been dead, I almost weep. On every one of those dogs, be it pet or hunter, there hangs more than one tale.

Of course I don’t weep, really, not out loud, as my friend Mike’s grandmother did off and on until the day she died herself.

Am I so abnormal?  I can’t say, but at all events, that night I pictured a chasm yawning before me, and I felt certain that one day I’d fall into it. And so I did in a way, though at length I’d climb out on the other side– or mostly out, as I’ve said. I’ll talk about that at some other point. It’s hard to stay on track here. 

What made that night in the yellow motel so taxing? What about it induced this vision of the abyss?  That particular dog was, if anything, too alive. Mike still blithely trod the earth– or maybe not blithely, but he did move around on it for certain. Yet somehow I knew, or believed I knew, there was something terribly wrong on that earth, and it involved an evil act or thought of mine, even if I couldn’t for the life of me have said what or when or how.

I remember a train’s passing through that patch of village. It must have furnished the moribund mill. The freight cars’ clanking and rumbling woke me up around daylight, and the engine’s whistle seemed to scream misery and condemnation of my ineffable sin.

I’d keep on living with this kind of vague anguish for years, still unable to give it a name. Things today are better for me, much better, but to this day, I cannot really assign that name, no matter the anguish lurks, all but imperceptibly, deep inside me. How do you work out a narrative when so essential an ingredient is missing?

The spooked dog’s paws.  My long-gone boyhood chum. His sobbing grandma. The train. The stink of the pulp mill. What do I know of psychology? What does anyone know? That I ended up with the wife of my dreams and with five good children and, so far, four grandchildren– well, all that is simply a wonder.

But how will I explain everything to a doctor if I can’t tell it right to myself? What’s the story, really?