by Philip Monte Verde

"It is death that is spinning the globe."

Death is our common companion. The well-meaning protectors are misguided in their reasoning for removing cinematic death and violence from theater and television. They wrongly seek to preserve innocent minds as they would fine china, never letting them out into the world to acquire a few scratches. But although the rationale of the protectors is off, their ends should probably be met. For the scripted and acted deaths are miles from reality.

While I'm sure I had seen a hundred 'deaths' on television before then, those of knights, cowboys, and space-invaders, it was the deaths of my grandmothers that first exposed mortality to me. The first grandmother I saw made up artificially and surrounded by flowers in her casket. The second grandmother I saw frozen, twisted and real in her hospital bed. These are two images I will never be able to get out of my head, nor should I even try.

These are not the images we see from our living room sofas or reserved-in-advance recliner-style AMC movie theater seats. Here final words of encouragement for the living are uttered by an actor holding the wound in their chest before their head droops as if for a nap. Here the blood of the anonymous conquered is splattered upwards, and the camera pan follows to show the gnarled, dark face of the antagonist or the handsome, white-toothed face of the protagonist. The slumped actor is a minor plot point, and the death of the extra is an insignificant blink; a quickly snuffed candle. While the film crew, whether HBO or CNN, packs up to follow the fighting down the road, human beings lay moaning or silenced in open fields and shell-pocked streets. Whether they are portrayed in our fiction or our non-fiction as the good dead guys or the bad dead guys matters nil to the weeping families, the families that must mourn them if they died, or tend to their emotional and physical damage if they lived.

One would think this would be perfect material for big and small screens alike. Our most common form of storytelling is that of the redemptive hero. He, still rarely she, who has had defeat laid on him, brick by brick, but manages to miraculously find the strength to burst through the masonry to triumph, until the next episode. What a way to build sympathy for the hero it would be then to show the common soldier in the post-op ward reaching to scratch a phantom itch in the pocket of air his arm had once filled. Or show the aged grandmother, hunched over a wood table, a long curl of ash running from the cigarette she lit and forgot in her worry of what to do with the orphaned grandchildren obliviously playing tag in the kitchen. Show the sleepless nights that follow the trauma of wartime rape. Show the pitiful efforts of the surviving villagers to remove rubble to reopen the bakery.

What sympathy these scenes would build if, indeed, that were the goal. The sad truth of it all is an elephant that has been stomping about the room unacknowledged for centuries. Building sympathy for the redemptive hero is not and has never been the goal. Tug on the high-cheek boned face of the knight whose armor shines through mud and blood and you will find his tan-but-not-too-tan skin peels off under your fingers. Gasp when you look up and see the sweaty, disheveled beard, hideous scars and wild, black eyes staring at you. For your hero and your villain are the same man. They are both yours, and they are you.

For in the two hours that The Joker holds an entire city at his mercy, we ride shotgun and feel that power vicariously. While Popeye fumbles for a can of spinach, we project on Bluto the Rapist "our own repressed anger, violence, rebelliousness or lust" and revel in the evil of it all. For fifty eight minutes in a Game of Thrones episode we indulge in the slaughter of the extras, before Jon Snow sends the baddies retreating until next week. He suppresses the evil we created in the first fifty eight, and in the final two minutes we have room to repress again our inner tendencies.

He who went outside the power structure in greed and lust (the criminal), is pushed back by he that went outside the power structure for more noble aims (the vigilante). Credits roll before we have a second to ponder how we got there. The lights come back up before we can consider how the villain was created, why we tune in every week for the slaughter, or an alternative way to fight evil beyond the violent methods that evil naturally prefers.

(quotes from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and The Myth of Redemptive Violence)

by Philip Monte Verde

​"How do you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?" This quote from the ancient philosopher Meno appears on page four of "A Field Guide to Getting Lost," but for author Rebecca Solnit it may as well have been the writing prompt at the top of each blank page on her word processor. Her book is full of self-described 'maps," attempts to demonstrate how she has navigated towards that undefined "thing." It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone at this point that incessant busyness and multitasking aren't the surest way to find that thing. That thing sneaks in in overlooked places. It takes the talent of being lost, that is making the conscious choice to be fully present.

Across the yard where I write is a 6-foot wooden fence. A spider, probably of zero consequences size-wise, has zig-zagged webs across the picket tips. This would hardly be worth breaking my book-review-narrative up had the little bug-eating bugger not then had the nerve to somehow propel its tiny body five feet off the fence and three feet down to the back of a chair in the grass. I can only pray that it is now making the scaling trek back up a wood slat, only to leap and leap again to create a web the size of which no one of its species could ever dream.

The point of that, of course, is that you have to look up sometimes. In particular you have to look up at 9:45 a.m., in late June, when the sun is breaking perfectly through the maple leaves to show off the long, thin hair of that one strand of web. Just time it right.

Looking up is a start anyways. "Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark," Solnit councils. Leaving it ajar, perhaps then it is important to acknowledge the threshold exists, and proceed to walk through that opening. To truly be lost, and to find, may require getting up from the patio table, the deep sunk couch, or the ergonomically designed, highly adjustable, $949.99 Aeron desk chair by Herman Miller.

"Lose the whole world...get lost in it, and find your soul." We've been retracing the same maps. When we say 'follow in someone else's footsteps,' it is meant quite literally. It's an easy habit to get into. As an infant, we would be devoured by wolves, or their modern equivalent raccoons, if we didn't have older humans to protect us and for us to emulate. Like migrating elephants, we follow these older humans trunk to tail through the first quarter, or third, or half(!) of our lives. A midlife crisis, classically defined, can really occur at any age. It's the moment you raise your now jumbo-sized head up and see the savanna alongside the trail. To see your body has grown stronger (or weaker) and that you've made plenty of money (or not), but that your soul isn't carried on this caravan.

by Philip Monte Verde

​Ribs of mine, often I wish you would just go on holiday. Buy three tickets, and take my shirt and skin with you. Let my heart live openly.

I want my afternoons and evenings to fill with the joy of Saturday mornings. I want to write, to drive, to sing, to flirt, to kiss, to cry, to yell and scream. These ribs feel more like a chain than a shield. Layers of clothing cake on like the exhaust on glass that obscures views.

Openly. Not stuck behind unasked questions or subdued feelings. Ebullient with compliments. Smile-giving, life-reinforcing acknowledgements of the humanity in others. I want to give that face-reddening praise the way a loving husband gives flowers.

Oh, to take people out of the rut. To gently tug up a chin as a 1950's leading man might, to make moment cementing eye contact, and to tell a man, woman, or child that they are beautiful. That they are charming. That they exist.

That they exist. Too often we forget that even we exist. We lose sight of the only truth: that we are part of this world.

by Philip Monte Verde

Alpha - Sometime Later (YouTube) (Spotify)
Alpha - Somewhere Not Here (YouTube) (Spotify)

There is this man, in Sometime Later by Alpha. He is a trapped man. A thoroughly ensnared man. Entangled by a net, he struggles against drowning. He is caught in the binding force of lust, of delay, of possibility, of just maybe sometime later. And it's long. The song is long, the wait is long, and the longing is an ache. The ache takes form. It becomes this ugly green pool below our rib cages. It's disgusting, it's awful, and it's perversely beautiful. 

His words, the words of this beaten man, are half-formed invocations. They are begging prayer. I suffer with him. How can I continue to listen to this man struggling for air? I rage at my inability to claw my way into ear-buds, race with knife between my teeth down the cord to find this poor, poor soul. To find him in that trawling net beside bluefin and dolphin. To hack away at the abrasive rope that pulls his swelling body across oceans. 

If I can't free him from that net, then I wish to give him words. Words of comfort, words that bring peace. Words to help express in sentences, what he seems to struggle to say in song. 

Life is such a slow drowning. A slog of a wait to expire. That is, until it isn't. For some of us there is that breaching moment when hands penetrate the sea. When a firm palm finds a limp wrist. That moment we are plucked up by mermaids or sailors. 

For others, that breach never comes.

At the end of the album (Come From Heaven) the same melody plays, and you think it's a repeat. But a smooth female voice tells us that we have moved to the beach. Tragically belated, she sings of our friend in the net. Does she know that the boat that pulls her eyes to the horizon tows him below it? Her words are a phantom life-safer. "You were safe and warm, I was in your hands." Cruel, cruel, cruel for our drowned man. This is a song of nostalgia. The separation is permanent. Perhaps sometime later they could've been together. Somewhere, but not here.

When do echoes stop?

Can old domestic disputes still be heard in the kitchen? Can the girl make out her faint infant cries on her first day of kindergarten? Do moans remain etched in bedroom walls like cave drawings long after she has left you?

Are plaster, plywood, concrete, and brick enough to contain our shouts? Do they mingle together with the whispers of the elderly lady a floor below and the cheers from the football stadium across town? Do they penetrate crust and mantle to become fossilized time-capsules for our descendants? 

Do they rocket past clouds and satellites, Saturn and Pluto, and out of the Milky Way? Do they sail on intergalactic currents, catching in the earpieces of voyeuristic aliens? Can a pleading, praying, begging, screamed entreaty for love, understanding, or forgiveness outpace the expanding universe, reach the bubbled ether of its edge, penetrate the border of existence and land in the lap of an understanding God?

And if so, is there enough fuel for the salve we need to make it back in time?

In my hand I see:
The tropical delta.
Blood rushes downhill,
Pushing to the fingertips.

My rivulets are warm,
When they bring me to your stream.

At the beginning you are February.
Life is hidden, dormant below.
My touch creates wetness on the ice.

Slickness, the first sign.
Cracks split, a thaw.
The timeless rhythm returns.

I have been here before,
On this creek bed.
I know the walls of each shore.
The center, where the stream flows.
The center, where the boil bubbles.

Life returns to the surface,
Forcing its way through.
The first budding,
Then every color.

What was slow, runs fast.
The body unfurls as a sail.

Ice shattered, rapids blasting.

Rivers are hints of the eternal source,
That is why they lay so close to the womb.

Once resting, then restive,
The force is now unstoppable.
No resistance, no taming.
Stream out, scream out.

​

​Morning sunlight sits outside the window like a childhood friend waiting to play. It beckons me gently.

Sacred morning. Last night's silt has sunk and settled; waters are calm above. Fish and frogs whip their bodies in my mind, to be observed and described. Looking up from my mattress, I see their slick bodies in earthy tones. I see people I've known and people I've yet to meet. As I start to think of the day ahead, the marine animals become disturbed. Such moments are a stalking predator. I must relax my mind, lest I cause a whirlpool.

A chirp from a chickadee at the kitchen window and the weight of a cat on my legs are better segues to reality anyways. A tender reminder that no matter what form our thoughts assume when they get stuck in our heads, life goes on all around us. In superstitious Russia there is a saying: the end may be coming, but sow the field anyways. On the sea-bed I meditate on that. At this moment the bed is all that is confirmed reality. How long can I maintain this stillness? When will the hours of sewing arrive?

Swim bladders keep fish from becoming anchors. The chickadee who announces itself in punctuated gasps is driven by hunger. The sun that sits outside my window lights a billion people and countless more blades of grass. 

The universe's resting state is turmoil. I scatter the fish and the frogs with my movement. Better go join the action.

I have been here before,
On this creek bed.
I know the walls of each shore.
The center, where the stream flows.
The center, where the boil bubbles.

Life returns to the surface,
Forcing its way through.
The first budding,
Then every color

The Thaw, a collection of intimate poems by Philip Monte Verde, can be downloaded for free here.

by Philip Monte Verde

The great blacksmith looms above us.
His hands are impossibly hard.
An even larger blacksmith must have made him.
Some unfathomable giant who creates men not of flesh,
But of steel.

Our hard man though,
He's closer to us;
A god lower in the strata.

The fire certainly bothers him.
He becomes a machine in need of oil,
Such is his battle with hydration.

Sweat empties out of his scalp.
The squeezed sponge,
It pours down his face,
Blinding eyes and soaking a beard
That drags down on his chin.

The drips trickle down his arms,
And he wipes those hard hands
On the rigid fabric worn by men of his trade.

I tell you this so you know,
He suffers too.

But this is no act of indentured servitude.
He is no slave, but master,
Our blacksmith is an artisan.
He is a creator, our creator.
And any artist knows the sacrifices that must be made

For perfection.

The fire can not be dimmed,
Nor the hammer swung with less furor,
And the day remains necessarily long.
Have sympathy, friend, empathy if you can.

The creator knows.
He knows how our skin feels when it touches the flame,
How our blood boils,
And of the callouses that form.
As time passes, he turns our body,
As the world turns,
And he hears our screams.

He places us on the anvil,
Which so resembles the executioner's block.
He takes in the fear we give off.
As his creation, this is as significant a moment for him,
As it is for you.

The blows will hurt, they have to.

But we must be strong,
Strong as his aged arms.

We must not break, 
In order to become better.

And when we are lifted whole from the anvil,
And dunked in the cooling tub,
Our relief is contagious.
As we bathe in water,
The smith reaches for a glass of his own,
And mutters a satisfied toast.

When he picks us up again
We catch the light.
Not the flame that warped us,
But the very sun.
We glint that solar magnificence back.
We shine, the blacksmith smiles,

And we are so much more.

To me the mountain has always been more utility than beauty, as a step-stool is. To be sure, my eyes have lingered over many hills, especially over the blue humps you can see way out on the southern skyline from Cobb's Hill or Highland Park. 

I wrote of the wheat field as metaphor for life, and we do walk from one patch to another, searching for better bites. The mountain, to me, offers an escape in perspective. Climbing above, you see more than a bird's eye view, if not quite a God's eye view. The wheat field spreads out before you, and I mean that literally and figuratively.

In the literal sense, you have the view of the valley. In Montana, we walked a short trail to get a clear view of the Flat Head Valley. The city of Kalispell, straight ahead, was only part of that view. To the north I could see the break in the Rocky Mountains that was the gateway to Glacier National Park, and even imagined an ancient river rushing down. To the south was the beginning of Flathead Lake, stretching far out of view. This wasn't just a pretty panorama though. In the valley, on the street, and on the crown of our heads, storms fall. Amid rain, our world is rain. But take the high road and you see that it is only raining, say, over by Farm to Market Road, and not at the airport. In our wheat field, at any given moment, we may be stuck in a barren patch. But go up, and look down, and you see the possibilities.

Figuratively, I am in love with the symbolism of the mountain-top. In 1818, Caspar David Friedrich painted "Wanderer above the Sea and Fog." Below him are the symbols of Germany, it's geography, before there was a Germany. The man in the painting, the wanderer, is reflecting on his self, and his would-be country in arguably the most significant era of change in human history. In this case on the mountain, you don't see what is literally true. Neither Flathead Lake nor the sprawling footprint of Brighton. Rather, all your hopes, your fears, your loves, and your past come rushing up the hills as rising fog. Ideally, the fog clears and you get a view you can understand. Then you can, as the Allman Brothers say, "climb down off the hilltop baby, get back in the race."