with my sister on the 44

our tour guide pointed out the world
strung up small and shivering in the air
when the san francisco curled up at the foot of my bed
we boarded muni with the new cold seats
teenagers stretched out across the aisle
eyes on their phones, sunken in apathy
we unwound along lombard street
fractured moonlight by the bay
the cable moved to the midnight pulse
a moth came through the window seeking light
i crushed it to the floor, not really
thinking of its frail hopeful life
you asked me for the meaning of
the bright box that carried us through the dark
i swallowed a bitter answer about something
that watched over us in our plastic cradle
and also watched me press the life
from the tiny, intrepid wanderer of the night
then you were gone, a skinny silhouette
fleeting beneath the streetlights
i could have followed you, maybe
but you seemed so profoundly disappointed
and i was transfixed by the torn wing
stuck to the bottom of my shoe
i shut my eyes and imagined that i was
somewhere high above, looking down
with my spine pressed stiff against the seat
i rode on to the edge of the sleeping city

Sophie Mazoschek (14)

Heavenly Pursuits

The rockets explode in continuous blazes of color which seem to illuminate the entire valley. As the whooshes and bangs from the sky above reverberate from the mountains around us, punctuated by oohs and aahs of wonder from the crowds below, our nostrils taste a strange, heady cocktail of gunpowder and damp earth.

The English have fireworks on November 5^th; the Swiss have them on August 1^st. We light up our skies to commemorate a traitor who tried to light a fuse in 1605; the Swiss light the blue touchpaper to commemorate Swiss National Day. August 1^st 1291 marked the beginning of the fabled 700 years of unification and democracy which (according to Orson Welles in The Third Man) had, famously but incorrectly, culminated in that zenith of Swiss achievement: the cuckoo clock.

In fact, part of the wonder of this particular firework display is that it has happened at all. August 1^st 1994 had threatened to be a complete washout. Early-morning fog had turned into mid-morning drizzle, which in turn had developed into torrential rain from midday to dusk, punctuated by a firecracker of a thunderstorm at about 4pm. For most of the day it had looked for all the world as though the firework spectacular, scheduled to begin around 10pm, really was destined to be the proverbial damp squib.

This is our second visit to Wengen. We had chosen the resort and the hotel more or less at random from the brochure last year, and such had been our delight with both that we have returned this year for an action replay. Wengen is a small but perfectly-formed Alpine gem, perched halfway up a lush, green mountain high above the Lauterbrűnnen valley. Here, traffic is a distant memory; apart from a handful of electric trucks (used by the hotels for transporting luggage to and from the station), cars are neither permitted nor necessary. The village is accessible only by rail, and is linked to the outside world by a regular procession of boneshaker trains which travel down the mountain to Lauterbrűnnen, Interlaken and beyond, or upwards to Kleine Scheidegg and the dizzy heights of the Eiger, Mőnch and Jungfrau.

Our hotel, the Falken, has been run by the same Italian-Swiss family since it opened 99 years ago. Apart from one or two concessions to the twentieth century (such as the installation of central heating, and a willingness to accept foreign credit cards), little appears to have changed in the meantime. The bedrooms evidently began as chambers séparées (two rooms with an interconnecting door), but are now put to more practical use as family suites. The Falken is one of those enlightened (but alas, all too rare) establishments which do not expect holidaying parents to share a claustrophobic bedroom with their sprogs. Yet the rooms retain a unique ambiance of an earlier age. Ours still boasts its original wood-paneled walls, a built-in Breton-style dresser, and a magnificent, tiled edifice in the corner, which looks like a cross between a samovar and a wash-stand. According to the owner, this used to be a stove, connected to the original kitchens by a complicated network of chimneys, which provided a primitive form of central heating.

The Falken’s dining room oozes a kind of eccentric, old-fashioned, understated elegance – from the snow-white tablecloths and parquet flooring, to the quietly authoritative omnipresence of the maître d’hôtel, Signor Emilio. Black-suited and white-haired, he glides around the dining room, effortlessly greeting the guests in their own languages (we’ve heard him converse in at least four in as many minutes) whilst simultaneously dispensing instructions to the waiters and opening our bottles of Hopfenperle beer with one hand. The food itself appears with the same effortless efficiency. A typical four-course masterpiece might well begin with hors d’œuvres garnished with crisp lollo biondo and radiccio lettuces which were still growing less than an hour ago, followed by a hearty soup carefully crafted to satisfy appetites whetted by the Alpine air. This might be followed by escalopes of veal, pork or turkey served with wild mushroom sauce, rösti and more home-grown vegetables. The whole thing would then be rounded off by a wickedly delicious pudding (one of our favorites was white chocolate parfait, with fruits of the forest sauce).

But on August 1^st the food achieves new dimensions of greatness, as the whole of Switzerland prepares for a great national party. This is evident everywhere we look: the stall in Wengen’s main square, dispensing free cocktails to the accompaniment of alpenhorns, accordions and yodelling; the special celebratory bread rolls (baked in the form of a Swiss flag) on sale in every bakery we pass; the houses, hotels and shops decorated with bunting and paper lanterns – and not least the special buffet provided in the evening by the Falken. Six garland-bedecked tables groan under the weight of melon with Parma ham, pâtés, prawn cocktail, Swiss tartlets filled with Gruyère cheese, tureens of soup, boeuf en croûte, honey-glazed roast ham, fish, chicken quarters, rösti, rice, noodles, bowl after bowl of home-grown salads, home-made chocolate mousse, syllabub, gateaux, more gateaux and a gargantuan basket of fresh fruit. Our experience with the gastronomic marathon last year taught us that this is the kind of occasion which one should not attend wearing tight waistbands! All day everyone has been stoically ignoring the rain. Perhaps one advantage of being British is that we can take the vagaries of the weather in our stride.

And now, two hours after the children should have been in bed, we are all perching, stiff-necked and numb-bummed, on a five-day-old copy of The Times, which is doing its valiant best to ease the discomfort of a hard, wet garden bench in the hotel grounds. We have followed the torchlight procession through the town, and have completely failed to follow the obligatory address given by the mayor of Wengen. Swiss German is less than comprehensible at best; this was delivered in an accent the like of which we have not heard since the days of Jim Henson’s Swedish Chef. Now the skyrockets are shattering the heavens, as if trying to compete with Nature’s own firework display in the afternoon, which had immobilized one of the region’s closed-circuit television cameras. The children, their tiredness forgotten, gaze heavenwards in undisguised rapture. From now on, our own firework displays on November 5^th will have much to live up to…

September 1994

An exploration of how the brain works.

Neuroscience haiku
by Leena Prasad

Blood-brain barrier
Microwaves, radiation
Open sesame.

Open sesame, in this haiku, refers to the dangerous break between the blood-brain barrier. This potentially fatal outcome can occur from exposure to microwave and radiation. This, and other, haiku in Eric Chulder’s, The Little Book of Neuroscience Haiku, deliver a quick, entertaining, and simple way to learn about the brain.

Every page in the book contains a haiku with a short explanation. For this haiku Chulder says: “THE BLOOD-BRAIN BARRIER, created by tight-fitting endothelial cells that surround blood vessels, limits materials in the blood from entering the brain. The blood-brain barrier can be broken down by microwaves and radiation, permitting the entry of chemicals into the brain’s blood supply.” The explanation is as succinct as the haiku itself.

Eric Chudler, Ph.D., is a neuroscientist at the University of Washington and the executive director of the Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering. He also hosts the website Neuroscience for Kids at http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/neurok.html. Dr. Chulder’s discusses his approach in writing this book at haikuHoopla.com, where his answers are as precise as the contents of his book.

The blood-brain barrier poem is from the “Places” collection in the book. The Little Book of Neuroscience Haiku is organized into three sections: places, things, and people. Places references locations in the brain. Things is about things that interact with the brain. People, of course, are people who have contributed to neuroscience as scientists, writers, artists, etc.

Excerpts from the book:

Borrowing from a traditional Japanese poetic form to present neuroscience, is a unique approach for expanding the horizons of knowledge about the brain. It is also a suitable format for quick flips while waiting at the doctor’s office, waiting for a train, waiting in line, etc. If you are suffering from information overload, this book is a nice change of pace for learning about the nervous system in short bursts of reading.

Indulge your brain
Feed it some haiku
about itself.

To read more about the brain, go to whoseBrainIsIt.com. To read other material from Leena, go to fishRidingABike.com.

Greetings readers, welcome to October 2013’s issue of Synchronized Chaos Magazine. This month’s theme is From The Inside Out, how big themes and larger social ideas play out on an individual level.

This theme can also signify the relationship between structure and function, how the way something is told, created, or done affects its meaning and impact.

Danny Barbare links form and function elegantly through his poetry, with a janitor who views his job as his creative work, figuratively signing his name with his mop. What he does comes from who he is, as he turns something ordinary into something personal and distinctive.

Our regular neuroscience columnist, Leena Prasad, changes things up in this month’s Whose Brain Is It, presenting an entertaining quiz covering the topics of her columns over the past couple years.

Some of her past columns dealt with music and memory, themes Irving Greenfield draws upon in his poetry. Greenfield illustrates how music can affect you, bring about certain memories and sentiments, even for things you don’t think you believe in. Melodies can reach somewhere in the mind deeper than facts or conscious thoughts, and Parisian poet Virginie Colline conveys this power through her evocative, romantic rendition of a moment near the sea. Colline’s words themselves do as much to express this feeling as their meanings, through rhythmical repetition of carefully chosen sounds, in this hybrid of craft and content.

Nigerian political commentator Ayk Adelayok uses similar methods to create a very different musical feeling in his piece, “Nigeria In-Dependence”. He uses punctuation, and short, pointed sentence fragments to call attention to disease, poverty and violence within his home country.

Other authors personalize, or localize, broader concepts. Cultural critic Christopher Bernard reviews Berkeley’s Aurora Theater Company’s production of Amy Herzog’s After the Revolution, where she examines how three generations of a family might be affected by a hypothetical left-wing Western political revolution. Bernard’s review encourages people not to stop working for humane ideals because of the failures in practice of certain governmental systems on both sides of the spectrum.

George Sparling’s new short story, “The Nearness of You” shows an awkward moment between two radically different individuals. The author speculates on the paradox and ideal of tolerating even the intolerant, and the associated dilemmas. Bruce Roberts’ review of Opera San Jose’s production of Falstaff shows people resisting unwanted seduction through cleverness and humor. Some may question whether sexual harassment is a laughing matter, but sometimes making someone’s behavior look ridiculous can serve as a real way to get their attention and disarm them. There is a difference between deriding someone’s behavior by laughing at it, and poking fun at the very idea of the behavior being an issue. And we hope Opera San Jose’s production found an effective way to convey its message.

Several writers use the daily experiences of small groups of characters to touch on deeper issues. Scott Archer Jones creates a memorable bartender whose sense of justice and loyalty transcends the racism of his time, in his short piece “Bear among the Dogs”. Carol Smallwood illustrates the way fiction can both mask real issues and comfort us, sometimes both at the same time, as her narrator struggles through a violent, tumultuous marriage in a town constructed to mimic and honor where Shakespeare created his plays.

John Grey gives a sense of a strong, precise and reserved man from the tightly honed, very concrete description of his son’s thoughts watching him shave, and continues to create these types of characters throughout the rest of his poetry. William Doreski presents prose-style poems showing us mice in his bedroom, his canoeing trips, the outdoors, and a meal where he self-consciously avoids organic produce for fear of losing his manliness. Valentina Cano also creates miniature personal vignettes, poems with bursts of feeling and imagery. She lets us see the river shaped like pus, the grossness of anorexia – and a surprising image of betrayal that does not involve adultery or heartbreak.

The poet who goes by ePLy has included a collection of pieces analyzing our motivations for certain values and behaviors. She questions why we try to manipulate each other to get along, help each other, and live responsibly within nature through fear, guilt and apocalyptic thinking rather than encouraging people to preserve our world out of genuine love and respect. Furthermore, are we good examples ourselves of the behavior we often insist on from others?

Reviewer Kimberly Brown also highlights the value of changing one’s perspective to effect change in one’s own life, as well as the larger world. In Alison Nancye’s Note to Self, one of the books she discusses, she observes how the protagonist learned to stop hating her life and feeling like a victim simply by choosing to identify and work towards her own goals. Brown also provides a unique point of view concerning Katherine ‘Catfish’ Nelson’s novel Have You Seen Me, a coming of age tale dealing with teen runaways, abuse and poverty. Many other reviews focus on the experience of the teens involved, their courage in building new lives, while Brown considers the impact on parents in the small town who would have worried about their own children.

More often than not, different perspectives and ways of viewing situations exist. Our other book reviewer this month, Elizabeth Hughes, looks at titles showcasing methods for and stories of self-improvement and personal resilience in this month’s Book Periscope. She also includes an original poem about her own journey out of homelessness.

I myself was skeptical of the self-help book industry for awhile on behalf of people in situations such as Elizabeth’s. I wondered if authors were simply making money by convincing people dealing with deep personal and societal issues that all could quickly get solved just by following a particular formula, and if it didn’t work, then one must not have done it right. However, Elizabeth had a very empowering experience reading the books, considers them very helpful and feels she learned a lot from them. So I have learned not to so quickly dismiss a genre when it seems to benefit others’ lives, when they perceive the books differently.

Lance Manion’s short story “Risking the Scraped Knee” whimsically looks at how instant fame, even for something quirky, can affect a person’s casual relationships. Italian photographic artist Samy Sfoggia also plays with concepts of memory and importance in her series The happy wedding of Mr. Nobody and Ms. Obvious, ascribing a certain dignity to her fanciful subjects’ ‘wedding’ through making the work resemble treasured heirlooms. She encourages us to consider what we find worthy of remembrance, and why we automatically lend gravity to some people and occasions.

W. Jack Savage illustrates interpersonal violence at large institutions of higher learning in his short piece “The Story of Baggs House”. We see here how some large decisions, which supposedly stem from deep concern for the welfare of the academic fields, or at least the schools, can in fact arise out of jealousy and ego issues among individual people. Yet his piece is not without a redemptive ending, and a note of hope for the human race.

Our dreams, and our music and art, can also reflect our hopes and higher aspirations, coming from our subconscious minds and extending out into the general culture. Fashion columnist Mimi Sylte interviews Lauren Grinnell, founder of Runway to Freedom, a Seattle fashion show benefiting a domestic violence shelter. As in “The Story of Baggs House”, she highlights the possibility of change and transformation for an aggressor, where they can learn healthy ways of relating to people if the process starts early.

Tetman Callis writes about a literal dream in his poetic piece, “After the Dreaming”. Inspired by the native peoples of the American Southwest, the poem suggests a return to a more traditional way of life, described colorfully but without romanticization.

Visual artist Kyle Hemmings also works with dreams, rendering them into colorful abstractions in his set of images. His pieces combine a technical, modern flavor with the energy of the subconscious. Old and classic movies inspire him, and his work thus represents a personal re-imaging of part of our broader cultural heritage.

Richard Hartwell brings us his childhood memories of learning to sail, helping rescue a swimmer, exploring boating technology, and not quite fitting in at the yacht club. These vignettes have a dreamlike quality, as they are vividly imagined, atmospheric, and non-linear, and come across as interesting and nostalgic.

Dave Douglas creates a vision of heaven in his poem “Limitless,” where he looks at flower petals and envisions infinite creativity and hope, symbolically as an ever-growing vine. He describes and idealizes the psychological effects of coming from a place of abundance and gratitude, remembering the goodness and beauty one has and looking forward to the future. For people so often afraid of losing what they have, who tightly grasp onto and fight over resources, this can represent a new way of looking at things. One can also imagine what they would do if nothing got in one’s way, and start working towards that in sustainable ways here.

Thank you very much for taking the time to enjoy this large and complex issue!

When hate is in the seeds, you can only harvest weeds. Ernst Jünger, The Glass Bees

In joined hands there is hope; in a clenched fist, none. Victor Hugo, Toilers of the Sea

An eye for an eye only ends up making the world blind. Mohandas Gandhi, The Mahatma

 

The Balboa Bay Yacht Club

 

Slip-Streams of Consciousness

I sit here listening to wind chimes softly melodizing in a light breeze backed by the ever-present sound of falling water from a waterfall and fountain in the pond. The Tibetan prayer flags are sending their plaintives up and out of the yard on the same soft breeze that animates the chimes.

Parts of the garden are slowly dying back, or going dormant as the nights approach freezing, although the days seem to still hover in the eighties. Unseasonable days are driving the plants and flowers crazy. I suspect the animals, reptiles and insects are more than moderately confused as well. 

Inside, I watch the news about the ten- to fourteen-foot swells hitting west- and northwest-facing beaches and I am reminded of the extreme tides occasionally surrounding Balboa Island when I was young. In some places the slight seawall would be compromised and the sidewalks and gutters would be awash with nowhere for the overflow to go. We felt as Atlantians sinking into the sea, at least for the scant hours until the tide turned and the local fire department could start pumping out the hardest-hit streets.

I sit here as an aging man with memories rummaging through my mind. Not all are good or fanciful, some are downright bizarre and macabre, but all are obviously part of me or they would not arise, bidden or unbidden.

I recall walking around the Island, and I do mean around the Island, on the sidewalk making a complete revolution. Some great exercise and, often as not, boats to stare at and oogle, far more worthy of wolf-whistles and adoration than even the skimpiest-clad beauty sunbathing on the beach. Even the sleek-lined hulls bouncing in their nudity of sails, bobbing at anchor in the channel, were more captivating of me from nine to fourteen years of age.

When Greg and I walked the Island, we would stop at the far northwest at the address we called merely the Shell House. On patio and deck, banister and railings, were displayed the shells and shellfish and the anemones, octopi, squids, and starfishes collected over years and miles and displayed in preservation jars for all to see. Back then none were ever stolen or molested and we all seemed to take a proprietary pride in what was only a proximity of residence.

The Shell House faced Newport Harbor’s great Turning Basin and one had only to turn about to behold an array of shapes and sizes of ships of all descriptions from the 101- and 102-foot Pioneer or Goodwill to the eight foot Sabots or Balboa Dinghies. There were powerboats, to be sure, some of great size and grand substance like the Ebb Tide and John Wayne’s Grey Goose, but it was the creatures of sail that always caught my attention. There was something about capturing the wind and placing it under bondage that captivated me. The scene was awesome, particularly on weekends or summer Wednesday evenings during the Beer Can Regattas. 

On those evenings, especially on those when the wind died to a mere whisper, one was easily captivated by the almost silent, slow-motion tacking duals of fifty-, sixty- and seventy-foot sloops, yawls, ketches, and schooners working their way up the north Lido channel. Each tack followed by silence and the serene-tenseness of slow footing to windward. 

The northernmost mark would be rounded and then an almost dead-run down the entire length of Newport Harbor would be fought to the finish line. By prior agreement, no spinnakers would be used, being far too unwieldy in the confined channels, but the sight of three or four of these large ocean racers slipping wing-and-wing downward, abreast of one another and almost filling the channel with thousands of square feet of contained wind energy, was not one to be forgotten.

As I became older I was no longer restricted to being an observer to such a fantastic image, but became an actual participant in the production of these sights. It would be impossible almost for me to exaggerate the ego posturing I assumed during the rare moments when my measly muscles were not being tasked to their limits. And I did pose and was definitely quite full of myself for my position as part of the crew on a fifty-one-foot eight-metre sloop Angelita. From her owner-skipper, Walter Podalak, I learned the basic skills of blue water racing. 

Ocean racing is an adrenaline thrill, a rush of speed and power, controlled fury as opposed to silent stealth. However, the contained might of those boats when raced occasionally with the confines of Newport Harbor, was not to be underestimated. My dreams and recollections are to be envied and I would not relinquish them even for a ‘round-the-world passage in a sumptuous stateroom aboard the QE2. 

A recollection of the day Greg and I, perhaps age thirteen, helped a woman caught in the riptide off Balboa Pier. We kept treading water with her and ducking under each massive wave as set after set came in. We were trying to get her to swim across the riptide, out past the surf-line, and then to swim in on the next large set, but without fighting the riptide. But she would have none of it. Finally, a lifeguard swam out with a rescue buoy and helped the woman swim in. To us? Nothing! No thanks, not comments, no help, not even a nod of the head from the lifeguard. Such is the life of heroes at sea.

I never knew how he was beached nor why nor where, although he ended in Newport Harbor by the 1950s working as a handyman for the Balboa Yacht Club. His name was Bill, Wilhelm, Old Bill to us kids running loose around the yacht club. Most of the kids were the spawn of money with fathers at the bar and mothers on the front lawn as uncovered as possible. I was an outsider, like Old Bill and Earl, who piloted the yacht tender for those boats moored in the main channel.

I belonged to the Balboa Island Yacht Club. One dollar, summer only, and you could race your boat against the rich kids just as if you were new money and welcomed. Me? I was old poverty, son of a divorcé, and definitely not welcomed by the yacht club’s brass, just by Bill and Earl. I was taught to pilot the Club launch, to place the turn flags and start/finish line for the ocean racers, and all manner of things nautical. I learned a hell of a lot more from them about seamanship anyway!

What’s the point of all of this? Nothing but to stir my salty loins, to pay homage to my mentors, to re-collect the me I am, and to place, at least, the value of memory on my earlier education of things that matter.

Rick Hartwell is a retired middle school (remember the hormonally-challenged?) English teacher living in Moreno Valley, California. He believes in the succinct, that the small becomes large; and, like the Transcendentalists and William Blake, that the instant contains eternity. Given his “druthers,” if he’s not writing, Rick would rather be still tailing plywood in a mill in Oregon. He can be reached at rdhartwell@gmail.com.