Poetry by Gershon Hepner

Ashes to ashes and dust to dust,
that is the way that we go when we rust,
oxygen making us oxidize, swords
turned into plowshares while fighting for words.
We must be buried as soon as we're rusty,
deprived of the luster that once made us lusty,
and dust turns to dust and our ash turns to ash,
with words that we've written recycled as trash.

5/29/06

Aspens doing something in the wind
give problems when you're searching for mots justes;
I've tried to do so often and I've sinned,
by imprecision readily seduced.
Finding the right phrases for the trees
that glitter in the wind is only granted
to those whose minds are blown when there's a breeze
refreshing them when they feel disenchanted.

Inspired by a poem by Robert Hass in the New Yorker, June 27,2005:

The Problem of Describing Trees

The aspen glitters in the wind.
And that delights us.

The leaf flutters, turning,
Because that motion in the heat of summer
Protects its cells from dying out. Likewise the leaf
Of the cottonwood.

The gene pool threw up a wobbly stem
And the tree danced. No.
The tree capitalized.
No. There are limits to saying,
In language, what the tree did.

It is good sometimes for poetry to disenchant us.

Dance with me, dancer. Oh, I will.
Aspens doing something in the wind.

6/25/05

As, sullen in the sweet air, sad,
infernos hold them where
they don't believe that they are mad,
although they sense despair,
they complicate the circuitry
the experts cannot fathom,
their minds becoming purgatory
astride a careless chasm.
Who are they? Where do they belong
and will they ever leave
the place where right seems always wrong?
They will, if they believe.

In "The Invention of Love, " by Tom Stoppard, A. E. Housman comes upon Oscar Wilde on the banks of the River Styx waiting for Charon and reading the poem from "A Shropshire Lad" about a young man who committed suicide to avoid exposure. When Housman tries to sympathize with Wilde for having had no friends, Wilde loses patience: "Dante reserved a place in his Inferno for those who willfully live in sadness--sullen in the sweet air."

5/12/98

Negotiating their asymmetries
within the wood you hear the grimmer trees
forbid all growth beneath their canopies
whose crowns despise the trivial tanner piece
translated from six pennies when a pound
was worth two hundred forty pence. Profound
the differences between the trees, and strange
how they like legal tender have to change,
and like a hedge without a trimmer tease
the level heads that hate asymmetries.

1/26/06

When wagging to the right its tail
your dog is telling you it's glad,
but with a leftward wag bewails
what's happening, to say it's sad.
The left brain shows the feelings that
are positive, like love and calm, and
greets friends, like a welcome mat,
with signals. On the other hand,
the right brain tells you it's afraid,
or else, at least, depressed, and warns
the body it may be betrayed,
evading enemies it scorns.

Asymmetry help us to read
the minds of sheep and chimps and chicks,
and those of honeybees, indeed,
but human signals play us tricks,
because we often smile when we
are sad, the privilege of clowns,
and, dreadful with asymmetry,
we hide from enemies our frowns,
and generally cannot be read
by friends or, even, when the light's on, lovers
who may find when they're in our bed
asymmetry between the covers.

Inspired by Sandra Blakeslee's article in the NYT, April 25,2006, "If You Want to Know if Spot Loves You So, It's in His Tail":
Every dog lover knows how a pooch expresses its feelings. Ears close to the head, tense posture, and tail straight out from the body means "don't mess with me." Ears perked up, wriggly body and vigorously wagging tail means "I am sooo happy to see you! " But there is another, newly discovered, feature of dog body language that may surprise attentive pet owners and experts in canine behavior. When dogs feel fundamentally positive about something or someone, their tails wag more to the right side of their rumps. When they have negative feelings, their tail wagging is biased to the left. A study describing the phenomenon, "Asymmetric tail-wagging responses by dogs to different emotive stimuli, " appeared in the March 20 issue of Current Biology. The authors are Giorgio Vallortigara, a neuroscientist at the University of Trieste in Italy, and two veterinarians, Angelo Quaranta and Marcello Siniscalchi, at the University of Bari, also in Italy. "This is an intriguing observation, " said Richard J. Davidson, director of the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. It fits with a large body of research showing emotional asymmetry in the brain, he said. Research has shown that in most animals, including birds, fish and frogs, the left brain specializes in behaviors involving what the scientists call approach and energy enrichment. In humans, that means the left brain is associated with positive feelings, like love, a sense of attachment, a feeling of safety and calm. It is also associated with physiological markers, like a slow heart rate. At a fundamental level, the right brain specializes in behaviors involving withdrawal and energy expenditure. In humans, these behaviors, like fleeing, are associated with feelings like fear and depression. Physiological signals include a rapid heart rate and the shutdown of the digestive system. Because the left brain controls the right side of the body and the right brain controls the left side of the body, such asymmetries are usually manifest in opposite sides of the body. Thus many birds seek food with their right eye (left brain/nourishment) and watch for predators with their left eye (right brain/danger) .
In humans, the muscles on the right side of the face tend to reflect happiness (left brain) whereas muscles on the left side of the face reflect unhappiness (right brain) . Dog tails are interesting, Dr. Davidson said, because they are in the midline of the dog's body, neither left nor right. So do they show emotional asymmetry, or not? To find out, Dr. Vallortigara and his colleagues recruited 30 family pets of mixed breed that were enrolled in an agility training program. The dogs were placed in a cage equipped with cameras that precisely tracked the angles of their tail wags. Then they were shown four stimuli through a slat in the front of the cage: their owner; an unfamiliar human; a cat; and an unfamiliar, dominant dog. In each instance the test dog saw a person or animal for one minute, rested for 90 seconds and saw another view. Testing lasted 25 days with 10 sessions per day. When the dogs saw their owners, their tails all wagged vigorously with a bias to the right side of their bodies, Dr. Vallortigara said. Their tails wagged moderately, again more to the right, when faced with an unfamiliar human. Looking at the cat, a four-year-old male whose owners volunteered him for the experiment, the dogs' tails again wagged more to the right but in a lower amplitude. When the dogs looked at an aggressive, unfamiliar dog - a large Belgian shepherd Malinois - their tails all wagged with a bias to the left side of their bodies. Thus when dogs were attracted to something, including a benign, approachable cat, their tails wagged right, and when they were fearful, their tails went left, Dr. Vallortigara said. It suggests that the muscles in the right side of the tail reflect positive emotions while the muscles in the left side express negative ones%u2026.
Brain asymmetry for approach and withdrawal seems to be an ancient trait, Dr. Rogers (Lesley Rogers, a neuroscientist who studies brain asymmetry at the University of New England in Armidale, Australia) said. Thus it must confer some sort of survival advantage on organisms. Animals that can do two important things at the same time, like eat and watch for predators, would be better off, she said. And animals with two brain hemispheres could avoid duplication of function, making maximal use of neural tissue. The asymmetry may also arise from how major nerves in the body connect up to the brain, said Arthur D. Craig, a neuroanatomist at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix. Nerves that carry information from the skin, heart, liver, lungs and other internal organs are inherently asymmetrical, he said. Thus information from the body that prompts an animal to slow down, eat, relax and restore itself is biased toward the left brain. Information from the body that tells an animal to run, fight, breathe faster and look out for danger is biased toward the right brain. In this way, Dr. Craig said, animals are naturally designed to cope with changing environments.

4/25/07

Parts of me stay glued together,
pulsing, sometimes radioactive,
unrestrained by laws that tether
reason as I write, redactive,
boldly taking many chances
on a curve that, asymptotic,
finds imaginary answers
on my axis that's erotic.

Sandra Tsing Loh gives a one-minute updat on scientific news each morning of the Pasadena City College radio station. She holds a bachelor's degree in physics from Caltech, a degree she describes as 'entirely made of partial credit. Yes - my degree was glued together, faintly pulsing with radioactivity, graded less on a curve than on a kind of wild hyperbola asymptotically approaching some imaginary actual answer.'

11/14/06

Decay, and its speedier
cousin, accident,
make the needier
beg atonement.

Roberta Smith ("Blurring Time and Place in Venice, " NYT, August 15) writes about an exhibition in Venice:
You know you've wandered into an unusual exhibition when what first appears to be a standing lead sculpture by Anselm Kiefer - an angel's wing, perhaps, or possibly a shield? - turns out to be something else entirely: an actual elephant's ear. "Artempo: Where Time Becomes Art" is a fabulously eclectic exhibition at the Fortuny Museum here that regularly blurs the line between art and nature. Among the most strange and powerful exhibitions I have seen, it stands at the pinnacle of a curatorial madness that seems to erupt here during the Biennale season. "Artempo" belongs to something of a trend: exhibitions that ignore all distinctions of time and place. Like this year's Documenta art exhibition in Kassel, Germany, it blithely yet rewardingly ignores divisions between periods, styles, mediums and even cultures. But it goes further, creating a site-specific, wildly stimulating environment of all kinds of artifacts, functional objects and natural specimens. It has been insinuated into an artist's house museum, that of the multitalented Mariano Fortuny (1871-1949) , an innovator in fashion, textile and lighting who was also a painter, photographer and theatrical designer. Fortuny lived, worked and experimented in his 16th-century Venetian-Gothic palazzo for the last 49 years of his life, creating a universe that remains very much intact today. The most ostentatiously Fortunian space is the grand middle floor of the palazzo, draped with the designer's textiles and lighted by his ornate parasol-like painted silk lamps, which served as a studio-salon-showroom. The organizers of "Artempo" have used this setting to create a reverie in three acts, skimming across human and geological history, ruminating on the nature and effects of time. It dramatizes art's ability to encapsulate time, and time's ability to turn just about anything, man-made or natural, into art.
The exhibition was conceived by Mattijs Visser, head of exhibitions at the Museum Kunst Palast in Düsseldorf, Germany, inspired by the vision and collection of Axel Vervoordt, a Belgian connoisseur, designer and antiques dealer. His many loans here suggest a preoccupation with decay. (Among his pieces are flaking table tops, displayed as paintings.) The show was organized by Jean-Hubert Martin, former director of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris; Mr. Visser; and Giandomenico Romanelli, general director of the city museums of Venice. Daniela Ferretti was exhibition designer. "Artempo" moves along the fluctuating line of demarcation "where time becomes art, " where an object's age and beauty acquire their own value. Beauty may be outright decay, or its speedier cousin, accident. Near the elephant's ear, for example, are three dark abstract paintings. Two are by Alberto Burri, a precursor of the Arte Povera movement. The third is a 16th-century canvas from the school of Tintoretto, scorched into blackness by fire, on loan from Venice's famed Galleria dell'Accademia. The show's three acts can be characterized in various ways - as the Marxist thesis, antithesis and synthesis; as a religious journey from earth, through purgatory to heaven; or as a continual back and forth between Mannerism and Modernism.

8/15/07

If you're accustomed to a constant ream
of cyberinformation, you'll be bored
when digitally you're deprived. Your stream
of consciousness won't be restored
until you're reconnected to the web
and to your e-mail correspondents, whose
departure made your inspiration ebb.
Addiction like this is far worse than booze
or drugs, because it very often wrecks
the brain it hijacks, virtually acquired
attention deficit disorder. Sex
can do this, too, to people who aren't wired,
and choice between addictions may depend
on whether you prefer to be the suitor
of someone with the virtues of a friend,
or someone virtual, screened by your computer.

Matt Richtel writes in the NYT, April 22,2007, about a twelve-hour blackout of BlackBerry service ("It Don't Mean a Thing If YoU Ain't Got That Ping") :

THE BlackBerry network went dark last week - cache-flow problems, apparently. Service stopped for a mere 12 hours, but to bereft users,12 minutes was too long. Information feeds our lives, they protested, and the BlackBerry provides it. What if we miss the e-mail message that makes or breaks our happiness, or our bank account? That's always possible, of course. But what if what the users were missing was more primitive and insidious than uninterrupted access to information? Experts who study computer use say the stated yearning to stay abreast of things may mask more visceral and powerful needs, as many self-aware users themselves will attest. Seductive, nearly inescapable needs. Some theorize that constant use becomes ritualistic physical behavior, even addiction, the absorption of nervous energy, like chomping gum. This behavior is then fueled by powerful social motivators. Interaction with a device delivering data gives a feeling of validation, inclusion and desirability. (It's no fun to be the only un-pinged person in the room.)
James E. Katz, director of the Center for Mobile Computing at Rutgers University, said the data coming from the devices was really secondary. "Look at a lot of the communication - it's idiotic in terms of substance, " Mr. Katz said. "But it's vital in terms of meaning." Dr. Katz argues that participation gives people a sense of belonging, one traceable to the atavistic desire to congregate and cooperate for safety and survival. In addition, he said, the constant checking is an exercise in optimism, like being an explorer or a gambler. Eternal hope delivered in tiny bits while you're on the go. It's random reinforcement, " Mr. Katz said. The fact that you don't know when important news will come, he said, "means you will quickly engage in obsessive compulsive behavior." These social needs and yearnings may drive the use. But at some point, that use becomes an end unto itself - a physical ritual that can take on some of the qualities of actual addiction, said Dr. John Ratey, a clinical associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard, where he specializes in neuropsychiatry. Several years ago, Mr. Ratey began using the term "acquired attention deficit disorder" to describe the condition of people who are accustomed to a constant stream of digital stimulation and feel bored in the absence of it. Regardless of whether the stimulation is from the Internet, TV or a cellphone, the brain, he said, is hijacked. I liken it to a drug, " Mr. Ratey said. "Drug addicts don't think; they just start moving. Like moving for your BlackBerry."

4/22/07

Hope has an audacity
exceeding the capacity
of what we, realistically,
should have in mind, statistically.

Barack Obama's book 'The Audacity of Hope' has become a best-seller and is certainly causing his presidential aspirations to be rather audacious.

12/11/06

With spectacles upon his nose
and autumn on his heart
the Jewish writer only knows
the love that's à la carte,
for love that's on the menu he
disdains, a gourmet who
loves changing colors, fancy free,
though fallen, always Jew.

From Ruth Franklin's review of Exit Ghost by Philip Roth (TNR, October 8, "Permanent Groping) , quoting his citation of Isaac Babel:
And so we return to the old merry-go-round, which has gotten creakier in the years since The Ghost Writer but still shows no sign of coming to a halt. The figures in Exit Ghost-Amy Bellette, Jamie Logan, Richard Kliman, Zuckerman himself-serve primarily as pegs on which Zuckerman hangs his favorite obsessions: the relationship between life and art, and the relationship between a man and a woman. The link between creative genius and sexual power has been a crucial aspect of Zuckerman's self-definition from the start. 'When I came upon Babel's description of the Jewish writer as a man with autumn in his heart and spectacles on his nose, ' he told us in The Ghost Writer, 'I had been inspired to add, and blood in his penis, ' and had then recorded the words like a challenge-a flaming Dedalian formula to ignite my soul's smithy.' The youthful Zuckerman was as yet unaware of the severe limitations of such a formula. If a writer defines himself by the blood in his penis, what happens when that vein runs dry? One response is the way Zuckerman has conducted his life up till now: retreating to his mountain to live and write in solitude, focusing his creative energies on the stories of others. The second is the one that is explored in Exit Ghost: to throw himself once again into the desperate pursuit of what he cannot have. The bitterness of this futile exercise evokes the novel's most intense moments. 'The center of gravity, '' Zucker- man quotes Chekhov, 'should reside in two: he and she.' It should. It has. It won't ever again.'

10/7/07