Árni Ibsen wrote:
> 
> on 9/24/03 10:24 AM, Frederick Pollack at [log in to unmask] wrote:
> 
> > Electricity here in northwest DC went off last Thursday during Hurricane
> > Isabel and just went on again.  Six days of rotting food, failing
> > batteries, freaked-out cats, unromantic candles, no music, and only
> > restaurant coffee.
> 
> Good to have you back, Frederick. Hope things are moving towards some sort
> of normalcy where you are. Power cuts are very rare up here, thank god, but
> we had them frequently when I was a child, i.e. before we had the sense to
> place power lines underground rather than on fragile wooden poles. I
> remember when in harsh winters electricity was rationed at night and we had
> to take our dinners early and then sit in the dim light from candles and
> oil-lamps. There was a massive power cut in southern Sweden and Denmark
> earlier this week. The reports of an entire city like Copenhagen stopping
> dead for hours were eerie. The fault there was not bad weather but a
> break-down in a nuclear power plant in Sweden, which caused a
> 'chain-reaction' involving another nuclear plant and several regular power
> plants.
> 
> Best
> 
> Árni
> 
> --

Arni, you live in a benign social-democratic country where government -
I don't know this for certain but would suspect it - does things like
bury everyone's power-lines.  I live in the District of Columbia, a
predominantly black city which until 1974 was ruled by Southern white
Congressmen and since then by a rightist Congress and generally corrupt
nepotistic locals; whose very license plates read "Taxation Without
Representation"; which has no money to upgrade its century+-old
pipe-and-sewer system or repair potholes; and whose power company is in
any case privatized.  Meaning no disrespect to the workers who were
electrocuted this week by downed lines.

Today I paid $1500 to have the fallen trees front and back cut up and
hauled away.  At least, thank God, they didn't hit us or the house or
flatten the car, like several on our street.

Getting back to normal, yes ... The German word unheimlich - eerie,
preternatural ... absolute blackness and silence, broken only by
occasional sirens and lights and noise of jetliners heading towards
National (no one we know calls it Reagan).  Deepest country in the midst
of city.  I have Gnostic tendencies anyway and all I felt in the long
evenings and nights was absolute inimicality, of and towards nature. 
Graded students' stories by (big) flashlight; I'm afraid my comments may
have been harsher than usual.  As for my own work, one poem:


To One Who Doubted


"Lead singers," said James
(who was one, briefly),
"despise each other, like divas."
("Or poets" - me.)  The one
hotel room he trashed
deserved it.  During
the act he felt
a scary rightness,
and a Sartrean void, "but that must have been the drugs."

You needn't worry.  Theater goes for centuries,
classical music decades
without.  There have been Alexandrians
before, parlaying tenure 
into hipness, and vain timid depressives.
Democracy produces more of them
but these people never really
mean anything,
 
falling like flakes
of LOX
from the rocket's rising hull.  And if
the clever realtor,
adman, systems consultant feel
their song will outlive them,
finding the proper toe to tap
only after they're gone, why shouldn't I?
The one thing needful -
the cliché to avoid -
is to hate one's entire life,
then discover love on one's deathbed.