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Note 77: I Want A River Empty

Robert Duncan weaves and warps the Navarro
river in his Passages
“the dream in which all things are living”
with a wind projecting gusts
from the Pacific, west, rippling whole planes
in little wave-forms on a surface
flowing upriver, a miniature
sea-storm at the shallow edge.

From reddish-brown through brown
pale bark, dead leaf, grey green
bush, and waxy California laurel
to the deep and dark green redwood
full color-circle back to its bark,
“It’s hid in its showing forth.”

The few people downstream
feel invaded by me so invade me
seemingly just to show
that they can. This is
a lovely spot, but won’t
be coming
anytime back soon.

I want a river empty
of human voices not
from dislike but from surfeit
of quotidian murmurings
wanting, not wanting,
caring, not caring, sudden
anger over sounds,
splash of selfish whims and
squiggles in the sand.

Note 76: To My Animal-Eating Sangha, with Love

Emaho!

My understanding is superficial.
Conceptually, I know that all things
And beings are empty and without self,
That samsara and nirvana are of one taste,
That apparent suffering is actual bliss —
I’ve even experienced suchness.

Yet…
Because of my obscurations,
When I’m threatened with death, I fear;
When hungry, I hope for food;
When thirsty, I want to drink;
When someone strikes me, I get angry;
Violence toward me makes me despondent;
The chance of losing an arm or an eye scares me;
When left standing hungry in the heat I complain;
Being packed in shoulder to shoulder infuriates me;
Even the threat of being shot makes me nervous;
I will fight you if you try to cut my throat;
When I’m hit on the head with a hammer, I cry.

O, how I aspire to be like you,
To have realized emptiness
With such intensity and depth
That to give a finger to a starving badger
on any day without warning would please me,
To be brutally slaughtered for a fat rich man’s exotic meal
Would only make me happy to have given pleasure,
To be eaten alive by ants only bring me
a more profound realization of emptiness.

Oh, you Buddhist, so far along the path
That you’ve realized
Your own inseparability from emptiness,
That your own pain is without essence,
That your own suffering is an illusion,
That your imputed self is a mirage,
You, who realize this so deeply
That you even experience
This emptiness in the minds of other beings,
The bliss that they think is their pain,
So that you can see them killed and eat them
Without the slightest perturbation of regret.

Oh, how deeply I aspire to be 
As enlightened as you are,
To have stepped past the 10th Bhumi,
To experience continuously
The equality of samsara and nirvana.

(Such are my thoughts when told by Buddhist friends that it’s ok to eat animals because everything is empty. Please don’t take offense at my play.)

Lotus 001: New York. March 7. 1978.

Handwritten headnote: (working
title. Will be a narrative
Many narratives.
in sequences where
they happen according
to some plan drawn
directly from events in my
life, but not autobiography,
inventing or not, as it pleases me
to amuse myself writing about
the past in a way that allows
me to simply make it up,
not like history, where one
really should [ahem] try to
stick to the facts.)

March 7, 1978

Dawn out in the atlantic
but the city below still
covered in darkness as the
727 landed at JFK.

By the time we got out of the terminal
it was cold, it was light,
it was partially covered
in snow from the days before
our arrival.

The sky a deep blue winter
sky without a cloud
but with a sun
that sucked out heat.

Items:

  • $188.00 (U.S. currency, Thomas Cooke Travelers’ Cheques (I think)
  • $3.46 (U.S. currency, cash)
  • 2 packs of cigarettes
  • a light “mountain climber’s” backpack (don’t even ask what that means)
  • a portable typewriter (Underwood, I believe)
  • several books. Probably more than several. The only ones I’m sure of are Pound’s Cantos,
    Wilhelm’s I-Ching, and Rilke’s Duino Elegies
  • 2 blue jeans
  • 3 work shirts
  • 5 days of underwear and socks
  • a denim jacket and a light wool jacket (Pendelton?)
  • several eye patches
  • a couple of hats, mainly a pork pie hat
  • a cheap guitar — Yamaha (cheapest model? maybe.) In a black hard cardboard case.

The Windup:

Everyone I talk to, with the exception of this magnificent middle aged middle class woman I fell in love with on sight (she had a different opinion from the rest, gushing to me about how wonderful New York City is in a way that made me feel rather flattered — it seemed she was gushing a bit more at me than at NYC, but I was unable to overcome the extreme prejudice I had toward myself):

Be careful when you get to New York, they said,
They’ll see you coming and rob you.
If you walk down the street with money
in your pocket they point a gun at you
and take it away

So, just to be safe,
I left everything in my room
and went for a walk down Broadway
from the hotel in which I stayed for
forty dollars a night, pre-paid,
at check-in, for two nights.

The Setup:

Arriving in New York “as is” (vide “Items” above)
not a single known person, so far as I knew,
not just on the island of Manhattan but the
five borroughs, Jersey City, Hoboken, Montclair,
in all of these places there was not a single known
person as far as I knew.

Should I have the choice of being hanged
or going back to where I came from
(Thousand Oaks, California)
I would have chosen being hanged.
I was not going to turn around and go back
to lie in my 1961 Valiant and focus on the
rhythms of the rain and trying to hear
patterns in the dropping then to take that
sound and bend it around my own ear so that
it fit the Greater Aesclepiad

Love, what ailed thee to leave life that was made lovely we thought, with you?

Or the sounds that were coming to me instead of to Swinburne:

Morning, multiplex loam blooming in round billows awash through space;
Phæton tiding in cool dawn; as his wave broadens its surge, its deep
Basin widens, whose id waters the earth; foaming, its parts dispersed,
Colloid, geysering heat, jetting a blue tint through the black of night
Deepens color with birth, labors in gloom, brightness. Decays the cold.

Because I could never quite get it
just coldn’t seem to get the rain to
sound like

DA da DA da da DA DA da da DA DA da da DA da DA

and never would have had I not left the former life
and invaded New York City with all my pomp and power
in the use of words, look out for me, I’m a badassmotherfucker.

Yeah. That’s how it was. Strong, weren’t you?
You could move a piano by your self or
heft up your half of a fully loaded player piano
or thrust step by step up 14 flights of steps on
the bottom rung of a sled with a 7′ Yahama
concert grand piano for someone to pound on.
Ha! Yeah, some tough guy.

Nor would I call anybody that knew me
for help, including my mother and father,
but would die in the gutter first.
I shit you not.
Whatever the fuck happened,
I was NOT GOING TO LEAVE.

Getting here was hard enough. I had to choose.
Chicago? New Orleans? New York?
Well, I had to admit the possibility that there
might be somewhere I’d prefer to go than
New York, but there wasn’t.

Once I had chosen New York City, there was
no other choice. I had to acquire a ticket. I had
to say goodbye to everything I knew and my
plan only went to the end of the money
in my pocket, but there was no way in
the concrete, steel, ice, soot, cold, crowded,
agressive, unyielding streets that I was going to
turn around and leave. 

Yes, I was frightened
to even go into a Deli and order: the very presence
of people who had mastered living in such
a place overwhelmed me and I almost had
the fortune to see them as gods. But not gods
as the Greeks saw gods. No, these were gods as
the Tibetans see gods: LhaDre: god/demon
included in a single word, a non-dual concept,
an embodiment without judgment
of positive or negative, it being merely a dual
aspect of power. But these masters, who looked
at home in this world, who were so powerful that
they seemed effortlessly able to inhabit it,
I was afraid of. Yes, very afraid of them.

Note: Don't fracture your skull and then go
traveling much by yourself. Things
can go wrong.

But the walk was exciting. My grandfather
had brought me here when I was seven
and I remembered the feeling of a vast
crowd of living beings emitting power and
energy and streets clogged with machines
under gigantic buildings and the snow.

Decided to go back to the room, get some money
and go buy myself something to eat. It
was going to take courage, but I was going to
do it.

A thorough search
of the room
and of all of my posessions
revealed the relative truth:
my money was gone.

I had two days left
 at the hotel and
$3.36 (I’d bought
a cup of coffee)
in my pocket.

It stunned me a fair bit.
I had no idea what to do
next.

I threw the I-Ching:

#13: T’ung Jen / Fellowship with Men : 6 in the 2nd Place

(End of 1st section, this being the first installment and so forth and so on kai to loipa.)

finis

Note 74: A Narrative Plaything, Reading Olson at the River

(All quotations with page numbers are from Charles Olson, The Maximus Poems)

Seated by this shallow river
at what was its deep and mid point
in December…

The birds sound the same…

What was I thinking this morning?

When the wind dies down
though the water keeps moving and changing
the surface smooths, far hills reflect in it
with leaves, without snow. Then another
wind, a different course of air stirs the
surface up into a color blend.

Sound of only wind and water.
Then tractor sounds above and past
the trees on a ridge.

In an earthquake this bridge could easily come down.
The river would embrace it.

(Or Verazano has it,
courously, put down as
a mud bank
p. 83

Appears a group of young women with small children
mostly naked, only bush and nipples covered
and lie along the river shore facing me
or wade into the water.

They peer curiously over at me.

The group moves somewhat closer,
all three lie facing me. The tops come off.

Infants’ laughter. Bird songs.

Just like that dragging
as we do
shifting new
land, sucks
down, into the terrible

inert of
nature (the Divine
Inert, the literary man…
p 126

Now some guy walks up 20 meters away
and tosses his fishing line in the water, looking over
at me as though he wants my spot.
I smile at him.

Didn’t think Friday would be so eventful down here.

Sat down, planted
fisheries
so they’ve stayed put
p 128

The women put their tops back on
and turn to face the other way.

We kill
as a fisherman’s
knife nicks
abundance.
p 129

The fisherman suddenly leaves. Seems to feel
unwanted, angry, drives off with skidding wheels.

The women turn back toward me, and take their tops
off again. The only sounds are wind and water.

if we
don’t find out the inert
is as gleaming as,
and as fat as,

fish –
p 130

Tops back on, walking the kids
toward me indirectly, on my blind
side then skirting around behind and
away down river as I write.

aloof, aloof
and came no near
new cry
p. 131

I eat a sesame & poppy cracker
w/ camembert.

A car, blasting hip-hop
through its speakers,
stopped on the
bridge
for approximately
20 seconds.

Put the camembert away.
Eat the second cracker.

Stop
right there, said time, Descarte
’s holding up
another hand and your own people
in this wilderness

not savages but thought
has invaded
the proposition.
p. 134

Behind me
dogs with large voices bark
at the returning women and infants.
New women’s voices raised at the dogs.

Then skirting very close to me
three women, each with a dog
single file, prim, reserved along the river
each with a dog.

In front is Black Dress, black shoes, tatoos
then Hiker Woman, pants, hiking shoes
then Shorts, very short shorts, wearing sandals.

Shorts has to restrain her dog as she passes:
he wants to visit with me, check me out,
be my friend, I smile, say,
“he wants to visit” she smiles back
and giggles a yes then sways her hips
the rest of the way down the river
single file behind her companions.

Coming along paths
we just now

get our feet on, that space”
p. 135

Then the wind, the birds, the river, the trees
shaking and dancing in the wind
until the child human voices enter
angry this time, upset, unhappy
then the voices of the mothers shushing
and scolding. It looks like I’ll be
alone again shortly.

The wind had veered to
the northeast and was
increasing
p. 140

Note 73: Baby Rapids

… Denn das Schöne ist nichts
als des Schrecklichen Anfang…
… For beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror…
             ~Rilke

I know your mind so well the tumult
of the stream is coeval with these thoughts.
Clear configurations of conquest and need
arise from the past and laugh behind my
back for sitting quietly at your rivers edge.

Knowing you as I do, from within and without,
It’s clear to me your claims
to dimness and mediocrity are mere
cusions against a slip and fall should you
happen to see yourself as I see you
and somehow can’t remain standing.

You wouldn’t be able to remain standing.
It would frighten you so badly
you would faint. When you came
to your heart would race,
sweat bead on every cell of skin
for the terror that your beauty
would instill in you.

Toss them aside, darling. You won’t fail.
Come walk across to me. I won’t let you fall.
Besides,
you wouldn’t anyway.

Can one blame me for positioning
myself
possibly
unnecessrily
in your path while you learn to walk?

I’m only a parent, a cheerleader,
lover, friend, brother, and pain in the ass:
someone to talk to and hold hands
while you make the transit.

Or should I
vacate
my spot and walk
along the river to a bridge
and cross
and never even look
over my shoulder?

Note 72: 7 Things To Do

  1. Burn incense (I favor the Tibet Shi-Tro incense, but
    use whatever make you feel connected.) and
    sing the 7-line prayer in Tibetan
          

          
    Then recite Om Ah Hung Vajra Guru Padma Siddhi Hung
          

          
    Dedicate the merit of this activity to the enlightenment of all.
          
  2. Put Lee Morgan “Sidewinder” into the CD player of your old dirty car
          

         
    Listen to him play while you drive away.
          
  3. Turn off the highway, also known as “Main Street”
    onto a continuously narrowing paved road
    until you reach a graded gravel road
    and follow that
    until you reach a dirt track
          
    pict0031
          
    I thought a trail began here
    but it’s still just the road
    continuing along it’s way.
    Once you’ve decided
    to park and walk
    you see a rock slide
    that’s been shored up
    with fragments
    on top of which sits a small boulder
    with just the right shape for your ass
          
    pict0017
          
    to sit on
    on which I sit to write this,
    and when this stops
  4.       

  5. Listen —->
  6.       

  7. After some time
    without external aim
    shift the attention
    slightly
    toward the eye
    and let it rest
    in the midspace forward
    into the open of the declivity
          
    pict0025
          
    and around and into
    the trees growing in patterns
    in portrait orientation and movement
          
  8. Shift
    • shapes into patterns of fern color white bark,
      redwood, dust, granite, laurel,
      madrone bark and sky
      overcast, shot with sprigs
    • fully smell the dirt and pollen
    • taste them mixed with spit
    • watch the mind momentarily
      become frightened at this utter
      loss of control
      then relax and go on
      it’s merry way thinking of other things

    Feel every cell in your body
    simultaneously.
          

  9. AH.

Note 71: What do you do?

For Holly Friesen

From a corner deli on the northwest corner
of 41st and Lex for a couple of years
the southeast corner of the Chanin Building
I carried lunches, in bags, in a row along
my left arm, swimming through noonday
crowds, a dolphin in a crush of tuna,
catty-corner, e.g. the Chrysler building
across the 42nd street intersection
with the exquisite custom wood
elevator doors no two the same, and the
very watchful staff of doormen
who force all deliveries to the freight
elevator. My (meager) income was
directly proportional to the number of
lunches I delivered during a 2-hour period
so refused to wait for the freight elevator
always pretending that I worked for
the company to which I was delivering,
bringing my own lunch back to the office.

I was 23 years old.

One time (not the only time by a long shot,
aside from the most attractive details) a
very shapely, well dressed and coiffed
fashionable woman in her early 30s
asked me what it was that I really did.
I really deliver lunches, I said.
“No, ” she said, I mean what are you?”
I’m a man who delivers lunches.
“Are you an actor?”
No, I deliver lunches.

She gave me a $5 tip, 5x the usual.

And now, when someone asks me
“what do you do?” I reply that I’m in charge
of technology for a division of a bank
that more resembles a small professional
corporation than a bank and is essentially
a financial consulting firm to public agencies
as clients, the staff a creamy selection
of mostly Ivy League post graduate degrees
but also Berkeley and other UC campuses
mostly MBAs, and good people every one of them.
Except me. I don’t have a college degree.

That’s what I do.

Sometimes I ask myself what I really do.
The answer is always ambiguous.
I can never put a stake through its heart.
So I always lie about what I do
because I don’t know what the truth is.

Since I’m lying anyway, and looking back
I see that I was just too stupid to see that
a very successful and beautiful older woman
in the Chrysler Building, New York City,
my new home, my Canterbury, might actually be
interested in me; to get things started
I only needed tell a different lie,
one that represented how I felt about
myself instead of how I pseudo-objectively
fit into the economic system and said,
“I’m a poet,” she would likely have interacted
further with me in ways that may have been
enjoyable for both of us: it may even have
become apparent to me, who had (?) never
been able to accept that someone might
actually be interested in me without some
philosophical proof or at least demonstration.

So I sometimes also lie the another way.

I’m a poet.

Addendum to “Modern Beauty”: EP Canto 80; Sappho Fragment 96

Context: A few days ago I posted some words from and about Ezra Pound’s Canto LXXX and a video of myself reading Arthur Symons “Modern Beauty” http://dirk-johnson.com/wpblog/?p=792

For ease of reading, here again are the lines from “Canto LXXX”

La beauté, “Beauty is difficult, Yeats” said Aubrey Beardsley
when Yeats asked why he drew horrors
or at least not Burne-Jones
and Beardsley knew he was dying and had to
make his hit quickly

Hence no more B-J in his product.

So very difficult, Yeats, beauty so difficult.

“I am the torch” wrote Arthur “she saith.”
in the moon barge Brododaktylos Eos

with the veil of faint cloud before her
Kuthera deina as a leaf borne in the current
pale eyes as if without fire.
(80/511:546)

The specific line I’m going to shine candle light on today is:

in the moon barge brododaktylos Eos

Rhododaktylos (”rosyfingered”) is the Homeric (Ionic) epithet of Eos, Dawn. Brododaktylos is the Aeloic form of the same word, used by Sappho as the (Doric) epithet of Selanna “Moon.”  In this one line in “Canto LXXX” Pound looks back to both Sappho and Homer. The Cantos is an epic poem, but this section is lyrical.  Homer and Sappho fused into a single line.

(Aside: For a lyrical stroll through The Cantos, read the enjoyable critical work:
The Cantos of Ezra Pound: The Lyric Mode
By Eugene Paul Nassar
Published by Johns Hopkins U.P., 1975
ISBN 080181703X, 9780801817038)

   

Earlier, in “Canto LXXIV,” were the following lines:

   

Time is not, Tie is the evil, beloved
Beloved the hours brododaktylos
as against the half-light of the window
with the sea beyond making horizon
le contre-jour the line of the cameo
profile “to carve Achaia”
a dream passing over the face in the half-light
Venere, Cytherea “aut Rhodon”
vento ligure, veni
“beauty is difficult” sd/ Mr Beardsley… (74/444:472)

   

Both of these passages were written in the “death cells” in Pisa, where Pound was kept in a cage in the middle of the American Army DTC: the place the U.S. Army put the most dangerous criminals immediately after WWII. Ezra Pound, poet, was considered the most dangerous man in the camp. The guards were instructed never to speak to him. It was feared that he could convince them to help him, to convert to his way of thinking.
He lived in a chain-link cage, at the center of four guard towers. At night, all four kept spotlights trained on him. As Hugh Kenner put it in The Pound Era (possibly the best book about Ezra Pound),
Irreparable death hung over the poet’s head, and there were no books but Legge’s Confucius and a Bible, and no sights but guards and prisoners and a sky and mountains and dust, and the Pisan Cantos invoked memory, seizing moments from the past “for those moments’ sake.” It was then that, reaching back to the time when Pound had poured over Greek fragments, memory yielded up, strangely, the splendid word of Sappho’s that Canto 5 had skirted: brododaktylos. The word presented itself amid a sense that his own personality was dissolving into recollections. “To such a tremulous wisp constantly reforming itself on the stream, to a single sharp impression, with a sense in it, a relic more or less fleeting, of such moments gone by, what is real in our life fines itself down” : so Pater had written in 1868, and so Pound felt in the summer of 1945.

From this situation, the Pisan Cantos, one of the most remarkable sequences of poems in the history of the English language.

For extension: Sappho, Fragment 96, translated by Anne Carson, Vintage, New York, August 2003 ISBN 0-375-72451-6. Here the lines will be flattened out along the left column because I won’t take the time to code them for word press to show the layout in Carson’s original. The papyrus on which this was found had no line breaks or spaces between words: it was a single string of letters. So I hope you don’t feel it too lazy of me not to bother with the presentation. But you will have it if you buy Carson’s book.

Brackets are used to indicate text missing in the papyrus from damage or decay — mostly, holes.

]Sardis
often turning her thoughts here

]
you like a goddess
and in your song most of all she rejoiced.

But now she is conspicuous among Lydian women
as sometimes at sunset
the rosyfingered moon

surpasses all the stars. And her light
stretches over salt sea
equally and flowerdeep fields.

And the beautiful dew is poured out
and roses bloom and frail
chervil and flowering sweetclover.

But she goes back and forth remembering
gentle Atthis and in longing
she bites her tender mind

But to go there
] much
talks[

Not easy for us
to equal goddesses in lovely form

]

]

] desire

and [...........] Aphrodite

]nectar poured from
gold
]with hands Persuasion

]
]
]

]into the Geraistion
] beloveds
] of none

] into desire I shall come

Note 70: Loathing (short story)

He couldn’t breathe. He brimmed and overflowed with self-loathing

(a sudden release from Jackson Lake dam, the lake itself a glacial remnant.

His groin was tight and knotted from the center down the thighs.

(a Santa Barbara Moreton Bay fig tree, planted in 1874 by a little girl, who got the seed from an Australian sailor

He knew there was no escape. He wanted to die.

He let the attention rest on a point, deeper in than the nose is.

(behind the Glabella,
above the point
where breath enters the skull
above the nasal cavity
behind the eyes
between them
above:
the third eye

When his breathing was blocked in the sinuses, resting his attention there would clear it. His breath would become calm and easy, his sinus passages would open.

(calm mind

It had been so long since he discovered how to do this he couldn’t remember ever not knowing how. When first learning to meditate it had been an obstacle. “Let your attention rest on the breath.”

His mind wasn’t calm. Didn’t become suddenly calm. He wanted to ask for help. There was nobody to ask. He was alone.

(a kind of dying
fear and desire united
toward one object: cessation.
how could he?
how could he allow himself?
how could he allow himself to attach?
how could he allow himself to cling
to what he knew was ephemeral
to what he knew could never love back?
he should have known better

He was completely overwhelmed with disgust for himself. It isn’t my purpose here to convey that feeling to you. You don’t need it. If you’ve never felt it, you won’t anyway. If it’s a feeling you know, you don’t need to be led into it to know how it feels: nothing in the future; the past merely validation of your worthlessness, stupidity, inadequacy. You know the drill.

(no escape

Could he change these feelings? Yes. Should he? No. He felt them. He allowed them to be. He thought, “if I just let them be, they will change.” Then he realized that they don’t need to change. He had forgotten. These feelings are just there. They are what they are. There is no point in changing them.

(the mind is a process

He allowed them to fill his consciousness. He looked directly into them. He felt them. He watched them.

(planning actions
I’ll do this
I’ll do that
I’ll change this
I’ll modify that

He let the reactions go. Didn’t stop them. Just let them go. Decided not to indulge any of them. Not to react to the feelings. To do nothing at all.

(very close to weeping
would weep
but tired of weeping
over these things

This mental state became just another mental state. The mental states continued to fluctuate. Now there is a different mental state. The other is nearly forgotten in the fascination for the now one.

(a cat curled up next to him
he stroked her fur
she purred.

Arthur Symons: “Modern Beauty”

Because a tanka posted by @kujakupoet on Twitter

luna / your pale green wings / into the flame / the moon sinks slowly / on the horizon ~Marje Dycke

brought to mind Ezra Pound’s Canto LXXX:

La beauté, “Beauty is difficult, Yeats” said Aubrey Beardsley
when Yeats asked why he drew horrors
or at least not Burne-Jones
and Beardsley knew he was dying and had to
make his hit quickly

Hence no more B-J in his product.

So very difficult, Yeats, beauty so difficult.

I am the torch” wrote Arthur “she saith.”
in the moon barge Brododaktylos Eos
with the veil of faint cloud before her
Kuthera deina as a leaf borne in the current
pale eyes as if without fire.

So I went and dug up Symons’ poem:

“Modern Beauty”

I AM the torch, she saith, and what to me
If the moth die of me? I am the flame
Of Beauty, and I burn that all may see
Beauty, and I have neither joy nor shame,
But live with that clear light of perfect fire
Which is to men the death of their desire.

I am Yseult and Helen, I have seen
Troy burn, and the most loving knight lie dead.
The world has been my mirror, time has been
My breath upon the glass; and men have said,
Age after age, in rapture and despair,
Love’s poor few words, before my image there.

I live, and am immortal; in my eyes
The sorrow of the world, and on my lips
The joy of life, mingle to make me wise;
Yet now the day is darkened with eclipse:
Who is there still lives for beauty? Still am I
The torch, but where’s the moth that still dares die?

After which, today, I made a video of me reading it.

This is the first take of the first such video I’ve ever made. seated outside in front of the detached garage

Location, location, location

Location, location, location



  

  
Looking out toward the walnut tree

  

  
Walnut tree from table

Walnut tree from table

merely to make a video. While I read, the activity around me outside got louder and louder. I suppressed background noise on the recording. By the time I finished, the street was roaring. Then people started up more machines. I decided to just go ahead and post the first take. My new web cam is supposed to arrive monday. It has better resolution and a better mic… and I’ll practice other things in the meantime.