Read Online Traveling Sprinkler by Nicholson Baker - Free Book Online Page A

is something somebody was on the verge of saying during silent meeting but for one reason or another didn’t say, but the pressure to say it is still there.
    This time a young woman in a brown short-sleeved dress said, “I sat down here an hour ago and there was nothing in my mind. I’d rushed to get here and there was just a jumble of stuff in my head that I’m supposed to be doing, a little to-do list for Sunday. And then in the silence a word came to me, and the word was ‘unprepared.’ I turned it over in my mind. I wasn’t prepared for meeting. I had nothing to say. And then I thought, But isn’t this the essence of Quakerism? We’re not supposed be prepared. We’re supposed to sit here and wait for what’s true to come.”
    She said some more things I don’t remember, and then she sat down, and I thought, She’s right, the key sometimes is not to be prepared. Wait and see. Don’t prepare for wars by having huge military bases all over the world, four hundred bases. Don’t prepare for terrorists by creating a homeland bureaucracy. Don’t expect people to hate one another. Wait and see what happens.
    Then there were announcements. A film about sustainable agriculture was scheduled for Wednesday, and the knitting committee was going to be knitting blankets for sale, the proceeds to go for the furnace fund. They’re thinking ahead to winter. Then everyone went into the other room to eat and have coffee.
    Afterward I drove to Planet Fitness listening to the song about Darfur, by Mattafix. It’s sung by a British man, Marlon Roudette, who has an extraordinary maple-sugar voice. At first I thought he was a woman. “Where others turn and sigh, you shall rise,” he says.
    Chevron discovered oil in the Darfur region of Sudan in 1978. In 1979, the CIA installed a friendly governor in Darfur, and the Carter administration began sending weapons and money to Jaafar Nimeiry, Sudan’s president, who allowed the United States to build military bases in the country. Reagan sent more weapons and proclaimed that President Nimeiry, a murderous dictator, was a great friend to America—the CIA loved him because he was anti-Qaddafi. The result of our years of military assistance and meddling was a brutal civil war and a catastrophe of refugees and starvation. If you corrupt a government with money, weapons, and covert advisors, people are going to die. That’s why the CIA has to be abolished immediately. It takes no great insight to see this. “You don’t have to be extraordinary, just forgiving,” sings Marlon Roudette.
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    Y OU CAN’T INCLUDE IT ALL. You might think, I’ll write a poem and it will have every good thing in it, and every bad thing, and every middling thing—it’ll have Henry Cabot Lodge and clouds and eggplant and Chuck Berry and the new flavor of Tom’s of Maine toothpaste and bantam roosters and gas stations and seafoam-green Vespa scooters and the oversalting of rural roads—but it doesn’t work. I’ve tried. As soon as the poem becomes longer than two pages, it stops being a poem and becomes something else. The longest poem I ever wrote came out in 1980 in a journal, now forgotten, not well known even then, called
Bird Effort
, which is the name of a Jackson Pollock painting. In the same issue was a poem by John Hall Wheelock, who had recently died—a friend and confidant of Sara Teasdale’s who produced a glorious posthumous oral autobiography. Really, if you want to know about kindness and poetry in the twentieth century you should immediately read John Hall Wheelock’s memoir. It was published a while ago by the University of South Carolina Press.
    My long poem was called “Clouding Up” and it went on for two and a half pages. It was mostly about clouds. There was something in it about the Cloudboys and the Nimbians, I