Don Shaeffer: A Special Vayavya Presentation of an Artist Viewed Through Snippets of His Poetry and Art

I N T R O D U C T I O N  T O  D O N  S H A E F F E R

Don Schaeffer is a phenomenological poet and visual artist, devoted to perception, making sense of experience. Don has published a dozen volumes of poetry, his first in 1996, not counting the experiments with self-publishing under the name "Enthalpy Press." His poetry and art has appeared in numerous periodicals and has been translated into Chinese for distribution abroad. Don is a habitué of the poetry forum network and has received first prize in the IBPC Interboard Poetry Competition. His first venture into fiction, Samuel: A Post Adolescent Novella was published in 2011. This volume extends his evolution into prose. Don holds a Ph.D. in social psychology from the City University of New York.

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Alex Nodopaka: Welcome Don. We all have different phobias. How do you feel about heights?
Don Shaeffer: The Morning

It's his fault
that he hangs
by the collar of his thin
shirt, forty stories
above the street.
He can't help

feeling the discomfort
from fear
that makes his
temporary heart
flutter. There is a
name for it.

Poor Jaquobin,
what you haven't got
is diligence.

Alex Nodopaka: How would you poetically be inspired by the 1952 movie Singing in the Rain?
Don Shaeffer: The Afternoon

They pressed together
mouth to cheek

under the slow rain
as the mud deepened

and the frame of their
shelter melted away.

They stood under
spots of roofing

when the wind
brushed cold

droplets from their
pink faces.

Alex Nodopaka: What is the difference between dreaming and reality?
Don Shaeffer: Ferdy got Away

When the professor said, "There is no demonstrable difference between reality and dreams." Ferdy blinked.

"The mind is the only important science", the professor said. "Social life is a fantasy. Even if we allow that the words of others are real, they are conspiratorial. They are attempting to keep a myth alive. They want to keep the world of wakefulness alive. We could just as well sleep. The myth is that our sleep impoverishes the world."

"See how desperately they want you to find mates, to marry, to bear children, to have happy families. They want you to invest in what you are given as real in the earth. They want you to construct the world, not repair it. Every bit of devotion pumps up the balloon, inflates the thin skin of the world. Whereas the natural state of nature is death."

With that, the professor sat down on the stage and crossed his legs over one another with surprising effortlessness, as if the limbs were not boned and stiff. His eyes remained open but his pupils pulled upward so that his open eye sockets were filled with white.

On the other hand, maybe God did create the world. Maybe we have to add our breath to God's to inflate the world. Ferdy looked out over the trees as he left the lecture hall. There was a spider web tangled among the leaves, catching the rays of 10 am sun. Everything was so green and damp with all these bits of life and magic moving autonomously about. Maybe it came about by vacillations of some random hand. But randomness may be our view of the way purpose happens.

The other student was wearing a dress since it was Summer. Ferdy may have sounded like he was young but he was actually old, three-quarters toward the end of his time. A voice came into Ferdy's head asking, “why do I have to include another person in this?” He didn't know her name. She shared the classroom, that's all. The narrative requires two reference points. Should I say it's natural. It's just that we are lost without it.

Ferdy wandered down California Avenue toward the basement apartment in the 1900s house at number 1001. He lived alone of course, but surrounded by youthful, noisy, exuberant graduate students. All the students suffered together, though they didn't really know it, through a life of defacto slavery and poverty, there being nothing around them of real beauty, and no time to create anything beautiful. It was a straightforward utilitarian community; although each of them had deep undiscovered capabilities of the spirit.

Ferdy half-recalled, almost forgot, there was an old crime. The habit of hiding gave way to the habit of being alone even though the memory did sometimes ooze through the mist in silhouette. He sometimes relived it in dreams. The law forgot about it. He managed to get so far away and it was already deep in time. Someone who looked guiltier, Ferdy smiled as the thought came to him, probably got caught for it and is now probably frantic, trying to escape the punishment. It was a little bloody and unpleasant but so what. Ferdy got away.

Ferdy's old people questions about his solitary solution toward life, questions about the ultimate role of reality and body, questions about the role of death in the universe were the questions professors racked their brains about.

Alex Nodopaka: What do you do for a physical hobby?
Don Shaeffer: Waiting for the Tai Chi Instructor

(We are taking "tai chi for better balance" through the YMCA. It's a limited set of eight movements. The course is designed to keep seniors from falling. I wrote this because the way people select each other for pre-lesson conversations reminded me of a slave market.)  

Maybe he felt it's like
a marketplace
as we arrange ourselves there
waiting for the teacher.
We do stand erect and
face forward. We do
pass each other, inspecting.
While we await the teacher
we do hope to be bought.

Maybe he thought
this is what we naturally do.
We've been driven to wallflowerdom
and shyness by such
strong need. We never
assume our value.
We wait to be bought.

Alex Nodopaka: How would you tell us about our humanness?
Don Shaeffer: It's no longer Lions

We are wild
tactical creatures, eyes
flickering around
a perilous world. Words
and fingers.
Words and fingers.
We are safe
only when we are
predicting.
When we
guess the future
then we are safe.
.
For those
whose life is not even,
I know how
tired you are,
how hard it is to rest.
Things waggle
day by day,
uncommonly. I know
how you
spend your days
dodging, with darts
fired at your legs.
.
You are
wild tactical creatures.
I see how your eyes narrow.
.
(Nowadays
it's the little predators
and the human
and abstract mind-predators
and the value predators
.
among the world's
human furniture
that are the worst).

Alex Nodopaka: Tell us about presence versus absence.
Don Shaeffer: House and Gardens

We leave our
jackets around the chairs
in spite of the
formality of the setting.
Well, the outsiders are,
as usual, absent.
There are no guests to
make the rooms into a
tasteful memory.
I know her jacket
and she knows mine. She
sometimes scolds me
but I take it with good grace.
I know she is not
mother.

Alex Nodopaka: You do ghost-writing in your spare time. Give us an example.
Don Shaeffer: The Ghost of Writers

This is the real world
expressed in the form of several days
worth of ghost writing.
Kowloon: The Walled City of Imagination; cosmetic dentistry;
REASONS TO STOP THUMB SUCKING;
New York's most iconic photograph; container shipping;
How are pets handled in divorce?
Medical cannabis and kids; plumbing and drainage inspections;
immigration counseling lawyer in Chicago;
Metal fabrication in Chuckey, Tennessee; How home security alarm monitoring works; How to make an HDR Photograph;
toxic torts; audiologists; plumbing and drainage inspections;
Tenth Edition, Calculus Early Transcendental;
ISEE test preparation in Los Angeles;
vinyl windows in Beltsville; great printers for Mac computers;
orthopedic doctors in Herndon, Virginia;
container shipping; public adjusters in Philadelphia; custom order fulfillment in Golden Valley; Minnesota; land surveys. Ghost writers know the real world better than poets.

Alex Nodopaka: What is the purpose of the world?
Don Shaeffer: Freud's Theory of Human Development

The purpose of the world
is to tell you what you can't do.
The world is made to
keep your ambitions scarred.
You will not get
what you can't move
past the filter of the world.
The standard is set high,
too high for me.
Maybe I should have
rested a long time ago.
Maybe I should have
slept without fear.
Now I know how I lost. I am
made real by the knowledge.

Alex Nodopaka: What do you think about angels' interaction with human beings?
Don Shaeffer: The Angel

He came
and brought her
life with his
stories. They
were all the life she had.
She lay
with her eyes
wide, blurred
with images from elsewhere.
He was earthbound small
and she was large,
floating.
It was dark
when he left the room.

Alex Nodopaka: Eureka?
Don Shaeffer: An Ahah!

I see suddenly clearly
through the window
while we await
our soup, an
ordinary man,
features cratered and
puzzled. He wanders
about in search
maybe of a place.
He speaks to
an invisible face
and hears through something
mounted on his ear.
The attachment is
a very thin thread.
He carries packages.

The world around him
looks like a jumble of bubbles.
But it's really a vacuum.
I realize how
un-assuring the wind is,
as he is tethered
far from birth.

Many of them walk,
straight on their missions,
tethered on thin threads.
They all take chances,
venturing far from sleep.
Yet there is a place, somewhere, they
emerge from,
a warm feathered nest,
a bed, a voice not kind
but familiar.

Alex Nodopaka: Don, you remember the TV show Star Trek, it sounds like eons ago but a lot of its fiction is now real life!
Don Shaeffer: Star Trek

The vacuum
between the stars
didn't care.
Much of it
died silently.
There were no tears.
The spaces
met each other
by chance. Strangers
rubbed together
to become families
without benefit
of wisdom.
We traveled
with our crew
of coincidental friends.
We almost cared,
but not quite.
We were tied together
by rules we learned
late.
With this crew
we imagined
a universe of life.

Alex Nodopaka: What are teeth to the soul?
Don Shaeffer: Cosmetic Dentistry

My signal
is made with my mouth
where I eat
and where I kiss.
I say yes around my lips,
biologically I may
suck in or
disembogue here.
My smile is
the main
face of my yes,
eight teeth
I keep fresh and
well shaped.
My smile is
more important than
my soul.

Alex Nodopaka: Do you meditate?
Don Shaeffer: Meditation on Serious Thought

Don't get
hung up on poetry.
When you get hung
up on poetry
you start to dream
and your dreaming
softens the darkening
lines in the world.

Alex Nodopaka: Were you granted 3 wishes, what would they be?
Don Shaeffer: Three Ungranted Wishes

I want to go home
You can't.
You passed through the gates,
and locked the door and it
has passed to someone else.
I want to be
rescued
by an old
bearded man.
You can't.
You have
become that.
I want
to forget.
You can't
You don't
control the memories.

Alex Nodopaka: Do you gamble?
Don Shaeffer: Casino

You go to Vegas
or the Riviera of France
in your best James Bond suit,
and the women
in their famous slinky
gowns rub their bare
shoulders against you
as you stand at the
table playing Baccarat.
The dealer has dark
flashy eyes but
doesn't care. You just pass.
You tinkle the ice
in your clear vodka drink.
It's a romantic cold,
a scary worldly cold
that assumes your self-sufficiency.
You are lonely
but that's how you
are supposed to feel,
how you feel most skillfully.
You win, you lose.
The house takes you.
You try to read
the mind of God.

Alex Nodopaka: Don, what a nice thought/poem to end our presentation. Thank you for being with us and showing how another artist thinks.

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