Category: Uncategorized

TELL YOU WHAT

IMG_4622Woodblock Print by Annie Bissett

Tell you what, the air aloft is falling.
Here it is, October, November, people
on the mountain speak again about
hydraulic jumps and fires. The power is

already down. Personally, I’m on
the wharf in Santa Cruz, but even so
I’m listening for downslope winds beginning
high before descending in a sinking

train of music aiming overland
and tumbling toward me on the coast. I take
a lung-full in, sampling for smoke
arriving from Sonoma. All of us

are breathing it. If I were to die
and then return to earth as horses, running
with the speed of money, I would fly
the flames behind me flaring into canyons,

sweeping through the prehistoric fuels
and towns to overtake the traffic trapped
on chains of roads as conifers exploded
overhead. Are they beautiful,

these evergreens ringed in elemental
force? Wreathed demonically? A problem
I will leave unsolved. If I chose
a bird, I’d be a phoenix to come out

alive and recognized on thermals rising
over vineyards and incendiary
homes. Really, I’d be chasing safety
same as residents evacuating

underneath the haze and rain of ash
to reach as refugees the temporary
camps popping up, and populating
open spaces. Lanterns sparkle here

and there. Someone lucky saved his ass
when chaos drafted every buoyant
movable alive, and separated
friends and families. Circumstances

fly apart so fast. Fathers on
their dying phones are calling children still
on route. Sisters hold out hopes for detours
full of serious grace, which I’m here

to say are unattainable in country
currently alight, and commonly
reset in violent conflagration. Such
derision drives us all to ground.

The Book of Delights

Massachusetts Reviews: The Book of Delights

– BY BRAD CRENSHAW

The Book of Delights: Essays by Ross Gay (Algonquin Books, 2019)

The 2019 Conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs concluded this spring, after nearly six hundred panels, readings and celebrations, and over eight hundred vendors and literary presses on display at the book fair—all crammed into three days and three nights. The Massachusetts Review was there, celebrating its 60th anniversary by organizing an excellent, memorable panel, and establishing its presence at the book fair. This conference for writers is, of course, not the only one held this year, but it is the largest, and its organizers were visibly committed to representing as wide a range of topics as writers can imagine—which, insofar as writers are very creative people as a whole, became in practice an admirably diverse program.

Indeed, many agendas were imagined differently than they are currently to be found in our national political climate. The AWP allowed space for writers to set topics for national debate, identify voices that are seldom heard or given credence, promote different points of view, cross gender boundaries, and in general call for resistance to the current political business of factionalism, paranoia, and narrow self-interest.

The virulence of anger and self-promotion at the highest levels of institutional power understandably prompts a rejoining ferocity in the opposing voices. What might be found missing among such voices, however, is an attempt to reach across dividing lines to find some basis for productive collaboration, or to discover a process of healing wounds after exercising cultural wars. Bravery is required to step visibly into the ground separating opposing militants, which is perhaps the first descriptor I want to use as I introduce Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights.

He does not make this claim for himself, bravery, but I think Gay would recognize that it might apply to a writer—perhaps especially a black writer—who, as he does, composes an entire book devoted to daily observations that include the delight he takes in seeing a red flower—an amaranth—growing by chance out of a crack in the street, or a woman stepping in and out of her shoe, “her foot curling up and stretching out and curling up.” He’s very good at finding small, everyday details that prompt intimate satisfactions, but we readers also know that elsewhere white lunatics armed with assault rifles are rushing into black churches to massacre the congregants. One of the risks Gay takes is to be trivialized, accused of ignoring the scale of atrocity as he attends to a flower.

Gay, of course, knows this, and very quickly in response he opens up the definition of delight. Readers might well think, we already know this feeling, but Gay demonstrates that we are incomplete in what we think delight constitutes, and that it is we who are trivialized by our lack of human empathy. This is a severe judgment, but he makes it kindly.

In Gay’s treatment, delight, and its close cousin gratitude, are fundamental experiential capacities: such feelings find and instill value in even unpromising features of an urban environment (flowers by a chain link fence with barbed wire on the top, “just in case”), and they respect the interpersonal gestures connecting people to each other. Most of these gestures are tiny, such as watching that woman with the tired feet surreptitiously take her shoe off. Or the pleasure he experiences when a stewardess on an airplane calls him honey.  Or the crazy humor when, during a security check at an airport, the TSA guy asks him where he’s going, and Gay tells him he’s being flown to Syracuse to read poems—and then a few seconds later he overhears the guy “saying to one of his colleagues as I jogged toward my gate, ‘Hey Mike, that guy’s being flown to Syracuse to read palms!’”

Gay will sometimes disguise the nature of his delight by offering it within an apology. For instance, he states “My parents were, mostly, mostly broke people who had neither the time nor the resources to always fix things the boring way, which is called replacement. And so the hatchback, cracked up by a trash truck. . . got fixed with a bungee cord.” His family also used duct tape to secure the hood when the latch broke, and kept a hammer “under the seat to tap the stuck starter until it went completely kaput.” I’ve had to use that trick myself on my forty-year-old diesel wagon, with kayaks strapped to the roof, way the fuck up the Gaspe Peninsula, where a person better know how things work because, let me tell you, you’re on your own. You won’t be calling Amazon for a new starter.

So this last delight is definitely one of my favorites. You just don’t find many people in literary or academic professions who know how to coax life out of an old, failing starter with the judicious use of a hammer. And of course what Gay publishes here is the practical knowledge that poor folks possess, unlike the overeducated crowd who can’t put air in their own tires. He is celebrating the basic competence and ingenuity necessary to keep your life running on track when you don’t have enough money to pay someone else to fix your problems for you. Thoreau and Emerson both would applaud him and his family for a self-reliance that professional economies condemn nowadays—because, by definition, impoverished people don’t spend a lot of money. He is reversing the common valuation.

And because he is a poet, Gay can also value the nuances possible in certain turns of phrase, such as “I need X like I need a hole in the head”—which, as he indicates “means I do not need X. I need to be fired like I need a hole in my head. I need this cancer to resurface like I need a hole in my head.” The occasion for mentioning this particular expression is the documentary on Vertus Hardiman, a black man who, as a five-year-old child, was made a subject by white scientists in a human radiation experiment, in which he was exposed to high levels of radiation that, in his instance, burned “a fist-sized hole in his skull, flesh and fat glistening.” Gay concludes this particular entry by noting “I’m trying to remember the last day I haven’t been reminded of the inconceivable violence black people have endured in this country. When talking to my friend Kia about struggling with paranoia, she said ‘You’d have to be crazy not to be paranoid as a black person in this country.’”

And yet he isn’t—neither paranoid nor crazy. He is writing a large book on delight, which includes, though is not limited to, the delight to be had in social resistance—such as his insistence on calling out white scientists who experiment on black children. Such as the delight his brother enjoys in owning a house in Pennsylvania, which “had a clause in the title that prohibited it from being sold to a colored person, which he is (indulge the anachronism; it was in the title).”  This is the same brave delight he takes in appreciating their parents, noting that “As my mother gets older, and in moments of openness, she has begun sharing more of her early life with my father—the family stuff, the this-apartment-is-no-longer-available stuff, the you-have-doomed-your-children-they will-be-fucked-in-the-head stuff. . . She told me my dad, to whom she was married for about thirty-five years until he died, said to her early on, ‘I might be making too much trouble in your life. Maybe we shouldn’t do this.’ But, you know, they did.”

In this one anecdote, as in many other of his daily entries scattered throughout his generous book, he wants explicitly to acknowledge the tensions inherent in what he means to convey by his term, delight, which in his mind is kin to what Zadie Smith concludes regarding the nature of joy. Gay notes that she “writes about being on her way to visit Auschwitz while her husband was holding her feet.“ “We were heading toward that which makes life intolerable” Smith writes,  “feeling the only thing that makes it worthwhile. That was joy.’”  She continues in this line of reasoning to conclude that “the intolerable makes life worthwhile”—which is a position Gay himself comes to agree with, though he infuses the idea with his particular belief in community: “What if we joined our sorrow,” he writes. “I’m saying, What if that is joy?”

This is a humane vision, a vision of social affinity, for which he assembles a chorus of supporting voices that include not only Zadie Smith, but the Japanese novelist Kenzaburo Oe, the poets Phil Levine and Rainer Rilke, the filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino, and Bethany, who was one of his students. Gay has a democratic and generous spirit. He wants to promote, in his own words, “the simple act of faith in the common decency, which is often rewarded but is called faith because not always.” He can, in fact, find instances of failure in common decency within his own behaviors. He is not a naive man, but a person who hopes to overlook or overcome momentary failures in people while expecting better of them. “I believe adamantly in the common decency, which grows, it turns out, with belief.”

Before turning you loose to read his book, I’d like to call attention to one more delight. Gay points out that at times his belief in common decency struggles against the cultural intent—by which he means chiefly white culture—to commodify suffering, especially the suffering of black families, by turning it into television entertainment. The particular source of his observation starts with a podcast about Whitney Houston’s early career, “which some channel,” he explains, “decided ought to be a reality television show, and which, from the sounds of it, a lot of people thought made good TV.”

And he goes on to imagine how that show might have gotten started, the pitch needed to convince producers to fund such a program: “I imagine you have to have meetings and secure producers or directors, get a budget, things like that. Many decisions and agreements have to occur, probably many handshakes, some drinks, plenty of golf, trying to figure out how best to exploit, to make a mockery of, a black family, the adults in which have made some of the best pop music of the last thirty years.” “I have no illusions,” he adds, “by which I mean to tell you it is a fact, that one of the objectives of popular culture, popular media, is to make blackness appear to be inextricable from suffering, and suffering from blackness.”

The proof that this equation is false is the book itself: “You have been reading a book of delights written by a black person,” he points out, “A book of black delight. Daily as air.” In The Book of Delights, Gay has published a vision that he is trying to make available to everyone—all races and ethnicities—though he is not insensitive to the odds. Delights may be daily, but they do not come cheap; they need earnest effort and sustained belief. They also require a soul like Ross Gay, who is sensitive to possibilities, ready to be pleased with people for better or worse, and who is willing simply to share what he has seen over the course of his forty-fourth year of life, from one birthday to the next.

 

Virginia Woolf at Night

Leonardo_portrait-silverpoint

Well, no, the image above is not a portrait of Virginia Woolf. I suppose, properly speaking, it is not even a portrait per se, but is simply one of Leonardo’s many studies drawn in silverpoint as he collected figures he thought he might use one day in a painting—or perhaps to  capture an expression, a cast of mouth, a glance that he saved for later use in his art. His days were long before there were any means of preserving what was seen—except by marks made by hand. This drawing is obviously unfinished, both insofar as her hair, shoulders and back are mere sketches, and also as her left eye is somewhat too large relative to her right eye. From our contemporary point of view, the drawing is masterful, immediate and expressive—and worth a fortune. But there is no indication that Leonardo considered it up to his standard for the serious business of his art. It is just a study, like the many others he has crammed together on scraps of paper, and in his notebooks, of old men, hags, grotesques, young men and women, anatomy lessons, and far-fetched inventions. 

Virginia Woolf, for her part, and in service of a different art form, worked on her human studies in her Diary. She favored writing while seated in an easy chair with a writing board in her lap. She used an ink bottle and a steel-tipped dipping pen, and wrote by hand at considerable speed without making corrections, editorial revisions, or authorial re-considerations. It is in this sense of immediate impression that I mean to emphasize when I call her Diary a daily series of studies: she is sketching her conjectures of people, in a prose style instant and unpondered, using diction that occurs to her on the spot, at that moment, to express ideas she is capturing just as fast as she can write them down.

Those contemporary readers new to her Diary might be most interested, at least at first,  in her observations of famous people. For example, the first time she met T.S. Eliot occurred on November 15, 1918, and she writes: Mr. Eliot is well expressed by his name—a polished, cultivated, elaborate young American, talking so slow, that each word seems to have special finish allotted to it. Beneath the surface, it is fairly evident that he is very intellectual, intolerant, with strong view of his own, & a poetic creed. Here is a penetrating estimation of Eliot’s character, formulated over a half-hour social exchange, which remains prescient even after a further century of research into the poet’s letters, prose writings, poetry and biographical study. As she indicates, she sees through surfaces, however refined, and incisively sums up what she finds hidden down there.

She is delighted by social absurdities, such as an exchanged conversation told to her when King George V, during a Royal visit, at one point turned  & asked Princess Victoria where she gets her false teeth. “Mine”, George exclaimed, “are always dropping into my plate: they’ll be down my throat next” Victoria then gave a tug to her front teeth, & told him they were as sound as could be—perfectly white and useful. Even in an era of personal disclosures among American political figures, whom you’d think would know better, comparisons of false teeth are pretty funny. In this vein she also reports discussions regarding self-abuse, incest and the deformity of Dean Swift’s penis.

More commonly she relates the quotidian ebb and flow of English life around her. And though she is not a naturalist, she does write frequently in the early years of her Diary about the full moon—though probably not for reasons you might imagine. She begins her journal in January, 1915, stops it six weeks later on February 15th, (for reasons I’ll get to later) and then resumes it again in earnest in October 1917. During these years, the First World War was raging, and German airships—chiefly zeppelins at that time of the war—floated across the English Channel to bomb London when the city might be illuminated by moonlight. Without the moon, nighttime visibility was impossible, insofar as the lights in the city were otherwise blacked out. In a characteristic entry, Virginia wrote on October 22, 1915  that “The moon grows full, & the evening trains are packed with people leaving London. We saw the hole [caused by a bomb detonation] in Piccadilly this afternoon. Traffic has been stopped, & the public slowly tramps past the place, which workmen are mending, though they look small in comparison…Windows are broken according to no rule; some intact, some this side, some that.

On December 6th, the moon rose later, after 11:00pm, so the zeppelins did not arrive until 5 in the morning: I was awakened by L[eonard] to a most instant sense of guns: as if one’s faculties jumped up fulling dressed. We took clothes, quilts, a watch & a torch, the guns sounding nearer as we went downstairs to sit with the servants…wrapped in quilts in the kitchen passage…Slowly the guns got more distant, & finally ceased; we unwrapped ourselves & went back to bed. In ten minutes, there could be no question of staying there…Up we jumped, more hastily this time….In fact one talks through the noise, rather bored by having to talk at 5 a.m. than anything else. Guns at one point so loud that the whistle of the shell going up followed the explosion. Cocoa was brewed for us, & off we went again. Having trained one’s ears to listen, one can’t get them not to for a time; & as it was after 6, carts were rolling out of stables, motor cars throbbing, & then prolonged ghostly whistlings, which meant, I suppose, Belgian work people recalled to the munitions factory. I have never been bombed, never had to flee the prospect of floating airships intentionally dropping high explosives on me to wipe me out, and devastate my habitable city. But if I ever am to be bombed, I hope I have enough courage and civilizing imagination to allow hot cocoa, shared among companions, to assuage my anxieties.

As I suggested earlier, most of her entries center on human observations in situations when she is not actively under fire. Here is one of many attempts to register the points of character of Lytton Strachey—a friend, and the author of Eminent Victorians: He is one of the most supple of our friends; I don’t mean passionate or masterful or original, but the person whose mind seems softest to impressions, least starched by any formality or impediment. There is his great gift of expression, of course, never (to me) at its best in writing; but making him in some aspects the most sympathetic & understanding friend to talk to. Moreover, he has become, or now shows it more fully, curiously gentle, sweet tempered, considerate; & if one adds his peculiar flavor of mind, his wit & infinite intelligence—not brain but intelligence—he is a figure not to be replaced by any other combination. She is writing about mere friendship here, which she considers at length, with sustained perception. She is not casual about her friends, but derives a nourishing pleasure from them, and with them, which does not diminish over time, but is consequential, and abiding in substance. She can be vigorous, humorous, entertaining, frank, unsparingly critical—but never trivial.

With that said, she was not merely concerned to write about friends in her Diary, and about people in high society, but she was interested in everyone. In Spring of 1917 she and Leonard were able to buy their printing press, which they set up at Hogarth House (Hence Hogarth Press), and thereafter spent some time trying to hire people to help them set type. Every single letter, punctuation mark, and space between words had to be set by hand, which required sustained attention to detail, and a certain strength of mind against tedium—which was not possessed by everyone who applied for the job. Barbara was one such person: Happily no apprentice today, which gives us a sense of holiday. We have had to make it rather clear to Barbara that this job may not be followed by another. She refuses payment for last week. So there’s no fault to find with her. No one could be nicer; & yet she has the soul of the lake, not the sea. Or is one too romantic & exacting in what one expects? Anyhow, nothing is more fascinating that a live person; always changing, resisting, & yielding against one’s forecast; this is true even of Barbara, not the most gifted of her kind. Virginia is never one to pull punches, which makes her obvious empathy and delight all the more authentic. Nothing is more interesting than a live person.

It is worth noting that she did not extend that interest toward introspection. She writes about others, not herself. That stoppage I mentioned in her Diary starting in mid-February, 1915, was prompted by her descent into a particularly virulent lunacy. On Monday, February 15th, she writes with her usual perspicacity about the people she encounters in the London shops, meeting Walter Lamb by chance, and rambling down to Charing Cross in the dark, making up phrases & incidents to write about. Which is, I expect, the way one gets killed. The very next day on the 16th she had a headache, which heralded her slippage into madness. By the first week in March she required professional care, and for months thereafter she was incoherent, violent against herself and others, and so densely insane that professionals and family alike doubted she could ever return to anything resembling a normative state of mind.

She did return, of course, and resumed writing her Diary in early August 1917. However, she never provided a single solitary word about the reason she lapsed in her daily discipline of keeping her Diary. She never mentions that she had a break in her sanity, never made an observation about the nature of her mental state, no word to characterize the quality of her consciousness, no statement of what it felt like, no memories of delusions, no lamentation about lost life during those awful months, no promises, no allusions, no apologies to others for her behaviors, no regrets for the harm she inflicted on other people. No mention whatsoever. One day in 1915 she writes about touring London shops for books, and the next entry on October 8, 1917 in her Hogarth House Diary she begins with another accidental encounter with Walter Lamb in London. A seamless continuity belying the one-and-half years silence.

Her creative imagination, even in her personal Diary, operates on principles quite other than contemporary intentions and aesthetics. At the bookstores we now have our choice among works focusing at length on lawn sprinklers in the author’s childhood, professors analyzing their lives among students and fellow teachers. IRL Streamers entertain their audience in realtime with attempts to pick up young women encountered on the street. Being offensive is the point of the entertainment. Virginia Woolf in her private, unpublished moments thinks about people who are other than herself. Apart from the healthy display of empathy, what a basis this is for a political stance.

It Occurs To Me That

IMG_3339

Years ago you might have thought, as I
did once, faring among the farthest crowds
of islands, unbearably green, in Polynesia,
ringed with stone gods,
                                             that I had dodged
ancestral prophesies, and finally
was shut of ghosts, momentous gossip and
the family doom. I mean, I absolutely
thought I cleared my mind. For years I slept
beside the blue-eyed ocean, courting every
hour pouring over in the surf
among the agile muses on their boards
by day, and on the beach by night, by fires
beneath a wash of stars handsome in
the high air.
                         So yeah, once you might
imagine I had lunged safely off
from my accomplishments and ends. My latest
lovely failure at the time had thrown
me out, amicably,
                                 and I eloped
exactly over burned bridges to
escape the facts and sad truths passing
for a way of life I thought was mine.
I’m grateful for my enemies. I made
my way to California, with its brimming
coasts, its pools of disenchantment and
regret,
               and those extravagant beliefs
in earthly reinvention, promises
of safe sex, not to mention transmigrating
joys, as witnessed on the glistening beaches
blanketed by actresses and beauties
browning in the sun of their ambition.
Pelicans offshore would swoop for food
on bent, pirate wings, while in the baselessIMG_3065
air, gulls dropped like raucous angels
tossed from grace. It takes me back, as if
I never lived in sight of tricks, or missing
persons rolled inside of plastic sacks.
I was roused, and rough in my instruction,
dazzled in the blue winds always
in the way, rendering the far-
away schooners blue at sea. They moved
me like an errand in an unknown land,
like promises, like rules I’d better try.
So far, so good. Near at hand, drag
queens were holding court in force against
the less-gorgeous mortals put on earth
obscurely, whose broken spirits dried their bones.
White men slept on graphic towels, and burned.
Meanwhile, movie extras practiced unexpected
love, and off around those fucking palm
trees, quarterbacks kept making plays
all day, and scored. Everyone auditioned as
adults. On mats, amid the pandemonium,
were golden body builders lifting their
eternal weights, and taking steroids sold
by lab assistants winging frisbees onto
precessed lyric vectors.
                                            And well, yes,
since you asked, I was carried off
by whole cloth, and left not a rack
behind of Baptist trash, but worked on boats
holding melons, and manned the harbor tender
when I could, escorting visitors
to shore for tips. One time, late,
with weather coming in, I ferried to
a ship the size of dreams a shimmery, drunken
star bestrewn with jewels and ropes of pearls,
but minus shoes
                                  —of whom was born, of course,
a famous trail of love, not unusual,
and who would later drown unfairly, I
should add, in another season, near
a Channel Island—
                                    years, however, after
I politely heaved her lithesome body
into bed inside her reeling cabin,
feeling generous and grandiose,
as if I had new teeth. Whereupon
I lurched precipitously, pitched backwards,
and was thrown away entirely as
the schooner slued round, hugely, as
I heard it, in the mounting wind. I hurtled
like a lost comet, crashing on
a davit, while a deckhand madly slipped
the anchor, and we plunged away like horses
into foam and swell, with me in tow.

What may not be wonderful about
abstraction? what is this world? to be plucked
from one dimension, and deposited
with bruises innocently in some midget
cosmos run by half-deities,
half of whom were sickened by the yaw
and ocean roll engendered by Pacific
squalls—which usually are marvelous
when seen from land,
                                          but in their ardent midst,
I’m here to say, the morning blew its smokes
on board, and thunder followed close on thought-
executing fire, the sum of which
de-magnetized the common sense of Hollywood.
Someone brought an ocelot they called
Naomi, who escaped her cage, and once
the winds decayed a bit, the weather settled,
she would climb the masts, and slink along
the yard arms stalking sea birds as they roosted.
Lavishly, she pissed backwards in
the rigging, which appalled the yardmen when
they reefed sails that simply reeked of pheromones
designed to carry miles inside a jungle,
and arouse erotic promise, for
a price. A tactic old as war, if truth
be told about it. If truth pertains at all.
Honestly, you wouldn’t either want
to risk inflaming the illiterate ocean
gods, a volatile lot by history,
nor rub the nether spirits up to rock
your bones with animal abandon, in
your wooden shelter, bobbing on the insubstantial
elements.

                       And since, to some minds,
by closely defined reasoning, I was
a stowaway, and hoping to have all
charges dropped, I peaceably agreed
to clamber to the topsails, trailing strings
of bloody sausages, and lumps of steak,
with which to tempt Naomi to her cage.
On balance, little could be easier.
Conceding how I cut my teeth on the family
wolves, and those invisible snakes coiling
through my nightmares—well, I wasn’t
discommoded by an ocelot.
Aloft together, we were clearly without
secrets when Naomi leapt symmetrically
to the crosstrees, with her jungle eyes
lighting up the red meat I
extended. I made her reach across me, and
adeptly show her teeth to draw the ligament
of raw beef away. And so it was
I fed her appetites. She slipped into
my lap, her demon body purring like
a tractor, and licked the wisps of blood between
my fingers. I took her collar off, which let
her swallow,
                            and from the main top watched the chief
navigational stars we followed spark
around me in the changeling darkness, vast
and starlit. Once I started getting cold,
I led Naomi down below for water—
where I peed into her litter box
to dominate her thoughts, should cats have thoughts,
such as they are. At heart, we both were built
from parts of blocks of sapience and feeling,
so it was alright. Naomi played like Rilke’s
phantom in her cell, where I fed
her by hand, by the way, daily—
                                                             and to
the point, we neither one were disinvited
from the schooner once we sighted islands
off the blessed coast of Mexico:
Islas Marietas, each about
the size of any whale that breached around
us. Pods of dolphin following, we ghosted
to the gateway port. A motor launch
collected our celebrities, and sped
away to parties, and exotic matters
prearranged by fame—which left the rest
of us to shave, and draw our wages. The bosun
promised he was going straight, and disappeared.
I was given to the cook, who took
me off to market to replenish stores
of ostrich meat, more beef, vanilla
pods and chocolate, tons of onions,
abalone in the shell—and who
relentlessly was preaching. There were rules
against stealing chickens, I remember.
He was strung out on a man, and left me with
the avocados, and my awful Spanish,
while he looked him up, returning with
a brilliant dancer, whom he introduced
with loud, resounding empathy, as usual
with him. They wandered way beyond their destiny,
while I foresaw our market purchases
on board, and stowed within our many-benched
vessel–IMG_3354
                though it was another year,
another boat, and in another port
before I understood the rules regarding
chickens. By then I’d beached in Polynesia:
let’s see, Cook Islands after pearls,
and Samoa twice, where I sacrificed
at shrines to the sea-goblins. I weathered
older furies in New Zealand in
the winter rains, representing to
my mind a truly vengeful beauty. White
sharks struck at table scraps and butcher’s
offal I tossed over for the spectacle.
Big-winged birds suspended in
the wind in my line of sight for miles.
Otherwise the latitudes were lonely–
bright, for sure, as every source of light
would scatter oceanic glitter, but we were on
our own. Below us rolled a rogue wave
now and then, exposing unexpected,
wrecks, and drowned roots of islands. From
her golden throne, the moon-faced goddess watched
for small mistakes.
                                     Those who know about
my seamanship have said I’m upward man,
and downward fish, but I was unresigned.
Most cooks aren’t lost at sea, maybe
one in ten some years, out in haunted
waters. Nonetheless, in Mexico
again, on land, knowing what I know,
I wandered inland after ocelots,
and soon was hunting caves, with bats like tiny
demons squealing from the core of solids
all about illegible truths and prophecies,
reminding me of home.

 

It Occurred To Me That…

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I should call attention to the project that the potter Ehren Tool has been engaged in for some time now. He has a compelling, wonderful installation at the Renwick Museum in Washington D.C., entitled  198 of Thousands, which is a collection of his ‘War Cups’ (This is my phrase, and not what he has chosen to call them). Each is made of stoneware, various glazes and decals. He is himself a veteran of the Gulf War, and his cups initially reflected his personal experience, but have grown to encompass the struggles of other soldiers, and their families. Here are links to his website, and to a recent interview with him:

http://www.dirtycanteen.com/ehren-tool.html

http://inthemake.com/ehren-tool/

The cup in these photographs reflects the traumas of Cortes’ invasion of Mexico, and the conquest of the Aztec civilization—as imagined in the last two chapters of my book Genealogies, some lines of which appear below.

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Crow-headed women picked through
the battlefields in a final rally within
the heat beneath the blue mountain clouds,
the mesas emptied. Sarah didn’t wait
for the awful flocks before she gathered
Elam from reconnaissance, and
together took positions like a mist
might insinuate onto a morning
beach—by which I mean, and by occult
degrees, they faded from perception as
they neared the city common. If they were phantoms,
they’d like to be assassin phantoms as
they hefted their munitions invisibly
into abandoned rooms upstairs in view
of the proceedings in the courtyard on
the well-made work of masons, where Cortes
negotiated with ambassadors from mercenary
nations, traded promises of plunder
with his higher math, using zeros,
and with no one looking stashed the novel
treaties in the toilet of his disrespect.


Thank you, I’ll take that. Elam reached
to Sarah for the firing pin, and springs,
and reassembled the dark machine of destiny,
is how Sarah thought of it: the rifle
oiled in Elam’s hands, and ready. Get
used to it. He levered in a cartridge
for the modest shot from there, and read
the white winds. The sacred sky was blazing
with a clarifying light, allowing
him to see an end, at last, of action as
he fired. The hammer detonated the
percussion cap exactly at the moment
when the mountains shook like green robes,
closing distant roads with rocks, scattering
scarlet flocks of parrots screeching up
through rising plumes of dust. Adobe buildings
swayed, or crumbled. The tremblor shocked the audience,
rocked Cortes off the dais. Several
celebrants heard a leaden insect
missing them. In the melee, Elam
levered in another round—no
man of mercy in this mood—braced
against a rolling seismic wave, and once
he sighted grimly on Cortes. He shot
for the umbilicus exposed below
the armored chest plate. That would stop
his exclamation, and by the way, disband
the rash, inconsiderate, fiery
voluntaries left from the invading
expedition.


                          Except, to begin with,
nothing happened as expected. It looked
as if the god of plagues had come
again because, before the slug could strike,
the body lice and European biome
bloomed on Cortes into a mythical
immune response protecting him from any
outside missile. The bullet simple shorted
out, with loud and visible effects.
Clouds of living powder flew in colorful
eruptions, lightning clapped about him with
its smoke and bounce, igniting little fires,
spores and alien bacteria
basically ate everything around him,
and left a circle of ancient visitation.
Whereas the implications wouldn’t register
with Elam, prodigious in testosterone,
rigid, lame in reason, slanderous
to the time, Sarah with the graceful
ankles took the hint. Get the fuck out,
she shouted in the thunder of the third
attempt as Elam made it with his non-
stop, devouring, lethal bullet clanging
off the armor-plated heart of Cortes,
glancing at an angle toward a metal
bell appearing out of nowhere from
another era in a lovely tower
full of swallows, where it never rains,
to ricochet again, and catch Sarah
fully in the chest. It took her breath
away, her lung collapsed, she staggered over
Elam on the floor, and fell.
                                                    Meanwhile,
two moons were seen outside in different
phases—full, and waning gibbous—horrid
winds ruled the superflux, but calmed
as Elam set the rifle down.
He reeled
in panic as he checked the hemorrhage
in Sarah’s chest, stuffing spider webs
into the wounds. That worked, and helped
to re-inflate her lung, which eased her breathing.
She was burning like a fallen star,
Lord Death was singing to her, and
offended decency by making private
offers that wouldn’t keep. You are my food,
He said, I love your bones, and other like
promises, while Elam bathed her, and
examined her for bites. He changed her bandages,
steeped a willow tea against fever
in the tasteless days, and soon when she
was less confused, was spooning in a rabbit
broth he stewed from rabbits left for them
in secret by the worshipful, who made
such sacrifices to defeated gods
and local deities like them—who could
be seen by now, a little. She’d lost a tooth,
and whistled as she breathed, sleeping.

                                                                        He watched
her re-compose, washed her with his tender
joy and vigilance, with no illusions,
and when she fell in moods, imperious,
subtle, full of unpleasing blots, he got
her up and walking, so when the kingdom finally
was taken in the name of Spain, she hobbled
on beside him, sometimes rode on their
improbable alpaca down the mountain
passes in a puny counter-clockwise
last push against the cosmic turning.
The jungles were abandoned, half-burned.
Press on their hearts, and they would say
they never did believe in travel. They
came down into the empty earthen world
at sea level, one of many, where they
had prospered once. Elam was afraid
to use the rifle, so they waded through
the blue-maned surf, and cast their lines,
or foraged in the tidal pools for crab
and abalone everywhere.
                                                  Whole
villages were gone. When the whale
ascended monstrous in the southern stars,
which marked their place, they started hunting for
their gig, sunk and hidden months ago,
but instead they stumbled on a lovely
cutter that Cortes had stashed for his
escape, just in case. What a weasel.
Still, they chased the boomslang and monkeys from
the hold—the latter soused on Spanish wine—,
plucked orchids, unhooked a mossy tree
sloth that dangled from the rigging near
the nesting quetzals, which they also cleared
away, wary always of goliath
spiders lying in wait. Look at you all,
Sarah thought, totally grateful. We must
be learning. With her charmed sigh, she stood
with Elam while the spring tide lurched
against the hull and keel, lifting them
from spills of silt until they floated under
light sail to slide through estuaries
into open water once again,
which Elam sometimes thought of—especially
after nights of excess in a foreign
port—as rapture. Looking back, he saw
a mauled corpse caught in the tidal swell,
rolling in the crash and drag of breakers,
until the sharks hit. Fog was ghosting
in. They needed room and blue water,
hence he hauled his wind, and bore north
by east into the pea soup obscuring
each particular beauty, all the big-
bellied sails—you wouldn’t think so—, moons
and other points of bearing on the unfixed
liquid elements transporting them

 

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Language Isn’t What You Think

PART I

     When you think about it, the evolution of language is a compelling topic for literary folks, and ought to be required study for literary critics. People have an innate capacity for language. The neurological center—what we might by analogy call the cellular “processor”—lies in an organized nucleus of cells in that part of the brain right behind your left ear. Language is not a town-made capacity: it is hard-wired in, as are the other senses, such as eyesight, for example. Our vision has evolved to detect a useful, finite spectrum of electromagnetic radiation emanating from the outside world. Using eyesight, we can detect important things out there: I can see the prey I want to kill and eat, notice the vegetable world from which to select edibles, ogle the other members of my species with whom I long to mate. 

     There are those of us human beings, of course, who have preferred to mate with other species than our own. The example of shepherds lying with their sheep is Biblical in scope, and I myself have known a particular farmer who would have sex with one of his cows. The give-away was the animal hair and fecal matter spread all down the front of his overalls. And as I recall, Governor Winship in the Plymouth Colony hung one of the original pilgrims for having sex with a turkey. They also hung the turkey, which is sadly, grimly humorous. Those first pilgrims meant business.

     With all this acknowledged, no one would say that the interspecies sex was a consequence of poor eyesight. They could see what they were doing, make selective choices among alternative beings in the world—because their capacity for vision referred to a material world existing outside of their mental activity. 

     You can maybe imagine language acting in a similar way. Spear in hand, you and your companion are out hunting for a wooly mammoth to kill, when the guy beside you abruptly yells ‘Run!” or something similar. In this way language might be immediately useful, multiplying the scope of the other senses, which have also evolved to respond to environmental events. The immediate assumption might be that the language has expressed the need for intelligent, discriminant behavior, quickly executed in the material world, in response to changing material conditions. It wouldn’t do, for instance, to run toward the source of threat—and in fact, if your companion took the necessary time to do the thing rightly, he might yell “Run from the charging mammoth directly to our right.”

     The immediate assumption might be that the eyesight detected something in the environment to which the imperative linguistic product referred—and referred as well to the speed of the approach, to the direction from which it was advancing, and perhaps even to the intended mayhem that the advance suggested.

     Those philosophically minded hunters for whom language did not refer to any referent, for whom no real ‘signified’ existed behind the ‘sign’, might prefer to deconstruct the etymology of the verb ‘run’, to quibble with the definition of ‘mammoth,’ or to be concerned about the inaccuracy of the word “right.’ However, that misconcept of language would carry its own sad correction, and our brainy hunter would not live to reproduce either with his own species, or with any other preferred choice.

     These days, those philosophically minded hunters roam through many university literature departments—where they are also about to become extinct, I fear. But that is the subject of another conversation.

PART II

    “ If I now tell you that my old dog, with his few sad last grey hairs, is sleeping by my woodstove, I trust you would not come into my house expecting to find an elk, and that if you did, I would be justified in believing you were fucking weird and never letting you near my dog again.”

      I have already asked you to imagine yourself as a neolithic hunter roaming around, spear in hand,  and using language to negotiate dangers originating in the natural, unconstructed world. This time I’d like to imagine something a bit more probable: that we are contemporary neuroscientists. As such, we can acknowledge our incredulity at post-modern language theory—because we are starting with a different concept of evidence, and indeed with a different conceptual pedigree entirely. As scientists we are looking at the neurological bases of behavior, the source of which is an organ—the brain—that has evolved over immensities of time, in response to uncountable numbers of environmental interactions, so that its capacities are determined according to its fit in its material niche. There are other niches, but we do not fit in them: for instance, we cannot breathe too good under water, we cannot eat bamboo for any length of time and survive, we cannot in arid places go for months without water. It is up to other animals to fill those niches.

     We inhabit the niche we are designed to inhabit—which makes good tautological sense.  I have more to say about this topic, but because I am at heart a shy and modest person, and so do not want to flash my naked, unseemly nerdism, I have provided links to brief lectures: one regarding the neurological areas in the brain responsible for language (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFGmCRc0njk); the other regarding a neuroanatomical area that coordinates our mental and physiological rhythms—called circadian rhythms—with the cyclical presence and absence of sunlight (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43E6Q7a8X68).

     What these links will do is provide some evidence—as well as further links to the world of other related evidence—that I am not just making this shit up. The entire worldwide community of neuroscientists believes from vast experimental evidence that, down to the most intimate neurophysiological degree—down into our very cells—, we are tied to events in the natural world around us. And language, as a neurologically wired capacity, is a feature of that linkage. As thinking, speaking human beings, we are as totally synched to the events in the natural world as our iPhones, Droids and iPads are synched to our computers.

     Post Modernism has a briefer pedigree: perhaps if we stretch things we can extend it back to Kant and his belief that the noumenon cannot be understood, but we might all feel more confident with a less ambitious lineage extending from Nietzsche through Husserl and Heidegger into Levinas, Barthes and Derrida, then forward to the current intellectual heirs. This is a Continental heritage, and works most persuasively with Continental languages. The way in which Kanji, for instance,  purports to refer to its signified clearly works on principles that are not well-characterized by Western examples. 

     But even with the continental tongues, the referent to which a sign points is not commonly in question. If, for instance, I now tell you that my old dog, with his few sad last grey hairs, is sleeping by my woodstove, I trust you would not come into my house expecting to find an elk, and that if you did, I would be justified in believing you were fucking weird and never letting you near my dog again. Some of you might even catch the intentional allusion to Keats. Further, if we were honest among ourselves, we would recognize that the books and articles Derrida has written were published with the particular intent to communicate his ideas, regarding which he worked with discernible effort to convey accurately. If you happened to attend one of his lectures at the University of California, Irvine, where he taught in his later years (and from which, I blush to confess, I graduated) you could have enjoyed his personal, extended, elegant use of language as it was classically conceived—and even ask in interrogative sentences what he meant by the ‘trace’ that language unearths.

Part III

     “In which Postmodern Despair is Vanquished, and We Can Return to our Universities and Teach Poetry.”

     My point—my purpose in making my previous observations is this: there is a disconnection between language as it is now philosophically conceived in postmodern discourse, and language as it is commonly used—even among the philosophers themselves. When Derrida and the murmuration of his followers reduce meaning solely to the relationship inhering between the sign and the signified—the noun and its referent—-they are omitting the vast majority of linguistic functions. Accordingly, they have imported a reductivist platform that is being made to stand for the whole, immense range of expressive uses. Just to pick one immediate literary example, when Marc Anthony at Caesar’s funeral keeps repeating his observation, “And sure, Brutus is an honorable man,” the meaning of that phrase—understood by all who hear it—has nothing to do with the literal referent. 

     The unpublished intention, implicit in the sign/signified postulation, is to introduce an unacknowledged axiom: that the true purpose of language is to reveal the ontologically real. The postmodern formulation tacitly asserts that language is not conceived for quotidian uses (“While you’re out, will you bring me home a portabello sandwich from the Black Sheep deli?”) or for poetical, non-referential pleasures (“The world is blue like an orange.”). The essential, defining purpose of language is as a tool for the contemplative mind to extract the unknowable “ding an sich” —in the performance of which, as we are told over and over, language fails.

     Well, now, that purported failure logically follows only if we accept the reductive proposition that, first, language is merely a matter of nouns and referents, and that, second, its essential purpose lies in its philosophical discourse. However, we are not constrained, either by logic or by common usage, to accept either proposition. Shakespeare (see Marc Anthony above) along with just about every body else in the world has already discovered and published other useful propositions for language. Here, for instance, is one such provocative idea:  

From 1991 until sometime in 2000, this image/symbol is the name of the rock star ‘formerly known as Prince’. As such, it seems to me to turn postmodernism inside out, in that we have a sign connected to its signified without the medium of language at all. 

     To choose another instance, here is one of Charlie Chaplin’s famous opinions on the matter:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_du8fjUN0Kg

For Chaplin, language appears to be an expressive act—extended sequentially through time—that necessarily involves gesture, facial expression and tone of voice—all of which transcends the literal vocabulary, which in this particular instance is comprised of faux Italian*.

    Of course, the ambiguity of language might in fact not be a function of all languages, but merely a feature of the Continental ones. For example, here is just a little of the mathematical language describing the physical reality of the twenty-six dimensional flat spacetime: 

I admit that this is not a language that I find especially pertinent to how I live, but I do believe that this is the best language to be used by those men and women—those physicists—who are truly, successfully capturing the nature of the noumenon: the absolute physics of the universe.

     If we do not commonly find among physicists the despair so often present in postmodernism, we also fail to locate individual differences in their mathematical language that will allow for particular people to identify themselves. Math is a universal language. It is better able to control its meanings, but at the expense of human definition, for which French, German, English—indeed virtually every other language is far better suited, even though that individuation necessarily introduces ambiguities. What I mean when I articulate a thought is not always reliably grasped in its full import by my partner in conversation. My differences introduce ambiguity into expression. I am other than you are, and what I mean—the shades of purpose I convey, the tenor of my voice, the pacing I choose—is individually mine. 

     It is exactly this individuality against which philosophy has protested. And it is this protest that I, in my turn, would want to revalue. I am far from equating linguistic ambiguity with the despair of failed significance that we find everywhere lamented in postmodernism. I would argue instead that ambiguity—precisely because it prevents material control and the successful exercise of power—is a joyous escape from convention, the delight in play, the opportunity for humor, the wonder of the unexpected, the nature of hope.

Know what I mean?

*Here is the text of Chaplin’s Song:

 Se bella giu satore
Je notre so cafore
Je notre si cavore
Je la tu la ti la twah

La spinash o la bouchon
Cigaretto Portabello
Si rakish spaghaletto
Ti la tu la ti la twah

Senora pilasina
Voulez-vous le taximeter?
Le zionta su la seata
Tu la tu la tu la wa

Sa montia si n’amora
La sontia so gravora
La zontcha con sora
Je la possa ti la twah

Je notre so lamina
Je notre so cosina
Je le se tro savita
Je la tossa vi la twah

Se motra so la sonta
Chi vossa l’otra volta
Li zoscha si catonta
Tra la la la la la la

How the Widow Velma Learned to Dance

I must apologize for all the tarps
and cans of paint I’ve strewn around the room
while painting Velma’s ceiling to improve
the vista from her bed of suffering,
where she’s lain, prostrate and staring upward,
since they carted Alfred in. I watched
her barking, I surprised myself by noting,
Velma with her white hair barking
as they carted Alfred in, dead
as meat. She levitated purely out
of anguish, bumping like a zeppelin
about the room, and up the stairwell before
our sense of peril was aroused, and she
nearly had transcended to the attic when
I finally caught her by the weights
of human nature. That was close.  Afterwards,
dressed in her bed things, she rode the unbridled
horse of hysterics. The spectacle has all but killed
the little shell of Evelyn, the eldest daughter,
who arranged the sweet peas in a vase,
and weeps beneath the rainy constellations
of her feelings. She isn’t being very
photogenic, and genuinely cringes
at her mother’s hydrophobias.
Ho, but Velma often battered Alfred’s
sentiments: Fat boy! she had yelled
in Evelyn’s hearing, and then denied him roasted
apples as he liked them most. Oh,
she bellowed, holding Evelyn by the cuff,
Oh she thought his love lubricious, physical
as it was, and for years refused
to touch his dick

                             My guess is Evelyn never
will forget the dreadful revelations
gibbered in her ear, and on the whole
remembers more about the funeral
than she wants–especially the bloat
man himself exposing what is mortal
in his box. Pray for a huge pity
on this woman, on us all, whose fantasies
and tricks of mind proved morbid as her father’s
body–which we viewed at last, to my
surprise, before the pageant minister,
robed in shreds and patches, bespoke himself,
closed the coffin lid, and sealed my friend
apart inside a distant and inhospitable
land. I wasn’t ready. In a lifetime
when the ozone layer is penetrated
by a mother’s can of hairspray, I’m humbled
by the victory of causes and
their preposterous effects, chased by lunacies
and wonders, in which I place all hope. The ceremony
grated harshly to its end, and then
we scattered from the graveside, green and drowned,
into the civil streets of the remaining
world, leaving Alfred to be stuffed
discreetly, and behind our backs into
a dirty hole. No one stayed to see
it closed, or watch the tanagers among
the starry bushes. Troupials were blowing
airs into the emptiness blue
as ink, and Elam could be overheard
to sing his sea chanteys, Sarah could
be humming something typically obscure,
but reminiscent of the fiddler birds
remembered from her youth. To hear them sing
like this across the gross diameter
of our experience, theirs and mine,
reminds me of psychotic processes,
or the ecstasies and revels of
medieval saints, friars summoning
through the gorgeous armories of prayer
their own seraphic messages from heaven.
If I had a rocket launcher, I’d maybe
stand a chance of pressuring important
messages from someone big, but otherwise
I’m used to the illumination from
the massive, dazzling static of the pulsars,
binary suns, and singularities
exploding overhead. In this century,
a body’s gotten cynical about
the salesmen seeing aliens, or postal
workers answering command hallucinations.

So the evolution of my jealousy
has seemed occult and melancholy, my brain
has held by night, in unknown places, an
ungodly envy of the Raleigh Baptist
women on the church committee who
communed in Velma’s parlor with their layer
cakes, and minced meat pies, to tranquilize
the seething widow with ancestral empathies,
at a time when I was drawing breath in pain,
but trying to be manly. Evelyn catered
to them sweetly from the hoard of pastries,
and each was growing sleepy at the moment
Velma hitched her afghan up, and ventured
into memory to ramble on
regarding Alfred’s manic appetite
for minced meat pie. Sisters, she had started,
and recalled incendiary chickens,
the cremated harrows and plows that happened when
the barn combusted, and there was Alfred, famed
among his neighbors as he extricated
their Barbary mare and foal, leading both
into the archetypal fields of sugar
beets.

           A minute later she lamented
her inner life, stuffed with history,
its revelations awful, the wind in it cold–
but that was after she remembered Alfred
in the ballroom, in the middle of
the rhapsody, had whisked the linen table
cloth from off a vacant table, and laid
it like a cape across her naked shoulders,
damp from the preceding waltz. There
she sat amid the sore-footed dancers at
the Peabody Hotel, no less, the shoeblacks
grinning in the halls.

                                    Forty years
of marriage passed before we had to gather
as a family for Alfred’s funeral,
with Evelyn pointing out the goldfish half
the size of boulders, Calypso blooms like dualisms,
and other universals of the Elams’
garden. We tried to keep our chatter to
a minimum.  New mothers washed
their boobs and red nipples: Keep an eye
on the toddlers, they called to husbands sitting
under the perpetual umbrellas,
sipping beers. Baseball featured the
St. Louis Cardinals losing to L.A.,
and all the kids had trooped into the kitchen
where, as usual, Sarah was bending
spoons with her telepathy: it was
a moving spectacle, and kept the children
out of mischief in the darker parts
of Elam’s woods, in which the lion plants
might eat them. It could haven gotten ugly, and turned
the public off. But our precipitation
there had been to bury Alfred, and
to smother Velma with our Southern over-
compensated love. You surely are
a comfort, Velma told the few of us
to bring her pomegranates, mow her lawn,
and Uncle Eddie Seymour–one of our
dear ethnic Catholics, along with Uncle
Anton–mornings in the shower said
novenas for her better health. Even
the gangsters of the family were reigning
in their hyperactive noise, and trying
to be tender,

                       but nothing of our physic
worked. Help. We had to be a little
smarter than we were. Eventually
we left the suffocating flowers, and
dispersed for home, nursing gingerly
our aching tennis elbows, and soothing our
pubescent sons and daughters, who developed
crushes on their cousins, and were then
bereft and humid in the separate backs
of each of our departing cars. What
had we accomplished? A unity of errors.
Velma’s grief, like solar heating, was still
in infancy. Alfred had been newly
and forever plowed beneath the Judas
trees when we reentered our abiding
cities, stepped off planes, and in walking
to the baggage claims admitted we
were irritated by the Krishna beggars
and the other vegetarians
displayed at airports. We assumed routines,
returned to copulations on our water
beds, how momentarily angelic,
and meant to be. We pulled the drapes. Incense
flamed in ashtrays,

                               and afterwards at malls
the charlatans had tossed us caramels
as some promotion–and so again
our metamorphosis into consumers
had us deftly waddling after sales,
and our way of life had fallen into
days of golf, and nights of agonizing
on our backswings with their unintended
circles. Velma, on the other hand,
remained depressed, and deviled by the malice
of her history. The contradictions
made no sense to her, for instance, once
when she was lost among the parlous streets
of Memphis, cabined in her huge Dodge,
and then a neatly groomed, a beautifully,
uh, rouged and tailored–in short a gorgeous
pederast kindly showed her home.
Travel seemed to be for liberals,
or other widows better suited to
it. She commuted in between the supermarkets,
armed with coupons, and on the loose among
her former incarnations as a cook
when she was young, and when her mother was
tubercular. The angers that had famished
Alfred’s appetites originated
in the sloughs of childhood as she stood
on top of orange crates to reach the stove,
and turn the rabbit quarters over with
a wooden spatula. And now, as then,
she gathered all her skillets, and attacked
the human drives for comfort, food and drink
by searing fatty meats, lubricating
everything with bacon grease, and acting
altogether like she never heard
the word cholesterol. Sunday brunch
became a terror to the delicate,
clogging the metabolism so
that afterwards, for days, my colon was
inflamed. Alfred was a bigger man,
however, and would have busted through the finicky
adjustments I required on Velma’s noxious
paradise: her mustang green grape
pie inside a milken crust was all
I’d touch, plus chicken, plus grits and pig’s feet. It
was clear to me, or should have been, the way
the flight of our desire was not between
our pleasures and their remedies, but
from hope to hope. I’ve been a slow learner.
One of Elam’s hopes was sighting whales
when he was on his polar expedition,
but it failed in its anticipated
greatness. One of ours turned out to be
that Velma journey to the Holy Lands
with Mrs. Usdan. Even I applauded
that. Like Solomon, let her be rich
in points of view, great in diction–haimisha,
a beauty if I’ve ever seen one, her hair
like a flock of goats.

                                  But she only
got as far as Nova Scotia where
she haunted fishing villages, and at
a minimum was drenched in all the rain.
She never did recuperate. When people
speak of it, they have to deal with Velma’s
losses, which are real. Once the brains
went out of Alfred, she never could recoup
the difference, never could recover,
never marry any of her ancient
suitors, who came replete with condominiums,
two physicians each who could not heal,
and simply chests of medicines.

                                                      And yet,
and by degrees, she stopped apologizing
for vitality. Several years
enwheeled around before I heard the joggers
trot aerobically across the lawns
as Velma roused the street at 6 a.m.
the stereo, to which she pirouetted
in her self-expression, deceived herself
in waltzing joyously at doctor’s orders:
to improve her heart, increase her circulation,
Dr. Rosen effectively prescribed
the studio at Fred Astaire’s Emporium
of Dancing, where Velma celebrated for
a fee the measured steps of tangos, danced
the sacred rumba, and participated
in the group emotions of a set of friends,
who, eventually, would take or leave
her. Each of us must love a special form
of violence. Velma found that dancing
was a multiplicity of social
fun, and soon discovered further that
the end of competition was in winning.
She has a cabinet packed in loving cups
she garnered at the national cotillions
held for ballroom dancers. I was at
the one in Memphis, watching Velma come
in second best because she rushed her entrance,
having gotten caught in traffic. Having
thought of strong language, and indicating
the dang weather, she nosed her Dodge through acid
rain that strangulated the mid-South,
not to mention Memphis, where it washed
the bridges out, polluted aquifers,
and mildewed everything that didn’t move:
closets full of linen, expensive winter
furs, shag carpets. Aquatic plants
were rooting in the living rooms, suspended
from the draperies, and catfish centralized
in kitchens, gluing luminescent eggs
in clutches to the bottom rungs of chairs.
It was one of our most famous hurricanes
for damage, calling forth the nation’s soldiers,
who resurrected barges sunk by the
deluge and scattered through suburbia–
bodies in the flower beds, and pools
of oil that oozed into the ritzy bedrooms,
where they emanated a prehistoric
stench. Velma scraped the killer mushrooms
from her walls before she dressed, and floated
to the Peabody Hotel, arriving
as the concierge conveyed the celebrated
ducks out of the lobby pond and fountain,
and in single file escorted them
through coteries of dazzling blondes in diamonds,
veered around bohemians, and cliques
of movie critics, then negotiated
plutocrats puffing on cigars
before he finally commandeered the elevator
to the basement, where they roost. Velma
paid them no attention as she trotted
every bit like Ginger Rogers to
the ballroom. It’s the end of speeches, the contest
will begin. Hurry. On the podium,
the maestro waved, and instruments combusted,
honest men huffed on saxophones
and trumpeters cut loose, but the truly
hyperbolic notes ballooned above
the tubas, while the treble violins
were sawing at their scores, the cellists waiting
for an entrance into music that
compelled the dancers to commence their risky
flapping, their whirling on the floor like Turkish
houris. They appeared and disappeared
as the ephemerae they are, infernal
beauties stomping toward the asymptotes
to strut in front of judges, each of whom
was buttoned in a tux, and stunned by the
insomnia of love. Velma hoofed
it with her gigolo–and it wasn’t
anybody’s business if she did–
and everywhere the elderly women with rubious
cheeks exuded their enthusiasm–
I said, were enthusiastic as
they sashayed, inspired by venery and sweet
cooperation. No one’s heart is ever
broken, though I find unspeakably
I have the urge to break them. I’m not the man
I was. And though there were no saxophones
and tubas, no treble violins precisely
as I saw them in the case of Velma’s
grief, still I wouldn’t either want
to say it didn’t happen just this way,
nor claim that, even if you wanted to,
you couldn’t see what looked like frolic in
the ballroom, or detect the signs of transport
in the many detours of exaggerated
waltzes–played by friends of mine beyond
all reason, and on toy horns and winds
in which suspend the deaths of Velma, me
and them

In The Wild

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Part I

The speed with which medical conventions can domesticate the most outlandish requests, or re-frame even grotesquely violent behaviors, is an under-appreciated marvel of modern social life. In virtually every other setting—for instance, at your workplace—, it remains inappropriate for me to approach you, hand you a Dixie cup, and request that you fill it with your excrement. Work conventions rightly disallow this behavior, which would appear out of place, out of bounds, and downright weird.

However, if I approached you in my hospital office, handed you a paper cup with a wooden spatula, and there asked you to fill it with a stool sample, the request would be rendered perfectly normal because the conventions in that setting make it okay to require unacceptable things of you. In the right context, one of my colleagues might insert his finger into your anus, peer wisely into your vagina, thread a camera up into your colon to take pictures–or even cut you open from your collarbone to your pubic mound, slice out your heart, and put it in an ice chest. Only temporarily, mind you, because the promise is that someone will put it back when the time comes.

Although hospitals do their best to disguise the fact by building routinized, institutional facades (look at the architecture of the hospital pictured with this article), they are nonetheless the wildest places I can think of—far crazier than prisons, science laboratories, or military compounds, though they may share aspects of each of these establishments. Hospitals are the licensed institutions in which we hide the uncanny things of the world, chiefly by erecting conventions that suspend our incredulity. Hospitals assert the commonplace, affirm routines, profess the customary, declare humane incentives: just mundane practice going on in here, another ordinary day of saving lives, move along, nothing to look at. And in fact, you will not be allowed to look behind the closed doors.

But let me tell you, if at some point in your life, you discover that you need to be frightened–that you want to challenge your complacencies in ways you do not control beforehand–then hospitals are where you want to be. Nowhere else have I routinely touched people, circumstances, fates that otherwise I never would have imagined.

I never would have thought, for example, if left on my own—never thought to step behind the Senator showing me and my friends around the White House, and try to give him a bear hug. I am just too inhibited that way, and I don’t like Republicans. But Andrew, an adolescent high school student from one of the blue New England states, was comfortable with open displays of good feeling, and felt obliged to make a public declaration of his patriotism by embracing the natty senator addressing the New England Debate Club.

Naturally, Andrew called down upon himself the hordes of Secret Servicemen positioned throughout the building. The event I am writing about happened years ago at this point, well before 911, but even then the Secret Servicemen didn’t take chances–and given the initial urgency, it is to their credit that they pretty quickly recognized this was not a criminal assault, there were no bombs involved, and that everybody was safe, after a fashion. They had no idea what was really going on, but their expertise was with threats and violence, which they were trained to recognize when they saw them, and Andrew’s behaviors fit neither category.

For one thing, he was pretty disorganized in his attempt–not hesitant so much as uncoordinated in a weird way. He was also spouting a sort of ‘word salad’ that might have been mistaken at first for an unknown foreign language–except recognizable, though misused, words in English were mixed in. He wasn’t hard to deter from his intended purpose, the teacher-chaperones intervened with the government men, and eventually one of them took him back to his hotel room.

By report, he seemed to improve over the course of the afternoon, though his parents were called nonetheless, and arrangements were made to whisk him back home–in the course of which, however, he suffered another, more severe and persisting disturbance to his language production and his mental organization. He never made it home per se, but was taken directly to my Medical Center and admitted through the ER, where he was taken for a CAT scan. He had an aneurism in his left middle cerebral artery, which had begun to leak, causing disturbances in his language and motor control over parts of his right bodily extremities.

If he had been 75 years old, I think the symptoms would have been recognized more quickly than his were, because mid-adolescence is not typically an age at which to develop strokes. Though no one said anything, my sense at the time was that the adults around him all were assuming he had been taking some recreational drug, and his goofiness was the result. In truth, he would have been better off if he had simply been wasted on something fun, the effects of which were temporary. But instead of merely needing de-tox, he was awaiting brain surgery to clip the artery.

I was enlisted to evaluate him to establish a portrait of his current level of cognitive performance, which would provide a baseline for his post-surgical therapies. Accordingly, I visited over two afternoons as arrangements were made for his surgery. There were the formal portions of the evaluation, which mapped out memory, attention span, visual-spatial organization, executive planning, and of course his linguistic functioning, which looked pretty decent even with the aneurism. There were also the informal parts of our interaction that let him tell me, off and on, that he liked political science, that he was an only child, and that his favorite band was Tool or Nirvana, depending. I preferred Alice in Chains to either one of them–which no way could he believe, man, because Cobain was such a great guitarist, and the best writer. And besides, Courtney Love was hot.

This could be a fun job. For two days we definitely had the best music going on the floor.

Part II

Other days, on other units, were less musical. On Thursdays we had neuropathology rounds at 7 a.m. in a group of inter-connecting rooms in the basement sub-floor near the morgue. There the neurosurgeons, the radiologists and the neuropsychologists (i.e. me and two others) would assemble among the pathologists to engage in Brain Cuttings: an instructive event during which the brains of persons who had died would be sliced in coronal sections to allow the group of us to examine the gross pathologies, before the sections would be given to other pathologists in other rooms to stain and photograph. Often there would be two or sometimes three brains trussed up in a vat of formalin, where they had been immersed in order to solidify and preserve them for the cutting.

In themselves, brains are remarkably fragile–which is the reason they each float in the cerebrospinal fluid inside each of our respective skulls. Suspended in that salty fluid, they weigh about one fifty-sixth of what they would on land, so to speak. The brain’s own weight would be lethal otherwise; it would collapse fatally on itself simply by the pull of gravity, squashing the life out. So it is a delicate thing to remove the brain from the braincase, and slide it into the fixative that will solidify it enough to allow manipulation. It takes a sensitive and dexterous hand–governed by the attentive mind of a sociopath. Here we’d be standing by this large butcher’s block, on which the pathologist would set the brain he just fished out of the formalin tank, and in the adjoining room, separated by a kind of shower curtain, we could hear the whirr of the diamond saw as the other pathologist was cutting off the top of a recently-deceased-person’s head. It took some getting used to. Hannibal Lecter might have trained in a place like this.

There were two pathologists: a male and female team. The man–call him Dr. Taft–always chose to cut the brains; the woman–call her Dr. Adler–had the knack of extricating the slippery cerebral mass from its protective layers of skin, bone and meninges without brutalizing it, and getting it into the formalin with minimal damage. I don’t know if she ever knew whose forehead it was into which she pressed that whirling saw blade, but the rest of us had to know. Otherwise we could not relate whatever pathologies we saw in the fixed brains to the particular medical histories that proved so fatal to our patients. That meant that each brain, which was labeled by the kind of tag you might find dangling on an appliance in Sears, could be connected to a clinical history, which one of us would read to the group while Dr. Taft prepared to start cutting slices.

You cannot believe some of the stories. One brain I remember looked as if it had been shot with a spray of ice. This had been a young pregnant woman who, some time during her third trimester, had been engaged in love-making with her husband. Given the size of her huge gravid womb, the couple had chosen to have oral sex. Unbeknown to either of them, as the poor guy was going down on his wife, his excited heavy breathing was introducing air into her vagina, up the birth canal, through the dilating cervix, and into the placenta, where it was absorbed through the immense plexus of blood vessels there. Their sexual excitement, in other words, fed multiple air bubbles into her blood stream, which abruptly killed her when her pumping heart shot all those emboli into her brain. She never knew what hit her.

You can imagine what it must have been like. For one second or so he thought he had brought his wife to climax, only to realize that, no, something was stunningly wrong. By the time he had called 911, she was already dead, and by the time the EMT’s arrived, they had lost the baby too. The group of us stood there in numbed silence, not making eye contact, and waiting just to get the session over with.

I never went to neuropathology rounds without preparing for them. The fundamental premise was, of course, that someone had died–which, naturally enough, occurs with some frequency in hospitals. But it nonetheless required a sort of steeliness, a resolve to take it all on, to walk into that room and slice up someone’s brain. It wasn’t for everyone. We strolled down unadorned corridors toward restricted rooms where, like it or not, our Thursday exercises assumed religious proportions. After all, our rituals required human sacrifice. With the permission of the deceased, whose organs we were using, we called up the gods of science, and retrieved truths as we found them in the literal world of the dead. We had mortality itself on the cutting block, and took the opportunity to dissect the accidents of disease and infirmity, tease out vital membranes, and prepare as best we could against the onslaughts waiting for every last one of us.

These were perilous ceremonies, requiring perhaps a sort of ancient Mayan sensibility. Mercy wasn’t in it. Dr. Taft accidentally inflicted a vicious wound in his hand with the knife he was using to transect one of those brains, and though he survived the resulting systemic infection, it was a very near thing. He was ill for a prolonged time, and he wound up losing some of the function in that hand.

My own changes came some months before Taft’s injury, and had a different provenance all together. As we gathered around the ceremonial block that Thursday, and as Taft prepared to make his first cut at the frontal pole of a male brain, I heard someone–one of the interns, probably–begin reading the clinical history of the specimen we were about to study: The patient was a 17-year-old adolescent male named Andrew, the voice intoned,  a neurosurgery patient with an aneurism, who post-surgically bled out in the recovery room. Oh man. Oh man. I could see the extensive, black irregular pool of blood that had guttered into the left parietal lobe, the left anterior temporal lobe. I didn’t want to see the rest of the ugly stuff in the lateral ventricles, once Taft cut back to them.

I was looking instead for the place where Andrew kept Kurt Cobain’s music, the place where he knew the words to Lithium, Aneurysm, Heart-Shaped Box–the secret area where he stored his version of Nirvana. Everyone would have, if they had known him.

Vital Signs

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     In a memorable volume of Parnassus, Annie Dillard writes about contemporary poetry that “it is the native tongue of nobody. As a language it is useless for important messages. It is arcane and luxurious. It amounts to a secret code. Only the people who speak it think it can save the world.” Part of her observation–the incomprehensibility of poetry– is by now a commonplace among critics and readers alike. But I’m interested in the discrepancy she indicates between this obscuring secrecy and the social power that poetry is expected to wield. There is a remarkable disparity between the modest aims of individual lyric poems–they capture the ineffable, the momentary illumination, the fragile beauty–and the grandiose ambitions of poetry and poets in general. Shelley claimed that poets were “the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society, and the inventors of the arts of life.” Whitman maintained he was the voice of the people (who preferred Longfellow), and Pound was nearly shot for elevating poetry and the arts over the economic interests he thought were at the root of war and of the universal dissolution of culture. Of course, he was broadcasting his opinions over the Italian radio at the time. If he had been anything other than a poet, which is to say if his prosecutors had taken either him or his ideas seriously, he would certainly have been executed as an example to the nation. Instead, they locked him up in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital–the “bug house,” as he called it. So much for power. Continue reading “Vital Signs”

Shadow of a Cloud, But No Cloud

What follows is the text of a recent review of Killarney Clary’s new book, ‘Shadow of a Cloud, But No Cloud‘, published by the University of Chicago Press. The review appeared this Friday, October 17th,  in the Los Angeles Times by Stephen Burt. This is a lovely review about a fabulous poet’s newest collection.

 

IMAGES MOVE, EVAPORATE IN KILLARNEY CLARY’S ‘SHADOW OF A CLOUD’

By STEPHEN BURT

Twenty-five years ago, Killarney Clary’s first collection made an international splash: The prose poems of “Who Whispered Near Me” wove evanescent description of Clary’s native Los Angeles, from her childhood’s backyards to her office mates’ cubicles, together with pithy regrets and vivid advice. The mysterious, teasing results — not quite short stories, not quite memoir; friendly and yet reserved — got Clary anthologized, imitated and even attacked by critics as far off as London. (Last year it was brought back into print by Tavern Books.)

“Shadow of a Cloud but No Cloud,” the fourth collection from Clary, who now lives in Aptos, Calif., refines and returns to her initial strength: It’s wiser, terser, sadder, never resigned, but alert to the years of a poet who has lost a parent, survived her first fame and kept her insight acute through middle age.

Clary’s prose poems depend on the melodies of their sentences, connecting phrase to phrase without the interruptions of line breaks. Their unpredictable paths cross the inland desert (“blooms of Styrofoam in the tumbleweed”) or head indoors through moments of recollection, as when the young poet painted with watercolors, probably for the first time: ‘Worry touches the loaded brush tip to the wetted paper and the color floods into a sharp-edged shape, darkens to be a thing, my own.” Such close observations recall the poet’s own training in studio art: When a child plays with a marble, “the game he plays he plays with his weight on one knee, on the press of a few toes,” with “beads of rain heavy on the leaves between his nape and the sky.” Other pages include single phrases that could be short stories on their own: “From the warehouse in Sparks, Nevada to fill a catalog order in Emmett Idaho, a blouse for a woman who will be better when the parcel has arrived.”

Such sketches, on their own, could make a beautiful book, but Clary has more. Midway through the volume, her single scenes, interiors and portraits give way to sequences about her parents: her mother’s illness and death, her trip to Ireland with her father (and her mother’s ashes) and then her father’s apparent decline. Dementia renders cruel the echoes and similes, the likenesses and paradoxes, presented in happier days by the art of poetry: “You want to introduce me to Killarney, then, puzzled, you stop. … I can’t imagine a kind way to tell you who I am.”

Stitching together such remembered moments, Clary sets up ironic pairings between her girlhood and her present self, her mother as powerful giant and her mother as an absence or a ghost: “I sit on the sunny pantry floor and read repeatedly the label on a can of mandarin oranges, its best-by date years past. There will be noise; they will need me. My hands are exactly as I remember my mother’s hands, now gone.” To listen to Clary carefully is to detect ever more intricate echoes, both in her psyche and in the sentences’ sounds: The passage above, for example, descends into 16 consecutive sharp monosyllables, from “its best-by date” all the way to “my hands,” before — in a cascade of Rs and S’s (“are exactly as I remember”) — it softens again.

Her volume finds ways out of sadness, not only in shining moments but also in present-day connections: She is, among many other things, a subtle poet of domestic affection, and it is in that key that the volume ends. “We hear leaves stir under the bamboo, the progress of our different pictures — fall wind or possum — and I lie against you. One of us is warmer. One will die first.” Is that a melancholy claim? Perhaps, but it should not undermine a pair bond, neither for people nor for the hawks that Clary and her partner observe. “Two shapes lift over the canyon, their prey hidden or scattering. I smooth your hair.”

Clary works in the tradition of modern novelists (Virginia Woolf, for example), who ask us to trust their characters’ streams of consciousness, but also in a tradition of prose poetry stretching back to Baudelaire. Fans of today’s short-short fiction — say, Lydia Davis — should check her out too. She may never be wildly popular: She’s too strange for that, and she leaves too many things out; nor is she the kind of experimenter who makes readers angry by what she refuses to do. Instead, she invites us into her shifting scrims and absences, her curtains of sentences, showing us slices and glimpses of her own experience, “waiting here where bees were once kept,” or writing graffiti “with the dry cleaner’s clear wax zipper crayon on the flat blue-gray paint on the closet wall,” or swimming with her mother’s “swirl of pale hair in the bay.”

Few writers have shown at once the vividness and the evasions of memory so well. And Clary explains — within her poems — the workings of her poems, which resemble parties (people move around, trying to listen to one another), optical illusions and party games: “there is a pattern, not a story, repetition of shape, change of scale and/or direction, a game of perception: find the hidden hat in the picture: it may be inverted. Shown for only a moment, the tray is taken into another room.”

As in life, so in her poems, the pieces are moving; Clary challenges us to figure out what we can.

 

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