Friday, July 18, 2014

mem card: "geometry of cure": 18 july



Clearly, nothing is sacred. Words are iron, unfiled. Not the death of irony, but of calm, of kind. Make a fist of your arthritic hand. Words flame like joints, (un)like the bombing in Gaza. Four boys captured in a photo running: photo of four bodies on a beach. A rebel fighter tells his Russian master he shot down the wrong plane. The loops in my daughter's hair cannot be unwound. Egrets pace a circuit behind the lawn mower, necks bobbing. The sharpest mantel is of hurt. Air hammers could break it, but with such a degraded sound. Look for the geometry of cure, a flour sifter's stuttering. Draw it on a board; leave it for the next class to memorize.


                                                                --18 July 2014

Note:
"Clearly": Dogen

Thursday, July 17, 2014

"Sweeping" the homeless away


 I ran into my city councilman, Ernie Martin, yesterday; I was riding my bike and he was waving campaign signs. When I said I'd testified in front of the council, he said, "You da professah." While he persisted in saying "we need to do something," by which he means the new anti-homeless legislation, he did say he felt very sorry for kids living on the streets in Kaka`ako (the part of Honolulu that is currently bursting with high-priced developments for the super rich). Here's an article that addresses homelessness in Kaka`ako, followed by a link you can use to give to the family in the television report.


http://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/story/26039725/former-pearl-city-family-says-citys-efforts-to-end-homelessness-is-hurting-not-helping


https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/help-3-year-old-talia-out-of-homelessness

Wednesday, July 16, 2014

mem card: "pain's roulette": 16 july


All my life false and real. The letter she sent was based on fiction, but it bore consequences. I'm bored, my kids tell me. To bear is to bore as to flow is to flown, conjugation as shotgun wedding. There was hardly any ground on which to make their film; there's surfeit of meaning in Israel/Palestine. How do we lend quiet to their stones, their walls, their pain's roulette? A factory near here makes samsara souvenirs. They're usually on sale: five for the price of four. Put them on your shelf at home and listen to John Zorn saxophone or the blare of air raid sirens. Each kit comes without shelter, without cork to keep the memories out. What it offers is lines and line extensions. Get on your hands and knees and set them down, inch by hard inch. Lines forget circles forget the dull refrains.

                                                          --16 July 2014

Note:
"All my life": Dogen
John Zorn: thinking of this.

Tuesday, July 15, 2014

Testimony against bills to criminalize homelessness

H. Doug Matsuoka has finally been sent video of the testimony against bills to make homelessness illegal. Here is my testimony. There is plenty more. A wonderful run of testimonies that were passionate, ethical, religious, practical, sarcastic, fact-filled, and so on. Even if it felt like talking to a wall. Two members of the City Council listened, Breene Harimoto and Kymberley Pine.

http://youtu.be/GU6c4eJWZ2M



mem card: "lines": 15 july



Doubts do not grow / branches and leaves. Why is that a Buddhist poem, Chris asks, the one that wanders through thought's foliage, not pausing to remark on the impossibility of narrative, the folly of grasping. My colleague asks me to look at the lines, not to honor them. These lines lose their branches and leaves like an odd island autumn, before the leaf-blowers & egrets come to fashion an end to story. I'm interested in what happens to context when it's shed, lodged beside other memory-sentences, when it asks you to re-imagine its slot in the machine. “How do you get down off an elephant?” Bryant's joke goes. “You don't, you get down off a duck.” The monk is a beggar away from his monastery. The man holding a cardboard sign, “Homeless Vet: God Bless,” turned his large eyes away when I reached the corner of Pali & Kamehameha highways. Sometimes, Pam writes, you cross the line.

                                                                 --15 July 2014

Note:
"Doubts": Dogen 
Photo by Radhika Webster Schultz

Monday, July 14, 2014

mem card: "salvage or suicide": 14 july


Mind is walls, tiles, pebbles. After death, a tile-cleaning, pebbles in the mouth. He saves his dead son's junk mail, as if he could still buy what he didn't need. My friend's father was stabbed by a Palestinian on a street in Jerusalem. What they do is not in my name but in my economy. RIMPAC actors destroyed a ship yesterday with a new Norwegian missile. Karl Ove's third book arrived in the afternoon, along with a cat comb. There are days when detail is either salvage or suicide. My “friend,” he writes, asks to be de-friended if you side with Israel. Outsource your disdain onto its actor. They're all bad, Kevin Spacey said. From his father's ceiling a dozen knives hung down like hams from their hooks.

                                                                 --14 July 2014

Note:
"Mind is walls": Dogen

Friday, July 11, 2014

Homelessness as contagion: Bills 42, 43, & 44 before Honolulu's City Council

 

“In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.”
             --George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language," 1946

I've attended the last two City Council meetings on bills to criminalize homelessness, one in late June and the other on July 9. Of course they are not called bills to criminalize homelessness, rather they merely "relate to public sidewalks" and to "defecating and urinating in public" in Waikiki and in Chinatown. (Another bill extends the range to all of Oahu.) At the first meeting, I listened as testifiers came before the Council to speak for or against the bills. It struck me then that two central arguments were being made: the first, by the side in favor, was based on the economy. Business people spoke in favor because they are losing business when homeless people camp in front of their store fronts. The second side said very little about the economy, except that homelessness is the symptom of a bad one; instead, this side's argument was a moral, sometimes a religious, one. "The least among us" was a phrase I heard more than once. How can you throw already homeless people off the sidewalks? (More than that, the penalty for such behavior is a fine; if the homeless cannot pay the fine, they end up in prison, where they are housed--in a modern-day debtors' prison.)

Honolulu's Mayor Kirk Caldwell was quoted at the end of June in the New York Times. "We haven’t eliminated the visual impact of homelessness,” Mr. Caldwell said. “When visitors come here, they want to see their paradise. They don’t want to see homeless people sleeping in parks or on sidewalks or on the beach . . . . I want to do this in a constitutional way, a human way, but I want to do it. We need to do it. I call it compassionate disruption — we are not doing it without heart.”

Where to begin a close-reading of such "jibber jabber," as one testifier called it? Perhaps with "the visual impact of homelessness." The Mayor sets us on the cosmetic level, the level of surfaces (nay sidewalks). This "visual impact" is not on the homeless, forced to witness others' disdain or avoidance of them, nor even on residents, but on visitors to the island who have come pursuing a fantasy that they want to see--if not in truth, then at least on their vacation. They do not want to see the homeless, who are an affront to the myth of Paradise, who are, in fact, more a part of the myth of the Fall. If Waikiki exists within the walls of ocean on one side and the Ala Wai canal on the other, then it offers Paradise before the Fall. Kick the homeless outside these walls because they sin against the image of Paradise. They have eaten the apple of poverty. But the richest of Caldwell's phrases is the seeming paradox of "compassionate disruption," which he has offered up on other occasions. "Compassion" is a word that means "to suffer with." It requires imagination--to feel compassion, you must feel as if you are someone else--and also to feel "for" them. "Disruption," on the other hand, means "a violent rending apart." Is not homelessness already disruption enough? How is the violent rending of "sweeping" (for that is the term) people off the streets also an act of "compassion"? Perhaps the Mayor means to use high falutin' language for "tough love," but that phrase, too, sounds better than it means. He wants to accomplish this violent rending in "a human way," "with heart."

Somewhere, Caldwell learned about the use of paradox. But he did not learn that simply yoking opposites together doesn't necessarily mean anything, especially in a world that is not metaphorical but real. Paradox works beautifully in poetry because poetry often imagines a different reality, but Caldwell is not talking poetry, he is talking public policy. To make the treatment of the poor into a clever paradox does not, cannot, help them, even if it makes him feel smart.

In my research on Alzheimer's, I found that right wing politicians talk about "illegal aliens" and people with "Alzheimer's" in much the same way. They are rootless, scary because they have no sense of boundaries or frontiers, and they don't obey laws that governments attempt to force upon them. Today, I see an article in AlterNet about the crisis of immigrant children at the US border, in which the author points out the use of "sickness" as a way to frighten people away from sympathizing with children in detention. You can read the article here, but the money quote (as it were) is this: "But the controversy really boiled over with news reports last week that these children were 'diseased' and were being shipped all over the nation, infecting Americans with everything from H1N1 flu to scabies to Cangas fever. Whatever other problems these people may have had with these children being allowed to seek asylum in America, it was now a public health threat." 

I'm not here to argue that all undocumented immigrants are healthy people; clearly, they cannot be, due to the situation they find themselves in, their lack of health care, the trauma of their exodus from Central American countries.  But it's clear that the trope (not the reality) of illness is intended to scare American citizens, make them want to reject the "illegal" "germ" that is the refugee. And I'm also here to report that the language of Bill 42 (re: Waikiki) and its echo, Bill 44 (re: Chinatown) feeds off this very system of metaphor. (Thank you Lakoff and Johnson, for your Metaphors We Live By.) 
For the bill itself, like the testifiers about it, splits between tropes of "health" and "disease," economics and the threat of hard times. Look at Bill 42, section (a), third paragraph down, and read this:

The public welfare is promoted by an economically healthy Waikiki special district area that attracts people, including visitors, to reside, shop, work and resident accommodations, restaurants, retail shops and other commercial establishments that offer a unique visitor experience and provides easily -accessible goods and services, employments opportunities, the tax revenues necessary to support essential public services and the economic productivity necessary to maintain and improve property within the area.

So, the welfare of the "public" (most of whom are visitors) depends on the "health" of the economy. What gets contrasted with such economic robustness, but "danger" and "obstacle" and "bad behavior"? See the next paragraph:

Persons who sit or lie down on public sidewalks deter residents and visitors from patronizing local shops, restaurants, businesses, and cultural and art venues, and deter people from using the neighborhood sidewalks . . . Business areas and neighborhoods become dangerous to pedestrian safety and economic vitality in the Waikiki special district . . . This behavior [of blocking the sidewalk] causes a cycle of decline as residents and visitors go elsewhere . . . residents become intimidated from tusing the public sidewalks because of obstructions in their own neighborhoods.

From then on, this becomes an issue of "safety" from disruption (this is not compassionate disruption, mind you). When we get to Bill 43, 'RELATING TO URINATING AND DEFECATING IN PUBLIC," we read about "a public health risk because of the possible spread of disease." Fair enough: untreated human waste is hardly healthy stuff. But when--as person after person testified--there are not enough public restrooms in Honolulu to accommodate a real human need, then what? Arrest people for not finding an unfindable restroom? For "intentionally or knowingly" fulfilling an absolute human need?

During the testimony on the second day of hearings I attended, David Cantwell, a homeless man in a wheelchair, pulled out "pooping pads," which he distributed to each member of the council. On this KITV report, you can hear him ask, "are we supposed to poop in our pants?" What gets left out is his question to the council members: "have YOU ever pooped in your pants?" You can see him (and me) here

So we're left with the dichotomy between health and disease, as if health were money, disease its lack. If you're "unhealthy," you need to be separated from the healthy, either by being "interned," as Kathryn Xian aptly put it, put in prison, or left on a distant island where no one can see your diseased skin or self. (That's been done before in this state.) The state will always opt for health (if not, of course, for health care). And so it did, passing the second reading of the bills on to a third reading, with only two council members in opposition to some of it. Remember their names, Breene Harimoto (of Pearl City) and Kymberley Marcos Pine (of Ewa, Waianae). They are legislators who answer to more than the monied interests. I found Ikaika Anderson notable for asking questions only of testifiers who agreed with him. "Do you not think that Waikiki tax revenues pay firefighters and police and university professors?" he asked one supporter. Which begs the question, again, of who supports the least among us. When that question gets asked, Ikaika Anderson will not come forward.

Here is how I ended my testimony on that second day:

So what is being hidden by this rhetoric and the language the bills before you, aside from the homeless themselves? What's being hidden is that this is all about money. Who is to pay for the poorest among us—the ones who cannot afford a $1000 fine for breaking these proposed laws—that's what is at stake here. The language of the bills pits a “healthy economy” (which we need) against an “unhealthy” “disruptive” and “dangerous” group of people who have nowhere to stay except sidewalks and nowhere to urinate or defecate because there are so few public restrooms and they're being chased out of parks that have them.

If you're going to pass these bills, at least acknowledge that you are voting to protect businesses and to sweep away real human beings who are “unsightly” and have no resources. If you're going to pass these bills, announce what you're doing. You're setting up to put people in prison for not being able to pay a fine that would keep them out of prison. You will be paying to house them in prison where visitors to paradise–to say nothing of outsiders buying fancy condos in Kakaako--cannot see them. You are privatizing blame and cost, while the “social contract” is being used to exclude some to the benefit of others.

Note:
Photograph of missing Ikaika Anderson (off on a restroom break, one presumes) is by Kaho'olemana Naone.







Thursday, July 10, 2014

mem card: "compassionate disruption": 10 july


This is everyday mind. A woman in North Carolina called the cops on sculpted Jesus. He'd not be a vagrant, she said, or need our care. His form is scary after dark, he looks so real. There are holes in his bronze feet. Compassion means to suffer with, or suffer as. Disruption is to rend apart with violence. Paradox can't cover them like a tarp, or a blanket. Paradox is a box too small for them to fit, especially their feet. I told my co-worker in London, 1980, that I watched the bums at lunch and she laughed. I had to say tramps: those men in dark coats in a park full of tulips and older lovers on the Thames. I was the nomad & they a counter-citizenry of the poor. We have privatized blame: give us your blankets, your medications, your shopping carts. We offer you the right to disappear, or to pay a fine for being seen. Can you define table and chair for us, asked a man who needed them for his busking. They'll just sit in wheelchairs and pretend, he added.

                                                                  --10 July 2014

Notes:
--"everyday mind": Dogen
--"compassionate disruption": Mayor Kirk Caldwell, on sweeps of the homeless
--some language from public testimony before the Honolulu City Council, 7/9/14 
--thank you to Catherine Kong for bringing Jesus to my attention.

Tuesday, July 8, 2014

mem card: "fake monks": 8 july



Each grass and each form itself is the entire earth. Each memory casts its form, like a pole whose fisherman dozes in his truck. From my bike I see which cars contain tourists, and which are lived in. The pulled-over van with a dog tied to a tree alongside it is one. If we consider the homeless to be tourists, perhaps we'd offer them hotels, fresh towels, maid service. Island of nomads, convertible Mustangs, rice rockets, Sunday's Harley drivers in their leather jackets. According to the New York Times, one monk entered a restroom and came out in street clothes, took the subway out of the city. They're fake, you know. Karl Ove's a novelist who hates fiction, so he writes his everyday; the critics call it “banal,” but women love it. We like our men in street clothes, buying their six-packs with panhandled dough. Real monks don't beg for money.

                                                                 --8 July 2014

Notes:
"Each grass": Dogen
Karl Ove: Knausgaard
The photo is from the Facebook page "Fake Monks in New York." 
So is the quotation at the end.

Sunday, July 6, 2014

mem card: "not a shell": 5 july


Vigorously abiding in each moment is the time-being. A dead eel in the shore break isn't banal; nor is the styrofoam cup shard, the panty liner half-buried in sand. In one's 50s, abstraction trades places with the particular. Not a shell of, but a shell my daughter holds up, three black dashes on white. A white fish with one black dot on its mid-section swims beside a coral head. Some boys scramble over rocks, find another dead eel; its spine & teeth show yellow on black rock. Three boys & then another killed in Israel/Palestine, horror to counter-horror. Trauma's memory without screen, unlatched door in a wind storm, flapping without brake, or interval. Each moment in its time until there's only protea stuck in a stump at Punalu`u. The image of these flowers can abide, refresh, return. Involuntary key stroke, happy typo on a sea wall.

                                                               --5 July 2014

Notes:
"Vigorously": Dogen

Saturday, July 5, 2014

mem card: "bike ride": 5 july

The “eyebrows” and “eyes” are mountains and oceans, because mountains and oceans are eyebrows and eyes. The mountain is net; ocean lacks stoppage time. Ahuimanu: clutch of birds. Small brown ones skitter as I ride my bike up Kahekili's shoulder. Landmarks for the dead: a football jersey & photo; cross & lower plaque (Courtney & Micah); some dim flowers in a pot, an upside down bucket. Stalks lean over a square of cement across from the sewage plant. Convertible mustangs whizz by, a truck with two sleeping women in the bed. Yes, she saw my phone up the road where I thought I'd hit a rock. Keep the Country Country. New City / What a Pity. There's a new lo`i beside the plantation houses. A Smoke Meat sign sits beside two lawn mowers. Inside the van, man hugs dog. To notice is not to know anything. Say mantras for dead chickens, doves; repetition might not heal, but it takes time.

                                                               --5 July 2014

Friday, July 4, 2014

mem card: "No Shit" : 4 july


The moon is neither new nor old, because moon inherits moon. I'm usually a happy, satisfied person, but not today. I can sometimes spend time alone, but usually I hit the button that shocks me instead. I'm a sad American, caught in black & white. The wall behind me reads No Shit. History's bunk, so I have none that cannot fit beneath my bed. I sort my memories as a teenage girl does beads, dividing blues from yellows, greens. They fight me back, like balls in a lottery machine, dancing. After practice, she sings in the car, stabs the air with her index. Been around the world, don't speak the language / But your booty don't need explainin'.

                                                                     --4 July 2014

Notes:
Photograph by Jim Goldberg
"The moon": Dogen
"booty": Jason Derulo, "Talk Dirty"
 

Thursday, July 3, 2014

mem card: "de-friend": 3 july

Spit out yourself and spit out others. She tried to disown me but I refused. She was at the airport saying never come back & I was orphaned & going away. Do you think you can talk to her? Phyllis said. He says he won't pay for the casual sex of others, for their mistakes, their lack of will, their elective surgeries. They are gendered female. Women want daddies, safety nets, claim their victimhood as privilege. I had an allergic reaction in Chinatown; on the way to my car I ducked in an alleyway to vomit. “I belong here now.” I'm the moralist, he opines. Click de-friend.

                                                                             --3 July 2013

Note:
"Spit out yourself": Dogen

Wednesday, July 2, 2014

mem card: "work benefits": 2 july

 


Everyday activity at this moment is hundreds of grasses brilliant in the moon. The moon an indifferent grade last night; gone behind gray cloud this morning. Birds, my black fan, the deaf cat calling, soon the RIMPAC planes. Yesterday, egrets patrolled the fresh mown lawn. They wear brown stripes down the backs of their necks, like ties. At Goodyear, one guy ignored me by staring at his screen; another jabbered on the phone. “It's a personal call,” a second colleague said. “He annoys everyone.” He was talking about work benefits, staring at his phone while his colleague and I talked about him. A woman and a man waited behind me. The supervisor's name is Scott. I walked to elementary school in the third person, composing the narrative of my life. Now the sun sharpens the green & the gray immensity of cloud as a man walks across my louvered window to the workers' shed. This was not the narrative I had in mind; it's no narrative at all. The end.

                                                             --2 July 2014

Note:
"Everyday activity": Dogen 
RIMPAC: military exercises in the Pacific