Photo spread from Italy, with prose

 Pina Piccolo has kindly published a sheaf of my photos in The Dreaming Machine, along with other photos sprinkled throughout the issue. 

Take a close look at the entire journal. https://www.thedreamingmachine.com/ 

 

Disappearances

"S told me that people become attached to the trees next to family member's graves," I said to a woman who was standing next to a stump, looking confused. She hadn't visited in a while. I pointed to another stump nearby. "There's a man who comes to that grave--lots of tatts--I haven't seen him in a while." She said they'd picked the grave site because of the tree. And now, she noted, it's all about money. The late trees had stood in the line of sight between the upper road and the new water feature, its bright gold arrow and sign, "OCEAN VIEW." Two of my favorite trees died for that sign.

 

Jo, who sits at the front of the administrative building, had no idea what happened to S; she's also been texting him. No response. She spoke quite softly. "Gotta watch what you say now; there are cameras everywhere." Smiled, said she was lucky because her camera had no audio.

 

In the conspiracy theorist's absence

Today, three cats lay down in the unmarked spot where S had always parked his beaten up green van. He had names for them.

Design of darkness (to appall)

 

"You're here on a Monday," I said to Uncle J, who was alone at the guard shack. S was not there, hadn't been for days. J was there because someone had to be. I asked if he'd been laid off. J didn't know. "He said that in a year no one who works here now would still be there," I said, "but he said that to me just last week."

Up the hill, Hoku and Ola said that S had been put on administrative leave. They didn't know what that meant, exactly. He and the boss didn't get along, they said. Lilith accepted their attention with benevolence.

 

On our way out, I said "administrative leave," to Uncle J. "Oh no, he's gone. He took all of his stuff with him. Won't answer my calls, and if he doesn't answer mine, he won't answer anyone's." I told Uncle J to take care of himself. Neither of us mentioned the fat envelope I'd passed him recently with Mayo Clinic information about depression and treatment. "S cares about you," I added.

 

I told him about our cat that went from not eating to eating everything in sight. "I guess I'd better start eating again," he said, vape smoke wrapping around his now thin face. "This was all done by design," he added.

Territorial imperatives

1.

 

A young bearded man was standing behind the receptionist Jo at the entrance to the main building at Valley of the Temples. I thought he wanted to say something to her. No. He smiled, looked off toward the mountains. "Men stand behind me," she said with a grin. She lives with men; she likes that. The men are young, eye candy; doesn't hurt, you know. Has arthritis in her knees, her neck, her hands, can't open cans or much else. Men leave you alone. She used to live with women, but it didn't work. "Territory, you know." "Don't take this wrong," she said, looking in my eyes. "But the one woman was a retired professor. She said to tell her whenever something was wrong. But she wouldn't listen. She could talk, though." And then there was the woman with three master's degrees. Also impossible to live with.

 

"I'll keep my degrees to myself, then," I told her. "Oh, we can talk just fine," she said, "but we couldn't live together."

 

 

2.

 

"I'm SO tired," a woman said to the mortician, who was standing near the entrance. "I've worked 9-9 three days in a row." "Why you do that?" he asked. "Because I have three jobs," she said.

 

The mortician said he was exhausted. Always at work. Why? I ask. He answers the phone when it rings; spent too many years in emergency management not to. "It's not an emergency any more when they're dead, is it?" I asked. "Oh yes it is . . . there's a family to deal with."

 

The conspiracy theorist talks love and death

The conspiracy theorist sounded bored. "I haven't looked at the video yet," he said. "The first one was botched so badly, was so clearly fake . . ." We walked away from the guard shack to talk. J is doing better, except when he isn't. Goes to the bar across the street; helps him feel better at first. S's father was an alcoholic, and his sister died of it. He offered a litany of the guys in the cemetery who've been in rehab. One had resembled "those guys you see beside the road, so thin, looking 100 years old." But he met a woman--she saved his life--and he's been clean ever since.

 

S mentioned his late wife, "the nicest woman you could ever meet. I miss her every day." I asked if he'd gotten remarried, as he wears a ring. "Oh no, I knew I'd never get married again, so I kept it on, plus it protects me from the Filipina aunties and their nieces. One of the maintenance guys, 15 years ago or so, offered me $20K to marry his sister in the Philippines. 10K up front; another 10K when the deed was done." He wanted none of that. The one guy he knew who'd married a Filipina woman was crazy about her. But they still got interrogated."

 

I asked S how long ago his wife died. Twenty one years ago Thursday, he said.

 

Meta Lilith story. (Not meta Lilith, but meta story.)

One tale I forgot to tell: "It was that second tomb," he said, "where a guy who owned a hotel was buried." I verified that the last of this line of tombs going up hill used to belong to Ferdinand Marcos, after his brief exile in Makiki, before his body was returned to the Philippines. All the tombs have rooms and roofs; you could house a lot of homeless people up those long staircases to where the views are especially good. "After he died, the family didn't care about his wife, who had a Filipino caretaker." I knew what was coming. "So she gave all her money to him. He comes by in his Mercedes once in a while, a happy camper." 

 

I've always preferred the meditative mode, looking inward to where the outside still impinges, but you can take time to think about it. Wandering thought, as it's referred to in Michael Pollan's new book on consciousness, the kind our phones too often mute. A mode that admits both the profane and the holy, like the photo of a muddy patch on asphalt that gleams like "Piss Christ." When I began my Lilith Walks they seemed like side notes. so ordinary that they actually _were_ ordinary. At best, they might be read as allegory. And yet, they're not that. They are the thing itself, this world of greed and death, layoffs and virtual replacements, bullies and wanna be's, tourists and local people, what is seen and what is lived.

 

Maybe the objective story is all I can write for now, when the subjective mind gets too close to public pain and anger. (It's a public / private partnership, like so much these days.) Not allegory but scale, this dailiness the scale I am able to witness without breaking.

 

Race, class, gender. Hint: they no longer exist.

Over a Lilith drive-through grooming session, Hoku on one side and Ola on the other, each making Lily's fur fly, I mentioned I'd heard that the big bosses had been at the cemetery. "One of them's a billionaire!" said Ola. There's money in what I discover on-line is called "the death care profession. "I'd like to have dinner with him." He won't bother with you guys, I muttered cynically. "Oh we local guys, we got our ways."

 

At my computer, I look up the Executive Leadership Team of the corporation that owns the cemetery. It's located in Houston, Texas. At the top of the webpage I read: "Humanity is at the heart of what we do because at its core, the cemetery and funeral profession is all about people." There are photos of the bosses, nine white men and one white woman (who is, of course, in human resources). Below them, two more white men, Divisional Vice Presidents. The men are in suits and ties. They all smile, except the last one.

 

On weekends, the cemetery is full of families: Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Filipino, Pacific Islander. They bring flowers and picnics and some of them burn incense in rusted trash drums. During the week, the place is full of workers: Hawaiians, mostly, a local white guy, who's a lower boss. If you walk after 8:30 a.m., you'll compete with huge tourist buses and rental cars going to the Temple. Usually the mix, while awkward, isn't toxic. There was an argument one day, I'm told, between tourists and a funeral party. Many of the tourists have no idea they're in a cemetery. Most of the grave stones are flat.

 

As we get closer to May, it gets hotter. Lilith and I were thirsty by the time we left the cemetery. I asked if they had any water in the guard shack. "What would you put it in?" asked S. I pointed out that they used to have a refrigerator outside the building next to the flowers. "It went the way of the trees," S. said. "Same decision-maker, too."

 

Death and life, Inc.

 

Lilith steered me to the door of the guard shack at the cemetery (she knows where to find her people). S came out and pointed past the display of flowers for sale, meaning he wanted to talk beyond the Cyclopsian eye of the new camera. The big bosses are around, and not just a couple of them, along with a large group of competitors. Twenty-two of them! Think of the airfare and hotel for all those people. Must be 100K. Something's up. S thinks the place is going to be sold, but even his source inside the company hadn't heard anything about the visit. M told him they'd been looking to see how big around the trees are at the bottom. How many plots could be put into that space. He thinks it's M but can't be sure. Oh, they want to put in a feature like the one here, he was told by one boss. But you know, you'd send two people for that work. Plus, the two businesses hate each other. In one year, S said, we'll all be gone. They bring in their own.

 

I told S I met a writer who wondered what people who work in a cemetery talk about. Oh, life and death, I'd said. "And everything else," he added.

Things mothers say

When you're grieving (as he had been for his wife) and people try to give you advice, S told me, "It's like you're in Missouri telling me what it's like for me in Yugoslavia." He'd had a girlfriend in Florida whose mother had them over for dinner each week. They brought a friend who was very short, and sensitive about it. "Don't say anything about her height," the girlfriend had told her mother. Just as soon as the door opened, of course, the mother let out a southern "why you so short, girl?" I told him that the second time my mother met my college roommate's parents, who had moved from Japan decades earlier, she told them how much their English had improved. S and I groaned. 

 

"I'm old and wise," said the man up the hill, walking with his wife. "No, you aren't," I replied, "you're a Cubs fan."

 

The former snail hunter of Kahalu`u feeds her chicken

Her cigarette smoke preceded her; as we turned the corner, she muttered something about "our nation." A hen paced beside the fence, demanding to be fed. The woman's brother-in-law had died this morning. He'd had Alzheimer's, as had his parents; his wife has Parkinson's. "She's mean," the woman's sister. "Complain about something new! Like Trump. I know she's worried about finances, but at that point in our lives, don't we need to find something that brings us joy?" Her own worry lines showed through the cigarette haze. "Trump's completely ruined us." The hen yelled; we walked home, though Lilith would have preferred to continue staring the chicken down.

 

from Startles

Startles

I’m shocked but not surprised, startled but unmoved. We'd been the American empire, but suddenly—how suddenly?--we are Romans. Afraid that he won’t be remembered, the president promises to erect an arch for a triumph to be announced later (TBA). Why can’t blasphemy be more fun? You cross over a hill and there it is, the Colosseum!

Festivals of blood replaced by rivers of tourists. We only see what others built, saw diminished, shored up, sold tickets to. To see is a neutral verb. But to see so many seeing so much; I had not imagined so many! I told a boy in Temple valley he was taking photos of a Brazilian cardinal; he didn’t look up. We confine seeing to our own devices, bearing witness in so many private rooms.

“The public” used to park for free. Now, instead of flowering bushes, we get poles with signs on them, telling you how to pay. With your entry to the Temple, you can get a faux Japanese shirt for $58. Tourists mimic pilgrims at the mock temple; to see is to take a pilgrimage, if you follow your maps closely enough. The Holy Sea it ain’t.

The feeling is heavy on us here, where a graveyard mimics Trump’s America. The boss insults his staff, tells them to “get over” their grief if they’re suffering, to “stop eating so much” if they’re heavy. Cameras on poles have replaced the security staff, like some nightmare out of Jeremy Bentham. Tree stumps accumulate, some red setter orange with red setter eyes staring up. Warehouse the dead in these plots or behind black walls.

Nature is our refuge, is it not? The sharply angled mountains, green, promising waterfalls when it rains. The earth, rich and dark, piled beside the road. A man with cut grass fur on his boots, green on brown leather. Another with dirt under his nails pets my dog.

To arrive at refuge, we crop our images ever more narrowly, leave off the absences of bushes and trees, the accumulations of signs. The space of the image grows small as a die, nearly as prone to chance. “It’s my opinion, and I have the right to have it,” a neighbor says, after telling me he “hates poetry.” Who’s to grieve if consolation’s odious? Who’s to praise the ruins?

 

Lilith marche en francais

"Ah, vous etes francaises," j'ai dit aux jeunes femmes au cimetiere. They stood at attention and smiled. "Je parle un peu," j'ai dit. Elles etaient de Bretagne and je leur ai dit que j'y suis restee pour une nuit a Quimper avec des spirituelles. J'ai entendu une petite fille appellant le Temple un chateau, et apres une femme qui criait, Guillaume! a son mari. "Il y a beaucoup de francais ici aujourd'hui," je lui ai dit. "Tu as entendu! Nous sommes avec des amis." 

 

The tourists arrive in clumps: German, French, Indian. Yesterday, I met a family from the Big Island who'd never been to the cemetery/Temple. Kona side. "What happened to the old guy who walked a dog in here for a long time?" asked Dennis the other day. "He died," I said, "and I found out that his son had been one of my students."

Chapgpt edited my French:

« Ah, vous êtes françaises », ai-je dit aux jeunes femmes au cimetière.
Elles se sont arrêtées et ont souri.
« Je parle un peu », ai-je ajouté.
Elles étaient de Bretagne, et je leur ai dit que j’y étais restée une nuit à Quimper avec des sœurs.
J’ai entendu une petite fille appeler le temple « un château », puis une femme crier « Guillaume ! » à son mari.
« Il y a beaucoup de Français ici aujourd’hui », lui ai-je dit.
« Tu as entendu ! Nous sommes avec des amis. » 

Valley of the bad air (after Gary Pak)

"Do you know R's mom? Nicest lady there is. She's large. Someone offered her a chair at a meeting and she said no, she wanted to stand. "You sure you can stand that long?" asked the boss, who chides her on what she eats. Chides everyone. "You see those trees over there?" S asked. He meant the ones on the hill between Kahekili Hwy and the mountains, lovely trees. "They're going to cut those, because they take up space where plots could be put." "Doesn't the cemetery have a certificate for being an arboretum?" I asked. S snorted. Said uncle's having a really hard time, yes; family problems, job. "He's in a bad way," Ola says up the hill, "but he's doing nothing to make it better. Quit his other job." He's depressed. I asked after the woman who worked in front of the temple; she quit the company, I was told. "At least we got Jesus in the White house," I said to S. "Oh, that's not Trump. He's been dead at least nine months. Notice how much shorter he is now. Down from 6' 2" to 5' 10. And there was the 6' 7" Biden, too. Someone's pulling the strings."

 

These days, I take pictures of stumps of bushes, the beautiful retriever orange/red of tree stumps. The final part of a quest narrative, I read, is lamentation.

A gray day in the cemetery

Uncle J has lost his bluster. Lilith and I stopped to say hello, get our trilled "Lilith Walks!" out of him, a handshake, a pet, something. Perhaps I shouldn't have opened with, "I'm sorry to hear the security guys got laid off." "All of them." Uncle is working some night shifts to cover, but at least there's peace and quiet then. But I don't think it's my comment that dampens the mood. His face has thinned over the last few months; even his beard has lost its attitude. "My cousin had one stroke, and then another, and another," he told me. Lilith and I hope his cousin gets better, and walk off in the thin rain.

 

That loving feeling

Daniel usually wears an emergency green vest and walks the path between Kahekili and the cemetery. Today, he wore a dark vest and walked next to the highway to avoid water and mud. I called him on it. Hadn't seen him in months, it seems. "I read your stories to my grandkids on facetime before bed," he told me. (That may be the very best review I've ever had.) I walked over mud patches so I could hear him better. "A homeless guy asked another guy for money. The other guy said he only had big bills. So give me one, the homeless guy said. It was an electric bill." Daniel has given me one bad joke every time we've talked over the years.

 

We'd missed the waterfalls, and couldn't see the mountains for the clouds. "If you go up to the top," Puna told me, "you can hear the stream coming down. It's loud. He remarked that the cemetery feels empty these days. The security guys were let go (replaced by cameras on high poles). "Felt like family," he said.

 

Tender tree mercies

"Did you survive the near-apocalypse?" I asked the young man at the gate this morning. He wears his baseball cap backwards, is unfailingly polite. His first name is Scottish, and I keep forgetting it. Many days he tells us to "walk safely." He thought they'd survived, and said S had talked to the big bosses about their immediate boss. "Oh, I was thinking of Trump and Iran," I said, realizing that the two conversations were oddly congruous.

 

On our way out, I saw three men standing together. They had the look of bosses, so neatly dressed. One had an HR (Bob) Haldeman haircut. "Are you the big bosses?" I asked. The local guy, dressed in a snappy aloha shirt, asked how they could help me. "Stop cutting down so many trees," I asked. HR (Bob) launched into the "damaged in the storm" rationale. "No, lots of trees were cut before the storms," I said, to which he nodded, slightly. "The place is beautiful otherwise," I said, as Lilith and I headed home. 

 

We're expecting another bad storm.

 

A big day in Lilith stories

1. 

 

"We were all waiting for you to get back," said S at the cemetery shack. I wondered why. "Because of all the destruction," he said. Yes, I'd seen evidence of downed trees, ex-bushes, new vistas no one wants. Fresh absences after two weeks away. "Those two trees by the turn toward the Temple . . . people get attached to the trees near their loved one's grave," he said. That would be the man with lots of tatts and a locals teeshirt; I've seen him often beside the one tree with flowers and family members. Kind of ironic, I tell S, that I was away reading from my book about befriending a tree when all these get chopped down. "They broke in the storm," another worker told me. And the bushes?

 

Lilith and I walked to the top, saw our two buddies there, and headed back down. S sat in a green maintenance vehicle, wrapped flowers in the back, Padres cap on, talking to the guy who sits in his silver truck early mornings. S said he's not allowed onto the Temple grounds any more. "Oh, I snuck in the other day, cuz he [the man in the truck] wasn't here. He chases me away." "Not any more," said S, the man in the truck nodding along. That was then. Now it's fine if you go in. He doesn't care any more.

 

Before moving on, I said we'll see if Iran survives the night. "Oh, that war is FAKE," opined S. "Iran can't control the Strait of Hormuz; they have no navy or air force. And the moonshot is even worse! You can see the CGI all over it." For an instant, I found his words a balm. If the war is fake, who needs to worry? If the war is fake, why feel despair at 3 a.m.? I looked up in time to see another green vehicle coming at Lilith and me. The two workers in the truck were staring up the hill. "Stop!" I implored. "Are there pigs up there?" No, mangoes. A mango tree full of fruit. That's what held their attention. S said he'd get a big stick and come back.

 

2.

 

On the other side of the chain link that separates Ahuimanu Park from Kahekili Hwy and the asphalt path Lilith and I walked on, we saw the park custodian whacking at high grass and weeds. Getting ready for the next storm. "You investigated all that water?" she asked. "It's moving!" There has, in fact, been a stream running down the bike path, even in the absence of rain. "It's coming out of the hill there, where the ground fell down," she said. 

 

She'd put a county lock on the gate to keep out the homeless guy that comes around; the lock's now gone. "He's the guy who steals flowers from the graves--the urns, too--and takes them to 7-Eleven down by the Hygienic Store to sell. You should write about this." I expressed surprise that I hadn't seen him. "Oh, he does it late at night." She offers a litany of stories about homeless (and homed) folks who do strange things. One guy took her to court for sexually harassing him, because he said she said he had small balls! (I already knew the punch line to this one.) "And the judge was laughing, just like you are now, and saying that's not sexual harassment. And I told him, besides, I have a wife, I'm not interested in his sort." Ka ching, there it was. The punch line.

 

I mention Iran, because that is what I do. "The bridges and power plants! Oh my god, what's gotten into him? Is he bipolar or what? Schizophrenic?" I suggested we didn't know, but he was not of sound mind. She returned to the subject of people in her park. "They complain there's no toilet paper, and I tell them the homeless people burn the rolls, so we stopped providing paper. And they come out of there disgusted, wondering what to wipe their asses with. It's coming out of your ass, so don't feel so disgusted," she said, before Lilith and I continued toward home, the bike path stream gurgling beside us.

 

This morning in Tehran

Deep in her dementia, but still at home, my mother knocked on a neighbor's door at 2 a.m. "The sun didn't come up today," she told them, thinking it was 10 a.m.

 

This morning, our demented president threatens to make that statement true for Iran.

La Parola da Casa: podcast on Io ed Eucalipto (I and Eucalyptus), Lavender Ink/Dialogos

 You can watch the podcast here. I'm at home, desperately missing the sound of Italian. Thank you to everyone who made the Italy trip possible, including Federico Preziosi, Pina Piccolo, and Lou Vezzali.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qdwpk18QxYs&t=175s 

Jesus' side arm

On our way out of the cemetery, I wished Uncle a happy easter and Buddha's birthday (in three days). "This is the day Jesus whups the Devil's ass," he said brightly, adding "peow, peow" sounds to his trigger finger and thumb sign. "I thought Jesus liked peace," said I. "Oh, he does . . . "

The last flight home from Rome

The young blonde woman in a Texas sweat shirt and Seattle Mariners cap (it was her boyfriend's, but I told her about Brendon Donovan anyway) had grown up in Indonesia, but lived in suburban Minneapolis. She was moving to Hawai`i with several other Marines. The weather would remind her of her first home. And Iran? "I have no business there." I told her about a Chinese dissident I met once who learned how to fail a physical exam. She's going to look into her bad joints. She wondered where on Oahu to live, after she and her boyfriend get married. Between them, their housing allowance is 6K a month . . . you can live on that, my husband said. (Local people don't benefit from the military's socialized housing support.) Toward the end of the flight, she scrolled and scrolled through photographs of her and her boyfriend (I infer). I passed her my phone number, in case.

 

Italy trip for I and Eucalyptus / Io ed Eucalipto

Le traduttrici Pina Piccolo e Maria Luisa Vezzali ne parlano con l'autrice.
Io ed Eucalipto (Lavander Ink | Diálogos, 2025)
Ispirato alle meditazioni filosofiche contenute nel libro Io e Tu di Martin Buber, Io ed Eucalipto di Susan M Schultz abbina prosa poetica e fotografia per condurre chi legge lungo un percorso di interrogativi sul rapporto dell'essere umano con la 'natura', la società, le diverse forme artistiche con i loro limiti e potenzialità. Ciascuno dei 21 capitoli è corredato da una specifica foto artistica a cura dell'autrice, una specie di palinsesto che consente di sondare le sfumature di colori, le fenditure naturali, le figure formate dalle gocce di resina in uno sforzo di interpretazione e di entrata in comunicazione con la diversità di quello specifico essere vivente, alla ricerca di sapienze ed alleanze che possano essere di reciproco aiuto in questo periodo cupo della storia. Angolando il suo discorso da quei margini che sono l'arcipelago delle Hawai'i e un albero come l'eucalipto considerato di scarso valore nella scala commerciale umana, l'autrice comunica lo sgomento provocato dagli squilibri del mondo ponendoci davanti a tutta una serie di elementi scomodi da affrontare nel nostro resistere e nella ricerca di soluzioni.
Susan M. Schultz è poeta, critica, editrice americana e professoressa di inglese all'Università delle Hawaii a Manoa. E specializzata in poesia moderna e contemporanea, letteratura americana e scrittura creativa.
 

https://www.cheventi.it/eventi/2026-io-ed-eucalipto-un-libro-di-susan-m-schultz/ 

How stories fall apart

 

There is also sweetness. If Lilith and I get to the top of the cemetery, where the mountains are, and we often do, we find Ola and Hoku. Ola's got a salt and pepper beard and pony tail; Hoku is younger, wears an aloha shirt on Fridays as he weed wacks. They come toward us; in the sun their shadows precede them on the green grass. "Hey, Aunty!" they call out, leaning over to pet Lilith as her fur flies off. "Hey, you get grindz the other day?" I called out today, walking with Rachelle, remembering that the boss had said he'd tell them when the movie crew was having lunch so they could join them. "Nutting." No lunch. No hello to Jason Mamoa, though Hoku got one video. Rachelle said some of the film guys come to Waikane Store to eat chicken and sushi. Adam Sandler invited them all to eat with his crew next door. Rachelle's a massage therapist. Tells Ola to get his wife to walk on his back. "Doesn't last long," says Ola, who wishes his wife would get massages at the new Planet Fitness, like Rachelle.

 

As we walked down the hill, I told Rachelle that my Lilith stories took a hit when we started talking to Ola and Hoku. No conflict, just family, just their love for my dog, my fondness for them. I gave Ola a baby gift, and am looking for an aloha shirt for Hoku. We're always happy to see each other.

 

Write about them, said Rachelle. And I did.

Lilith sees a celebrity in the cemetery

"He tro you one shakah!" said everyone to whom I showed my photo of Jason Mamoa on a Harley-Davidson at Valley of the Temples. The woman at the gate had said he'd gone by on his motorcycle before we walked in yesterday, so when I saw a Hawaiian man coming down the hill on a motorcycle, I whipped out my camera. Just in case. "A friend said it was probably his body double," I told her today. She smiled. "Oh no, it was Jason Mamoa." "Yes, my friend checked his left arm tattoo in the photo against another of Mamoa's arm and found them the same. (Mad research skills, you know.)

 

After Ola said "he tro you one shakah!" he told me that Mamoa was pulled over for speeding yesterday. A friend of his heard it on the police scanner. "That might be why he wasn't on his Harley this morning," said the woman at the gate. "I hope they fined him," I said. After all, he could afford it.

 

[part redacted]

 

A gray haired woman waved at us from a van. I yelled at her to stop. "Is your name Lani?" I asked. Yes. "I know a friend of your sister," I said, letting her know the connection was made on social media. "Oh yes, in Kona."

 

Another woman wore an Old Miss teeshirt. "Old Miss is like Punahou," she said. Lots of rich kids go there. Very exclusive. Her nephew played baseball there, with Hayward. "Jason Hayward?" I confirmed. "He played for my team for a while, didn't do very well." But he was on that Cubs team that won it all.

 

Ola and Hoku, weedwhacking up the hill, were hoping that they'd get grindz with the film crew. Such good food! A real spread. On our way out, Lilith and I saw a truck with racks for making hotdogs on the back. But really, so much good food. Hawaiian food. Boss said he'd find them to tell them about lunch, but that might not happen, you know.

 

At the shopping center across Kahekili, we wandered toward more film trucks, and were waved off. "Want to see my photograph of Jason Mamoa?" I asked the security guy who said he lived next to Mamoa's family in Waianae. "Oh," he said, "he tro you one shakah!"

 

from Startles

     

We’re slouching toward justice to be reborn. Or something. He saved us money on the drapes for his big beautiful ballroom. Oh, and dead soldiers, mangled limbs. His neck on fire with what might be shingles.

Not a roof in sight, only rubble couples on the street, and a monkey with an orange plushie to make it all better. A small child with hers is somehow more and less disturbing. She’s in Gaza and the bigger monkeys have bombs. Lilith turned back this morning, as the gray of the sky threatened to fall in dimly lit diamonds. It’s the more and less of it that cancels action.

Some have flown to Tokyo to see the monkey, Punch. No one goes to Gaza to see the girl, as Gaza is closed to merchants of aid, to say nothing of tourists. The monkey lives in a concrete enclosure filled with hills and a cement mountain. It lacks greenery. Commenters object to these poor conditions, even as the monkey dances on two legs beside his stuffed toy.

I withhold what doesn't have any effect, like judgment. If my anger is judgment, it breaks my own bones. The girl, too, lives in a concrete “jungle,” but hers used to cohere, before the bombs. The world is our zoo; in it we play our roles of empathy and distraction, the western detachment that has so little to do with compassion. After I was kicked out of a hotel for sleeping in the lobby, I talked to every homeless person I stepped around.

They were like punctuation on the sidewalks of San Francisco, but we’re trained to overlook our commas, our periods, our colons. I notice there are no semi-colons in Italian; paragraphs are one long comma splice, repeated like an aria several acts in. The semi-colon asks you to stay, if you’re thinking of suicide. The semi-colon stops you, if you’re between clauses. Brakes in rain sing like little monkeys, more resembling birds than primates.

"Ode on a Macaque," as written by a poet beneath Cement Mountain. I thought the Filipino gravedigger was Chinese, what with his pony tale and ragged beard, as he stood under the fogged Ko`olau. “He speaks up, Uncle Golden,” says Ola. He hates the tree cutting, the unmaking of nature from this climate into another less tropical. When tourists get off their buses in the cemetery, heading to the temple, they sometimes have next to nothing on.

“You can see everything,” says Ramsey, who hands out tickets from behind glass. “They don’t even know they’re in a cemetery,” he adds. It’s all beach to them, with side trips to ring the gong at the bonsai temple. It resembles another, in Kyoto. On Tuesday, they’ll be making an MMA film in front of it.

It’s already monetized, after all, the Buddhist temple. We can squeeze money from a koan, make it worth our education in ambiguity and impermanence. “I like money,” the president says, looking at his drapes, before he remembers the dead and dying soldiers of other wars. His war will last only a few weeks; deaths will happen, but we’ll get a “good deal” in the end. It’s transparency, it truly is.

The dangling non-conversation

Yesterday. We could hear him coming, the retired airplane mechanic, his dry cough resounding down the street. Lilith and I crossed Hui Iwa to run into him. "I am NOT in a good mood," was his greeting to us. "That fucking [long string of curse words]!!!!!!!" We walked down the long Hui Iwa hill together, he and his dog in front of me and mine. Occasionally, he'd bark at me. "More people out with their dogs this morning," he remarked. "I wonder if they feel the way I do." We passed the Japanese woman with her dog, perhaps the one who'd had gene therapy years ago, or at least another dog like that one. At the corner of Hui Iwa and Hui Aeko Streets, we crossed. The airplane mechanic and his dog followed the cross walk to the other side of Hui Kelu. Lilith and I continued on ours; the mechanic and his dog had disappeared up the hill before we arrived at our parking lot. 

 

There have been fewer Lilith stories of late. I want to write about the way this president, this culture, snatches words away from us. Our vocabularies have been vacuumed up, leaving us to sputter on the sidewalk, even with friends. "How are you?" no longer invites a comment on the weather, the smell of the puakenikene, our dog's habits, but a splutter of words lacking syntax, fraught silences.

from Startles

     

My dead entered the dream single file and formed a circle around me. Not sure if that was the dream or is the dream of the dream as I write. Do they remember me? I wondered, as one does about the demented. How close are dementia and death, or death and my dream? The dead are relatives, til we become them, dissolved.

Dissolved into solution, where solution is liquid, not a fix. To solve for X means Y is but a pedestrian on the equation’s sidewalk. A pedestrian sees not what is there, but what has heretofore not been seen. The backwards puddle reflection works, but only once each time. Impermanence is cloud, is cloud dissolved.

There are stories, but I don’t want to tell them. Gestures will have to do, the sweep of an arm we make over piano keys when sound isn’t enough. Wings of the egret above a scene of mowing. What a therapist of egrets couldn’t find there, the switch from cow to machine, from meadow to lawn. Does an egret dream of worms, of roaches, of men on mowers?

The dream went nowhere. There was the circle, and I was in it. There were the dead and I, asleep. The scene, such as it was, felt neutral, unadorned. Do my dead recognize each other through me, or must I introduce them, as I would at a meeting?

In another dream, my father disappeared. He hadn’t died, he had simply moved, leaving no address, no phone number. He stayed as the idea of my father rather than as a man in a dapper sport coat, preparing to leave for dinner. I don’t remember seeing him among my dead; all the dead have lost focus, been redacted. Like victims, they’re protected from their names and faces.

Or like the predators, whose names are too big to fail. Structures, also, dissolve, and in their place, an empty plaque. No memorial where none intended. Death starts as memory, ends as erasure. Red smudge where Y took the place of X and was corrected.

Italy in March

 In late March, I'll be in Italy to launch the Italian translation of my book, I and Eucalyptus by Pina Piccolo and Maria Luisa Vezzali. Here are announcements of one of the events. 

 

https://www.casadonnemilano.it/evento/presentazione-del-racconto-filosofico-io-ed-eucalipto-di-susan-m-schultz-tradotto-da-pina-piccolo-e-maria-luisa-vezzali/?instance_id=152820 

 

https://lacasadelleartiste.it/?p=6390 

 Itinerary:

20 March, Online interview with La parola da Casa

21 March, Casa delle Donne, Milan, 6,00 PM

23 March, Modo Infoshop bookshop, Bologna, 6,00 PM

25 March, Università di Bologna class, Forlì

26 March, Università di Milano class, Milan

28 March, Biblioteca delle Donne, Firenze, 6,00 PM

 

 

 

 

My new book from Spuyten Duyvil: WAR DIARY

 

https://spuytenduyvil.net/War-Diary.html

When the Russia/Ukraine war started, I began to follow @strategywoman on twitter; she’s now on Threads. Her life alternated between war and conscious day to day normality, cat and son and “war coffee.” I began a diary that ran parallel to hers, folding together my daily life and her war, our own failing state and my cats and dog, Lilith, as well as photography and coffee. I tried hard to think and my feel my way through all this personal and political history, and maintained my diary for a year. Her war and her diary go on.

Review copies are also available; let me know, and I’ll ask them to send you a pdf. The book is blurb-free. You can find some selections from the book here, before you write your own blurb (lol)

https://www.chantdelasirenejournal.com/susan-m-schultz...

The photograph is mine. I called it 4' 33", after John Cage. The woman who checked it into a show in Hilo called it 4 feet and 33 inches.

from Startles

Startles

The photo is pornography’s abstraction, black square with a little girl’s tutu peeking out. Stuffed animal held by a woman’s hand beside her. Another photo can’t be seen, but the files contain its thick description. Words, sentences, images as we know them in poetry, a document as we locate it in the archives. Why redact photos, but not the words?

Look, don’t look, witness and/or be traumatized. Testimonies on social media, first person behind a handle. If you click on the gray lines, words exfoliate. “That’s not the word I would have chosen,” my daughter says. They blossom, horribly.

Like a mouth full of blood, every orifice a wound. Hide pain behind black squares. When words emerge like translucent dots on a camera lens, they correspond with you, your wish to void yourself of poisons. Our old cat coughs up fur in small puddles you hope not to step in before the lights come on. The prophecies are coming true, a man in scrubs says.

Down to the detail, he adds, meaning that “peace and security” in various contexts makes a prophecy, or is it a conspiracy, true. Once you turn the conspiracy theory upside down, and shake it out a bit, it makes more sense. The monk tells us to wash our mirrors after we brush our teeth. Odd in a philosophy that downplays identity, but we can at least see our form, if not the smudge of soapy stars. The monk wept at his teacher’s feet, his face vividly damp when he stood.

Wisdom is internal, but only if you fail to react to what wants to enter, lie down on your couch, watch your television, plaster you with obscene videos. To redact is not to take away, but to cover over. To unredact reduces us to our basest impulses in the sentence-mirror. Typos are rife. They pulled teeth, so the children couldn’t bite.

I don’t see images in my mind, even the worst of them. But words hang in my mind’s cave, sharp, savage, promising the onset of migraine. I cannot push words away, as I sometimes do the images they describe. The cave fills first with music (drop after drop) and then the redacted sound of forced silences. Your phone is your lover, the monk says, turn away.

 

"All the way down to the details"

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Lilith was interested in the mortician's blue scrubs (even though they'd just been washed, he said), and in his off-white athletic slippers, the heavy socks that slipped into them. The mortician asked how I am; we haven't talked in a long time, except sometimes through the window of his red Mercedes. OK, I say, so long as I don't turn on the news. "Oh, the news is good!" he says, his voice brighter than usual. "The prophecies are coming true.They say that when people start talking about 'peace and security,' things are falling apart. And that's exactly what they're saying, in just those words, peace and security. The United Nations is saying they want peace and security." I suggest that whatever the Trump administration says, the opposite is true. "Oh no, it's not Trump, even though he thinks he's the only one. It's the entire world." Beside us, The Detailer, as the mortician says he's called, was washing a white van until it shown, revelatory, in the morning sun.