September 2011

My last post was of found memories from just after 9/11/01. This post takes up the newspaperman's question ten years on:

When you think of 9/11's psychic effects on Hawai`i, what do you think?

I think of a conversation at the playground, not long after 9/11. Two mothers and their kids, Bryant and I and our son. “We've got to get Saddam Hussein,” they said. “Watching too much Fox,” Bryant responded, later on.

I think of my husband hanging up loudly on one of his oldest friends. “He's been drinking the right wing cool-aid.” That was not long after 9/11. They've never spoken since, though I'm distant facebook friends with the man's wife.

I think of the story a graduate student told me, of how he moved to a hostel when he first came to Hawai`i. His two roommates were both vets in treatment for PTSD. One told him simply, "don't startle me." The other one slept in his keflar vest every night.

I think of the graduate student I saw weeping in the hallway, how I thought perhaps she'd broken up with a boyfriend. Later, someone said her best high school friend had been killed in Iraq.

I think of my older students and parents of soccer teammates of my daughter whose spouses are far away and who are doing their best to keep things together.

I think of the obligation to send these men and women off well. “Cheer for Lauren's dad,” the soccer players are told.

I think of the day I approached the cashier at Times Supermarket and she asked if I “wanted to support the troops” by buying a yellow ribbon magnet for my car.

I think of a friend who stole such ribbons off other peoples' cars and made a Lynndie England silhouette out of them. Thumbs up!

I think I first notice Fox News on at Kaiser when I take Sangha in for his check-ups. I keep noticing Fox, ask them to turn to another station. When the World Cup is on, I ask to see that instead.

I think of the air shows over Kane`ohe, the Thunderbirds coming in low over Kahekili as I drive my car home, the jets shaking our townhouse in Ahuimanu, the neighbors coming out to watch. I hear myself saying “I hate them,” as I lift my chin to watch.

I think of a former neighbor, Intel officer with several tours in Iraq and Afghanistan under his belt. We'd talked easily about politics. On his return from Afghanistan he told us a story as we walked back from our kids' school; he's ordered an Afghan man shot (“he wasn't acting like a friend”). The man survived. He was a “friend.”

I think of another morning when he and I walked back from the school and I started talking to him about politics. His face looked different from before. He turned to look at me, said: “that would mean talking about politics, and I can't (or was it “won't”?) do that any more.”

I think of a colleague asking me if this meant the world would be forever different. Not a question, really, but a wry wondering remark.

I think it's hard to talk to people who don't agree about politics. I remember my mother's neighbor telling me we can only talk about my mother now.

I think of how my mother would cut people off if their politics got too right-wing. I think about how her wings began to change oddly when she got Alzheimer's.

I think about how, when I travel, active military are asked to get in line first. Why not teachers, electricians, plumbers, poets, physicists?

I think of how I think about “correcting” student work when they write about “defending our freedom.” “Cliche,” I write in the margin, but that doesn't quite cover it.

My son, Sangha, is now 12 years old. He loves Airsoft battles and sometimes his friend (who left Hawai`i with his parents when the economy went south) brought over the Playstation and they play hours of Halo.

I think of the effects of all these separations and losses on all of us. There is a lot of grief out there. And it cannot be compensated for through the phrases I sometimes hear, like "fighting/dying for our freedom." Abstractions simply cannot bear the weight of so much loss.

Found memories: September 11, 2001

Michael Tsai contacted me about a piece he's writing for the Star-Advertiser on the effects of 9/11 on Hawai`i. It took me some time to remember that Alison Croggan in Australia had asked for reports on the event just after it happened. Her website has since disappeared, so I'm re-presenting this found text as we approach the tenth anniversary of that day. I'll follow up with a new report soon. (Oh my, how Sangha has grown!)

Report from Honolulu, September 16, 2001

I remember the day last year I drove over the top of a hill and looked down on Pearl Harbor, which was in flames. Taken aback, I suddenly remembered, “they’re filming the movie.” This memory assumed new importance for me this week, when two of the first reactions one heard all over television to the terrorist attacks of September 11 were: “it’s like Pearl Harbor” and “it’s like a movie.” My friend Miriam says that if they didn’t keep telling her it was real, she’d think it was a movie. My mother, who remembers Pearl Harbor well, wondered where it was on December 7, 1941. No one wonders where New York and Washington are.

The president disappears the first day. Reports have him in Florida, where he was reading to schoolchildren when the first planes hit; in Louisiana, where he landed at an Air Force base, and finally Nebraska, before returning to Washington to deliver a four minute speech late in the evening. My husband says it sounds like there was a brush-fire in Nevada and two firefighters died. For consolation, the country turns to New York’s mayor, Rudy Guiliani, best known recently for the acrimonious end to his marriage. Somehow he seems always to be there (eight press conferences the first day) and to be saying the right things.

Five thousands miles away from “ground zero,” Ala Moana Shopping Center was closed on Tuesday, as were public schools on the Big Island, whose mayor (yes, here islands have mayors) used to be head of civil defense for the state, which is constantly under threat of tropical storms, hurricanes, earthquakes.

Two days after the bombing, I drive through Kalihi, a working class area of Honolulu. On many of the telephone poles I notice color photographs of an Arab man with a beard and the words, “Osama Bin Laden: Wanted, Dead Or Alive.”

On the day after the bombing, my prose poetry class is scheduled to sections of Joe Brainard’s book, I Remember. I ask them to write their own “I remember” sentences, inserting recent events where they wish. Most of them linger on childhood memories.

I ask my Form & Theory of Poetry students to write a “sonnet” based on Shakespeare’s rather forgettable # . Make a list of eleven images from the past day, I tell them. Then write a one line “introduction” and a two line “conclusion.” After they read their poems, one of the students bursts into tears. Her classes have all discussed the attacks, done nothing else.

Images, the ones that wake you up at night and then won’t let you get back to sleep: one plane hitting one trade tower. Later in the day, another plane hitting another tower. Fireballs. What one witness calls a “reverse mushroom cloud” as first one, then the other, tower falls. Men and women on the streets of NYC wearing nothing visible except ashes, concrete dust, asbestos. Someone worries about the asbestos. Someone wipes off his camera lens as the billows of dust reach him, huddled next to a SUV. Early in the day, people were jumping from the towers. My friend Gaye’s son saw a man and a woman jumping holding hands. Later in the day that footage disappeared. Apparently, the networks will spare us something. But already we have the theme songs, the video-taped lead-ins to special reports, the titles: America Under Attack, America Unites. People holding photos of their loved ones who are missing, walking from hospital to hospital in New York to see if they’re there. After seeing the towers collapse, we know what “missing” means. The words “pulverized” and “evaporated” make more “sense” now.

Sounds, reported or in one instance recorded on an answering machine (that which does not answer, in this instance): the cell phone calls made by people trapped in the Trade Center or in one of the doomed airplanes. “I love you,” all these voices say or are reported to have said. What people say into their video cams: “You saved my life. Thank you,” and “Jesus Fucking Christ,” which CBS ran with a prefatory warning about its language.

The strikes are an invitation to us all to do something horrible. Many of us, those now termed "academic defeatists” by the right wing minions of Fox News, do not want to strike back militarily, do not want this called a “war,” do not want the USA to kill more people. My adopted son is from Cambodia; read any contemporary history of that country and you will know what evils American foreign policy is capable of. But what should we do? One circulated email, from an American Studies professor in Washington, DC, noted the instant politicization of our grief by the president and his men (patriarchal language is back, without apology, this week). Grief, by any other means, is now our politics.

I’m tortured for a couple of days, as a teacher of creative writing, by the sense that this attack was brilliantly imaginative. It was 9/11 (911 is the phone number to call in an emergency); planes hit the twin towers and the Pentagon, paragons of American might; these killers knew how to define the word symbol. “Poetry can kill a man,” Wallace Stevens wrote. He did not mean this, but we might. This is not what we want poetry to be.

The New York Times Magazine is on-line only this week, to be printed next week. It’s virtual pages are devoted to photographs and to commentaries by prominent American writers. If you want to see what they’d already printed for September 16, please click here, my screen says. I do. That issue was titled, “9.16.01: The Way We Live Now,” and included an essay on Silicon Valley, another on television viewing from the point of view of a network exec, another on the Japanese baseball star, Ichiro, who plays for Seattle, and another called “Fire and Spice.” “Remember when perfume was naughty?” it reads. “It is again.”

My two-year old son, Sangha, still plays delightedly with his aten (airplane) and fie duck (fire trucks) and do do do (bulldozer). For the first time, surely not the last, I’m thankful he can’t be drafted.

No Poetry But in Fact: Allison Cobb's _Green-Wood_

[grave site at Valley of the Temples, Ahuimanu, O`ahu]


A gravestone offers facts: name, dates, relationships. It also--through these same channels and that of its narrow platform--offers poem. The gravestone is in equal measure original (here lay one particular person) and derivative (formal choices few, language abstract). The hyphen between dates turns us all into quotations.


Allison Cobb's Green-Wood traces the history of a cemetery in Brooklyn, New York. It begins aptly with two head-notes: quotations, titles, names, dates. The poet doesn't yet speak for herself, but first through an 1857 book about the cemetery by Nehemiah Cleaveland. His words are transplanted into hers:


You are about, kind Reader, to enter and explore a still yet populous Village of the Dead. Through its labyrinths of roads and footpaths--of thicket and lawn--you will need a guide. Take one that will be silent and unobtrusive, and not unintelligent.


By virtue of its being quotation, that last sentence sounds a note of humility, but these words describe the poet's mien, her task. She is no Virgil, more a ranger, or arranger. In the final section of her book, Cobb makes several poetic moves that she soon turns against: "That arc, it's fake," she writes (127). After one particularly high-flown phrase, she re-turns back: "No that's Poetry-swagger, false, a cover like / the cemetery = sleep" (129). Swagger is false metaphor, is the Victorians' substitution of "falling asleep" for "dying." Graveyards are incomparable places.


Metaphors there are in this book, but they emerge from square sections of text. The book's form is that of short prose paragraphs, slabs really, or gravestones that appear on the page with aisles between them. It's there reader walks with poet: "Wait. I came to know the place by waiting. Not waiting. By standing still and also walking. I lived. From the Old Teutonic stem 'to remain'" (8). Cobb's book often traces words back to their origins, stems, in this way. But the poet takes reader on a tour of life between its origin and end. That pathway is historical, not transcendent, even if part of the history of the cemetery is embedded in Cobb's research on the American Transcendentalists, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Beecher Stowe among them.


If there is a starting place to this book for Cobb, it's 9/11. I can't find the marker just now, but Cobb writes of hearing about the attacks on the World Trade Center off the radio of a delivery truck. The driver too happily announces there will be revenge; he promises that the unmarked cemetery that lower Manhattan becomes will be replicated elsewhere. This is reproduction, but of a deathly kind. Among the graves are many of people killed on 9/11, others of soldiers killed in Iraq. Beside the stones Cobb finds objects:


stars and stripes pinwheel glow-in-the-dark
angel muddy stuffed bunny face
down near Crescent Water
Batman action figure frog riding a bicycle
Virgin of Guadalupe pen
DADDY WE MISS YOU pumpkin (33)


So much unsaid, yet visible to the eye: American patriotism (jingoism), the Hispanic/Catholic dead father, perhaps a soldier; the autumn season (with Halloween lurking in the pumpkin); the kids' toys; the odd humor of a frog riding a bicycle. Cobb calls these "juicy intervals" (33).


Although the objects appear at seeming random, they make an awful sense, one that draws the poet into the story. On one walk, Cobb finds an airplane part, clearly off the Airbus on its way to the Dominican Republic that crashed in November, 2001, making that autumn even more grim. (It's easy to forget that anthrax was traveling through the U.S. mail during that time, as well, dealing its own manner of death and terror.) On the discovered tag is manufacturing information, a kind of headnote in the airplane's memory. Having recorded the PART NO. of the airplane, Cobb notes that "The first five digits match my Social Security number" (32). The moment is sublime, but it's a bureaucratic, corporate sublime that draws a witness into its vortex. The uncanny identifies a "horse of disaster" with the poet whose eyes are glued to her grove of graves.


Before I return to groves, let me quote another bit of connective tissue, one about connection: "Ovid in the Fasti wages a pitched battle between order and chaos says the classicist Barbara Weidon Boyd. She discerns patterns in the seemingly unrelated episodes that keep sending us back, inviting us to make new connections between previously unconnected phenomena" (93). The cemetery does not come with a map, but with these landmark passages that teach us how to read the book about the cemetery.


And again, of Emerson and Benjamin: "Each focused on the minuscule as a container or concentration of the whole, hoping to encounter in the small and minute not just emblems or symbols but an actual instance of the all in concentrated form--as Benjamin wrote, the crystal of the total event" (120).


When you begin to stitch connections, you find yourself linking activities: walking, observing, researching. You stack up histories: Revolutionary, Transcendental, the Vietnam War, 9/11, Iraq. You put together etymologies, facts, objects, land, birds, 19th century collections, trees. You put many of these in lists, along with the names of drugs and pesticides. You take down names of the dead who have left their influence in the poet's thinking: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Linnaeus, N. Cleaveland, Alfred Russel Wallace, Walter Benjamin, Birute M.F. Galdikas. You note land that has been taken and/or devastated from the American Colonies to Papua New Guinea. You consider that the poet is at once naturalist, historian, citizen, and mother.


Or, she wants to be a mother. Cobb, who is partnered to a woman, undergoes fertility treatments, has frozen sperm shipped to her doctor, tries and tries again. She walks through the Village of Death, and cannot seem to enter a region of new life. Presented as fact, the name of the fertility drug, Clomid, bears affect in its trace. There is no baby at the end of the book. That is not metaphor or narrative arc. That is fact.


America is death-drenched, but cannot grieve. Like Emerson his late wife and then his son, America digs up its dead and then keeps quiet. "Of these experiences, Emerson recorded nothing" (72). Like Mayor Bloomberg, perhaps, Emerson was embarrassed by grief. Of some families he spoke to a year after 9/11, Bloomburg said, "It's not my business to say that to a woman, 'Suck it up and get going,' but that is the way I feel. You've got to look to the future" (72). The silences of the private sphere become screams from the public, another of the graveyard's paradoxes.


A cemetery's future lies not simply in its dead, but also in its trees. Cobb writes lists of the trees she sees at Green-Wood. She also writes about arsenic that's used as a preservative in wood. And she chronicles the perverse process of transplanting trees to New Jersey before planting them at the WTC site because New Jersey's climate is the same at that of New York City. "Those that can't adjust--the weak and the dying--will be 'culled' before planting" (70). When Green-Wood gets too crowded, an old tree is cut to clear the ground. Fertility and infertility alternate in the cemetery, but perversely, through human agency (transplanting, culling, poisoning, cutting, treating).


The fact of art a trace (9). Facts are made things, not truths. In this book, Cobb has constructed her paragraphs to offer us traces to the facts we make. Fact is not inert object, then, but a series of connections, the tissue of stories we tell ourselves about American history. The back jacket tells us that this book is "poetry" and also "American Studies." But what I love most about this back cover space is that, though it folds over a book of epitaphs, it offers up no blurbs.


What the book does contain is "heart pillow wrapped in a plastic grocery bag" (38). No aura here, but an amazing work of documentary poetry. Gravestones, like photographs, are not original, but the (mechanical) re-productions of image and text in Cobb's book offer us a point from which to contemplate our own citizenship, and to hope to parent a better world.



Allison Cobb, Green-Wood. Queens, NY: Factory School, 2010. Buy it here.

For more on Factory School, click this link.

Don DeLillo's _Falling Man_: 9/11 & Alzheimer's

About ten days ago I got a mystery package in the mail. After tearing off the cardboard covering, I found a used copy of Don DeLillo's novel, Falling Man; a few minutes later, I vaguely remembered having ordered it after hearing that it contains an Alzheimer's sub-plot. I'd started reading this novel about 9/11 when news of Bin Laden's death was announced by President Obama on Sunday; last night I finished the book. This morning the television is plastered with images of Bin Laden taken from his house in Abbottabad. Book-ends.

I was teaching a course on prose poetry in Fall, 2001. A day or two after 9/11, when everyone was still in shock from the events of that day, I asked my students to do the "I remember" exercise, based on Joe Brainard's book. Many of them said they didn't want to remember, but they dutifully wrote their sentences. We'd already been told, in no uncertain terms, that the world had changed, so their memories--not that I remember their responses clearly--had a before and after feel to them. Or they were memories of the event itself, memories lithographed into their eyes by the constant stream of televised images. Early on the morning of 9/11, when my husband awakened me with the news that the towers had gone down, I had seen images of people falling from the towers, images that quickly disappeared, as if "forgotten" because "erased" or "removed" from the video stream. A friend who lived in St. Louis later told me he'd refused to watch television; he'd never seen the towers fall. What kind of willful amnesia is that? How odd to be the one man who can't "remember" that day in the sense the rest of us do, as image, as awful sequence?

"Where were you on that day?" There are a few days we are supposed to remember, grounded in the places we were when we heard the news. So my mother remembered hearing about the first Kennedy assassination as she brought a plant--thereafter called "the Kennedy plant--home from the store, and I remembered it as my first public memory, when she met five year old me at the door and told me. I have no memory that I knew who President Kennedy was, but I remember hearing the news that he died. The question is more interesting and strange for survivors of such an event, like the characters in Falling Man, including Keith Neudecker, who was in the first tower struck, found a friend dying in a nearby office, then descended the stairs with other survivors, clutching a briefcase someone left behind. In an NPR interview, Don DeLillo describes his character as possibly "suffering some sort of dissociative amnesia that the shock of the attacks induced in him." Here is someone who was there who cannot remember. And he's hardly alone.

This is where DeLillo's use of Alzheimer's strikes me as incredibly effective. Keith's wife, Lianne (whose father had "died by his own hand" when he found out he had early Alzheimer's), works with a group of early stage Alzheimer's sufferers, leading them in writing about their lives. But she--and we--live in a post-traumatic world where no one remembers what happened to them on a particular day. They can name the day, 9/11, but they can't say clearly what happened to them, or to us, on that day. In some cases, they don't know the "real" names of people with whom they are intimate. DeLillo's description of Alzheimer's effects also applies to the effects of trauma on his characters: "a mind beginning to slide away from the adhesive friction that makes an individual possible" (30). Writing allows the Alzheimer's patients to re-collect themselves, just as the novel gives DeLillo access to what it might mean to recover a cogent memory of that event. The memory-damaged group writes nothing different from what my college students wrote: "They wrote about the planes. They wrote about where they were when it happened. They wrote about people they knew who were in the towers, or nearby, and they wrote about God" (60). Rosellen wrote that she wanted to see the jumpers hold hands; "I am closer to God than ever," she noted (61). Rosellen appears later in the novel only in Lianne's memories of her, as one day "she could not remember where she lived" and no longer came to the group's meetings (141).

Keith Neudecker recovers his memories in encounters--sexual, competitive, ever awkward--with other survivors. He's part of a huge jigsaw puzzle that attempts to put itself together, pieces seeking out other pieces, those that might fit, might be good neighbors. But nothing fits that is not being destroyed. Neighbors soothe themselves, but annoy each other with their music. The book ends with Neudecker's memories of 9/11, his recovery from amnesia, the symbolic Alzheimer's DeLillo describes. But the actual Alzheimer's patients, writing desperately together toward coherence, inevitably lose it: "The truth was mapped in slow and certain decline. Each member of the group lived in this knowledge. Lianne found it hardest to accept in the case of Carmen G. She appeared to be two women simultaneously, the one sitting here, less combative over time, less clearly defined, speech beginning to drag . . ." as Lianne imagines a memory of her past as "a spirited woman in her reckless prime, funny and blunt, spinning on a dance floor" (125). Fearful of Alzheimer's, Lianne has herself tested, succeeds (mostly) in counting down from 100 by 7s. Neither 9 nor 11 participate in that count-down, although those are the numbers that haunt her the most. She ends the book consumed (as it were) by the number 3, as she turns to Catholicism for solace.

This morning, 5/7/11, the television promises us Bin Laden's home videos, including one of an armoir that appears in what we are allowed to see of the Seals' death scene video. (In DeLillo's book, children think obsessively of a character named Bill Lawton, Americanizing him in a very telling way.) We will see Bin Laden's memories, not our own. There is no sign yet that we allow ourselves to forget him, or our own trauma, let alone any of those traumas inflicted on others in our name. Our private memories of that day were also public; some of his private memories belong to us, now. What we will do with them is a mystery. The missing photo, that of Bin Laden in death, shall haunt us too, not because we don't see it, but because we can.

I'll end with another absent photo, that of the "falling man" on whom DeLillo bases a performance artist in his book. The falling man replays a famous but hardly ever shown photograph of one of the "jumpers" from the Twin Towers. The New York Times published the photograph next to Frank Rich's review of the novel, but blurred the falling man out. Up to 200 people died on 9/11 by jumping out of the windows, away from the fire, the heat, the lack of oxygen. They would have died anyway; they were the few who "chose" to die by "their own hands." A French documentary represents "the jumpers" only as sound--repeated thuds on roofs and on the ground. Apparently, many of the thuds were edited out, as the sound itself was thought to be too traumatic for viewers (induced synesthesia?). The photographs are not violent, but are treated as if they were. I suspect that some of the trauma of the photos is precisely that lack of violence; they exist in moments between horrific events--the burning in the Towers, death from the fall on the ground. These are the moments we oddly most want to forget, when time still moves, but cannot, will not, achieve the ending we wish for it. They image the present, a last moment in time before we lose time. The Alzheimer's patient still has it; everything else has been forgotten. And so the present tense becomes pornographic precisely because it's taken out of sequence; it belongs to no notion of life as we conceive it. We are drawn to and repelled by it, in equal measure.

The falling man, unblurred by the censor, is here. The article by Tom Junod that follows investigates ways in which people approach their own memories, or forgettings, or not knowings, by way of a single photographic image. One mother of two brothers who died that day recapitulates the film, Blow Up, demanding that the photographer make a larger image. Others choose to look away from the image, even to hate, reject any possible connection between it and themselves. The photograph becomes such a powerful symbol that it's suppressed. What we choose as our icons for the event are ordinary things. Don DeLillo names them in an article he wrote for Harper's in late 2001. I found it in the Guardian, which explains the spelling: "The cellphones, the lost shoes, the handkerchiefs mashed in the faces of running men and women. The box cutters and credit cards. The paper that came streaming out of the towers and drifted across the river to Brooklyn backyards, status reports, résumés, insurance forms. Sheets of paper driven into concrete, according to witnesses. Paper slicing into truck tyres, fixed there."

We can remember these things, because they do not, on their own, traumatize us in the way a photograph does, or in the way memory is sometimes so strong we cannot find it. Some are items one finds in an Alzheimer's home, intended to calm the residents. Shoes, pieces of paper, insurance forms. There they are. The rest of us deal with them as we can.