A Trip on TheBus: Monday, December 21, 2009

I've taught "Poetry & the City" a couple of times now. Better to call it "Poetry & Place," since many of my students are not from Honolulu, but from places like Whitmore Village, an old pineapple plantation community outside of Wahiawa, or from Kane`ohe. One of the assignments that works best is to get students to take photographs of the place they live; the only stipulation is that they not be in any way touristic. Then they are to add captions to the photographs and post them on the class blog. We begin to get a sense of the histories of places that way; I remember one student from Waipahu who took a picture of an old general store that has, in recent years, become a Samoan church. Another assignment that proved even more valuable was to take a public bus (TheBus) and write about the experience. (This assignment has since yielded a forthcoming bus map publication of literature about TheBus and an honors thesis by Gizelle Gajelonia, namely Stop Requested.) Once of Gizelle's best ideas, that the bus is like a cathedral, never even made it into her work. Tinfish Press will be publishing her chapbook, Thirteen Ways of Looking at TheBus, in the Spring.

Like many of my assignments, the bus exercise was one I had not done myself. With very few exceptions, I have not taken buses since my first year in Hawai`i, which was 1990. But today my husband decided we would travel to Ala Moana Shopping Center in Honolulu from our home in Temple Valley as a way to show the kids how to get around. He's been working with our son on taking the bus for several months now. So we took the 65 to Bishop and King Streets, then a 20 bus to Ala Moana. On the way back, we took the 57A to Alakea and King Street, and then the 65 back to Ahuimanu. Between trips, we spent time at what used to be the biggest shopping mall in the United States, where a manic counter-recession seems to be occurring.

The bus leaves Hui Iwa Street and winds around, only to stay put next to the McDonald's for 13 minutes or so. Then it goes down Kahekili toward the Hygienic Store, a local landmark notorious for its reputed drug market, then right onto Kamehameha Highway, past Hee`ia Pier and Point and down the coast back to Kane`ohe. Once through Kane`ohe, the bus turns up the Pali Highway and into town (Honolulu). We were seated toward the back of this bus where

--a young man in jacket and sunglasses was chatting up a young woman in tank top and skirt; his voice was slurred as if he'd been in an accident or had been drinking--he talked about drinking, something about the cops, too--and he showed her a picture of a woman he'd liked on his cell phone, and later a video off his laptop. Another young man sat at the back with slatted earrings through his pierced ears, on and off his phone. After he left, another young man sat in back, talking on his phone, while the young woman fell asleep.

--near Times in Kane`ohe a man ran to get on the bus. White, in his 30s, with a neat mustache, he was carrying a large military backpack and a camouflage jacket, which he put in the seat in front of my husband and daughter. He fumbled for change, turning down Bryant's offer of a quarter, and returned to his seat. He pulled out a sushi roll, the kind with the plastic wrap around the nori, and ate it. Then he pulled out a quart of milk and started to drink it, and then he pulled out a plate lunch and started to eat that. Somewhere in there, Sangha pointed to the seat next to the man who was hungry, and I spotted the nose of a dog that had a bone in its mouth, just peeking out of the backpack. It was a black terrier, to whom the man fed bits of his sushi roll. Then he pulled a brush out of the pack and energetically brushed the dog. Every so often the man would turn to look at the woman in the back (her conversational partner had gotten off at Windward Mall). His eyes were a bit too big, perhaps. There was a story. He got off before us, and the dog, hunting for crumbs on the floor of the bus, almost missed the stop. She was an unneutered animal, looked like she'd had puppies recently.

--Ala Moana Center Makai Food Court: an old white man wearing a Santa hat and a bib wandered around, in his mouth a pacifier. A few minutes later, he came the other direction, a baby bottle hanging from his lips.

--Alakea Street bus stop on the way home. A young man started offering us advice on buses to take, thinking we were tourists. My husband promptly started reciting the bus schedule chapter and verse. The young man was from Kailua, on his way to the airport to try to get a job pushing old people around in wheelchairs, being "friendly to people," which he said he always was. But the guy in headphones and a slant cap pacing back and forth ("fucking going up and down," he said) made him nervous. The guy was overweight, appeared too old for his gangster get-up, hardly dangerous. A homeless woman sat down, asked the young man what he did for a living. He said nothing right now. "Have you trained yourself?" she asked. Yes, he did handyman work, he replied, but business was slow. "Is it Easter?" the woman asked, chomping on ice from a Starbucks plastic cup, when she wasn't taking a drag off her cigarette. She wore a black dress with floral patterns on it, could have been on break from work. "No, it's near Christmas," the man answered, then got on his bus to Hickam/Airport, along with the gang banging wannabe. The woman wandered away, talking about Easter.

--A woman with Down Syndrome, her hair curly and graying, got on at that bus stop. During the trip she leafed through a photo album (family pictures?), smiled, and stuck her hands in her mouth, as if to retrieve something she'd lost there. She got off in Kane`ohe, and trudged beside the bus, likely heading home.

--[late addition]: two overweight teen-age boys get on the bus at Windward Mall. One pulls out a paperback (looks like sci-fi fantasy, something about thieves) and starts to read it. The other guy sits with a Borders bag on his lap. The first guy says, "I can't believe you don't like to read--always watching the tv! The first book I read all the way through was a few years ago, and I loved it!" He settles into his book, while his friend sits looking out the window.

--The bus wandered back over the Pali, beside the golf course, through Kane`ohe town, and down Kam Highway. A white-haired guy in broad brimmed hat and swim trunks got off the bus with a six-pack slung over his shoulder in a plastic supermarket bag. Bryant said, "going fishing!" When I remarked that he lacked a fishing pole, Bryant said, "perfect." The bus turned left at the Hygienic Store, went as far as the sewage plant, then took a right. On Hui Ulili Street, two women got on, one older, not terribly mobile, the other tall, lanky, assisting her. The second woman had large upper arms, a long heavily powdered face and bleached blonde curls; her legs were large, thick. We smiled as I and the family exited the bus to walk home.

A friend who came through Honolulu recently noticed the homeless problem on the way in from the airport. There are Vietnam Vets begging on Nimitz Highway under the H1 freeway; there are homeless people in tents in parks from Makaha to Kapiolani Park and beyond. Today's trip did not offer witness to that level of struggle. But it did offer much else, the promise of stories that might explain something, not only about the person seated in TheBus, but about the larger community. I look forward to my next trip on public transit and to next semester's Poetry Workshop (if it makes...) which will concentrate on poems of place.

"The angel at the center of this rind": Wallace Stevens & Hawai`i's pineapple culture

Nothing quite says Hawai`i vacation to the tourist like a pineapple. Airplanes leaving Honolulu fill with travelers whose carry-ons include pineapples packaged in neat boxes, the Dole logo displayed prominently in red. When my father returned from his yearly business trip to Hawai`i in the 1970s, he always brought us a pineapple. More oddly, perhaps, a neighbor in Williamsburg, Virginia, where I taught for a year and a half in the late 1980s, flew a pineapple flag outside the front door. When I asked what the pineapple meant, I was told it was a sign of welcome, of hospitality. Googling "Williamsburg and pineapple," I find pineapples galore in the architecture and culture of colonial Williamsburg, along with ads for pineapple door stops, a table top pineapple votive candle holder, a handmade pineapple mug, pineapple glassware, pineapple soap, pineapple garden stake, a "folk art Santa with pineapple needlepoint, a pineapple snow globe bottle stopper, pineapple rugs and mats, pineapple plaques and flags, pineapple night light . . . I could fill this blog box and more with pineapple kitsch. Suffice it to say that the pineapple is both more (and less) than a fruit; it symbolizes leisure time, hospitality, even Christianity (Christopher Wren used pineapple finials on churches in the late 17th century).

None of the pineapples I've mentioned thus far appears in a field of red earth, irrigated by water contended for by more than one part of an island, picked by laborers and machines, shipped thousands of miles, placed on store shelves; instead, these "pineapples" rest on tables or stop doors or hang from poles. The pineapples my father brought home had nothing to do with ground, but everything to do with ornament (of the kitchen counter, the dining room table) and with an exotic sweet-sour taste that I never quite took to. Though, to be fair to my father, who grew up on a farm, he marveled at Hawai`i's red earth when he saw it. My mother also used pineapples out of cans, which cut the sour and added considerable sweet to the equation.

Wallace Stevens wrote "Someone Puts a Pineapple Together," a poem he left out of his collected, but which can be found in the Library of America edition as part of "Three Academic Pieces." Less likeable than Stevens's poem on two pears, this excursus on fruit and the imagination presents the pineapple as a replacement skylark. Where Shelley used the imagined bird as fertilizer for his metaphorical frenzy, Stevens uses the real pineapple as a goad to figuration, as well as a warning against it, ending with what he terms "prolific ellipses," or the gaps rapidly (rabidly) filled in by the poet's imagination.

In the second stanza, we find the pineapple already tabled:

It is something on a table that he sees,
The root of a form, as of this fruit, a fund,
The angel at the center of this rind, (LoA 693)

Stevens, who called money poetry, calls this fruit a "fund." Lucky they don't grow in hedges. Fundamental to his observation of the pineapple is its appearance as "imagined artifice," not a double negative for "real fruit," but a marvelous description of a fruit that looks so baroque it might well be imagined. And so, since "These casual exfoliations are / Of the tropic of resemblence," at once tropical in origin and trope-ical in trajectory, Stevens riffs on them:

Day, night and man and his endless effigies.
If he sees an object on a table, much like
A jar of the shoots of an infant country, green

And bright, or like a venerable urn,
Which, from the ash within it, fortifies
A green that is the ash of what green is (694)

Elsewhere in the poem he refers to the pineapple as "a table Alp," doubly displacing the fruit from its soil in the tropics to Switzerland, albeit making a fine visual (if not a pleasant sounding) pun on the pineapple as Matterhorn. Can the pineapple as clockworks be far behind?

According to Gary Y. Okihiro, in Pineapple Culture: A History of the Tropical and Temperate Zones (UC Press 2009), the tropics have long presented the temperate zones with a conundrum. From the tropics come wealth and good food, danger and illness. Hence (to make a very long story short) the plantation system, where natives and workers/slaves from Asia and Africa performed the hard labor in the tropics, and well-to-do citizens of the temperate zones (from Scotland to Williamsburg, Virginia) enjoyed the shoots of those infant countries, shoots that also (in ways that few tourists carrying their boxed pineapple can imagine) killed. Stevens was more incisive in his view of the imagination when he wrote that "poetry can kill a man"--if not poetry then what inspires it, the pineapple and the labor it takes to grow it. Something Stevens may not have imagined. These days, "It Must be Abstract" gives way to "It Must be Material." For better and for worse.


Reading Kane`ohe: A History of Change, one of the marvelous 1970s-era reports on the archeology and natural history of the windward side of O`ahu that I find in the Public Library, I see that I live in an area that was farmed with pineapple in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Pineapple, rice, and sugar were planted by outsiders, and replaced the indigenous culture of taro. There was a large cannery at Matson Point nearby, where the old Pineapple Hut (crumbling tourist trap) has been crumbling for decades. This cannery was built on the site of a heiau, or Hawaiian sacred site, and was rumored to have failed because of it. Pineapple has moved away from Kane`ohe, from Lana`i, from most of Hawai`i, where it is too expensive to produce compared to Thailand or the Philippines. But my husband brought home a "Maui Gold organic" the other day, a pineapple with a large label designed to appeal to anyone who likes his fruit hand-picked, organic, and locally grown.



Okihiro's book is very good at showing how Hawai`i pineapple became an object of desire more than a fruit, as much artifice as foodstuff, and hence an object of advertising. (The photos here are of a neighbor's garden down the hill; the pineapples are ornamental, nearly as artificial as the other objects in the garden.) Georgia O'Keeffe got a three-month junket to Hawai`i from the Dole company to paint; she came up with many paintings of Hawai`i, but only one of a pineapple, and that a bud. James D. Dole himself said: "Perhaps the romantic nature of the pineapple hit me, don't you think? You know it has a personality; an 'IT'" (129). Or, as Stevens writes: "the incredible, also, has its truth" (695). The advent of plantation culture and advertising meant that no longer were pineapples the province only of the rich, but also of the middle class. While a 1909 Ladies Home Journal ad for Hawaiian Pineapple shows a worker bent over in a field of pine, a large hat on his head and floppy sack on his arched back (146), other ads highlighted practical uses for the pineapple, and emphasized the can more than the field. "The freshness and tenderness of ripeness, the flavor of Nature, canned on the field in sanitary cans" reads another LHJ ad from 1909 (145). Agency is gone: who canned them on the field? Part of the sanitation, it seems, is the "ellipsis" where labor was. Pineapples are magical, after all, objects as notable for what the observer does not see as for what Stevens does:

The small luxuriations that portend

Universal delusions of universal grandeurs,
The slight incipiencies, of which the form,
At last, is the pineapple on the table or else

An object the sum of its complications, seen
And unseen. (696)

Among the pineapple's qualities--more aptly, those of its observer--is its status as a waystation between beauty and danger. Okihiro quotes one of King Ferdinand's envoys to the "new world" as writing that the plant has a "very sharp thorny thistle with long prickly leaves . . . very wild," even as is was "lovely" and "delicate." "Paradise," Okihiro concludes, "Europe's Orient, was indeed both civil and savage" (89). In "Someone Puts a Pineapple Together" Stevens tries to mitigate the natural dangers (if not those of the "evilly compounded, vital I" as he puts it elsewhere) by absorbing nature into thought:

The fruit so seen
As a part of the nature that he contemplates
Is fertile with more than changes of the light

On the table or in the colors of the room. (694)

And a few lines later: "There had been an age / When a pineapple on the table was enough" (695). Stevens intends a sufficiency before thought, ratiocination, scholarship. He expresses a nostalgia for the object itself. But as Okihiro points out, Stevens's own desire had a historical basis. "Captives of those wants and initiatives, Indians and their material culture, including the pineapple, were spoils of imperial designs, annexations of conspicuous wealth and power than encircled the globe. . . But it was expensive, that mastery over nature" (92). I do not want to do a "Stevens is insufficiently aware of the ramifications of imperialism and capitalism" riff. It would be too easy to accuse a businessman from New England (where the missionaries hearkened from) of such a lack of imaginative knowledge. Stevens has his strengths. Among them, even, is his awareness that the pineapple is an amazing work of natural art, one that can inspire a poet as much as bird or vase or constellation. But I do want to add a layer to another of his poems (a better one) about table-gazing, "The Poems of Our Climate."

Okihiro spends many dozens of pages at the beginning of his book on the meanings accorded to climate by scholars of geography and race; much of this chronicle is profoundly depressing. The globe, as divvied up by scholars like Ellsworth Huntington (in 1915) or Ellen Churchill Semple (in 1911), was divided between temperate zones and their industrious folk, and the tropical zones, with their lazy louts. Whether framed as an issue of climate or one of race pure and simple, these early scholars ("the forfeit scholar coming in," to take Stevens out of context) justified empire as enlightened behavior rather than remarking on the theft it was. Read in this context, Stevens's poem on climate is not simply an allegory of the mind, but of the mind in such a world, one that creates unfulfillable desires for a paradise where fruit grows and savages need to be saved. His poem begins with a "brilliant bowl" on a table, a simple day in which the poet's mind (is "evilly compounded, vital I") still "would want more . . . need more"):

There would still remain the never-resting mind,
So that one would want to escape, come back
To what had been so long composed.
The imperfect is our paradise.
Not that, in this bitterness, delight,
Since the imperfect is so hot in us,
Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds. (Collected 193-194).

While Stevens misses out on the material history of the bowl (I'm seeing in my mind's eye a picture of one of the crystal bowls from Williamsburg, decorated with pineapples), he gets at something profound about the western mind and its desires. He was publishing these poems in the mid-1940s (in war-time, in other words) and the early 1950s (the age of suburban abundance). [Hat tip to Jon Morse for pdf and dates.] What is worst (and best) about the Western imagination is its propensity to want. The poet's imagination (metaphorically) travels in search of desired objects. The strength of Stevens's imagination, in this poem if not in the later pineapple poem, is in his awareness that what paradise there is involves search more than finding.

And, via the pineapple, Stevens is also aware of the dangers of making metaphor at the expense of the object. In an earlier piece, "Poem Written at Morning," he avers that:

A sunny day's complete Poussiniana
Divide it from itself. It is this or that
And it is not.

His proof text is the pineapple:

By metaphor you paint
A thing. Thus, the pineapple was a leather fruit,
A fruit for pewter, thorned and palmed and blue,
To be served by men of ice. (LoA 198)

But the truth is more complicated, involves "experience," touch, "the total thing." Unable to resist his own desires, the poet ends with metaphor, but this time it seems well earned (urned?): "Green were the curls upon that head."

So, to Okihiro's assertion that desire was created in the "'inarticulate longings' of white middle-class women," and the pineapple was rendered "safe for the homefront even as Hawai`i's annexation and the absorption of other distant colonies made their products 'domestic'" (190), I would respond yes, but. That desire was evoked in the ever so articulate longings of Wallace Stevens leaves us with poetry that explores (if not with the historical and material consciousness we might wish) the process of travel and desire in the western imagination. Stevens's pineapple poems may seem to this reader too abstract in some ways, but they are not ever safe.

[added a bit later: painting by A.M. Cassandre]