You're the robot!

A and B were talking just outside the guard shack, so Lilith and I approached. B said he was fine, well not fine, and he pointed at the new camera set on the side of the shack. I said something about Trump's America. "Oh, the surveillance state, that was Biden." A: "I can't believe you supported Biden." I tried to say it was the Democrats I was supporting, not Uncle Joe, but he responded with another attack on the Dems for installing Kamala as the candidate. And besides, the new boss hates Trump. He's a Democrat. I didn't say anything about my political ambivalences. Ambivalence, like irony, is hiding under a rock somewhere (a power washed rock, I'm sure).

 

A started in on No Kings, the hundreds of millions of dollars funneled into the protests. "I've been to them all," I said, "and no one paid me a cent." "That's because you're a ROBOT." "Don't you call ME a ROBOT." 

 

The other day, my auto body shop friend told me, apropos of leftist over-stepping, "I hate what our side does sometimes; we NEED those words." He listed a batch used in stand-up routines. "I NEED the word RETARD," he said, "because that's what he IS."

 

Union brothers

Heading uphill toward what once was Ferdinand Marcos's grave, Lilith and I encountered a short Filipino man power washing stone walls. He stopped. I leaned in to say how much I love the moss and lichen. "Boss's idea," the man said through a bluish cartoon mask, which he lowered. "Have you seen the big stone wall?" Yes, I responded, I used to love the green moss. "Ugly," he remarked. I said something about hoping this cemetery regime ends soon, and he reached over to fist bump me, green debris on his right hand. I said I'd heard that trees are being power washed too, and he pointed up the hill, where Lilith and I were to find palms nearly naked up to a point that no one could reach. "He thinks the black stuff is ugly, but it's not going to work. It doesn't all come off." Sure enough, the trees wore ghost lichen and moss, faint shapes that reminded me of hundreds of photographs I've taken of them before they were ghosts.

 

The subject of surveillance cameras came up. "If he puts them in our dining area, we're going to the union," the man said. I said I was glad they have a union.

On the way out, close to Kahekili Highway, dozens of cars were entering the cemetery. One woman was standing beneath a palm writing a condolence card; her young daughter, in a bright dress with her hair carefully combed, was reading gravestones. "Big funeral," I noted to a man in a San Francisco 49ers shirt. "Yes, someone with a lot of support in the community," he said. "A stevedore." I said I'd appreciated the support my union had from the stevedores when UHM went on strike. "He went to UH," the man said, "football player." Young.

 

Ruminations on the surveillance state

"I just want you to know," said worker A, his tone uncharacteristically formal, "that cameras with audio have been installed in the building." Lilith and I mouthed our thanks and hellos as we walked by. Out of recording range, I was told that the boss said cameras were there for the workers' "protection," that they wanted to work there. Up the hill, workers B and C tell us that cameras are being installed everywhere. "I don't care," said the one; "the guys who are bothered by them are the ones who don't want to work." 

 

"You know," worker A had said, "I talk to a lot of people who are grieving. We have conversations--rather intimate ones--and I don't want them being recorded." He hesitated at the word "intimate," but there's no better word.

 

I, too, record these conversations. Is my intention different enough from that of the boss who so clearly distrusts his own employees? I'd like to think that I record them--and you read them--for better purposes. Is the archive for control or for preservation, and are they always separate? Do we write out of suspicion or trust? Out of fear or love? Is there any pure space, and if there were, could we write about it? At what point do I stop posting stories and photographs on the internet? Shall I write in the voices of the trees, the mongooses, the stray cats?

Tree washing

 

"What kine fish dat?" asked a new guy at the guard shack. "Fish in a tin," I responded, as I was wearing my past tense Tinned Fish cap, given me by a friend. "Oh, Pidgin!" he said, "Filipino!" 

 

At the top of the first hill, Lilith and I noticed that the beautiful mossy stone wall before the hillside recently denuded of trees, had been power washed. No moss, no ferns. From above, we heard the sound of a power washer "cleaning" another wall in the cemetery. On our way out, I told Scott it all had nearly made me laugh, the traffic snarl at the Temple, the naked stones. "They're power washing the trees," he said. Wondering if I'd heard correctly, I repeated, "they're power washing the trees?" Yes, they bring union guys in on Sunday now (they get double-time you know) to wash all the stuff off the trees. I pointed to the palms nearby, as yet unwashed of their lichen. Yes, those. "I've taken so many pictures of them." 

 

He said he hadn't heard that the East Wing rubble will be used to expand a golf course. It all seems of a piece, or pieces.

from Startles

She’d been praying as she drove by, she said. Not cell phone distraction, but god’s own. I read an article this morning on attention as “predatory.” We become prey, as he (yes, he) devours us. The author argues that attention is usually conceived of as solitary; I suggest otherwise.

The cult is false friend to compassion. It closes what is opened otherwise. The woman in the cemetery comes nearly every day to lie on her son’s grave. Grieving is her attention to that patch of earth, a blue dinosaur in brown lei standing beside a typed prayer, a white rosary. I witness her grief from the road with my dog.

To witness might be to prey upon, I suppose. Effective witness is rare, like royal jewels, and can be stolen in broad daylight, if you bring the laddered truck. When nothing comes of it, keep at it. The woman looks at me with tears in her eyes and smiles. The other day I left her alone under her black umbrella set against the sun.

In a poem, her tears would be jewels. According to the article, I might be stealing them. To write about them takes, and then offers, like a palm over the heart, or the palm over my stained white umbrella. What does the language see in us? Does it take the words we write and reorder them, making true statements false?

If I take her story, am I thief or amanuensis? If I offer her story up, have I pawned it, or left it on a doorstep like a foundling? To the extent that her story becomes mine by way of attention, I am both creatures, prey and praying for. If I breathe in her hurt, I take what she would not offer me, and breathe it out where she cannot see it. In my depression, mere politeness seemed the utmost of care.

Both depression and happiness are true, even in the same container. Put it on a ship and send it to sea. Or talk about it as a shaggy dog story. Daniel told me one that ended with “soldiers in your cup.” We live on the hinge of the pun, the turn between truisms, the balance born of counterweight, a sometimes happy accident.

 

BathHouse 27: Resistance

 The new issue of BathHouse is out, and includes one of my Startles, along with other work by Steve Benson, Deborah Meadows, and many others. https://dev.bhjournal.net/bathhouse-journal-27/ Patrick Flores-Scott is editor, and Carla Harryman is the faculty adviser.

 

Have a look. 

from Startles

In the everything makes sense department, the Temple’s enlarged black parking lot fills with orange cones and “compact only” spaces, each separated by a line of fresh white paint. No need to up the contrast. A lone chair sits on the grass, lone cat beside it. I ask where the tourist buses will park. “Behind that line of cones,” one worker says.

The line of cones in front of “compact only” spaces? Yes. The woman at the front gate says where there were two rows for buses, now there will only be one. “They need five people back there now to figure out what’s going on.” A line of temple-colored bird houses stood where only compacts dare park.

In the everything makes sense department, the White House now resembles Gaza. Who saved the furniture, the windows, the wooden floors? Who removed the archives? Where will tourists go, whose entrance was into that wing? A huge American flag droops over broken concrete.

Who needs metaphor now, when rubble is rubble, and history’s washed away with water hoses or blood? Susan Howe’s “rubble couple” denoted the end, but at least they had each other. Tree stumps on the cemetery’s hillside sprout new branches. The same “rubbish trees.” You don’t have to weed, if you replace plants with stones, says my worker friend.

In the everything makes sense department, I suggest that the cemetery’s boss has taken over landscaping for the White House. “I don’t pay attention to that,” the woman at the front gate says; “it gets to me.” The trees are coming down, the grass being paved over, roses getting cut out. It gets to them, these living beings inhabiting a symbolic space. If you tear down the space, the symbol goes with it; that’s the thought.

In the everything makes sense department, the homeless of DC were taken away, the men at “Alligator Alcatraz” disappeared when it closed, and the rubble will doubtless be sold at a profit, like the Berlin Wall. It hardly matters for what the symbol stood, it stands for him who sells it. And the rubble will turn to gold, like water into wine. And donors will come from far and near, bearing myrrh and incense, chips and crypto, to dine with the ballroom’s money changers. Senators must make do with goodie bags given them by the Orange King.