Startles: philo-fantasizing

Each elegy is about us; hence our discomfort with its details. Privacy’s a shield for the reader more than the subject, who “will be dead for a long time,” as Anne says. To leave in chaos is a kind of invisibility cloak. The death of a friend leaves a debt, if only you can find the bank account. Someone will pay the utilities.

Proceed along this path, finding places where brown leaves bleed yellow light, or where paperbark peels into shadow, or where palms stick out their pollinated tongues to the bees. In grief, I’m told, nature offers us solace. But we’ve had two hurricanes this month, three Kona lows this year, storms without name that made our ceilings into topo maps. Dry wall’s decreation gives us distraction, like the portrait of a lion on a gynecologist’s ceiling. I love dead leaves, not dead friends.

Follow the light through this patch of rain forest, geometries of large green leaves held over twigs. Asemic, this forest’s language. Can we read it the way we read our dead friend’s essays, for the shade they might cast on our friendship? A tentative series of vertical lines, fraktur that’s at once fracture and a grid for syntax. Italian sentences walk backwards, from mystery to resolution, hiding their punch lines at the end.

Stories are reputed to develop empathy, the palliative effect of narrative on  fractured synapses. My friend didn’t understand why stories might be a problem. Assume there’s a progression from beginning to middle to end, even in Hopscotch. There’s no end to this life, or the end’s as imperfect as the life. She refused help, until no one offered it any more.

Because “help” suggests weakness, and that’s disallowed in a survivor of her parents’ flight from Mao. And other traumas I will leave out, for privacy’s sake. Diaspora doesn’t choose its trajectory, or its shift in words. Some part of origin remains as sacred, however beautiful the breaks in clay. When she told a friend that she’d “saved her life,” the friend had no idea what she meant.

I’ve come to understand my mother’s retreats into self, her silences, her willingness to hurt rather than to be hurt. What saves the child sometimes kills the adult. Her shield grows knives inside, so each defense causes a wound. To lose a self is not to be self-less. It’s to be a faint pattern on a carpet, a computer left on in the dark, a cat waiting to be saved.

 

A 9/11 rerun from the blog

 I don't remember the novel. I can't hold onto plots. But I vaguely remember having written this essay about Don DeLillo's book, Falling Man, inspired by the photograph of someone we now know was Jonathan Briley, sound engineer, falling from one of the twin towers. DeLillo connected the event to Alzheimer's in ways that made sense to me then, and now that I reread my response: https://tinfisheditor.blogspot.com/2011/05/don-delillos-falling-man-911-alzheimers.html

 

Startles (an elegy)

1.

She told the story from beginning to end, when it was the end that mattered. Story gets in the way of death; perhaps that’s why we’re drawn to it. Not that stories explain our lives to us, but they interrupt their flow. Do not want your friend to be immortal, Weil inveighs. But mortality's the form of our beauty, and hers (and hers before) was not.

2.

She and I watched the OJ chase in my living room in Makiki, spent hours on the phone weighing the clues. Among them, the blond detective with a racist bent, and a glove that may or may not have fit. There was a wall, and an outbuilding with another blond man inside, a high pitched, thin Falstaff, good on television. She liked television dramas, the way you could piece clues together. She wasn’t persuaded OJ did it.

3.

We never solved that one, nor can I solve her death. The unopened cards, years old, the unopened bills, the unopened boxes of subscription teas, the unopened suitcases and a box containing Sina’s papers. The scatter itself was closed, too confusing to piece together. She’d laughed at my resistance to narrative; now I wish there were one. A clean one, beginning, middle, the end.

4.

A good day to sit inside the rain, a roof between, the constant percussion of high and low, fast and slow drops. Ferns reach out their tousled hands, as if to reach through the window grid. My algorithm brings me a brief video on shame, a song by Dolly Parton. Another friend prays to Dolly for her, though she’s Buddhist. Survival is a rhinestone performance in high silver boots and low cut dress.

5. I pulled her tiny red shoes out of the car after she died, carried them to the garage, wondered why I was holding them, returned them to the car. Inside were remnants of fast food, dog treats for the dogs she walked. Her slice of the gig economy. Academia was a sick jig we danced lest we get stuck, like Medea or Lot’s wife, for looking back. One student tells me she was writing a “dark memoir.”

6.

She talked in code. Or was it fiction as fact, easier to breathe through? She called them “Heathers,” devoted a square of her instagram to the name. Sometimes she laughed to think they fit a narrative they’d never recognize. “The clique,” AI tells me, “consists of three girls who are all named Heather.”

7.

Beside the door from her garage into the laundry room, I spotted a copy of Cortazar’s Hopscotch. It had just arrived, her twin tenants said. I told them they could read the novel from beginning to end, or they could use a key at the end to read it in other directions. He wrote narrative software before the fact of software. I didn’t tell them about the man in a short story who became the fish he’d been visiting at the aquarium.

8.

Looking out, he saw others looking in at him. Trans-species thought seems paranoid, but knows what the other thinks, and it’s rarely good. To be a fish is to inhabit a role you can’t understand. A diasporic person flung from China to LA to Honolulu, where she was doubly foreign.

9.

Polite (though "she was a fighter"), self-enclosed, distant in public. And then, over the years, in private. “She became more distant after she didn’t get promoted,” a friend told me. “I tried to call and text and write to her,” they all said. She told stories to push them away.

10.

“I’m worried about our friend,” Sina said. She wrote a long letter in her defense. Then one morning I called her to say that Sina was dead, murdered by a friend in Samoa. We’d all had lunch some months before in Chinatown, an awkward triad that failed to last the twin defeats to come. Silence became us.

11.

“We read,” Weil notes, “but we are also read by others.” “To be a slave is to be forced to read yourself as others read you.” “ A dialogue of the deaf.” “Each being cries in silence to be read otherwise.” Weil writes. “Don’t be deaf to their cries.”

in mem.RYH

Simone Weil, Cahiers: Tome 1. Paris: Plon, 1951. Translations mine.

 

My 9/11 poem

 

from _Portraits and Parables_, Tinfish chapbook, 2005. 

Valley of the cameras

 

"I'm sorry," I mouthed, remembering the security cams in the cemetery. Woman had been hugging man (his tattooed forearm wrapped around her back), whispering "braddah." When she turned I saw that she had tears in her eyes. I said it was good to see her, thanked her for taking care of the cats. I realized that mine was the only voice. Man and woman remained silent, looked at me without responding. 

 

Up the hill, a worker in a Black Panther shirt and Josh in emergency green were surveying the cemetery. "We're going to cut down all these trees," Panther said. They are eucalyptus trees, a couple damaged in the storms. I suggested cutting the broken areas and leaving the rest. "It's the boss; he wants walkers like you to have a view." When I said I liked to see trees, he said he meant "tourists." 

 

I've never seen a tourist up that particular hill. But there is a security camera at the top.

Smoke between the flags

 

"She's got some years on her, doesn't she?" said the woman walking toward us cheerfully with her somewhat less cheerful husband. "But she's perky." She was wearing a cap with a Maryland flag on it; he was carrying binoculars. We were at the top of the cemetery, having spent time with Ola and Hoku at the Lilith salon. The woman wanted to know where the crematorium is. Her mother is getting cremated today. She didn't want to witness it, but she did want to watch the smoke rise into the sky. "Something sacred about that," she said. Her mother had died in a muumuu with flags on it. She loved flags. "You'll see the smoke between those two flag poles," Ola told them, which made the woman happy. Her death had been sudden, but her mother had been 90 years old, "had a good life." The woman (white, in her 60s) had come to Hawai`i since the late 80s to work in the archive; ten years ago, they moved here. As Lilith and I walked downhill, she and her husband drove by in a black Chevy; she waved. "Did you see the smoke?" I asked. "No, but it's ok," she said, smiling, through the open window.

 

 

Addendum: The woman remarked on how pleasant it was to stop and talk to people. Ola was especially kind to her. I mentioned the Lilith Walks books. "Maybe we'll be in the next one," her husband remarked.

Devotionals

 

S speaks of her in the present tense. He'd been to see his wife, he says; he comes every morning and feeds the cats. There are fewer cats than there were, and the boss hates them. Ola tells me S got his job because he used to sleep in his car near her grave. He buys her flowers and, because he wears a wedding ring, one friend assumed she was alive. (I think she is, in many ways.) He got fired a couple of months ago, still comes to see her and feed the cats. The woman who quit before she could be fired feeds them in the evening.

 

Up the hill, we talk about the next storm. A woman on a plane years ago told me that after Iniki took all her neighbors' roofs off--but not hers--everyone moved in. Ola says power was out in Kahalu`u for days. His grandfather took a shovel and dug an imu in the empty lot next to his house, invited everyone to cook there. "It was one fat party!"

 

Some social media posts suggest Hawai`i is preparing for sovereignty. After all, we're on our own. "Da national guard do nutting." Others tell us two more storms are coming. Each storm leaves a map on one of our ceilings. The map changes color, brown to black. We agree to help each other.