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.