"I cannot speak to that"

The old man doesn't come on a white horse; he shuffles quietly in, turns his tired face to us (whom he cannot see). He is self- and probably other-restrained, his face lined but empty of affect. His hearing isn't good, so questions get repeated, false assertions lost to him, if not to us. He is monosyllabic and monotone, falling back on "please repeat" and "I cannot speak to that."


One Republican asserts "there is no there there." What Stein would do with "I cannot speak to that." What is that that I cannot speak to? That is everything missing, like history. That is outside the "four corners" of his report.


The old man who is not on a white horse is not a showman. He disappoints us with his care, his hesitation, his refusal to talk to that. The old man who walks to his helicopter hides within its noise and screams at a reporter. She is "fake news." We inhabit tapestries of two dimensions, walking slowly across a narrative plain that's covered by dead bodies and the remnants of a plastic world. We hold us inside our stitches, even as we seem to move forward on time's fabric. Who sewed us up so carefully we cannot argue against such beauty. Refugees off Australia sewed shut their lips in protest; a performance artist does the same. To stitch is to heal by cutting into skin and pulling the thread back out.


Some of the kupuna sat in wheelchairs across Mauna Kea (or Mauna a Wakea) Access Road; others chained themselves to the cattle guards. Before a policeman arrests an old woman, they embrace. Robert Mueller could be our kupuna, but he is not. One after another, the congressmen scream at him. They do not speak to that, or to him.


He was a reluctant witness, but not false. He warned us, but did not scream loudly enough to hear through social media threads, ad hominem assaults, assertions so flat they suffocate. He has been displaced from the group, left out on a rock to die. Chris's photograph of "the back yard" at Mauna Kea shows a vast stretch of gray and broken rock, sky so utterly clear and blue. He lived there for a week in a convertible Mustang, did night security on Saddle Road.


The special counsel leaves the hearing room, probably for the last time. He looks older than his 75 years, and his mouth quavers when he says "true" or "yes" or "I cannot speak to that." He cannot speak to the question of whether or not Trump took the 5th. He cannot speak beyond the purview of his text. He's consigned to formalism for which there is no world beyond word-stitches that bleed  into themselves.


Robert Mueller is the statue marred by acid rain, an old general who sees nothing more from his stone pedestal. Pigeons visit to paint his bronze white and gray, but we who walk in the park no longer look that way. Robert Mueller is not our kupuna. He sits alone at the table to testify. Everything he says will be held against him. We hand him a needle and thread and bid him stitch his mouth shut. So he does. We cannot speak to that.


Note: an outside view of the Mauna Kea / TMT protests now going on on the Big Island: https://tinyurl.com/y3l99maf