Meditation 1

12/27/2019

12/27/2019

Between decades a change. “Change is important,” said the woman at the Hilo market, who egged me on about Trump, joked crudely with a man who laughed as he said he was fleeing. Aspiration as breathing, not ambition. Caught between free air and suffocation. Between the frail brown skin on a diabetic’s leg and the cudgel of the president’s tweets, all they represent (if representation can be said to follow breaking). Is representation a form of repair? The OBU Manifestos (Vol. 2) diagnose, dissect, laugh bitterly at. Rise to the bar of community formation, then fall like the bar we wriggled under in elementary school, usually knocking it to the floor. A coalition of categories always more difficult than the category of one, even as mandated as forgetting in Ogawa’s novel. Community of forgetting, rose petals scattered on river water, beauty before release. The feeling of these petals already gone as a woman scatters her garden on water. It’s not memory that matters to the police, it’s the affect that attaches to it. Affect to effect: it’s either politics or spirit, and the real trick is to weld them together. “The bus driver was so kind,” said our new tenant, and he was, speaking to each passenger in turn, bidding them good-bye until the next ride. Sandy wondered about the man who did not turn into a deer and I had no idea where that sentence came from; not even the deer who was one with the dachsund could explain that one. Not metamorphosis but metaphor, presage not the spice itself. The words open like petals, then fall into sentence slots, or spaces between sidewalk segments. A yellow weed reminds us of something, pincered in the gaps. Should we breathe with the poems, she asks of Paul’s new book. I hadn’t thought of it that way. “Look at the tree!” she’d said on the walk home.

Enforced oblivion is violence; dementia degradation. Neither is as quick as gunshot or concussion. If we slow this down, no one will notice our shift from speech to deeply guarded quiet. The book referred to the “war” for silence, which sounded the oxymoron in me. Gerschwin streams from the living room, bartering saxophone for violin, heart cry for mind meld. We argue ceaselessly against the binary, but in terms of oppositions. Do we mean to break them over the knee, like a baseball bat after an ill-timed strike-out? Break into the binary, but never recover the grain of the wood, or the potential energy of the instrument. We adore our teams, but they are composed of contracts made by agents and susceptible to breaking. Our neighbor’s yard fills with scraps of ceramics from projects that did not rise to the bar of commerce. He uses volcanic ash in his process, which comes out as solid grit on a slab, more potential than actual evidence.

But again, the problem. We talk in small groups about trauma and depression in the classroom. We notice the spiking (up, not down like a volleyball). There are so few resources: wait for over a month to talk to a stranger about your affliction, then another six weeks to start talking to another stranger. Our talking makes us less lonely, but just as ineffective. We decide we need each other. K. says her friend opened a door in her house and ran into her husband’s legs; his body was hanging from the ceiling. They’d just been talking about what to eat for dinner. Do not try to make her feel better, I say out of my training, just be present. Present at the harshest absence there is. We are not to call it epidemic and yet. I read the book on the death of culture after hearing of the author’s suicide. Then we read as much for clues as for content. Blu’s Clues will star a Hispanic actor for the first time; the consolation there is in likeness. The one, divided into self and image, reorganized in the mind of a little boy imagined by a man.

Tell your student she can come to the office to cry. Tell her she can count on you to be present. Tell her there’s so little else you can do. Call admin and demand assistance. Watch admin muck up. Another six weeks until she can talk to someone with or without a license. Tell her you’ve been there, without knowing where her there is. Counsel long walks. Take things in your own hands and wring them into the shape of an arthritic joint. Pain beats oblivion, but only in moderation.