All the News that's Fit to Break

 

16 March 2022

The news of the world is misnomer. Like atrocity, it’s cliché, just more deadly. “What are cliches?” students asked, when I advised them against. What we have thought before. What we have destroyed before. Theme and variations. A theater in Mariupol, hundreds of people inside, destroyed today. Apartment blocks altered, reduced. Why do birds run into windows, someone asks. Here are only frames, but still death, not in the rebound off glass but from the inside of skeletons.

Zelensky shows a video. The past is in color, the present in black-and-white. It’s beautiful propaganda, with music, but it’s true. We’ve seen these images already; we know them as fact. But why the music? 

 

Emotion arises from sound, not image, or the peculiar overlay of each on each, like a palimpsest of loves; you want only the last layer to survive. When she saw she was losing a board game, she lifted it up and all the pieces fell off. Their beating hearts were plastic.

A chamber concert on a roof in Kiev, the city spread out, bright as a sunflower. I find Ukrainian flags: dead end sign against blue sky; blue tape and yellow tape embracing; lemons hanging in front of a blue house. When Sangha was young, he spoke in long strings of d’s, as if he were trying out Russian. Doosh doosh deva meant salmon and rice. My head fills with such syllables. The protagonist in MIRROR is from Ukraine. He stutters, and a woman performs magic on him, til he talks. Straight.

The stutter in history comes of a missing front tooth in the skull of a goat I see nailed to a fence post. Goats laugh; they fall in love. They become skulls, as if life turned to sculpture only when it died. They worry about their families, not themselves. In our mirror: they get a shot to go to the movies, but not to eat with their families. We are looking in the fun house mirror, except it’s the one that’s true, and uncorrupted. We need a new paradigm, she writes on twitter. Progressive lenses also distort.

From distortion to detachment is it. The street signs have been altered to confuse you, the invading party, invading your own narrative so as to destroy it. She kept her secrets until she died of the very disease that told the truth about her addiction. To detach from the signs is to risk bombardment, but to follow them leads also to mistaken places, whether they are inside or out, up or down. To walk up and down is still to traverse the world horizontally. Where the vertical disappears (there are no saints, no satans) there is still this phrase to describe our movement. Restless, with deficit of attention. I write up and down in my room. The orchid maze down Highway 11 is closed post-COVID.

“Find and replace” is a command my computer offers me. I cancel the very choice. Can we replace what we cannot find? Find what cannot be replaced? Where is the plant language for that? Morning glories bear their pale purple blooms in long threads of vine, burying small koa trees in their greed to expand. An empire of vines. We pull and pull, but often the vine snaps before we get to the root. I cheered when I freed a small tree. For now.

Lilith’s eyes were scared last night. She flinched again and again, like hiccups. Fled under the couch. Followed me to the bathroom, heaving. No vomit, just evidence of discomfort. I took her outside for cool air, buried her under the blanket on my bed. When I turned on President Zelensky at 3 a.m., she was snoring.