Genre issues in war-time

 

31 March 2022

This screen of apapane song: are we talking depth or surface? The bulldozer’s a lousy tuba for this orchestra. A flat screen offers false depth. The depth I hear is only surface because it fades like a slow shutter speed in bright light. We sense the leg without seeing it. Its surface is mist, not sturdy enough to walk on, though she’s lighting across campus on her “good” leg. More students are ghosts now. One teacher talked for 50 minutes to a student who was only sometimes over speech’s threshold. The portal caught, like a tube filling with lava. No one to surf the molten rock; no one to mold syllable bits into word shapes.

Humanitarian convoy stopped by Russian troops outside of Mariupol. The only way to survive is to leave and to leave is to lose your (sense of) place. Death as surplus loss, a horrible economy of less is more, inflation of shattered things. One side kills civilians, the other POWs. We call both unethical. A new orchid fell in the rain last night and broke near the top. Don't worry, it’ll bloom again in another year, Bryant said.

Idealism as the mist that sticks around for a while after its own destruction. To accept its loss as wisdom, embracing halves like rust’s accidental bounty. All of it accidental. She keeps working to keep the war at bay. I am given contemplation to catch her words like small birds. When I went into the kitchen this morning, a small brown bird looked in, then flickered away in early light. Omao?

The poem is ideal, while a diary simply records. The seven hour gap is a given, not a crime, in this practice. We’ve abandoned forms, the philosopher writes, as we’ve abandoned ritual. Atomized, we wander toward death without acknowledging its power. If we look away, it isn’t there. Keep sending us emails about stolen mopeds; they’re less disturbing than hearing of a student’s death by suicide.

Above all, do not disturb us. And do not disturb us when we’re being entertained. Will Smith’s slap resounds more loudly than missile strikes in Kyiv. It shocks us to our bones, that someone would mix genres in that way. It’s the death of form by another form, imported from a film. Change channels: at least the war is a consistent de-formation. Our correspondent in Ukraine wants a normal life of coffee and a view out of the window of her drab apartment block.

But back to idealism. It’s a fixture like a faucet or a drain, fixed, yet witnessing water’s creases and songs. The faucet envies water its reality principle, one that remains only in its coming and going. That paragraph doesn’t flow, a student might say, without knowing what words open flow, and which shut it down. But the faucet can do nothing but feel anger, opening and closing its valves with a violence that changes only the rate of flow. There’s nothing the faucet can do with the nature of water itself. A spider knows to make its web from faucet to handle, not from faucet to drain.

“We need a new paradigm.” Need a world without politicians or leaders or followers or weapons or those who grow rich on their use (which is mandated to avoid warehousing your profits). To die would be one such shift, to turn one’s face away. But barring that, you look out your window at the small brown bird looking in, catch your breath at an enormous web woven between tropical leaves. Even the bulldozer has its place in this lessening. You can’t invent a ritual to make it all go away, but you can imagine inventing one. Project that on your window screen, lingering at its surface before catching on a brown hapu`u frond bowing in front of you.