Mirror Stage

 

15 March 2022

So much is about watching suffering you can’t touch. Where’s the virtual hand for touching the virtual head of a woman on a stretcher? Is prayer an artificial hand? Do I lift my mug of war coffee with a prayer, not a fist? We have to say our mantras, John High writes, but I don’t know which to say.

We divide ourselves into the watchers and the can’t-be-watchers. I feel so helpless, I keep the television off. It’s hard to stop watching, isn’t it? It’s an addiction either to rubber-necking on an international scale or to witnessing pain. Probably it’s both. Our neighbor, whom I’ve not met, had a son who died, beer can in hand. The memorial down Highway 11 is for a man killed by the neighbor when he crossed the two yellow lines in his fancy red car. He bought a replacement, color black. Still drives to work down the same highway. It’s the only one.

Dear Y, we both drink morning coffee, take morning walks. We both want to be safe. I don’t want a manicure, but you do; I’d prefer a massage. You take pictures out your window in the morning, as do I. If my window could see your window, we might catch each other’s eyes. They’re good eyes. But twitter is all the eye we have now. I find your noun verb issues incredibly moving.

Your leader talks to us through a screen, always in his drab green shirt, sometimes a drab green jacket over the drab green shirt. He’s a politician, someone says; don’t worship him. He has a history. But we’re now out of history in history, living as the present moment what turns to retrospective prose in an instant. I’m watching MIRROR, a film in stream of consciousness. Not my stream, not yours. Other people are method; we’re actors.

How the vatic happens. Always in response to: chaos, confusion, blur of trees beside Highway 11. I will pronounce words instead of manipulating them. All rhetoric is manipulation, she writes, but what happened to persuasion? If I’m persuaded to kill in order to stop killing, have I been manipulated?

No fly zone. Pidgin kine. No can. Peace through war. The trains still run (do trains run?), filled with women and children, everyone crying. A journalist is killed, but Russia says he was not a journalist. A Ukrainian calls this genocide, but even after we look the word up in a dictionary, we can’t assign it to circumstance. Having become a word, it’s only abstract. Abstract genocide is an empty mirror.

My friend bought a tall mirror at a garage sale for next to nothing. The wood frame came later, more expensively. Why are you so sad, the mysterious man asks the mysterious woman in a field, punctuated by a bush that determines each walker’s map. The man up the street names his dogs after anti-depressants. There have been many dogs. Dogs bark, I take my meds, the world burns.

“May all those who grieve be released of their sorrow.” Roshi Joan Halifax