See Me, Feel Me

 

24 March 2022

Symbolism comes of helplessness: Sydney’s opera house in blue and yellow; a mast in Hilo harbor, equally blue and yellow; a cup of #warcoffee; a “like” on Zelensky’s feed. What you do when you can’t touch. The mask between mouth and supermarket air. That’s what mediates your breath, present as a barrier to what you’d otherwise breathe in.

What is most ordinary gains power because we can hope to touch it. The harsh texture of made paper, neat flex of a pocket knife, soft remnant wasp nest, a green newsboy cap. The tool puts you back together as it takes a machine apart. Paper can’t accommodate writing, except recycled words trapped inside it.

She writes through her twitter mask, from her twitter handle, posting a photograph from her window each morning. Perfect for an “uninteresting photographs” site, except we know it’s in Ukraine. There are no shelled apartment blocks, no burned cars, no sheeted bodies. The scene, while dull, is oddly, miraculously alive. Except our air is not hers. Her air is symbolic, while ours is just the wind that shook our cottage last night, brought trees into speech. Memory is another word for it.

The loss of the poet is real, though I only met him once. The loss of a girl in the Ukraine is only image, or news report. Transpose the grief you can touch onto the grief that feels more abstract. That might end a war or two, no?

Sun rises through the wind and the interrupting trees. Birds syncopate within the wind’s brusque legato. The crater resounded with falling rock, echoing off its walls. The sun came down Mauna Loa, until it joined the fire in the pit. Behind me, a man talked into his device. He’d done some cardio and now he was watching the eruption. A woman held onto his shoulders. The new fireside chat is a man in the square, anaphora I can’t understand, but know the beat to. Like the man in a train compartment entering Yugoslavia who told good stories, though I didn’t know where they went.

A church sign down Highway 11 reads: “When the world is cray cray / Jesus is the way way.” Underneath, signs for therapy and food. Half of all college students suffer the lack of a basic need, and this new 3-year plan will address that lack with food and new administrators. The strategic plan stands in for care; it’s the absence of touch that promises touch.

The screen reflects, but it also divides, like a wall. We will keep you out by looking at you. Witness promises some kind of touch, but watching does not. I will sit with it. I will live with the poem inside my head for years. I will make of my skull space a haven, bomb shelter, community center. There is nothing private about our heads; it’s the gallery of our public imagining, and you can go there to look at it.

My meditations are as abstract as they want not to be. What I touch is keyboard, and the cool wind brushes my shoulders. The window in front of me frames ferns, living and dead, through which the morning sun travels. A spider’s thread glints between leaf and wiry trunk. Bryant said a small bird was hanging upside down from the gutter looking for spiders. Yes, the film was very slow, but when I woke up the next day, I had been in it.