At the Tomb of the Known Quantity

 

30 May 2022

Today’s “current events” will be as obscure as a dial phone by next year, but I wrap myself inside them like a hair shirt on a baroque composer, who thinks his fugue will cure memory of its scabs. We forgot all the old people shopping in Buffalo when the kids were killed in Uvalde. Our senses of place make none. Names as headstones, just as apt to fail. Take photos of the spalling to mark the disintegration of concrete as it falls away from rebar. Everything is a mark: this word, that photo, old conflicts butting into the repeat sign. We won't give Ukraine rockets that reach Russia, the president says. A domesticated war, though the word “genocide” pops up like a question, or a popsicle, melting into our inability to define terms. Term limits might help, but they’re just other borders snapping shut.

Wish me a “Happy Memorial Day” and I’ll tell you some memories are worth misplacing. We praise memory for keeping our losses alive somehow, families under umbrellas at the cemetery this morning, children fanning out to play, little girl with hula hoop. She said she was bored of memory, but it’s my perpetual borer, worm making the silk screen of my brain, a wooden frame to hold cloth still. Dying for, so honored. Dying as, forgotten. One little girl who danced wanted a Tiktok account to show them off. Her parents told her she was too young. In her absence, they create it themselves.

Domain expired. Digital memory depends on subscriptions, on sturdy platforms, on benevolent technology. Time with its ones and twos keeps strutting past in the parade, cheerleaders wearing yarn leis.

The Donbas will not be recognizable. The faces of children shot by an AR-15 must be reconstructed by a special mortician before the casket can be opened. "Cut flower food" reads a tiny plastic pocket on the ground. Keep the blossoms going, at least for this weekend.

At the cemetery, the men call me Aunty and scratch Lilith’s head, her flanks, call her a good dog. Today, the place crawls with local folks, including two old women bearing stacks of ginger. I take a picture of one from behind, but it doesn’t reveal much. Tomorrow, it's back to tourist buses, to phones held from car windows to shoot the mountains. To drive through is not to be, though to be is rather like a drive through, never a still moment, always wandering in the clouds of impermanence. Where is the middle way when both rails are so extreme? In a concrete gutter beside an old wooden house, where you throw a bone your dog found? Gutter, gutted. We can’t grieve because there are no intervals. So we check out of Hotel Mourning to watch an action film. He said when his father-in-law died, he watched three action movies in one evening. He didn’t feel well when he woke up.