Wednesday, September 20, 2023
Lilith and the hoarder
Sunday, September 17, 2023
Lilith hears a chicken tale
Thursday, September 14, 2023
Lilith and my mother's ashes
Wednesday, September 13, 2023
Seattle reading with Jeanne Heuving, Eric Acosta, and Norman Fischer on Bandcamp
See here: https://gregbem.bandcamp.com/album/a-night-of-philosophy-now-to-music-05-09-23
Thanks for Greg Bem for putting this together. (He's now in Spokane.)
Saturday, September 9, 2023
Lilith and the fake indictments
Friday, September 8, 2023
Lilith and the big bosses
Sunday, August 20, 2023
Lilith and the gospel musician
Saturday, August 19, 2023
Lilith Veritas
Thursday, August 17, 2023
It's been a hard year
Tuesday, August 15, 2023
Lilith is alive
Friday, August 4, 2023
Hilo bus driver
Tuesday, August 1, 2023
Lilith drinks and drives
Monday, July 31, 2023
Sunday, July 30, 2023
Lilith Joins the Jack Smith Fan Club
Sunday, July 23, 2023
Lilith does many things
Tuesday, June 20, 2023
Lilith's hat
Wednesday, June 7, 2023
Thursday, May 4, 2023
June 3rd reading in Washington, DC
Hope to see DC-area folks there!
Thursday, April 27, 2023
Lilith learns ancient Greek
My brief essay on my experience taking ancient Greek from the Catherine Project has been published in their first issue of Commonplace. I'm forgetting the Greek alphabet, yes, but I'd also forgotten that my encounter with Greek was also a Lilith story.
https://catherineproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Commonplace_Issue-1-Summer-2023.pdf
Thanks especially to Alex Baro, who is a marvelous teacher. And to a wonderful group of fellow students.
Friday, April 21, 2023
Lilith talks baseball
Tuesday, April 18, 2023
Buber 21
Farewell, Eucalyptus! Not as substance, but as idea. I want to gravitate toward fact, but my eco-meditations wander off with me in their thrall, sentences that stick to other sentences, sappy, insubordinate ones. The tree distinguishes between form and format, between hard wood and the soft pulp where words go when they leave my screen. Think of them as seeds, or screeds. The double ee’s leave trees for thoughts. More than ought, I think. Imagination turns us to a You, Buber says, but isn’t it It that we need to save? Is there a You after the coming storms, driven mad by climate change? Without It, there’s no You, or do You, too, ascend to heaven, Eucalyptus? Or stay as the gray wash of ash beside a new grave? Today, the dog and I found coffee cups in the cemetery. One had been purchased by Lisa, another bore only its kind, and the third read “thank you for composting me.” I’m glad the punchline came last; an out of order joke never ends well. The graves are about lines: grandfather, mother, sister, son. A baby named Cadance, etched bear on her stone. You too are composed of lines, sticky ones and straight ones, brown marks between sheets of black. White print on black costs more, I remember, and the pages tend to smudge. We find fake paper money sometimes, good only for burning. Transmission through ash and smoke, a white kite blown over the green wheeled incinerator. I’ve wanted to transmit something of you, Eucalyptus, but I fear the wandering is mostly mine. My camera proves we’ve come to know each other, but not what has been said between us. Saying is not surface. Surfaces suggest, but there’s no recording them as sound, except as insubstantial palm leaves like those outside my window. My friend tells me that “thinprose” is better than a mistake. Let this thinprose resemble the thintree, so nearly thing. The You we say to [them] sticks to the threshold of language which is sometimes black tar, sometimes brown sap. Threshed and held, such a thin harvest.
Sunday, April 16, 2023
Buber 20
There must be days Eucalyptus would slam the door and stay inside, like a scared child. Bark curtains half-cover portholes of lighter wood; three layers deep, it’s still surface. To take a photograph is to trust in surface; sometimes this takes time, returning to the same storefront year after year as its wooden structure yellows, pipes rust. Character is what gets shaken off, though we refer to our wrinkles as add-ons. The places that scare us, increasingly, exist outside, as if raw emotion manufactured guns in 3D. Print out your fears. Tree appears not to feel terror, though clearly it inhabits its losses, the narrow girdle of black bark strewn on the ground around it. Not self-loss, which we can manage, but loss by ax, by termination notice, by accident. Tree is self that becomes shelves, through no artistry of its own. But island Eucalyptus are too expensive to mill, just cheap enough to burn. There’s power in loss of self or shelf, a bulb burning late at night, gathering image in, then dropping it, like a match.
The tree might have been the paper this will be printed on. That’s
the place that scares Eucalyptus, or would me, this change of states
from wood to word, from silence into a furnace mouth. Young people
take photographs of each other on the tracks at Auschwitz. Picnics at
Bull Run. Either we can’t foresee or we won't remember what ruins remind us of. Somewhere nearby a cardboard sign tells us
we are in our last day. Don’t go to hell, it urges us in crude
black marker. On the other side, $5 barbeque. $5 painted a careful red, the event partially erased. The sign
opposite was scrawled in haste, last “days” crossed out, replaced with
“hour.” We presume it to be a single hour, but it’s been days the
sign has hung on this telephone pole.
Eucalyptus and I stand on the lawn beside the swimming pool, I taking its picture, it refusing to pose. There is no posing in this world. Every You in the world is doomed by its nature to become a thing, the return trip always different from the voyage out. Save this ticket as proof of your journey. A small brown veined leaf slips inside a gap in the bark, held tight by black sap. Its sell by date comes sooner than ours. The men in sandwich boards can’t be far behind, announcing our close-out sale, including remnants.
June 3 reading in Washington, DC
I have no idea of the location of this reading, though there's plenty of time to figue it out!
Saturday, April 15, 2023
From I and Eucalyptus in Trilobite, Paul Vogel, editor
https://trilobite.bond/current/schultz.html
with riffs on Martin Buber's _I and Thou_ and photographs of my favorite tree.
Friday, April 14, 2023
Buber 19
Does motive matter? Something such as a need or desire we wish not to share but to know, so it stops. Motive is repetition; its end is motiveless. That it is another person’s need or desire matters only insofar as it might be our own. Rage marries depression and they bear an ugly soul. Hatred marries an automatic weapon and enters the bloodstream, sheds it. That’s what gets blurred out of our images. We’re most disturbed by clips that contain no violence, only preamble. Preamble might be thought, or it might be a shallow intake of air. An officer is down; another hides behind a planter. If we didn’t hate the shooter beforehand, we do now, watching to see glass shatter. The moment of rage restrained by a bullet to the head, leaving waves that catch inside our bodies. Yet whoever hates directly is closer to a relation than those who are without love and hate.
The relation of woman to tree approaches love, as on a highway around a central wound. Rainbow sap extends its bouquet, as Eucalyptus also gives its scent. Perfumes are made of such, and decongestants. Eucalyptus is the strong silent type; the woman prefers words, but never uses them in his vicinity. (If you don’t talk about your relationship, I read, it might never change.) Bullets are syllabics, unalliterative. The tree is quiet, holds its silences together. We all want beauty, the photographer says, even the tract homes in morning light, when they luminesce in rows. To take the photo removes their ugliness. That is troublesome, says the critic, but not so the mirror. It takes light in and casts it out in equal measure. You catch it on the rebound, seeing yourself on the stage of a country store, standing before paper cups and bottles of Coke. Outside, a machine makes a “fried chicken” balloon dance, and a dog barks behind a boarded up window. The old sign hangs sideways; painted letters in an old font next to a banner that shows us what we’re famous for, not so much who we are. Bright blue ocean, held to the storefront by a rusted screw. I leave with chicken, sushi, and photographs.
Relation is less intensity than extension. Extension is compassion, not vitriol. I hate the shooter but I know them as someone very like myself. Arriving at a hostel after a night on the train, I detested those who ate their bread and jam, knowing I had eight hours of walking ahead of me. I did not have a gun.
Lilith talks non-fiction
Thursday, April 13, 2023
Lilith and a history of violence in Hawai`i
Monday, April 10, 2023
Buber 18
Each morning I read a walk poem before our walk, another patch of language full of verbs and prepositions, those that push us apart or pull us together, act in the poem or in us, like priming the pump to expel unnecessary air. I haven’t seen Eucalyptus yet today, but we’re old married folks by now, comfortable in our distances that are not distances, or are distances even when we’re close by. I sit, therefore I am not a tree. Camera blurs Eucalyptus's bark so it appears to move away from; the black bark and drops of yellow sap fizz into a tableau that is no longer tree. Get close enough to your object, and it reappears as something else. The back of the asphalt laying machine turns to fine grained wood, or a book whose pages might turn. The broken plastic off a car turns into a red flower, rhymes with another at the curb, though plastic seems more alive than the old flower. What appears is sometimes stronger than what is. Which is not to devalue what is, as is comes first, in advance of what cannot dissolve into narrative time. The landfills are full of busted images, as are the beaches, covered in shredded plastic, their lights bright like Christmas, but so out of place. Place in time, or place out of the time to which it rightly belongs. Fast food toy on sand. Plastic land shark. Its bite is on delay. Like all word problems, post doom is a mystery to be solved, at least theoretically. We’ll never change, but our plans will, not that we ever follow them because someone always coughs to make the silence sing another chord. Discord, c’est moi. I left my I and Thou downstairs; I’m writing upstairs, inside but with the outside air sounding of palm leaves and maintenance, rain again, which comes in patches. To come in patches is to live within a cycle; isn’t that odd? A motor starts, then moves away. The clock ticks, and I’ve forgotten to wind it. My microwave has beeped. The dog scratches herself against the dirty couch. It’s not comfort so much as habit that sets me here, laptop on my lap, to list whatever presents itself to stolid me. Claude has found a leaf to hunt and chew on. The dog’s ears are up behind her blanket. Calm outside the storm: another shooting, another legal case, another all caps tirade. Pull yourself within. I know you understand, Eucalyptus. It’s your bark that falls, not you. I find no alteration there.
Friday, April 7, 2023
Buber 17A
The tree stands scarred, like Bishop’s fish. Chunks of bark litter its base; those that haven’t yet dropped hang from the trunk, dipped in sap’s black ink. Our teacher calls off “medication” class, then repeats her typo. There was gunfire out there this morning, a frazzled man told us at the old sugar mill, and lots of cops, back where the junked cars were, the old sugar truck, its bed pointed in the air, netted with holes. The pictures I took were still, though they marked a history etched in rust. What is absent from these old machines tells us more than what remains. Ramp up the blacks, so what’s missing becomes more visible in its not being there. Or add shadows. It’s an odd form of creativity, editing, the pulling up or taking down of light. To crop is to take away, to harvest off the sides of an image. If I only took what was cropped off, I’d have another chronicle indeed. If the eye is what remains, then thou are what gets displaced. A gallery of empty frames, scraps of images on the walls between. The frames then do double duty, holding in the absence, pushing out the thing that lacks context. Becomes the context of an I and Thou seen from the other side, oneself in the mirror talking to oneself who drives the car. I am empty; Thou is a wisp of smoke inside of which an image grows, or fades. Her photographs came one hour apart. In the first, you could see nothing through the rain except a couple of dull roofs. In the second, apartment buildings, power lines, the whole urban apparatus. Eucalyptus resembles an old pole covered with resins: blue, yellow, white. It testifies to the rhyme between detritus and beauty, between what serves a purpose and what does not. It reminds us of the larger smoke stack, gold against blue sky, ornamental now that the sugar mill’s shut down. The context of history in what is missing: work. Or that work. Now men make surfboards in the old water tanks, and someone fixes a large boat beside the stack. There used to be a large source of silt across the road, a man in dreads tells us. Others deal drugs in the shadows, where the junked cars are. “I know you’re just taking pictures,” the man said, “but you should know.” We leave, you and I, both of us abstractions inside this sentence, most truly ourselves yesterday. The old photographer sits under an umbrella beside a “caravan.” Photographs introduced him to class consciousness; they got him a job at Harvard. In one photo, we see a man from behind: he stares at a brick wall. Closer to us, a pile of newspapers. He’s not recording history, he says, though he sure remembers what’s gone missing.
Tuesday, April 4, 2023
My review of Anne Waldman's _Bard, Kinetic_
can be found at Ron Slate's _On the Seawall_ website. Here is the Waldman piece:https://www.ronslate.com/on-bard-kinetic-by-anne-waldman/ I also call attention to the work of poet, Selina Tusitala Marsh. For more on her, see here (and elsewhere!): https://aucklanduniversitypress.co.nz/authors-and-editors/selina-tusitala-marsh/
This morning (afternoon in Rhode Island) I spoke and read to a group on Block Island, off Rhode Island, about writing on dementia. https://islandfreelibrary.org/event/book-group-susan-m-schultzs-memory-cards/ Thank you to Susana Gardner for making this happen.
Monday, April 3, 2023
Lilith and the gilded mirror
Sunday, April 2, 2023
Lilith celebrates QingMing at the cemetery
Reading with Fischer, Heuving, and Acosta in Seattle, May 9.
May 9 in Seattle, 119 First Ave S, free tickets on eventbrite. 7-9 p.m. Margin Shift Reading Series.
Friday, March 31, 2023
Buber 16
I return to Eucalyptus; it wears spots today, darker brown on lighter brown, framed by black bark. A droplet of sap falls in front of my iphone, which fails to notice. On the other side, tracings of brown thread hang off the bark, like inauthentic webs. Can a bot offer us authentic dharma? the interviewer asks. “Authentic dharma is always impossible,” the bot notes. Artificial wisdom is true outside of context. Context makes inauthenticity true, if you add a scene to the spectacle. Let us love the world . . . in all its terror. The shooter was caught on video wandering, wondering where human beings were for her to destroy. The xerox machine was safe with her; it only reproduces. She dressed the part, backwards red cap, camouflage pants, black AR-15. She left an action pose on the camera’s eye, gazing down from the ceiling at what had not yet happened. I have wandered back into the world with all its terror, meaning to be with the tree only, to hold myself as it, tall, calm, stoic (if you read into tree). It’s the tree’s dharma, intended or no, and that hardly matters when we receive it. She sent the wrong letter, one that pulled apart her sense of herself like an unraveling onion, but her lesson was the greater for it. Forty-five years on, I can't remember what that lesson was. Something about Lacan. Yes, we can, unless like the Republican rep, we cannot, because school’s an exact analogy for World War II and his father passed on the smarts of a soldier in combat. You can’t stop them from killing you. The tree appears to have bullet holes in it, but they’re only gaps in the bark.
Other side of the ravaged door, cat’s tail and haunches. The cat lives his fiction, less often indulges it. My meditations are likewise fictions infrequently acted out; how do you act out of so much space, so few props except those you watch float by? One little girl was a dancer with a pan; the other little girl was a shooter with a gun. How could we tell them apart? I am here with you, if that helps, says the dharma bot. Calm agency, unseen, voice only, composed of inauthentic sounds pressed together like plywood strips. The only way to survive is to invent a new self, television villagers realize in the shadow of the mill, as men in helmets march past. Their French tends to be good, these Germans’; even the subjunctive falls neatly in line. Children read their notes to the Collaborator, noting his kindness and wishing him good chocolate. Truth can be found in a photograph folded into a diary, put in a drawer by the door. The baby doesn’t know, but he cries.
Wednesday, March 29, 2023
Lilith talks funeral planning
Saturday, March 25, 2023
Buber 15
Oh Eucalyptus, tree that offers so little shade, so rich a palette of reds and greens and browns, I’m back! From the sidewalk, up hill from your base, I can see your cracked limbs, the spidery leaves in a splotched canopy. I can’t climb Eucalyptus, only infer from the bottom what the top must be like. Inference is imagination, if that is defined as collage rather than pure color. Like all true teachers, he wishes to teach not a view but the way. But what I’d give to have that view from the top down: bent shadows of monkeypods, a blue swimming pool, chain link fence, parking lot, stairs whose edges have been painted bright yellow. The way of the tree has nothing to do with destination. I could ascribe aspiration to its height, or stoicism to its peeling bark. But, as DH Lawrence wrote to the fish, “your god is not my god!” Nor are your verbs mine. If all nouns are actually verbs, you tree yourself here, acquire volition as your sap saps from the peeling bark. A haven is active, where the verb “to bend” in the wind suggests a bow, like Lars Nootbar to his Japanese fans. The tree is like us, but the like likely’s difference. A new pressure gauge serves little purpose, but its open face tells us that time’s a kind of pressure, that we can add or subtract it. We age into less of it, our needle bumping back toward zero, but not without a rush of water from the tank, brown from the catchment. That wow was for the photos by Tarkovsky; slow cinema ground to a halt, as when a pepper grinder completes its task, emptied of pepper, but full of beans. Her mother said Putin was coming for dinner and they didn’t know what to do with him, but the conversation turned toward life-long learning and Putin disappeared. We understand our minds best in extremis, though that makes everything else more difficult. Chaos in French is chaos, so you don’t have to learn that sound for that phenomenon, only how to organize whatever it represents. To represent chaos in two syllables simplifies it already. Language is the maid with a broom and dustpan, pushing chaos away from the center of the room and into the furrows of the house’s brow. Hausfrau. It’s the ultimate collaborator, trying so hard to live inside an ethical frame that rots as you watch it. To keep order in a disordered state is itself an act of betrayal. But it may pad your life’s lease. Find an new tenant, one who faithfully pays the rent. Do not talk about the past. It’s an early stage of grieving, this sense of shock that stifles words. We approach the subject gently, and then back off. We talk about sports and cooking instead. It’s a kind of communication, of kindness, that puts off the pain while still acknowledging it.
Tuesday, March 14, 2023
Buber 14
If yellow eucalyptus sap looks like a duck, where’s the quack? Weed whacker, maybe, interrupts the duck’s drip, which I catch as image before another sap drip forms. They're all real to him, the characters that emerge from lines of paint on the road. Why does this duck bill drip its yellow glob on green and black below? Its palette's visible more to the camera’s eye than to mine; it filters out ambient colors, leaving only black. But approach the tree and its duck and you see a world refracted. The first sentence of this meditation quacks like a duck. I am he as he is I and we are all together. Presence is not what is evanescent and passes but what confronts us, waiting and enduring. Eucalyptus duck teases me with its slow motion. Look hard enough, and each drop carries an image of you in your red cap, standing on a green lawn, grasping your phone. Becoming Christmas ornament or tropical icicle. Somehow more pleasing not to see these excess images, to wait for the duck to return to dropness, for the tree to untangle from its wild spectrum. If you put too much red in your photos, the observer will be overwhelmed. But if you like red, you’ll swim in it, like a duck on a still pond, thin layer of algae quivering.
On each end of the Temple’s tile roof, two new golden birds. I’m told they are phoenixes, but the maintenance guy says they look more like chickens about to fight. They stare at each other, raising their golden feathers. Somewhere, plastic Buddha places his bets on these two. A photograph morphs into story, especially after humidity bends its edges, removes a boundary, opens the border for crossing into memory-land. Like a kid’s game, where you spin the wheel, move your tiny car across a line of squares, and hope to win at Life. When I remember the game, I don’t play it backwards, but forwards again. I don’t remember how it ended or what I won or lost. I find paper money in the cemetery, huge denominations, Hell Money. Bills are fictions already, like banks, even when there’s a run, but this one overspends its symbolism. If you burn it, it goes to its original owner. Heaven has high rents, like Hawai`i, but you buy a view there, away from the mounds of red clay, the wrinkled tarps, the coffin carriers on wheels. Artificial flowers are forbidden, though you find them run up against the bushes that mark an end to this carefully tended place. But seriously, I’ve never seen a duck in the cemetery, only in the culvert running parallel to the road I walk on. A tree crowned with egrets. A mongoose rushing into the bushes. The line of cats that watches us warily for signs of food. A woman in Aiea feeds them in a wooden shed by the parking lot. “No recreational use of the parking area,” a sign reads. The karaoke place next door is empty, but a sign demands silence.
Sunday, March 12, 2023
Buber 13
I told her I’d taken pictures of her rusted filing cabinet and the old American car, both of them now gone from her property. She asked if I wanted to take them. Only the photographs, I said. A moment of taking removed from the moment of having been taken. There’s less to haul around that way. Her granddaughter saw the rhythm of a Pollack; he listened to jazz as he threw the paint. (She said she didn’t understand modern art, only Impressionism.) To take an object out of time renders it beautiful. That might be a big problem, as beauty shocks us more than ugliness. A woman shot on January 6, bleeding, composed. The color red spreading on a hand, the woman’s pale face framed by black hair. The cop who took Tyre’s photo as he died was not an artist, but the camera on the light pole that caught them both might have been. A still from a film from a set from a “based on truth” hate crime makes a martyr of a degraded man. Michael Palmer’s Auschwitz shoes, such a beautiful image, I remember my anger at the poet. Do not aestheticize! Make your photographs as ugly as their subject matter. And then listen as friends oo and ah over your orchid pics.
Before the immediacy to the relationship everything mediate becomes negligible. But the photograph’s immediacy arrives out of mediation. Mediation is choice: to look through a screen or to pull it away. The cat on a railing in the rain through a window and a screen, or through a screen only. The screen behind your eyes. The screen that muffles sound. Consider the screen another form of presence. It is nothing more than screen, white as a sun-drenched plaque in a graveyard. I take a picture of that blank screen beside a name and two dates. Was a man’s face on the screen; was that face a map of presence and decay, the presence of decay? Let me tell you a story. Let the story enter your mind without a screen. You inhabit a French novel, one that insists that you become an adulterer. You do that in “real life,” then return to the pages of your book, replacing one fantasy with another. The novel tempts you to become pregnant by the handsome guy on the motorcycle. Your real pregnancy, terminated, results in your execution, under a proposed law in South Carolina. History brought forward is a horror movie, both for its content and for its form. The guilt we feel seems like a way to stop time, take selfies, and then use our guilt as cudgel. A guilty settler is no better than the original one. Guilt isn’t presence, but mediation. My glasses smudged when my dog took on an aging cat and I lunged for her leash. Eucalyptus mediates the lens, grows roots in my eye.