20 December 2023

 

The sound of one frond falling. No koan that; I just heard it fall outside. In pouring rain, a man with a machete cuts from the top of the palm: coconuts, seeds, growth’s detritus tossed off. Thump. The would-be dictator imagines himself a gardener; he shapes, he prunes, he transplants. He makes art with his machete, though he sometimes wishes he had bulldozer or drone to do the job better. The cultivation of violence is like this, so be suspicious of analogy. The man destroys enough to tame the palm, but I wonder about his work conditions, as he stands on the narrow palm’s trunk, spikes in his shoes, a belt around them both, pushing water off his face with the back of his macheted hand. I worry about the man who bulldozes tents, who shoots the innocent, who takes the narrow jewelry chain from a broken house. He will be someone else when he gets out, pruned into grief or hatred. Moral injury takes violence inside and nourishes it like a small child. It takes up a crayon and traces buildings that shed streams of red. Five men stand in the cavity of an apartment. If there is no photograph, it’s because the cameraman was pruned away. The empire considers itself an editor; the rest of us see blood flowing from shifts of tense and number.

The man who cuts works for men who do not. Take that desk job; it buries all impulses into one act of forgetting. One summer I had a typing job, but there was nothing to type, so I played hangman on the Wang for hours a day. When “work” dried up, I counted the change in the coffee room until pennies danced in my head at night. You must seem to be working a boss told me, so I seemed. You must seem to be making your land safe, another says. Safety must come with barbarism, the cry of a child out of rubble. Rubble couple, Susan Howe wrote. There’s blood in a fairy tale. I tore that sentence away. But I learned the word "tsunami" that summer.