Ruminations on the surveillance state

"I just want you to know," said worker A, his tone uncharacteristically formal, "that cameras with audio have been installed in the building." Lilith and I mouthed our thanks and hellos as we walked by. Out of recording range, I was told that the boss said cameras were there for the workers' "protection," that they wanted to work there. Up the hill, workers B and C tell us that cameras are being installed everywhere. "I don't care," said the one; "the guys who are bothered by them are the ones who don't want to work." 

 

"You know," worker A had said, "I talk to a lot of people who are grieving. We have conversations--rather intimate ones--and I don't want them being recorded." He hesitated at the word "intimate," but there's no better word.

 

I, too, record these conversations. Is my intention different enough from that of the boss who so clearly distrusts his own employees? I'd like to think that I record them--and you read them--for better purposes. Is the archive for control or for preservation, and are they always separate? Do we write out of suspicion or trust? Out of fear or love? Is there any pure space, and if there were, could we write about it? At what point do I stop posting stories and photographs on the internet? Shall I write in the voices of the trees, the mongooses, the stray cats?

Tree washing

 

"What kine fish dat?" asked a new guy at the guard shack. "Fish in a tin," I responded, as I was wearing my past tense Tinned Fish cap, given me by a friend. "Oh, Pidgin!" he said, "Filipino!" 

 

At the top of the first hill, Lilith and I noticed that the beautiful mossy stone wall before the hillside recently denuded of trees, had been power washed. No moss, no ferns. From above, we heard the sound of a power washer "cleaning" another wall in the cemetery. On our way out, I told Scott it all had nearly made me laugh, the traffic snarl at the Temple, the naked stones. "They're power washing the trees," he said. Wondering if I'd heard correctly, I repeated, "they're power washing the trees?" Yes, they bring union guys in on Sunday now (they get double-time you know) to wash all the stuff off the trees. I pointed to the palms nearby, as yet unwashed of their lichen. Yes, those. "I've taken so many pictures of them." 

 

He said he hadn't heard that the East Wing rubble will be used to expand a golf course. It all seems of a piece, or pieces.

from Startles

She’d been praying as she drove by, she said. Not cell phone distraction, but god’s own. I read an article this morning on attention as “predatory.” We become prey, as he (yes, he) devours us. The author argues that attention is usually conceived of as solitary; I suggest otherwise.

The cult is false friend to compassion. It closes what is opened otherwise. The woman in the cemetery comes nearly every day to lie on her son’s grave. Grieving is her attention to that patch of earth, a blue dinosaur in brown lei standing beside a typed prayer, a white rosary. I witness her grief from the road with my dog.

To witness might be to prey upon, I suppose. Effective witness is rare, like royal jewels, and can be stolen in broad daylight, if you bring the laddered truck. When nothing comes of it, keep at it. The woman looks at me with tears in her eyes and smiles. The other day I left her alone under her black umbrella set against the sun.

In a poem, her tears would be jewels. According to the article, I might be stealing them. To write about them takes, and then offers, like a palm over the heart, or the palm over my stained white umbrella. What does the language see in us? Does it take the words we write and reorder them, making true statements false?

If I take her story, am I thief or amanuensis? If I offer her story up, have I pawned it, or left it on a doorstep like a foundling? To the extent that her story becomes mine by way of attention, I am both creatures, prey and praying for. If I breathe in her hurt, I take what she would not offer me, and breathe it out where she cannot see it. In my depression, mere politeness seemed the utmost of care.

Both depression and happiness are true, even in the same container. Put it on a ship and send it to sea. Or talk about it as a shaggy dog story. Daniel told me one that ended with “soldiers in your cup.” We live on the hinge of the pun, the turn between truisms, the balance born of counterweight, a sometimes happy accident.

 

BathHouse 27: Resistance

 The new issue of BathHouse is out, and includes one of my Startles, along with other work by Steve Benson, Deborah Meadows, and many others. https://dev.bhjournal.net/bathhouse-journal-27/ Patrick Flores-Scott is editor, and Carla Harryman is the faculty adviser.

 

Have a look. 

from Startles

In the everything makes sense department, the Temple’s enlarged black parking lot fills with orange cones and “compact only” spaces, each separated by a line of fresh white paint. No need to up the contrast. A lone chair sits on the grass, lone cat beside it. I ask where the tourist buses will park. “Behind that line of cones,” one worker says.

The line of cones in front of “compact only” spaces? Yes. The woman at the front gate says where there were two rows for buses, now there will only be one. “They need five people back there now to figure out what’s going on.” A line of temple-colored bird houses stood where only compacts dare park.

In the everything makes sense department, the White House now resembles Gaza. Who saved the furniture, the windows, the wooden floors? Who removed the archives? Where will tourists go, whose entrance was into that wing? A huge American flag droops over broken concrete.

Who needs metaphor now, when rubble is rubble, and history’s washed away with water hoses or blood? Susan Howe’s “rubble couple” denoted the end, but at least they had each other. Tree stumps on the cemetery’s hillside sprout new branches. The same “rubbish trees.” You don’t have to weed, if you replace plants with stones, says my worker friend.

In the everything makes sense department, I suggest that the cemetery’s boss has taken over landscaping for the White House. “I don’t pay attention to that,” the woman at the front gate says; “it gets to me.” The trees are coming down, the grass being paved over, roses getting cut out. It gets to them, these living beings inhabiting a symbolic space. If you tear down the space, the symbol goes with it; that’s the thought.

In the everything makes sense department, the homeless of DC were taken away, the men at “Alligator Alcatraz” disappeared when it closed, and the rubble will doubtless be sold at a profit, like the Berlin Wall. It hardly matters for what the symbol stood, it stands for him who sells it. And the rubble will turn to gold, like water into wine. And donors will come from far and near, bearing myrrh and incense, chips and crypto, to dine with the ballroom’s money changers. Senators must make do with goodie bags given them by the Orange King.

 

from Startles

Startles

The land of magical thinking forsakes thought for desire, a flatter sense. Days I want to think I drive the car; only at construction sites can you see the road’s peeled skin, mud and pipes. As a child, I had a clear plastic doll filled with colorful plastic organs. I could take her apart and put her back, admire her pink intestines, her gray lungs. Like a jar of pickles, she seemed immortal, though they both got misplaced in the end.

The inside that is outside lacks air. The outside that is inside escapes the brine, the bitterness. It’s all compromise, but we’ve forgotten how. The diagrams on fliers apply to other procedures. The joke begins when a literature professor walks into a room where engineering diagrams have been written on the chalkboard.

Whatever the process is, she follows it. An IKEA bed frame instructs you on your grief. There must be five stages to both, though only one is clear cut. Instructions on how to meditate offer us paradox. Images of screws and wooden slats take wing, then fade out.

The diagram is a recipe and a dream. The recipe appears stable until you follow it. The dream revels in its precarity until you wake up. The bed is sturdy, though you’ll forget it unless you put your memories in a jar, hide them on a shelf somewhere. I write to close my jars and read to open them.

There’s an engine of return to the poem, more form than format. Double space your way back to the doll’s transparent skin, her plastic bones, and see if you can’t imagine her alive. An older sister to your childhood. No matter that your mentor was plastic. She hid nothing from you.

 

from Startles

 

Writing not to know what I think, but to think how I write. Now, when the street resembles itself only and my bed is still firm, nothing else is the same. Nothing else feels like metaphysics, a windshield blurred by heavy rain, but is an ICE raid set to music. Only perform! If you say there is peace, then there is; if war breaks out again, it hasn’t.

How I write changes with circumstance, as if style were a mirror, after all. As if everything we post is a position, not an impulse. Even whimsy’s become instrumental. Be the frog who isn’t that frog, but isn’t real, and you’ve arrived at the counter-symbolic nature of fact. Meditation’s a fly-over state, all content striving not to be.

But none of this gets me to the end, even if the end is everywhere in sight. Are long sentences back in fashion? a friend asks, noting the cultural capital of words that fail to find pause. Your post will find more readers if you include music, the very music you find suggested above. A man wearing a Yelich shirt and zip ties gets pushed toward the maw of an open van. It’s 3 a.m. in Chicago.

The sound of the music echoes Fox during the bombing of Baghdad, classical yet hollow, in case you can’t imagine people dying below. Gaza re-opens, but there’s nothing left that isn’t wrecked concrete. What’s the music for that? Post-triumphal, like the melody of a single tone that warps on stage. Silence is freaky, don’t you think?

The era of magical thinking lacks magic. In lieu of cleansing mantras, we have the clutter of lies. America is a hoarder whose storage container is set to explode. To describe it would require one long sentence, if only you could walk inside of it. The dream has awakened us, as if we were its dream, folded inside a sheet.

Does the dream know we exist? Can it be witness to its own vanishing? Can we find it in Freud’s index near “pulled teeth”? What interpretations do our dreams have of us, of our desires to live them out? What dream embraces the men who walk the highway’s narrow shoulder, pushing their shopping carts?

Put music to it, the supermarket refugees. My son said a homeless man asked him for something to eat and he bought it for him. Said the man was brave to ask an officer in uniform. One or two different decisions and we’d be there, too, he tells me. I’m proud of his wisdom, if not the cruel economy that gets him there.

Breaths of life

O leans over, puts his forehead to Lilith's, says "I do the Ha with all of my dogs. Breath." Went to swim meets this past weekend, so we talk dull sporting events with kids. "Practicing for fatherhood". O says he already raised his brothers; their mother a single mom with two jobs. In a better place now. "Or so they say," I interjected. "Oh she is," says O. Cancer.

 

An expanded forest of cones greets us at the Temple parking lot, where a man sits in a bulldozer, dozing. Preparing to expand the parking lot. "So many tourists," he says. "Why do they all come here anyway?" He has family in the cemetery, but he's never been to the temple. I don't know how we get there, but we always do. "Why aren't people kind to one another?" he asks. "They seem to get such pleasure in hurting each other, and they call themselves Christians." He's going to Vegas soon on vacation, but given what's going on, he doesn't want to travel, told his wife that. But the tickets were bought. He's hoping things get better. I say Lilith and I will look for him later on in the week.

 

I ask at the booth why they don't put more parking at the front, and move tourists on trams to the back, where the traffic has gotten so thick. "Oh, they can't have the tourists near the funerals," I'm told. "Some tourists started yelling the other day at people at a funeral who were trying to use the restroom. It got ugly. Most of them don't even know they're in a cemetery; they think it's a park with flowers scattered over it." The stones are flat, most of them, so they don't see that they're graves. 

 

"That asshole blocked the cats from getting under the guard shack at the front. They're killing the spirit of this place." Sure enough, plywood's installed between asphalt and the bottom of the shack, nearly all the way around. "The cats were all upset; they started circling the shack, some almost getting run over--we warned them about that." They're going to block off the space under the refrigerator, one guy says. (The space is very small, indeed.) "See that guy over there in orange bandanna?" he asks. "He did it, was proud to do it. Says he enjoys pissing people off." (This surprises me, a bit.)

 

Does anything surprise you?

from Startles

 

Startles

No doubt, I’m an awkward Buddhist. No, there is no no doubt. Can’t be two places at once, unless you are. Imposter of prosody, I limp. Here with the donkey, there with the cloud, if it’s imagined. Even faux transcendence is better than this, no?

That is, if transcendence gets us out. Expats of natural time, clutching our memories as truth’s pearls. The ocean, Buddha said, though he’d not seen one. Led by our noses to the shore, where water is water and is also greater than itself. Let my feet stay in damp sand, my hair in the “firmament.” All words are doubles.

The rain keeps us in, but we still hear it. Sound shorn of wet, plunkers plunking. A man in a regal blue shirt played an instrument in the cemetery; not xylophone but more like a workshop table being struck with a hammer. Around him, people in masks picked up sticks around the grave. As the mortician said, the acoustics are very good.

If the beat of the rain runs in accordance with my pulse, does my pulse spatter? The matter on the sidewalk is now kept behind a wall by instagram, except when it isn’t. It’s brain matter, arm matter, child matter, everything that ought to matter. Mother and child, father embracing white sheet covered corpse. Our meditation teacher said she’d cover the corpse later.

But that was metaphor, that corpse. The body, unmoving, rendered as log, as plank, as half a cross to bear (without the wheels). Even as metaphor, it’s heavy, but we feel less anguish over it. The man in the cemetery bangs his mallets, but we can’t see what for. The mongoose is a prospective corpse.

My body is useless before the animal on the road. Compassion knows us connected, but no umbilical gives my blood to him as nourishment. How do we make an action out of helplessness? The return to self precedes the exit into community. Or does it?

I know that kindness matters, but it’s not armed. If it were, I could zip-tie small children with my love, throw grown men into unmarked vans with my caring. I want to think the outcomes would be different, but I’m piss poor at logistics. The woman is but two steps removed from the man who (was) disappeared. Soon so many more of us.

If only disappearance could return to the world of magic, rabbits escaping back into their tall hats, children running to follow them. Transcendence isn’t magic—Thoreau could tell you that— nor is it unentertaining. Hire a mystic for your birthday party, and you might grow younger yet. More time to witness history unfolding inside and outside of time. Put metaphors of blood and flesh here.

from Startles

 

My eye met the mongoose’s eye; the animal appeared to be paralyzed, though one front leg shook. A leaf-like object fluttered in its mouth, from which an electric pulse seemed to emanate. The mongoose’s odd stillness met our own. I spotted a motorcyclist at the top of the hill and told him, as if to describe the mongoose might cure it. On the way down, the man stopped to tell me the mongoose had walked off the road, “struggling a bit.”

The story lacked a beginning or an end, at least for us. What it didn’t lack was analogy. Take the mongoose as an immigrant on the concrete road; take the road as a cul-de-sac, which it is, though it’s at the back of the cemetery in front of accordioned mountains. Take yourself as witness without power to aid, your dog less bloodthirsty than befuddled. This is not a story, but a situation whose emotional center is helplessness.

If I could have walked for the mongoose, I would have gotten him off the road and onto the grass. But empathy doesn’t extend to the limbs. If I could reach to remove the zip ties from a small child in Chicago, I’d need to break the screen that sits between us and history. Not like a truck window in late morning, reflecting blue sky and trees and me with my camera. Rather a screen that cannot reflect. One that only projects.

I can take photos now, but I can’t reflect. It’s not that I’ve become a surface, like a window, but that the truck cab inside my ribs is stuffed full of paper cups and straws and a Bible on the passenger seat. There’s no way to get inside. Auto-portraits come of it, my face blocked by the camera’s lens as it looks at, but not into, itself. One comfort of photography is its refusal of depth.

To say is not to explain. To have explained was a privilege, but explanations wear out like light bulbs and washers and dryers. We hope to hear the sound of the machine to know we have fixed it, but there’s no looking at its eye, an eye that stares back. There’s no talking to the small brown mongoose on the road, though it squeaks like a tiny motor. To say is to say what you see in the early light beneath mountains and the clouds they seem to spit out, but there’s nothing to listen to now, except 80s music that leaks from the earbuds of another walker.

That isn’t the sound of time passing, but of its repetitions, those that are surfaces that prevent us from feeling time boring in, reminding us of politics and loss and the fact we won’t know where the mongoose went or if it is still alive. The man on the motorcycle sees things not as they are but as they pass by. Fence post to fence post to fence post, the clicking of a shadow into place. I cannot think of what it means, but I see it as musical notation, stuck in space but marking prospective sound. Start time by singing it.

Lilith in the hinterland

 

One of her tenants just moved out, the one who wobbled when she walked, slammed down the stairs, parked way at the top of the hill when there are spaces much closer by, who had more stuff in her room than the mover could believe was there, who ruined the walls and floors, who had a family but never saw them, who had had a house, but got rid of it because the roof needed to be fixed; now she's waiting on her other tenants to leave so she can get a reverse mortgage and live alone. No one in her family needs her property (one has two houses, another three, the kids will each get their own). Her nephew earned his. Maybe some heirlooms. But no one needs anything. 

 

When thinking about having too much meets thinking about not having enough. When, in what remains of a gift economy, no one needs what you might give them. When families are divided into haves and haves less. When thinking about housing turns into thinking about dying.

Lilith encounters a grieving woman

I had thought she was his sister, the young woman who keeps coming to visit Noa's grave, he (now) a handsome young face staring up from a headstone in the grass. I've seen her buy flowers and chat with S, a wide smile on her face. I've seen her drive by in her black car. I've seen her at the grave, where she was today. This time I asked if she was there for Noa, adding that I'm niele and sometimes look to see what graves people visit, and she said yes, he was her son. He died in a motorcycle accident in April. Some days she's strong, and other days she cries a lot. This was one of the latter. I suggested that crying is a strength, then told her that I'm on a medication that keeps me from crying. I miss it. "I understand," she said, "it's such a release."