from Startles

     

We’re slouching toward justice to be reborn. Or something. He saved us money on the drapes for his big beautiful ballroom. Oh, and dead soldiers, mangled limbs. His neck on fire with what might be shingles.

Not a roof in sight, only rubble couples on the street, and a monkey with an orange plushie to make it all better. A small child with hers is somehow more and less disturbing. She’s in Gaza and the bigger monkeys have bombs. Lilith turned back this morning, as the gray of the sky threatened to fall in dimly lit diamonds. It’s the more and less of it that cancels action.

Some have flown to Tokyo to see the monkey, Punch. No one goes to Gaza to see the girl, as Gaza is closed to merchants of aid, to say nothing of tourists. The monkey lives in a concrete enclosure filled with hills and a cement mountain. It lacks greenery. Commenters object to these poor conditions, even as the monkey dances on two legs beside his stuffed toy.

I withhold what doesn't have any effect, like judgment. If my anger is judgment, it breaks my own bones. The girl, too, lives in a concrete “jungle,” but hers used to cohere, before the bombs. The world is our zoo; in it we play our roles of empathy and distraction, the western detachment that has so little to do with compassion. After I was kicked out of a hotel for sleeping in the lobby, I talked to every homeless person I stepped around.

They were like punctuation on the sidewalks of San Francisco, but we’re trained to overlook our commas, our periods, our colons. I notice there are no semi-colons in Italian; paragraphs are one long comma splice, repeated like an aria several acts in. The semi-colon asks you to stay, if you’re thinking of suicide. The semi-colon stops you, if you’re between clauses. Brakes in rain sing like little monkeys, more resembling birds than primates.

"Ode on a Macaque," as written by a poet beneath Cement Mountain. I thought the Filipino gravedigger was Chinese, what with his pony tale and ragged beard, as he stood under the fogged Ko`olau. “He speaks up, Uncle Golden,” says Ola. He hates the tree cutting, the unmaking of nature from this climate into another less tropical. When tourists get off their buses in the cemetery, heading to the temple, they sometimes have next to nothing on.

“You can see everything,” says Ramsey, who hands out tickets from behind glass. “They don’t even know they’re in a cemetery,” he adds. It’s all beach to them, with side trips to ring the gong at the bonsai temple. It resembles another, in Kyoto. On Tuesday, they’ll be making an MMA film in front of it.

It’s already monetized, after all, the Buddhist temple. We can squeeze money from a koan, make it worth our education in ambiguity and impermanence. “I like money,” the president says, looking at his drapes, before he remembers the dead and dying soldiers of other wars. His war will last only a few weeks; deaths will happen, but we’ll get a “good deal” in the end. It’s transparency, it truly is.