Meditation: On Tragic Appliances

The Apartment of Tragic Appliances is the title of Michael Snediker's new book of poems. I carry the book around with me, though I hardly ever open it. I'm at home in Kahalu`u listening to the rain and the fan and the deaf cat's random calls from my kitchen; Snediker's book remains in Honolulu at my office. More and more my cat's meows resemble appliances, though we cannot turn him on or off and he doesn't do the dishes. The phrase "tragic appliance" hums in my head like an unguided motor, all energy and nowhere to go. What might it mean for an appliance to be tragic, or for a tragic event to be an appliance?

Apply yourself.

An appliance makes my life easier: it does my dishes, washes my clothes, cools my food. Until it turns tragic, breaks, makes my life more difficult. The appliance is a metal box with an inside and an outside; it rumbles, hums, leaks, whirls like a dervish, emits steam, runs on a timer (it has beginnings and endings, punctuated by whooshes and knocks). My appliances are private; two of them reside in a dingy room whose door closes on a floor of dirty clothes. Other appliances are public; for years, I went to the Mānoa Laundromat to wash my clothes, drank coffee at the now defunct cafe. One laundry day I thought I met Paul Theroux. He said he wasn't, but added, "Theroux honors Hawai`i by living here." He said he'd met Theroux in Bali. I didn't believe him. The private appliance allows me to write (processing my words), while the public appliance takes me out of my home and head.

Appliances are automatic. They do their work without us, though we turn them on and empty them when they're finished. Genres too are automatic; we fill them in with words, turn them on, and out comes poem, story, song. A too-simple proposition, but let's start there. Tragedy is an appliance. Once its narrative begins, there's no shutting it off; the hero falls, the heroine dies, the accident cannot be stopped in traffic. We automate our lives in art, but that is much of its joy. If I put Alzheimer's patients in children's stories, a process proceeds without my intervention, except as scrivener of a story that cannot come out right. If you follow Antigone into the tomb, you know you can't get out as the same person who went in. If I am someone with a good memory who runs into a telephone pole at high speed, I become (or am becomed) someone other, someone clean of memory.

Memory is a tragic appliance. What I remember seems automatic, but what I forget is the spin cycle that disarms me. My memories turn and turn (in the laundromat there are windows to see undergarments spinning in public), but my memories also take flight as if there were no containers for them. Forgetting is what crosses the line, becomes the red flag, beckons memory like a cruise missile strike. It knows not what it does; it's automatic. Someone else's memory drones on.

We're reading Kevin Varrone's Box Score: An Autobiography in my creative writing class. It's an app. John Kinsella wrote an autobiography called Auto. Cars are appliances, as were automats. The app makes a poetic sequence into an appliance of sorts. I ask my students to use the "shuffle" function to find poems to talk about in class. One group happens upon Rick Ankiel of the St. Louis Cardinals, who lost the ability to pitch. His left arm had been automatic, a gorgeous appliance, but it and he broke before he returned to baseball in another function, that of outfielder. To what extent is a life an app? One with sound files (Kaia Sand's voice flits first from their devices), with collages, with poems. They seem not to match, the documents and the poems, but that's because we assume they apply to one another. Pretend they're not applied, not glued together as binary code. See what happens when you let go of that idea, the one we believe about how meanings fold together, like gluey flaps over an envelope. Marianne Moore with one flap up, tricorn hat askew.

The little boy who comes with his dad to remake our bathroom (including its appliances) has a Gameboy with no batteries. My husband gave it to him, as it was unwanted by our children, an elderly appliance. He roams the house with his little yellow box, its screen dark, the battery housing empty. He makes noises, he causes the yellow box to fly. It's better without the batteries, his dad notes. Imagination is an appliance, but one that has no immediate function. The yellow box may be tragic (it doesn't work, after all) but where it goes we cannot know because it is no more yellow box than we are.

My students are scared of our book on memory and forgetting. Forgetting can change you. The moment you kill a man in battle makes you someone else. There are images you cannot ever get out of your head. They are automatic, persistent, unchanging memories, and they never break (even if they break you). My students wonder if they could be so broken; they suspect they could. What we remember is not necessarily what is most important to us. It's our brain that causes us to forget. When the batteries run out, the electricity fails, when the mechanism cannot work, our appliance fails. La machine, c'est moi. Another student tells me Rick Ankiel, outfielder, was recently released by the Mets.

The phone just rang. Caller ID: Georgetown University Hospital. "As you know, this is about your mother's remains," says a jovial man's voice at the other end. He checks my address, mispronounces my street. Her ashes will come by US Mail. FedEx and UPS won't ship cremains. He will get a tracking number, a receipt, try to make sure they get here safely. From body to ash, from ash to US Post Office. What we love best.

A poem editorial on the "no fly zone"

I dreamed of a beach covered in trash—plastics, glass balls, single slippers, a couch—and a sky where a stealth bomber sailed. On the bomber a large magnet gathered rubbish up from the beach. It was a trash rapture, the lifting up of junk toward a transcendent black plane. Stealth bombers this morning over Libya. And the slow alert of tsunami trash circulating the Pacific, following old trade routes, an empire of junk. We've confused firepower with cleansing, no-fly zones with highways of death: our empire stinks of rot. Liberation theology this is not, counter-faith of force, immune to radar and yet not in any sense holy. We await the news, the ever-breaking news.

For Michael Snediker

--20 March 2011

The opening is from Lyn Hejinian's The Cell, part of my on-going memory card series based on (mostly) randomly chosen pieces of other poets' work. The ending was inspired by a facebook take-down of the phrase "breaking news" by Michael Snediker. The poem sounds more certain than I do in conversation (inner or outer) on this subject; I am confused over the intervention "to save civilian lives," suspecting as I do that such saving is benevolent, but military actions are bound up in histories and futures we cannot begin to understand or control. And so these events enter the realm of the poetic more even than the historical. The metaphorical shifts are especially violent, on the level of the sentence (from 1848 to what? from Iraq War to what?, from no-fly zone to what?), but pale in comparison to actual violence against human beings.

Interminable Baseball & Dementia & Queer Optimism & Metaphor

When last I wrote in this blog box, Michael Snediker was in the air back to the east coast and I was listening to the interminable game between my St. Louis Cardinals and someone else's New York Mets. That game ended in the 20th inning; only in theory can baseball games lack endings. After 18 innings during which neither team scored (it's nearly impossible to achieve so little, yet that also marks an excellent series of pitching performances), the Mets prevailed 2-1. The last innings featured a starting pitcher playing left field for the Cards, a utility infielder (or two) pitching, and announcers whose voices verged on hysteria. You can find the box score here; that the game tests the limit of "box" is only appropriate. It was a game played outside or beyond the box, maybe even beyond the diamond. For a close reading of the game, see Viva El Birdos, a wonderful Cardinals blog.

I received another series of boxes in the mail yesterday, part of the "Service Plan" of my mother's Alzheimer's care provider. In carefully numbered sections, 1-25, is set out (passive voice intended) the plan for care and the "expected outcomes." In academic lingo, these would be SLOs, or Student Learner Outcomes, but in an Alzheimer's home the goal is not to learn so much as to slow (not SLO) the process of disintegration. Beside each "Expected Goal" is a list of four possibilities: Maximize Independence, Maximize Orientation, Minimize Agitation, and Minimize Health Risk. At the end, there is an Other, specially tailored for the resident, but in appropriately bureaucratic language. For example, under "Personal Hygiene," the Other function is "Resident will be [sic] appear neat and clean," followed by "Expected outcome in 6 months." All of these outcomes are expected in 6 months as a matter of principle, or at least as formal closing to each numbered "box" of actions by the care home.

In bold, the reader finds language specific to "her," or as she is sometimes called in the document, "Mrs. Schultz." And so, under number 3, "Dressing and Undressing," I read: "Encourage her to dress herself. Help her as needed and lay out clothes for her to wear." There are also certain surprises in the bold language: under #6, "Bladder Management," I read: "Mrs. Schultz is incontinent of bladder. Wears pull ups. Will use grab bars when needed." And then, "Hospice to assist with this care at least twice a week." About 10 days ago I was told that the staff wanted to see if hospice would help with her care, but there was nothing bold about that inquiry. Here, in cold hard type, hospice care enters the documentation proleptically.

The dull language of the form at times captures something of my mother's personality. For example, under "10. Challenging Behaviors" (and which of hers were not, at some point, so!), we are told: "Mrs. Schultz does not like to take showers on her own and does not like to get her hair washed. Will need to redirect and encourage her to get this done. Otherwise is not exhibiting any challenging behaviors at this time." And in the next section, "11. Socialization and Activities,", in bold: "Encourage her to participate. Likes to read the Washington Post. She does not like to be approached to dance or actively get involved in an activity but is a passive participant." While this section appears outdated--she no longer reads or even glances at the paper, nor does she passively participate, but sits alone in a chair, her right elbow off the arm rest and in her lap--it does reflect the personality of a woman who insisted that each thing could be chosen. That will would make things right. That one could master one's soul and captain one's fate. That, while others might try to intrude, one had arms with which to push them back.

I mean to turn back to Michael Snediker's language of queer optimism in this post, somewhere, in large part because this document, like my mother's condition, is in so many ways grim. It's passively grim; as I was told last week, my mother is not "actively dying." Whatever she does now is done passively. Her verbs, like those of her document, are passively constructed, if they are constructed at all. However I think about her now, I can hardly feel that I am doing so actively, for even when I think, there is an end to my thinking that is not completion but impasse. So, in a minor key (I am trying to talk optimism, but thus far failing!), the language of the document tries to reassure the family member (myself) with its final (#25) section, "Special Individualized Services," where I'm told that my mother uses the Salon services. This was another point of contention, as my mother no longer likes to be touched. But when I last saw her I watched as her hair was washed and combed and then "set" in old lady style by a Filipina woman who talked to me about her grandchildren. The "Expected Goal" at the end of this section includes none of the Maximums and Minimums, but "Other: "Resident will have improved self esteem," below which I read, like the refrain that chimes at the end of each other section, "Expected outcome in 6 months."

In six months, my mother will have improved self esteem. What am I to make of this language, however formalized, however much a part of a form, a formula, a pre-form/fab construction sent to everyone like me whose parent or relative is in Alzheimer's care? What does it mean to have "self-esteem" when one cannot get out of one's chair, or even effectively watch television? What does it mean to have "self-esteem" when you do not recognize a photograph of yourself, but think you are someone else, whatever your mind still makes of the concept of "someone" or "else"? To hold oneself in esteem is to have, to hold, to register verb forms, nouns, pronouns. When one's language is reduced to formulas about everything being well and glad you called and everything's ok, then what is self-esteem?

Self-esteem is itself a formal quality, then. It's a term best used on forms. What it might mean in any individual case is over-ridden by the necessity of its existence. We cannot survive if we do not feel esteem for ourselves. The idea of an Alzheimer's patient who does not esteem herself proves too much for us to bear. The words intend to console, even as they are empty rhetorical features, sections on a form that is poetic only in the sense that it is written, and in form. Informed by a culture that demands that we love ourselves, even as we suffer in our anger and sense of having failed to acquire happiness and BMWs, and both at once, we shall at least have the form.

Interminable game. Interminable form. Interminable questions. Can interminability be the ground for optimism, this dying that is not active and seems (but only seems) to have no end? In the spirit of Snediker's queer optimism, I will say yes. Like him, I do not mean Disney's simulacrum of happiness, a song in a tunnel, a couple of strapped on plastic ears, a wild ride. Rather, I mean that after so many decades of difficulty between us, my mother and I are at peace with one another. She has been reduced to her kindness (and how can one call that, so simply, a "reduction") and I have expanded to encompass her. She is my daughter now, my ward, my dependent, in more than tax terms. More forms. When she dies, as she will, I will mourn her, not feel that something was missing, that if we had only, that failure to communicate caused us not to thrive. We have found an ending, and while there is pathos in it, and while for now it isn't even an ending, there is peacefulness in it for me and I hope--somehow--for her. (What, I wonder, is the verb form of "it"?) All endings are formal and, while the document about my mother diminishes her, the form of her ending cannot.

[Editor's note: I note that I never got to a discussion of metaphor here. What I meant to do was to suggest that the making of metaphor--an interminable baseball game IS dementia, for example--offers an instant of joy that alters the experience of interminable sadness or even banality involved in witnessing of someone else's dementia. More on this another time, perhaps.]

17 Innings with Michael Snediker, Jack Spicer, Queer Theory, and Disability

Michael Snediker was our Joseph Keene Chadwick lecturer this year in the English department; he delivered a talk on Jack Spicer this past Thursday. Along with this starring role, he played utility infielder by reading his poems at the M.I.A. reading on Wednesday and by leading a seminar on disability theory on Friday. How felicitous to have the author of a book on optimism speak to us during this cruel April of the soul in Honolulu, where cuts in education lead the headlines nearly every day. No furlough for Michael, who devoted hours to talking to my students, in addition to fulfilling his obligations to lecture and run a seminar.


Snediker is a theorist whose theories are creative and a poet whose poems bob and weave through theoretical notions, alongside descriptions of cauliflower and broccoli, water and nervous pastorals (landscapes of the nervous system). Most striking to this reader of his work is the way in which Snediker turns a long tradition that equates pessimism with knowledge, constancy with suffering, and asks why we do not consider our moments of happiness as of equal interest? Once he sets up this experiment, he finds such moments in astonishing places, the poems of Emily Dickinson and Hart Crane, for example. He finds worth in "the junk heap of happy poems" by Dickinson. One of my favorite chapters in his book, Queer Optimism, locates Hart Crane in the very vocabulary of Elizabeth Bishop, inducing smiles for me, like the smiles he interrogates in Crane's poetry. Lest we think Michael's extemporaneous and playful monologues are mere language games, he tells us that theory equipped him to become a gay man, not the other way around. This is not to say that theory becomes his belief system, but his method of weighing transiencies (I begin to write as he speaks!) in such a way that they offer up their joyful instances. (The audio emanating from my computer tells me that the Cardinals/Mets game enters the 15th inning with no score, and as I hope against hope that the moment of joy will be mine and not that of a Mets fan.) His is a mind in which the actual and the allegorical are in profound relationship to each other, in which sex and theory nuzzle, where his own episode of depression relates to the landscape of England (as he told my class) and to the lack of coherence described by queer theorists before him (Butler and Bersani and Edelman, for example). He defined "melancholy" to a seminar group as what might happen if he were to discover that his friend Susan had been a Mets fan all along, instead of a Cardinals fan. (This will not happen, no matter what the 15th inning brings, as we move to the bottom, Yadier Molina at the plate, the announcers giggling at memories of a game from the 1970s or 1980s that lasted this long, when the aptly named (?) Bake McBride ran from first to home on a pick-off attempt, cooking the goose of the opposing team.)

If not Bake McBride, then Demi Moore. Less is more. Half is more. Raise or raze. Long Island or New Canaan. New Canaan or Kingston. Kingston or Honolulu. Everything appears as possibility in Michael's intellect. Including the possibility that Jack Spicer is worthwhile not only for those who come to him with hope, but also those who approach him with disgust. Snediker hated Spicer when first asked to write about him, collected quotations that he especially disliked, culled them, read and reread the work and then allowed Spicer to educate him as a reader of poetry. Isn't this what we want for our students and colleagues and friends, this opening out that poetry promises, but whose promise must be accepted by the reader, cannot be forced on her?

The prodigal son in Spicer evidently mirrors that in Snediker, who went west mid-way through college to find himself as a gay man in San Francisco, even as Spicer's trip east did not go so well. Michael's description of Spicer wove in and out of the biographical and the steadfastly anti-biographical. His assertion that Language writers appreciate Spicer for reasons of biography and not the work was left to hang in the air; I would like to hear more development of that idea, though I can see that Snediker's Spicer is a poet who folds meaning to his chest rather than alienating and then educating his audiences via obscurity or other verbal obstacle.

Snediker's definition of optimism is not quite ours (as we go to inning 16 on my computer audio stream, a broken bat out having foreclosed the Cardinals potential win, man stranded on third base), not a Disneyland of the soul but instead a long but forward-moving drive (like Manos Hand of Fire's interminable opening scene). His use of the word "disability" is likewise untethered from subject positions (so and so is handicapped, say, and this is how they walk) but let fly into a description of how characters read themselves. If Michael's neck IS a neck because it hurts (after Blanchot's declaration that "a broken fork is most a fork"), then characters are best able to read themselves when they are dis-abled. Disabling is a condition of reading and interpreting oneself. Hence Snediker tropes suffering as a launching pad for the joy of thinking about literature within literature (and of course without it).

(The Mets have their first runner on third in 15 innings of this game. "Here's trouble." I feel optimistic yet, as the Cardinals will bat again in the bottom of this inning.) What was most striking about Michael was not the way he speaks of himself as the subject of theory and theory as an integral part of his life, as the way by which he reads himself (STRIKE THREE AT THE KNEES), but the wisdom that sits underneath a wild shelf of fancy lexical doodads. As one colleague wrote to me, "I'm an overnight fan - mostly of the way he kept bringing theory back to how we live." It's the way we live that means most, and seems most difficult to approach through the academy and its trivial (and sometimes untrivial) differences and bitterness. Michael's theory of living combines incision with kindness, the profoundly temporal (he was utterly present to my daughter Radhika yesterday and this morning as he brushed and braided her hair) with the atemporality optimism provides. Optimism may be short, but it is true.

As the 16th inning dawns, my friend Aaron Belz writes to say he hates that LaRussa has left two relievers in to bat for themselves with two outs in their innings, and the game goes on. The game's very fascination is now in its tediousness; my optimism at a good outcome is almost met by a strong desire simply THAT it end. Base hit to centerfield by Ryan Ludwick brings Albert Pujols to the plate (that most poetic of baseball names, as Sandra Dollar said to me in Denver last week). I am not finishing my blog post because the game refuses to end, but I enjoy the fact that I am writing Snediker through baseball as he's a Spicer scholar who does not know an out from an at-bat. Strike to Pujols. The announcer chuckles. Base hit for Pujols; two men on. Peter Gizzi writes about Spicer's use of baseball: "It turns out, in fact, that baseball works for Spicer as a model of individual and social composition; in the lecture he uses it to describe his practice of dictation and in his last book, Book of Magazine Verse, the diamond becomes an incarnation or synthesis of heavenly and earthly cities." But incarnation depends upon the grinding of time on the diamond, this game going into its fifth hour, at least. And a double play ends this inning, 20 players having been stranded by the Cardinals in this game. I have begun not to feel anything for this game except anxiety. But to paraphrase Michael, "These baseball players, to paraphrase Dante, show the way one might feel eternal, but also the way one might, more generally, differently, feel. (41). Poets and theorists, like baseball players, cannot predetermine their temporal fields. What they can do is read the ground ball or the bounce or the instant of happiness, hard earned after so many innings. Jack Spicer's radio drones on (the game was blacked out, even though it's nowhere to be seen on Hawai`i television) and he would appreciate the ways his voice informs Snediker's informs the baseball commentators (on the verge of hysterical laughter) informs mine. The game has not ended, seems not to want to end, but this post has ended at the bottom of the 17th with no score, six hours in.


[in the pictures with Michael are Cindy Ward (seated with MS) and Radhika Webster Schultz (standing)]