On returning from a trip to Seattle where I talked about documentary poetry

Sent via Certified Mail by the County of Fairfax, Office of the County Attorney, notice that I am delinquent in sending my annual report of my mother's condition. I remember ignoring one of these last year. So I will send in news that she died in June of 2011, and ask them to please stop sending me these notices.

Odd Doc Tuesday: Charles Bernstein meets the DOE Ethnicity Information Form

This form came home with my daughter yesterday after I got a call from the school's counselor, a man with a lovely Irish brogue (he would be an L on the form). As you can see if you click on the document, Radhika's parents (both Ls) had listed her as "Other" in the ethnicity category of a previous document. The school informs us that "Other" is no longer a category (would that this were true!). So we were asked to provide a more appropriate label for her. Mr. Ellis read all of these categories to me over the phone; the only one that applied was (R) "Other Asian." How much more specific that is than "Other" is hard to say, but her Nepalese heritage has no place on the form, so she becomes an (R). Her name is Radhika, so I guess that's appropriate. She is a bit jealous of her brother, Sangha, however, who has a category, (N), or Indo Chinese (Ex. Cambodian, Vietnamese, Laotian). Far be it from me to tell the composers of such documents that the Cambodians and the Vietnamese are traditional enemies, and that Cambodians are mostly of mixed races, Khmer, Chinese, and others. For purposes of the form, they exist as (N).

I was reminded of a poem included in Charles Bernstein's new book from Farrar, Straus & Giroux, All The Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems. The poem is "In Particular" and was originally published in a beautiful chapbook by Chax Press, Let's Just Say. Written as a list, the poem catalogues people by their ethnicity (or a feature like dyslexia or addiction) and has them do something; it's very much an update of Walt Whitman's section 15 of Song of Myself, a poem that aims to envelope Americans in the bard's long arms, bring closer President and prostitute. You can click on a site oddly called "Infoplease" to see that poem, here. The poem begins this way:

The pure contralto sings in the organ loft,
The carpenter dresses his plank, the tongue of his foreplane
whistles its wild ascending lisp,
The married and unmarried children ride home to their Thanksgiving dinner,
The pilot seizes the king-pin, he heaves down with a strong arm,
The mate stands braced in the whale-boat, lance and harpoon are ready,
The duck-shooter walks by silent and cautious stretches,
The deacons are ordain'd with cross'd hands at the altar,
The spinning-girl retreats and advances to the hum of the big wheel,
The farmer stops by the bars as he walks on a First-day loafe and
looks at the oats and rye,
The lunatic is carried at last to the asylum a confirm'd case,
(He will never sleep any more as he did in the cot in his mother's
bed-room;)

and it ends this way:  

And these tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them,
And such as it is to be of these more or less I am,
And of these one and all I weave the song of myself.

The inward and outward are one, like Stevens's dog and dachsund, because the poet is large enough to encompass them. Bernstein's poem has less poet and more particularity sans commentary. Here are the first two pages of the four and a half page piece.


There's humor here to deflect what now seems grandiosity on Whitman's part: the mixing of ethnic markers with ethnic activities undermines the notion of category, even as the poem runs solely on the principle of category. Hence the Afghanistani who eats pastrami and Filipino eating a potato and a Buddhist financier and an Armenian rowing to the typo of Amenia. [Editor's note: it's not a typo, but a town in New York State.] Bernstein's "conclusion" resembles Whitman's, in that he brings groups together, but his means of doing it leaves the poet out of it, except as a gatherer and randomizer of categories. So the first two lines of the poem: "A black man waiting at a bus stop / A white woman sitting on a stool" are also the poem's last two lines, but inverted in terms of gender: "A white man sitting on a stool / A black woman waiting at a bus stop." Not all boundaries have (or can?) be crossed, but Bernstein suggests that some can be, sometimes.

But back to Radhika's school form, sent to us by "The Federals," as they are termed, by way of her public elementary school. We can surmise from the fact that "'Other' is no longer a category" that categories do sometimes shift. That they spring back, stronger than ever, we glean from the plea for "your help" in finding "the category they now wish you to choose." There's humor in this letter, too, just peaking through the bureaucratic prose. It belongs to the Irishman (L) who composed it. Is his humor Jewish? Or is Bernstein's Irish?

Odd Doc Monday: Hawai`i in the Alzheimer's Home

Last Wednesday I blogged on this month's calendar at my mother's Alzheimer's home. On the 20th of May, residents will experience Hawaiian culture, and on the next day, they will remember Christopher Columbus. (Irony is perhaps the trope in writing about Alzheimer's.) Today I got an invitation to a Mother's Day celebration on the 20th, a Hawaiian Luau that will feature "Hawaiian & Polynesian Entertainment." Too bad that I'm not arriving in Virginia until later in May! The flyer alone presents us with the pineapple and the plumeria, both signifiers of Hawai`i on the east coast. I would be interested to see and hear the program itself. For now, I present this odd doc as part of my mother's story, and the culture of the Alzheimer's home. That culture is proudly, even necessarily, simulacrous. It could not possibly be real because it is never perceived as part of the reality from which it comes. History's witnesses cannot remember what they saw. Is a history without witness still a history? That's a question I do not want to touch, at least for now. I'll think more about it on this coming trip.

Odd Doc Wednesday

As a rule, my mother does not attend community events at her Alzheimer's home any more, but for two or three years she spent most of her time in the activities room. She didn't sing when the others sang; she didn't respond when they spoke; she didn't do much except sit. She was the still point in a universe askew. (I've written about that room elsewhere, here and then here.) But I still get calendars of events each month to let me know what she might be doing were she not now sitting in a smaller common room all day every day, where the television disgorges old movies and her peers snooze and/or sundown together.

While Alzheimer's residents like my mother are hidden away in their homes, the histories they lived were public. Each of these monthly programs presents a section of their histories; patch a few months together, and you might have a social, political, and cultural history of the USA in the mid-20th century, along with points of reference learned in schools early in the last century-- Florence Nightingale is an example of this. One of the categories of days belongs to famous people. May's calendar features musicians like Bing Crosby and Irving Berlin; politicians like Harry S Truman (they got the S with no period correct!) and JFK (along with Jackie Kennedy Onassis); entertainers like John Wayne, Sugar Ray Leonard, Gary Cooper, and Mickey Mouse. (My mother always referred to him as "Mickey le souris," because she'd spent time in France where Mickey is much loved.) There is some evidence that the United States contains diverse cultures--after all, today's events center on Cinco de Mayo and feature Mexican food--but for the most part this is an older America, one that lives in the memories of those who can remember it. Or an America that is being used to prod, cajole, nudge the missing memories of the residents of this Alzheimer's home. "The lost America of love," one might call it.

But then there is Hawaiian Luau day on the 20th of the month, which features a 1:15 event I would love to experience, namely, "History and culture of Hawaii," sandwiched (sorry) between "Trivia Question" and 3 p.m.'s "Hula Dance." That the day after "Hawaiian Luau" is "The Discovery of America" is an irony probably lost on the planners of events, but suffice it to say that the neighborhood of the 20th and the 21st of May looks a bit fractious from my Kane`ohe perch. At the same time (1:15) as the residents learn about Hawaiian culture on the 20th, they learn about Christopher Columbus on the 21st. I'll wager no one tells them that the state of Hawai`i no longer celebrates Discoverers' Day, let alone the Columbus Day of my childhood.

Hawai`i fits into this patchword (that's a typo, but I'll keep it) history not simply because many of the residents likely vacationed here, but also because these residents are part of the "greatest generation." They would not only have remembered Pearl Harbor, but some of them would have lived it in Pearl Harbor. (My mother remembers hearing about Pearl Harbor and wondering where it was . . .) When they reminisced--when my mother reminisced--it was often about The War. I always understood this to mean World War II, even when we were living through the Vietnam War, which came after the Korean War. Even now, The War means that to me, and so many wars have come since. I grew up on her stories about The War, the battles she witnessed in Italy; the bombing raid she got caught up in (in north Africa), which landed her in a ditch; the soldiers and pilot she knew who were killed; the pilot whose life was changed when he witnessed a little girl running in terror from bombs; the nearly Catch-22ian events she recounted vividly over dinner or to friends. Whether it was the pilot who told his girlfriend that if she did not marry him, he would go out on a mission and not come back and who did not come back; or the soldier who asked mom to marry him until she pulled a minister in on the joke and demanded to be married at once, thus silencing the guy, who ran the other way; or the truck she drove, in which she once feared she'd hit a child; or the time she (unschooled in French Revolutionary history) asked where the Bastille was . . . these stories have stuck in my memory, as hers has downloaded to a blank drive. (That's a metaphor she would have never used.)

The calendar, like the alphabet, organizes memory, but does so in a way that also scrambles it. If B must follow A on a book shelf, then the events of the 21st of May necessarily follow those of the 20th of May. The calendar may be lived as history, but it is performed (as in the Alzheimer's home) as scattered chapters ("livid hieroglyph," oh Hart!) in a public history that comes apart. "At Melville's Tomb" is its tune. What has washed up are fragments of memory's bones, and the Alzheimer's residents are left to wander in and around them. In a sense, they seem put there to be re-collected into new histories that combine the lives of residents with those of their era. While "trivia" plays a large role in their activities, the calendar is far from trivial as a document. I must remember to pay each month's schedule more heed.

[click on images to make them bigger]

Odd Doc Monday

For the family member of an Alzheimer's sufferer, documents come to stand in for a life. There is the document that makes me my mother's guardian; there are documents threatening me if I don't complete the inventory of my mother's assets for any given year; there are the tax forms I sign in her stead; there are the frequent Defense Department forms I have to sign to assure them my mother has not remarried. (I have taken to writing in the margins, "She has Alzheimer's and is in no position to remarry!") These documents carry an emotional weight very different from those acquired during two adoptions, although the diction and tone of bureaucracies are remarkably consistent. In each instance, persons are represented by, mediated through, documentation whose wording is tortured, banal. We are our finances, our certificates, our licenses. And yet still, somehow, the documents also carry a freight of feeling with them. To what extent am I my mother when I sign for her? What might it be like for her to fall in love again, could she do so? Why do I feel so angry when I'm called upon to prove not only that I've not cheated my mother out of her money, but that I may have added money to her account without recording where it came from? No matter how hard the writer tries to dampen her language, emotions flare. Even a document has a memory, but that memory is ours, something the document itself claims to forget.

So the letter I received the other day from our lawyer was at once filled with pathos and irony (mostly thanks to the lawyer's barely suppressed wit). I've copied it above. It seems that if you die this year, and this year only, the rules for dealing with your estate will be different from the 2009 rules and the 2011 rules. The lawyer sets out "old rules" and "new rules" for her reader, using indented letters and numbers in good legalistic fashion.

But the wording of this document achieves an odd brilliance on the second page, where the lawyer reports in section (2) of indent (c) that "the 'old rules' encouraged the use of IRS-approved words and phrases in your will and living trust which, under the 'new rules,' may have no meaning whatsoever, resulting in confusion and possible disagreements with the IRS." She follows this marvel of crazy logic with the dry remark that "you may have read that Congress was unable to agree on anything." That the "approved words and phrases" result in "no meaning whatsoever" and that "no meaning" results in "possible disagreements" goes against the very principle of documentation!

She saves the best for last: "Again, these new rules are only for people dying in 2010, so if you think that you, or a loved one, might be in that (unfortunate) group, we would suggest you call us to set up a meeting to review your documents in light of the new rules." Will our call, our meeting, result in our finding meaning, or simply in setting out what we ought to do in case meaning breaks down? I'm tempted to call and ask.

[You can click to enlarge the photos to make them readable, if not meaningful.]