Memory Card [nerves, nations]

Although mountains belong to the nation, mountains belong to people who love them. Mountains lean like mothers; at night they're what isn't lit, can't be felt save as assumption based on fact. If memory writes fact, we are tattooed skin, nerve, synapse. We know the mountain exists because our brain has been altered by it. Cajal's mountains and waterfalls, gravity's nerves shuttling in rock pools. To assume means to think you know, gain power from that knowing. We assume what memory offers, until it stutters, runner caught between first and second, wagering his vacillations against another runner's sprint. There's no clock in baseball, but it's still all time. The mountain has its rain delays, days we time the water's flowing stops to arrive at clarity. Shama thrushes & Miles Davis: sun and spotify. It's “nation” that sets boundaries, as a mountain does. What is the mountain's quantum of river blood, its signature on the rolls? Where is the place of my hand, index lanced, red dot bubbling?

                                                                    --1 June 2014

Images by Santiago Ramón y Cajal, whose Recollections of My Life comes highly recommended.
First line by Zen Master Dogen, from Moon in  Dewdrop

Baseball Sutra, for Norman Fischer.

Because all green mountains walk, they are permanent.

What does the green mountain do at 3-0? Does it take the pitch & trust in permanence, or does it swing?

Although they walk more swiftly than the wind, someone in the mountains does not realize or understand it.

The green mountain is a catcher, sad in the knees, who reads the pitch & runs.

“In the mountains” means the blossoming of the entire world.

It means the beauty of a passage from first to third on a single to the opposite field. It means the exfoliation of diamond into water, of water into cloud, of cloud into radio voices reduced to silence, the audio's on-deck circle.

People outside the mountains do not realize or understand the mountains walking.

They are on streets or in shops, praying at other altars, staring at their apps, as just past their eyes the mountain walks toward the mound, nursing its fork balls and cutters, change ups and sliders.

Those without eyes to see mountains cannot realize, understand, see, or hear this is as it is.

The vendor in Hiroshima started every call “ICE COLL, ICE COLL.” In the seventh, balloons littered the field, wafts of cigarette smoke ascending into a cacophony of trumpets & drums.

If you doubt mountains' walking, you do not know your own walking: it is not that you do not walk, but that you do not know or understand your own walking.

I do not doubt that the pitcher gives up walks, or that the batter takes his walks, or that the umpire walks to the mound, which walks toward the outfield, away from sharply hit liners or drag bunts, or that whoever walks walks the same path as all those who walked before. The genealogy of walking scatters chalk in its walk.

Since you do know your own walking, you should fully know the green mountains' walking.

My mother said she counted steps, though not for long. My father & I marched down corridors while he barked numbers & hut-huts, chanted martial mantras. I walk with my children, when I'm not driving them. A walk without aim finds counsel under the Koolau.

Green mountains are neither sentient nor insentient.

Our sentience gathers in neurons, ganglia, prions. We are ourselves and not. Our machine becomes us when we walk through letters that on the typewriter end with a ding! Return.

You are neither sentient nor insentient.

I am the sentence that I write. My sentence walks across the screen like a mountain in its folds. Clouds were white-out before that paradigm-shift.

At this moment, you cannot doubt the green mountains' walking.

I choose not to doubt Michael Wacha. He stands on a mound that resembles a mole on the steep mountain's green skin. We hope the rain delay does not last.

Italicized sentences by Zen Master Dogen

[Norman Fischer, a Giants fan, bet me a poem on the Giants-Cardinals game two days ago. I lost, so this is my poem for Norman.]

A memory card on belonging

Belong. Long for, long with, long-necked. To be and to long as. The sorrow there is in teaching. He said it overcame him like a shroud when he walked to the post office. Tomorrow is all forgetting, for now. It's the street that will get crossed. Double-crossed if only you trespass the date line. Stitch in time saves none. “Are you still obsessed with time?” my mother asked. That was before we switched sides. She in sorrow kept forgetting, lost her time. We must account for history, a colleague says. But the more I count, the more the onion sheds to thin skin on a wood board. I cannot count because I do not belong. I do not belong because she says so, who does not belong either. Cause with two many effects, ideas counted as cudgels not crow bars. Bar none: morning sheds skin to skittering birds and fugue states. The state is a lie, my student says, but it's not, even if its origins were. Origins are what is not--is were, was, always already gone, not to be found. My father pulled me into the trees across the road from a man and the police. In case the man has a gun, he said. Prions affix memory, or they destroy it.

                                                                    --29 May 2014


PS "Long-necked" came from my computer's memory.

On Being Apart, or A Part (after Catherine Taylor)

Catherine Taylor's Apart: the devil's in the preposition. Apart from; a part of. Or: we play a part, or we play apart. She's writing about the aftermath of South African apartheid. I'm thinking about Hawai`i. This is an inexact analogy, but it is one.

She quotes George Oppen: "We are not coeval / with a locality / But we imagine others are" (108). Or we imagine that some of us live at a point of origin that can be found through imagination and an archive.

My colleague told me that some graduate students want "to move into identity-based work," which means away from what I offer them. I work in identities falling apart. A part of identity work, but apart from it. My mother lost her culture; almost everyone I know at the university here is trying to find theirs. As an eighth grade teacher of mine said, you can't simply undo what you did; these are two different processes, that of putting together and falling apart. One is historical, the other medical. But both base themselves on the notion of identity, that there is one, that it is somewhat stable, that you can acquire or lose it.

Judith Butler, again quoted by Catherine Taylor: "Are there modes of belonging that can be rigorously non-nationalistic?" Butler writes about Hannah Arendt, who wants to belong, but abhors nations (for reasons utterly apparent): "she poses that question: what would non-nationalist modes of belonging be? I'm not sure she is describing reality as it is, but making use of language to invoke, incite, and solicit a different future" (108).

Taylor, whose family left apartheid South Africa when she was a child, knows guilt, parses it from shame, seems to favor shame. Guilt is white, though she also understands the instabilities of racial positions, either when she encounters a "colored woman" or when she remarks on her family's skin colors, which range from pale to dark. She wonders about her brother's racial make-up, until she reads Nadine Gordimer on how finding a drop of black blood becomes yet another power play for whites.

Her mother joined a group called the Black Sash, which tried to intervene against apartheid not by overthrowing it (who could?) but by manipulating its rules to help individuals in their daily lives. To subvert the institution by treating individuals it mistreats with humanity. Taylor is ambivalent about this group. It was bourgeois; its members led otherwise comfortable lives. Did they not recognize themselves as individuals, then, self-worthy in a barbaric regime?

I am not coeval with my location in Hawai`i, though I do live here, work here, have extended family here, love the place I inhabit. There is an inherent difficulty to not belonging, a deep anxiety to it. I felt another version of it growing up in northern Virginia, where I appeared to belong, but did not feel as if I did. For my nearly 25 years here I have watched as newcomers and long-time residents of Hawai`i wrestled with this problem. Here everyone suffers it, and it's often marked by one's color and by one's culture. Usually, these are plural, though the plural also foments anxiety. There's safety in the one, the singular, the pure, or so we think.

Here are some claims to belonging that circulate at the university I work for, if not the community at large: "My family has been here over 80 generations; my family worked the land as contract labor and speaks Pidgin." Only that first claim seems to hold water now, after a couple of decades during which the latter mode of belonging held brief sway. If you are a newcomer (and feel that you always will be, no matter how long you live here), there is no way in. So many (mostly white) colleagues work to belong by allying themselves with and for those whose claims seem better. They aim to make this "a Hawaiian place of knowledge" as the University's strategic plans calls it. As allies, they belong, if only metonymically, perhaps. As allies, they have power they would not have as "haole" or as outsiders.

These actions honor a terrible history. These actions also ignore other histories, and the present. To honor the present, I would argue, we need to respect everyone who lives here, whether or not they "belong." This category of belonging, while in many ways historical, in many ways psychological, is also a wedge to wielding power. If I belong, or if I work with someone who does belong, then I can control the narrative. In an intellectual community, the narrative is all. And it becomes curriculum, syllabus, arc of a course, a student or faculty career.

And so at UHM we rehearse the past; we try to parse out settler from native, as if so many of us are not both at once. We try to make right a terrible wrong by creating an echo chamber in which what happened in 1893 (the overthrow) also happened in 1959 (statehood) and happens every day now and so makes us perpetually angry. A former student tells me her professor said she would leave the islands if she were asked to do so by native Hawaiians who attained sovereignty. "But what about those who are mixed race, or who cannot afford to leave?" this student asked her. Such ideology does not coexist with common sense.

My fear is that we will remain angry as the sea levels rise, as storms get more violent, as the drought on the Big Island intensifies, as development covers all of O`ahu with condominium towers, suburbs by Gentry, as the military continues to control 20% (is it?) of O`ahu's land. Our anger over past wrongs cannot get in the way of our need to make allies to overcome the wrongs of the present.

Our anger can also make us weaker, less inclined to act in the world as it now exists. Taylor quotes Breyton Breytenbach on apartheid: "I have come to the stage where I don't want you to talk about Apartheid unless you also recognize how it flows from our shared history, how it dovetails with elements of your ideologies and sentiments, and how talking about it can morally neutralize the unimaginable horror of it. I refuse to continue being a party to the condemnation of Apartheid, which leads only to moral posturing. We are fattening the monster on our outcries of shame" (114).

In the past year, my department has voted for the following: a) to reduce the teaching load of tenure line faculty from 3-2 to 2-2, while releasing tenure line faculty from teaching freshman composition once every four semesters; b) to slash courses from the catalogue, because we don't have the personnel to teach them; c) to require anyone who teaches the course required of English majors to include "indigenous texts" on their syllabus, and to consider them in cultural and historical terms; d) to separate out what used to be Asia/Pacific into Asia and Asian diaspora (after an earlier attempt to make that Asian/Asian American) and indigenous Pacific and Hawaiian. And more. The courses that were slashed were almost all in literary studies, namely the traditional literature offered in English departments. The courses that were added were in indigenous Hawaiian and Pacific. The end result is to segregate fields by race, rather than join them by theme or aspiration.

When asked why we ought to require faculty members to teach indigenous texts, we are told that "we are teaching on stolen land." End of conversation. Or, we are told that "this is the only ethical thing to do." End of conversation. Or we are told to "do the hard work of retooling." End of conversation. As Laura Murphy writes in a review of Taylor's book: "She suggests that the privileged are envious of the irreproachable position of the oppressed. They long to identify with a position that is ethically indisputable. They long for the right to speak from a position not sullied by a legacy of hatred and oppression." How does one both agree with the force of these statements (yes, we are in Hawai`i and the Pacific and we really ought to teach those literatures), while arguing against their totalism? Are we not also in a larger Pacific, one that includes the Philippines, the Pacific Rim, the west coast of the north American continent? Does the trash that washes up on our shores not come--of late--from Japan's tsunami? Does the military presence not affect us all, no matter our race or ethnicity?

This is all food for conversation, but I fear we will not, can not, have it. Where "the only ethical thing to do" is something I do not agree with, clearly I do not belong at the table. Where the intensity of location as defined by original inhabitants completely overcomes any notion of location as where we are now, there is no dialogue. It just is.
 
These issues leach out of the department's public life, its intellectual life (as it were), into the personal. Many colleagues refuse to attend meetings because they are so painful. Others do not speak up because they fear being called racists. There's an excess of emotion at the meetings, but it bleeds into the conversation as a wedge, becomes persuasive in the ways that rhetoric are meant to be in our line of work. We cannot talk to one another. What to do about this immediate problem, the interpersonal? The one that causes us to take circuitous paths through the corridors, to avoid eye contact, to suffer simply for being at work? I'm reminded of Thich Nat Hanh's remark in his recent book on communication, that diplomats in a peace process should not start cold. They should, he writes, spend some time on a silent retreat, preparing to listen to one another, to deal with each other as individuals rather than as enemies. I doubt this would happen in my department, but that doesn't mean it would not be a good idea.

So what do we do now, those of us who want to belong-without-belonging, who want to expand the notion of location beyond what Barrett Watten calls "bad history," who are fascinated as much by the dissolution of identity as by its recreation, as much by family as a cross-genetic, trans-racial grouping as by who got what from the Webster line? Two recent conversations with friends provided some hints as to what is still possible, even at a university where much of what I've been describing above is written into rules that govern more departments than English.

One friend, Michael Epp, who ran a Pacific health organization for years, suggests that it's in the teaching practice, as well as publications (aka Tinfish Press), that alternatives can be posed. "Teach widely," he suggests, "offer a version of the Pacific that is expansive, that gestures toward a larger economic vision essential for the survival of Pacific cultures, if they can come together as a Blue Continent and exert more control over the resources and destiny of the Pacific. This will require a more cosmopolitan, more inclusive understanding of identity and belonging." Another friend, Murray Edmond, a poet and dramaturge from New Zealand/Aotearoa, wants to investigate what he calls "Pacific Modernism." Across the Pacific there have been writers who combined the interests of their location with methods aligned with Modernism: I suggested the work of Wayne Kaumuali`i Westlake to him, and he had several other figures he wants to work on. I don't want to steal Murray's thunder, so I'll leave it there. But this imaginative bridging of indigenous and Asian and European and American literary works strikes me as very promising. It won't change the world--no study of literature seems to do that!--but it might set our students to thinking about the very real complexities of not-belonging in the Pacific, or anywhere on this globe. There are other, more overtly political, ways to address these issues, too.


I was at a memorial service recently on the beach near the surf spot "Publics." The minister delivered the Christian service in English and Hawaiian. When the man's friends came up to talk story about him--a man in his mid-40s who had been very active until he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage--they began hesitantly, formally. Then they wen bus' out the Pidgin, brought themselves and their friends to life. The communities gathered to mourn were many: family, surfing buddies, work buddies, dirt bike buddies, members of his step-daughter's soccer ohana (I was in that group). After the canoe with his remains went out past the reef, joined by dozens on surfboards and even boogie boards, and then after the ceremony there ended, paddles and hands hit the water, which splashed high in the air. Those of us still on the shore clapped. He was home.

This was our present, and might be our future, if we can keep imagining. As Taylor quoted Butler writing of Arendt (a lovely female intellectual genealogy, that):" I'm not sure she is describing reality as it is, but making use of language to invoke, incite, and solicit a different future." Let us not fatten our monsters on outcries of shame, as Breytenbach wrote, but turn ourselves toward that future, in whatever model of togetherness we can muster.

Catherine Taylor, Apart. Brooklyn: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2012.

PROPOSED ADDITIONS, by Donovan Kūhiō Colleps, has arrived!

To order our new book, go to http://tinfishpress.com/?projects=proposed-additions.
It's $14, printed at Obun in Honolulu. Thanks Vince Watabu, for your help, and all the baseball talk over the last few years!


Donovan Kūhiō Colleps constructs Proposed Additions out of many parts: a house blueprint; his grandfather’s cancer journal; the instructions to a pulmonary respirator; the story of a daddy sea horse; and an investigation of O‘ahu’s leeward side, its histories and its mo‘olelo. In this hybrid work—documentary poem, prose reflection, elegy—Colleps recovers his grandfather’s memory by way of the filing cabinet he left behind. As the poet carries the metal cabinet strapped to his back across the ‘Ewa plain, he recovers more than this intimate past. He also recovers significant cultural and linguistic histories of place in a part of Hawai‘i now being turned into fields of templated suburban houses.

from “Daddy Sea Horse”

I found him behind
the Appliances folder.
Daddy Sea Horse, preserved
like so many things aren’t.
In a dirty plastic
watch box tomb.
His perfect shape
a memory organ,
his dried skin
a dark yellow. Each
ridge of his spine
confirming the fractal
geometry of generations.

reason 3: sight & sound. the daddy sea horse is anchored to a plastic plant in the tank and people are yelling behind me. i do not understand the words being thrown but i see hands cutting the air in the glass reflection. my sister storms out with her naked children, and when the front door slams, daddy sea horse explodes. i do not count his babies because there are too many. a desire to make a shaka in the water overwhelms me. but it passes.

I brought him
to the dining table
to Ma.
“Here,” I said, “here.”
Standing in the spot
where I swear
it all happened,
and placed the box
in front of her.
“Where dis came from den?”
The hole in daddy sea
horse’s belly was
still there cavernous, and
he was leaning
against the clear side
of his container, staring
out at the empty
plate of sausages.
“Nana bought dat,”
she said,
“long time ago,
probly
from one adoze
touris-tee stoas


Donovan Kūhiō Colleps was born in Honolulu and lives in Pu‘uloa, ‘Ewa, on the island of O‘ahu. He is currently working toward a PhD in English at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, focusing on creative writing and Pacific literatures.

If you find Donovan's book compelling, try other Tinfish titles. Books about place include Kaia Sand's Remember to Wave, Barbara Jane Reyes's Poeta en San Francisco, and Craig Santos Perez's from unincorporated territory [hacha]. Hawai`i authors include Steve Shrader, J. Vera Lee, Lee A. Tonouchi, Lisa Linn Kanae, and the many authors of Jack London is Dead. Books of documentary poetry include jai arun ravine's and then entwine. Elizabeth Soto's book, Eulogies, complements Donovan's elegy to his grandfather. And so on. It's a weave, a lei, a labor of love.

A short essay on Alzheimer's & Aliens

ka mate ka ora: a new zealand journal of poetry and poetics includes an essay by me on Alzheimer's. (Please click to see the essay!) This issue comes out of a conference held earlier this year in Auckland on poetry and social action.

Christopher Parr has a response to the conference that includes a critique of my work--not the essay but the documentary writing--to which I intend to respond soon (though I'm very happy to see it).

Here is that section of Parr's essay:

The speaker I heard most willing to push the envelope for social change through poetry was Susan Schultz, in her explication of texts generated in part by her mother’s verbal disorientation because of Alzheimer’s disease. Perhaps appropriately, she presented a serious challenge to me-as-audience or reader. By appropriating scrambled sayings and disjointed speech patterns from her mother and others with that debilitating disease, Susan was certainly expanding the range of what ordinarily gets included in poetry, and in regular language use, so she was again questioning the boundaries of ‘the social’ and what constitutes social action in communication. I found myself made uncomfortable by this source of practice, without being sure I should be. The problem had to do, I thought at the time, with whether her mother could and would truly choose to consent to her mis-speaking being used like this.

On reflection, I think it may really have to do with appropriating unintentionally impaired speech from someone else. I am myself a fan of appropriation strategies and have indeed used found speech and language, and I readily concede that in most if not all instances we writers use such found language without the consent of the initial utterer or writer. But usually the utterer has a choice whether to have said or written what we appropriate, no matter how discombobulated their utterance might have been.

In the case of an Alzheimer’s victim – or, I reflected, of my own mother who has survived a bad stroke but has serious though not total aphasia and at times gets words very scrambled – we can see brain impairment causing them to say something which is not what they would want or mean to say, were they not impaired. Yes, such utterances are thus language in the world. But poetry as art is (by definition) a form of display. So does one honour the person whose scrambled speech, caused by brain impairment, one displays in texts presented as poetry? Or, since they may not truly identify themselves with what is coming out of their mouths, is something less than honourable going on in this appropriation? I am raising this as a genuine question, definitely not as an accusation, since I see a number of variables involved in getting an accurate picture of what the practice is, including seeking consent. Happily too, I know I am raising issues that arise in the avant-garde, a context that exists as much as anything to highlight discomforting matters, especially about boundaries and acceptable or admirable practices. Susan’s work takes its cues in this regard from those like the Dadaists – both in the derangement of language and its ways of making sense, and in terms of what experiences we humans have and pay attention to, in order to be aware of our capabilities for awareness. My own anxiety is that the issues Susan raises for me are moral ones, more than aesthetic – but then, that would surely come with the territory of ‘social action.’  



Thank you to Michele Leggott, Lisa Samuels, and Murray Edmond for making this possible, and to Pam Brown for being herself in Auckland, as she everywhere. She was one of the featured speakers at the conference. Here's to you, Pam. The ad for Ryan Higa ain't bad, either.

Poems for my children

In the aftermath of the long witnessing of my mother's Alzheimer's and death, I've written a couple more light-hearted poems for my children on the occasions of their birthdays and remembering their adoptions. Sangha adores the St. Louis Cardinals, as do I; Radhika is a terrific soccer player. So here's the one for Sangha, which appeared in Talisman a while back:

http://www.talismanmag.net/schultz.html

and here the one that just came from DUSIE for Radhika:

http://www.dusie.blogspot.ca/2014/04/tuesday-poem-53-susan-m-schultz-rules.html