Mirror Stage

 

15 March 2022

So much is about watching suffering you can’t touch. Where’s the virtual hand for touching the virtual head of a woman on a stretcher? Is prayer an artificial hand? Do I lift my mug of war coffee with a prayer, not a fist? We have to say our mantras, John High writes, but I don’t know which to say.

We divide ourselves into the watchers and the can’t-be-watchers. I feel so helpless, I keep the television off. It’s hard to stop watching, isn’t it? It’s an addiction either to rubber-necking on an international scale or to witnessing pain. Probably it’s both. Our neighbor, whom I’ve not met, had a son who died, beer can in hand. The memorial down Highway 11 is for a man killed by the neighbor when he crossed the two yellow lines in his fancy red car. He bought a replacement, color black. Still drives to work down the same highway. It’s the only one.

Dear Y, we both drink morning coffee, take morning walks. We both want to be safe. I don’t want a manicure, but you do; I’d prefer a massage. You take pictures out your window in the morning, as do I. If my window could see your window, we might catch each other’s eyes. They’re good eyes. But twitter is all the eye we have now. I find your noun verb issues incredibly moving.

Your leader talks to us through a screen, always in his drab green shirt, sometimes a drab green jacket over the drab green shirt. He’s a politician, someone says; don’t worship him. He has a history. But we’re now out of history in history, living as the present moment what turns to retrospective prose in an instant. I’m watching MIRROR, a film in stream of consciousness. Not my stream, not yours. Other people are method; we’re actors.

How the vatic happens. Always in response to: chaos, confusion, blur of trees beside Highway 11. I will pronounce words instead of manipulating them. All rhetoric is manipulation, she writes, but what happened to persuasion? If I’m persuaded to kill in order to stop killing, have I been manipulated?

No fly zone. Pidgin kine. No can. Peace through war. The trains still run (do trains run?), filled with women and children, everyone crying. A journalist is killed, but Russia says he was not a journalist. A Ukrainian calls this genocide, but even after we look the word up in a dictionary, we can’t assign it to circumstance. Having become a word, it’s only abstract. Abstract genocide is an empty mirror.

My friend bought a tall mirror at a garage sale for next to nothing. The wood frame came later, more expensively. Why are you so sad, the mysterious man asks the mysterious woman in a field, punctuated by a bush that determines each walker’s map. The man up the street names his dogs after anti-depressants. There have been many dogs. Dogs bark, I take my meds, the world burns.

“May all those who grieve be released of their sorrow.” Roshi Joan Halifax

#WarCoffee

14 March 2022

Watched Winter on Fire last night. History has an inside, like the cave of the heart, or spleen. “They are 

not human beings,” human beings kept saying about other human beings. Broken things: buildings, 

noses, eyes, the voices of witnesses. History broken, like a skull. Fast forward (is that it?) A wounded 

soldier holds up his phone in bed and Zelensky peers at it. Gives the man a medal.

Bird song, until the television comes on to sirens, explosions. Not better to be there, but better to feel a part of it, to have a hand to lend, to be a witness with benefits (as it were). The screen is a part in information’s skull. You can be arrested in Russia for trading information.

You don’t fuck with Ukrainians. Bodies against tanks. Bodies against trucks. Bodies against Darth Vaders with steel wands, their magic the fracturing of bodies. They want to be more like us. Decadent, corrupt, possessed of the courage not to wear a cloth mask.

Yesterday, Lilith escaped again. Across the road, inside dense rain forest foliage, I heard pheasants being flushed this way, then that. Punctuated by barks. She came toward me; when I called, she re-entered the forest. She came back when she got thirsty.

There’s drama without plot. An explosion kind of ends development, gets too quickly to denouement, kills the syllogism. Death is not a plot, nor is it an endpoint. The street-fighting continues, a young man telling his mother on the phone that he loves her (because he’s so prompted), as a body lies 10 feet away.

Cris puts his art up again. Bad feeling about art is not the same as bad faith in art. We cannot help Ukraine, nor can we take advantage by our witnessing. We are apart from. I want to take your portrait means I am relieving you of something about yourself, whatever trace of you there is in your image. That’s why some people say no to be photographed; they might lose themselves to spectators, as if they were actors, not persons.

How do I spend my creative time, a friend asks. Very poorly. What is to be made against the vision of so much unmaking? I don’t see babushkas screaming at Russian soldiers any more, just stretchers emerging from a hospital. The journalist says his colleague was shot and left behind. He says that from his cot.

There’s a Peace Park near here, devoted to providing a safe space for aliens to land. The once-naked woman is now covered with a concrete toga. Bryant suspects that concrete has about five more years in it. Evelyn finds a buried stop sign; a buried Raelian symbol; part of a buried bird. Blue peacocks stand guard on the patch of ground. It’s been mowed, but nothing else is well kept, except perhaps the vines around the statue’s head and hand.

I’ve started reading The Memory Police again, though I hardly ever re-read. It’s about forgetting the plot, the objects that populate it. It’s about erasure. If we are mandated to forget, we also forget to care for. A stray bird means nothing. The narrator’s mother has kept some forgotten objects, like perfume, in her furniture. After their death, they are magical in resurrection. The ordinary is what becomes sacred after its objects are forgotten. A manicure in war-time is act of resistance. Let’s drink more war coffee across our twitter feeds.

Note: The Memory Police is a novel by Yoko Ogawa.

Tweeting woman

 

11 March 2022

Erased yesterday’s entry and changed the date. A Ukrainian woman on twitter can't find a manicure. “Do you not know people are dying?” is one man's response. Does he not know the value of nails neatly trimmed, of the clothes we work in and those we sleep in? (Sometimes they’re the same.) Each nail marks a boundary between air and skin, a mobile defense system to keep us in our chairs. She hasn’t left her home, sends photos of coffee cups, steaming.

I join her for coffee, laughing at her previously-annoying neighbors, Snoring Man and Sneezing Man. I used to live next to Laughing Man.

I am copying her words, because that is how I receive this war. I drink coffee, too, so we have that in common. Cris pulls back his project based on war images, photographs he transforms to brazen metallic near abstractions. He's reached the boundary of art and horror, wonders which side to stand on. Art is Poland, war Ukraine. You can eat in Poland, but you feel guilty about it. Trains are passing through the night, some returning to Ukraine. There are people on them.

Atrocity as cliché. Russian soldiers talk to their wives. One is bringing back a large TV, another a kitchen appliance his wife requested. Another says they shot two civilians who saw them. There’s less bluster in opposing war, sticking a hole in your gas tank and walking away. Four soldiers confront an elderly couple. She shoos them away like stray geese.

Dear Y: It’s a cool, crisp morning in Volcano, Hawai`i. I’m in a rain forest, listening to birds, tracing the course of shadows through the large leaves and the hapu`u fronds. My dog Lilith got loose yesterday and ran through the forest chasing pheasants. When I came around a corner and saw her at the end of the loop, I called her name. She turned, rain the other way with an absolute joy I can’t deny her. When she returned, it was for water. This story escapes allegory; it’s so much more simple than that. Imagine everyone else who feels this feeling: the grief, the anger, the frustration. The dog in my former student’s film was beautiful in this way, walking an old man toward his death, tail up, nose out for the ghost of the old man’s wife under the tree outside.

Who’s to say who or what leads us out of such helplessness. The tedious horror of maternity hospitals and apartment blocks destroyed. The antic humor of a tractor pulling a stolen tank. Helen was the original meme, and she also emerged from war. One of my students lost her father, a veteran of a US war, to suicide; another’s father merely threatened suicide; and the father of a third died of a heart attack in Ewa.

Our suffering over your suffering hardly matters. My writing to your writing is trivial. Cris’s art from the bombed out city square is one poet’s click-bait. Our despair kills only us. The man’s grief over his wife’s miscarriage isn't sentiment; it’s analogue. Witness doesn’t abide scale. I’m writing words as if to protect you from bullets and bombs. A comedian speaks for us all.

From my morning walk:

 

St. Vlad of Kyiv

Sitting at the start of the trail at Kipukapuaulu, waiting for my morning glory eradication group, I talked to a woman with white hair and glasses with clear frames. She was wearing a skirt, but had changed into walking shoes, and was about to go up the trail. She told me that Putin's father was an atheist, but his mother was convinced that he would be a great leader, and that his Rome would be Kyiv. When I asked what her source was, she laughed, then said she got an email each month with the words of Count St. Germain; he was explaining the world to us. She had earbuds in, and a cord around her neck and torso. I suggested she take them out to hear the birds. She said she heard them, but there was someone who needed her and she needed to be in touch. Her brother, dying of cancer in Texas. Another brother (or was it the same?) had answered his phone in Denver by saying he did not work for doctors, lawyers, or ? because they never paid. So, for your further edification and mine:

newworldencyclopedia.org

 

And some of what the Count says about Putin: https://eraoflight.com/2022/03/08/versions-of-vladimir-putin/?fbclid=IwAR0-qFKZjGxjbsVG7FLvOSRQvVdqPFkzdJlBz_oXgvRhLG7nJTaGZQ6-cj4

War diary

8 March 2022

A woman on twitter invites you to share “war coffee” with her in Kyiv. She’s abandoned make-up, but still drinks coffee each morning, sharing occasional selfies, without the selfie smile. The soccer player who died by suicide smiled for hers up to the end, for which her parents said there was no warning. It’s our obligatory happiness. Her mother wears a sweatshirt that smells of her daughter. Smell is presence, not pretense.

I took pictures of a black & white photo of my father. When I turned the photo around and put it at the window, I could still see him, along with the name of the studio in Alexandria, Virginia. There’s no sentiment to the image; it was a head shot for work, I suspect. Mid to late 1960s? He’s not smiling, and he’s wearing a suit and tie. But as I carry him from window to tree and from tree to blue bowl and from bowl to the orange-speckled chair on the porch, I talk to him about war. On the Washington Mall, a plane flew over, low, and he imagined how it would feel were the plane shooting at us.

I placed him on the reflective silver ball in the crook of a hapu`u fern, and pushed the shutter. His image appears to melt into ferns, taffied by memory.

When I took a photo of his photo, showing just one eye and the edge of his mouth, he looked like Eisenhower.

President Zelensky speaks to his phone in a square full of sand bags. He talks softly, so as not to alert his enemies. It’s the beginning of Spring in Kyiv, and he’s outdoors in his drab green shirt and jacket. He repeats words. This is how we know he’s rhetorically brilliant. And then he winks.

Is that a selfie? Or a war-time speech to one’s own device, held out for the benefit of Instagram, Facebook, our corporate warlords (a different war)? A grandmother falls by the train tracks and two soldiers pick her up.

We each have a war diary; it’s the new democracy of affect. A friend vomited in her sleep, she’s so troubled by her television. Another friend wants to volunteer with Sean Penn, doesn’t know that Penn left his film behind. To watch is to act, isn’t it? Saner to stop watching.

The man in gray pony tale said he laughs at tourists because they wear watches, and consult them frequently. My empty wrist assures him I’m not a tourist, to say nothing of my dog. Says vaccinations should be the individual’s choice, and besides don’t people still get covid?

My father’s on the coffee table now, staring up awkwardly in his suit and tie. I walk past him many times a day. My photo project’s done, and he was well received. May his memory be a blessing.

How to Talk about Bad Stuff

 

4 March 2022

He sits at the end of a very long and narrow table. Men in suits sit at the other end, but we can’t see them pre-pan. Tibetan flags hang in a vacant but well-tended lot, wet, on strings; blue and yellow masks look out from ohia trees. One is wrapped in wire, its face a cipher. Another has a long ceramic chin, bent like a banana. A horse strides across one flag, through which I see light blur. From close-up, language turns to wires that hang between trees.

He wraps his girlfriend in newspaper after a shower. On her belly the headline about a man who killed his three year old and then himself. It’s not wet enough not to be legible. It’s not legible enough to grieve.

Lilith goes chin to chin with a pink flamingo beside a small tree. Label in front of flamingo reads “lime.”

The oligarch’s 600 million dollar yacht was not taken, but it’s not allowed to leave the harbor of Hamburg. Plus it has maintenance issues. Some sanctions are accidents.

I have a hard time reading the computer’s small print. I’m told I have a “good eye.”

Is that a civil defense test in Volcano or an air raid siren in Kyiv? Is the television on or off?

The affect of her reading perhaps out-weighs its content, which is not to say that the content isn’t embedded in our time, like a reporter in a tank in Iraq, or the man who tweets out each morning that he’s alive in the Ukraine. This is not a criticism: I can feel her words’ import, always in conjunction with the time. The screen on my DSLR reads “cleaning contacts” and shivers, at least when the digital screen works. Otherwise, look through the narrow tunnel of the view finder to compose what has already been composed. To compose in this case is perhaps to frame, and to frame is to turn time into space. He took photos that made the earth stop, sun moving across it.

Each camera has its own eye. I compose according to its eye, as much as my own. Bryant has cleared one camera’s eye; no more black blobs on blue sky. If you look at the sky past the yellow diamond “No exit” sign, you see Volcano as a Ukrainian flag.

Lens and eye rhyme. Layers of a mechanism points and shoots and comes back a bit altered each time. My father’s photograph on a steel ball set in the crook of a hapu`u fern blurs like taffy. Too easy to say it symbolizes time’s passage, or forgetting, or remembering. They’re all of the same piece. I took the prayer flags so I could bring them home, stare at them on a screen. Many of the prayers had dissolved, but I can’t say them anyway.

How to talk to your kids about Ukraine. How to talk to your kids about child sexual abuse. How to talk to your kids about gender identity. How to talk to your kids about being canceled. How to talk to your kids about bullying, and the toll it takes on their mental health. How to talk to your daughter about the soccer player who killed herself. She’s been on a suicide watch (not her own), so she knows.

“I hope I was not too forward.”

Open Door Policy

 

2 March 2022

--We will keep the door open, says the diplomat.

--We will keep the door open, says the president.

--We will keep the door open, says the tyrant.

--We will keep the door open, says the border guard.

--We will keep the door open, says the chef.

Babushka holds anti-nuclear signs, almost as tall as she is, in her dark coat and cap. One darth vader stands at each of her elbows; they lean over, their helmets black. Each vader takes one of her elbows. She does not drop her signs. The camera lens is left behind.

He says he cannot post the video. It’s too horrible. So he describes it.

Old woman toe to toe with Russian soldier. She talks to him about sunflowers, but she does not put one inside the muzzle of his gun.

Column of Russian tanks meets column of unarmed Ukrainians. Traffic jam as resistance.

Bright lemons hang in front of a blue house. Bright yellow strip on telephone pole beneath blue sky. Blue wooden support beam meets yellow at the site of a torn spider web. (That photograph lost to digital hash.)

She sees balance in her being on 1) a Russian to-kill list, and 2) Ukrainian top 10 Bachelorette.

“Fuck you, Russian ship.”

What have I done to stop the war today? Eaten my cereal. Taken my walk. Sat down under ohia bird canopy to type. Years ago, I got a call at 3 a.m. to tell me that my mother had fallen down.

Her elbow was broken, but her bones were too fragile to set.

--We will keep the door open.

What says the door?