14 December 2023

 

Is it form or format, door or door mat, car or automat? You can’t open a door mat, or drive an automat, but you can put your sonnet inside an appropriate format. Sonnet is to format as door is to door mat, the thing itself beside the plan of it. Scrape your boots before you enter the National Park to prevent the spread of pests; Russian boots placed in the shape of a star; children’s shoes at Auschwitz. It always comes back to shoes, not as evil doers but as boundary breakers, slipped over murderous ankles. That was what made me think the wax woman was my mother; not just her 1960s skirt and cream-colored blouse, but her thin ankles. Ankles aren't usually used to identify us, but hers broke the wall of (her) death and (the museum’s) work of art. When realist sculpture proves more real than life, it brings the dead back to sit quietly near a guard, surprised to hear me say he was guarding my mother. If I stared into her eyes, would she or I be Marina Abramovic? Would one or the other of us elicit a tear in the other?

To be a stranger’s witness, using you as hers across a museum table. Please refrain from cynicism, I say to a fellow academic; allow that the word “wisdom” carries the merit of impermanence, along with an aspiration to sculpture-hood. When asked to draw a clock, I got the circle and the numbers down, but couldn’t find 11:10 on my first three tries. The digital world has ruined me for this kind of arithmetic, that of measuring time in the last century. That it was not 11:10 in any case didn’t confuse me so much as the two hands, one shorter than the other, lost in magic marker on a white board.

Don’t play everything; just let some things go by. Monk dances like he plays piano, a staccato grace to his feet across the board. His music is not staged, like play or a conspiracy theory, but emerges from planks like commandments. You can tell musicians what to do, because they will not do it exactly. But there is fascism in my fascia.

One refers to history, the other to emotion. Untethered, even as they are made. Written either by the victors or the victims; both narratives compelling, and each could be a novel of manners, not in the sense of politeness but of grammar well caged. The question of his identifications came up in the comment stream, after a piece of his graphic memoir appeared on Facebook. He felt more for the girl his daughter's age from Gaza than he did for young men who might have been himself. To whom do we owe our identifications, our empathy? Its grammar is hard to diagram.

I flee so many arguments with which I agree. Word-bound, I quarrel with the sutta’s translation, the tone of logic, appeals to history that is another's history bombed. A leaflet about flooding Hamas's tunnels was couched in the language of God to Noah (or am I misremembering?). Watch the side of the sentence you fall into, subject or direct object, agent or acted upon. Combine one part memoir to two parts history to another logic, stir up controversy. Our sentences dislodged, we look to an underpass as comfort. On the questionnaire I noted that I have housing and food, that I’m not depressed, and that I don’t need the assistance of strangers. When asked for my quality of life, I filled in the circle 8. 

 

Note: language taken from Thelonious Monk's 25 tips for musicians, 1960. 

13 December 2023

The hatred of those who harbor such feelings as, “He reviled me, assaulted me, vanquished me and robbed me,” is never appeased. Fuss with the word “harbor,” which means “to protect.” Fuss again with the word “never.” Words are tassels, Carla writes; though I don’t understand her analogy, I move toward it, as a dog to her treat. “Never” is stasis, like one interpretation of “wisdom”: unable to be altered, permanent. If impermanence is one form of wisdom, then wisdom must itself be fleeting. It shifts between sentences, slurred sounds rolling a different putty shape. I can imagine an icicle hanging from a palm frond because I remember icicles. I remember, despite my inability to see the past as a film; it’s too static for that, like a filmstrip that you can stop for a while to assimilate its square knowledge. The blocks of stone are translucent, as if knowledge were light that traveled through substance and toward a common area, covered in slate. I'm not there as I write this, but somewhere on the internet, where photos lead me back like guide dogs. A place (New Haven, say) can change emotional shape over time, and according to the weather, inward and out. There’s no ordinary evening there, just iterations. Repetition is not ordinary, or it wouldn’t be so remarkable. Last time I walked there, it looked the same, just happier.

Bryant hangs our red sheets on the line in front of a line of rain and fronds, in air and seated on the cement ground. The red is wrinkled. Red palms denote murder, war crime, disaster, but these are sheets that have been loved on (much as I dislike that young man’s metaphor!). I can use anything, sheets or wisdom, carry them away from context like blocks of stone that move in the light, like the surf that wrinkles, in the way one could surf the sheets. Red are the streets of Gaza, and to place them here feels blasphemous, as our topographies are rendered sacred by murder. Tunnels have been flooded with sea water, which leaches into the ground water. Snipers aim at poets and journalists, one way to end a narrative line.

I cannot write about Gaza; I cannot appropriate Gaza. What is your wisdom on this question?

The palm fronds are weighed down with water, like tassels slung from a graduate’s mortarboard.

What is the grammar of conflict? Is it internal, like a disagreement of number, or is it what grammar is forced to confront, having no army except in number? If I alter the structure of my sentences, can I bend conflict to reason? It’s the emotional back beat, the ungrammatical drum, that pulls the sentences into tunnels now flooded with words. Ideology is fixed affect.

The grammar of Noah Fischer's feeling bends toward identification not with himself as a young man, but toward his daughter, who might be trapped underneath the stones of Gaza. Those stones are me, he writes. I think he means in a sense both of the place and of its violence. I throw the stone that identifies me, at you whose stone looks the same but cannot be, because words. Between us, a wall that has nothing to do with mending.

Note: quotation from Dhammapada: Wisdom of the Buddha, translated by Kaviratna.

Some mental health charities in Palestine/Israel

 

ntdosoSrpel6403a60i26g5llggu37fc70hi1fu01a475cafcg49 I I find these charities on-line that support mental health efforts in Gaza (if such a thing is possible):

 

https://www.gazamentalhealth.org/

https://www.emro.who.int/.../priority.../mental-health.html

https://www.savethechildren.org/.../where.../west-bank-gaza

https://www.pcrf.net/gaza-pediatric-mental-health-initiative

I really can't vouch for each of them, or recommend which is doing the best work, but surely each is trying to offer valuable services.

 

WHO also has this article about mental health issues in Israel, post 10/7: https://www.who.int/.../23-10-2023-shock-grief-and-the...

12 December 2023

Tiny Houses

 

 “Seduce him and then shed on his eyelids,” comes up as I open the Iliad, something about sleep, though I prefer the shed to be noun, stick edifice constructed on an eye’s fleshy platform. What comes between seeing and vision, like blinds between virtue and virtue signaling. Flat floor, semi-translucent, eyes at half staff behind a veined wall, wondering why flags are sulking halfway up their masts. Even the wind stops for them, leaving cloth heaps hugging metal posts. I shed skin like memory, find it lying like dust on the carpet. Dust bunny snapshots, returned to sender via phone, where sender is also the sent, scent of plum blossoms alerting us to a friend’s absence, except that we see a photograph, smell nothing. Reconstruction projects depend on erasures, rubble couples standing on concrete piers in Gaza City, where civil order promises to collapse, as if promise could be used as a negative. I promise you my worst, but warn you of my kindness. The gall to offer such a thing, wanting only kindness in return. The echo chamber of my bursitis hips contains a world’s theater; what I cannot see in Gaza is almost contained in me, though I can afford care. The half-truth of metaphor. Hear the dead poets recite their last wishes, for they know they are last. Hold that against the prize-winning poem that panders to an audience of others. There’s a difference.

A boy, his face bleeding, covered in concrete dust, pleads with the camera. There are no sunflowers in the background, or canyons striated orange and white. This is a selfie without others, without even the assumption of audience. The new prayer is spoken to a digital device. It places us as micro-gods, but we having nothing to wield but words, and more words, none of them arriving in his hearing space. They don't worry about death, but about not dying quickly enough. The carnations on my lanai turn yellow again, but droop in displeasure at my inattention.

In the meantime, crops of kittens trot out with their names, some kept, others changed. A nose patch the shape of Idaho, tortoise shell eyelids, one cat asleep on the other, choreography of new life in an enclosed space. My son’s hand brushes the backs of both cats. He’s pinned to the couch by such purring, eyelids closed, paws outstretched to reach a pillow, or his arm. It’s not abstraction that’s wise; it’s a species of love more than of knowing. The greatest virtue is a vacation from the rest of it, if vacation can be described as right view, the sea spread out in front, telegraphing its moods as currents, bathing the sun in its folds. A girl in Gaza holds her cat close for a photographer's glass lens.

 

Note: the opening quotation from Stanley Lombardo's translation.

11 December 2023

Attention is flesh, wisdom skeleton.

Outside the physical therapist’s door, a skeleton is turned to the wall. What might be a face leans, hiding a massive overbite.

A man and his daughter were just in Samoa, travel next week to Vegas. He’s learning to walk with a prosthesis on one leg, from knee to metal foot tucked neatly into a running shoe.

I with my crutches challenge an older woman with a walker to a race down the tiled floor.

Empty plastic boxes hang on a wall. Above them, a sign indicates Health and Wellness Resources. Underneath, a faux modernist couch on which couples sit, one or another favoring arm or leg. Our pain signs itself, like the wide receiver trash talking in ASL after scoring a touchdown.

Andre 3000 says he plays the flute, but is not a flautist. He’s not an artist, but a respondent. A photographer plays the camera in this way.

Witness is a form of attention that asks more of us than insight. Out sight is not out of sight or mind, but a vision of what sits right in front of you. Vision as in the giant letter E, not William Blake rolling on cobblestones chanting mantras. The photographer was killed by a sniper, as was an 8 year old boy playing soccer in the rubble.

To hear is to see. In the new film about Auschwitz, you see children playing in a fenced yard. What you hear are screams and machines of death unimagined by them but not their parents. A lawn mimics a rural field; the death camp cannot mimic anything. It is relentless industry. If I wanted to write about birds, I would have to get away from bombs, the Palestinian poet wrote. If I wanted to show the death camp, I would make it my sound track. The jumpers on 9/11 looked free until they hit a roof, thud. When the movie turns violent, I hide my face behind a pillow, but I can still hear. Eye witness ducks what ear witness cannot.

Blind Murphy dog brought a dead rat inside the house. “We had no idea,” they all said. The images came to them on railroad tracks, but all they knew was the clattering. A train is a neutral object; what it carries is only theoretical in cases where the non-witness requires abstraction to evade the rest.

So much depends on inattention. Our politics, for example. Inattention is difficult, so we invented distraction, speed. No one actually watches the Indy 500; it’s too fast. They wait for the pile-ups to see where the cars line-up. We pay attention to accident.

I mean to write about witness, but I pursue evasion instead. Too much telling results in a showroom with no cars in it. If we did have a car to show you, it might be red with a black roof. The electric cars would be as quiet as a budget hotel without wi-fi. The sign says they’re a “Concept Hotel.”

The engines of industry resume; it’s our property that’s so intensely managed. A neighbor put up a sign that reads, “Scoop your poop!” It sits beneath a tree adorned with ornaments, in a field of candy canes. They were 99 cents each. The tags tell us so.

8 December 2023

 

There are entire wars I cannot bear to witness.

From the ledge, I attend to what falls in front of me. He pushed himself as he fell backwards, half-remembering there was sand past the rocks.

From the living room I witness a broken city, broken people, bodies borne down rubble streets.

From there I see light cast itself on tile, my black and white cat half-purple in the morning sun, grooming his black and his white fur.

From my chair, I have seen the so-called news come and go, around and back. When you come back to forward, let your arms fall slowly to the sides. If you go into a city with your arms, you may come out wanting to wash your trigger finger with acid.

From my perch, I hear weed whackers and mowers and carts and pidgin-inflected voices cut into strips beside the bird songs.

She said she had not trimmed the tree, because it had already been cut.

“Why didn’t you just say so?” refers not to periodic sentences but to single words. My every conversation a translation of over 40 years of language use.

There is the bumbling toward, not something to say but how to avoid saying it, yearning for spots of time that frolic in the meadows of a distant England, when memory seemed more benevolent.

I entered the room where I studied teaching English as a foreign language. It was that in South London. (I never called “oven” a “cookah.”) Everyone from their desk in a circle stared at me, late from the train. I was my children’s age. “He was very insecure,” one instructor said the of man who’d been shot; he knew a man who worked for him. We went to the caf to talk about guns in America, underneath signs addressed to “our custies.” A barge on the Thames blared "Imagine." (Was that before or after?)

From my chair I cannot see pure memory, pure light, pure poetry.

Machine drone, rattle of chains, pieces of a voice, bird chittering, back to droning. Drone has graduated from dull sound to hoverer, to photographer or to Kiki’s Bomb Delivery Service. One sheep’s baby was stillborn (or is it still born?), the other had twins. The sheep with twins gave one to her grieving companion.

7 December 2023

I cannot say who I am, or perhaps I refuse to say I am or am not my-self, suspecting that it can’t matter or has little to do with matter. Material isn’t matter, though it might. The shelling of Gaza matters, is matter’s destruction. We live in concrete houses; they destroy our concrete images. Be concrete, my teacher told me. Do not bomb me or otherwise crack my shell. There’s a CV inside, like a treasure chest to long lost gold. Someone put the map inside, so you’ll have to wait until I “pass” to read it. To pass is to die, with a helping of reincarnation, because we pass on. Somewhere. Anywhere airfares are cheap. No bird can compete with the almighty weed whacker. What sounds like laundry is a bread machine, the mechanical knead. To pass is not to be killed. 100 men on a beach. The caption says they were killed, but they are still alive in the photograph, shirtless, cloths wound around their eyes, kneeling. Please let me evade the idea of what came next, if it did, because photographs lie. We’re told that all the time, then use ours as proof something happened. I was there, and so was the shadow of my dog’s ear on her back. She sat near the cat, whose shadow spread like a puddle in from the screen door. Witness is a form of attention that asks more of us than insight. The seeing in, like a peeping tom on death’s stage. Or the cactus that astonishes us by surviving our neglect. Peer around the spines like pages in a book, thrust into the shelf to be blind to hands that reach out to touch its back. “I knew she was Irish!” I said this morning, as I stretched head down, listening for the NGO’s talking head. Dark humor breeding empathy in a dark time. The way she massaged her vowels, rage working its way through lilt and diphthong, what she said about dying in Gaza. These images, they promise, will be disturbing, though they’re placed immediately on the scales of emotional justice. How could they say this but not that, that but not another this. Vista of this. In her latest post, she commands us to be kind to another person. I like kindness, but not ordained. When I asked for a haiku, she said she didn’t like to be told to do anything. The young man whose father was in the military refused to write a sonnet, for the rules. Rules are rules, I gather, whether to march or to make rhyme. The rules for a love poem oblige us to love in a certain way, and at a certain pace. You walk across a field, in taut formation, while I watch from the bleachers. Rehearsal is form exhausted by its meter. Do not ask me to draw a quarter now, when we no longer use change. You must change your life. Look at that beautiful flower, my demented mother said, again and again. Her order made it so, but it wasn’t the flower I attended to.