mem card: "team of orphans": 30 june

 

“The green mountains are always walking; a stone woman gives birth to a child at night.” Not a birthing stone, but a woman. Beneath a blue tarp, above a blanket, lies a round stone with face etched in. Above the blue tarp, red lava consumes condo towers. We circulate through the gallery, watched by a docent in a wheelchair. When she smiles, one bottom tooth shows. She asks about the volume of the music. The woman is not stone, but sidewalks are as hard. The cold corridors of Bal Mandir: her crib stood by the door. Two men arrested for forcing girls to wear bridal gowns, have sex, molest little boys. “The only team I'd coach is a team of orphans,” Mike Matheny wrote.

                                                      --30 June 2014

Notes:

 "The green mountains": Dogen

Art by Imai Kalahele, from the Iolani Gallery, WCC, fb page. 
Images of Bal Mandir, Kathmandu, Nepal.

mem card: "a particular pronoun": 27 june

You should study this in detail. He testified that the homeless sleep perpendicular to the street, rather than parallel. The homeless are a particular pronoun. Leaving a restaurant I saw a fresh line of tents on the sidewalk; a couple my age walked toward me from theirs. I have my grandfather's Hamlet, who was taken off a Pittsburgh street by nuns. He was a great salesman, my mother said. A poet's son was killed at Leavenworth. To leaven is to make rise. The homeless must get off our sidewalks, leave our parks, keep their shit to themselves. In an interview, the poet said, I like all my children, even the squat and ugly ones.

                                                                  --27 June 2014

Notes:

"You should study": Dogen

"I like all": Howard Nemerov

Photograph of Jeremy Nemerov (1968-2014), from an article by Bill McLellan 

Testimony in opposition to Bills 42, 43, 44

I shamelessly borrow from H. Doug Matsuoka's more eloquent post to frame my own contribution:

[This is my testimony to the Honolulu City Council which will hear Bills 42, 43, and 44 on Thursday, June 26, at 8:45 am, then immediately again by the Zoning Committee at 9 am. Bills 42 and 44 propose to make it illegal to sit or lie on the sidewalk (in Waikiki for Bill 42, extending to Downtown in Bill 44), and Bill 43 makes it illegal to urinate or defecate in public even if there are no restrooms available. These criminalize the acts of living, innocent behavior, of the homeless without addressing any remedy for them. The Council refuses to address the causes of homelessness on Oahu, where the median selling price of a used house is $682,000.

Links to the bills and other cited material are at the end. Doug]

Testimony in opposition to Bills 42, 43, 44

Aloha Chair Martin, Vice Chair Anderson, and Council Members,

I write to oppose the passage of Bills 42, 43, 44, which would criminalize sitting or sleeping on the sidewalks of Waikiki and perhaps also the rest of the island, as well as forbidding urination or defecation in places that often lack restroom facilities.

I live in Temple Valley, Ahuimanu, and work in Honolulu; I take frequent bike rides and ferry my kids to soccer and music on the weekends, so I see a lot of the island. We have regular visitors who stay in Waikiki or right near Kaimana Beach. Since the financial crash of 2007 the problem of homelessness has become more and more visible. I'm sure you're trying to address the problem, insofar as the problem is frames as one of seeing (and smelling) something unsightly. But the problem runs much deeper than my or anyone's line of sight. For every homeless person there is a lost job or a mental health problem or a drug problem. To put it even more succinctly: every person who lives on the street has a story. We owe it to them to respect their stories.

What the council would do, were it to approve these bills, is to privatize blame while socializing the notion that the rest of us should be able to spend our days unaware of others' suffering. It would legislate the notion that not having a place to live (in such an economy as ours!) is the fault of the person who does not have it. And it would endorse the idea that the rich, who will be moving into the fleets of fancy highrises in Kakaako—and who are moving into my area of the island, too—deserve better than to notice people who couldn't afford 1 square foot of their condo or house.

Let's stop obsessing on how bad homelessness LOOKS and pay more attention to the underlying issues. I know there are no easy fixes, especially since the economy is more global than local. But economy aside, affordable housing can be legislated, can it not? Compassion, I might add, is free.

Yours truly,

Susan M. Schultz

47-728 Hui Kelu Street #9

Kane`ohe, HI 96744

 

[more from Doug]

Bill 42 criminalizing sitting and lying down on Waikiki sidewalks:
http://www4.honolulu.gov/docushare/dsweb/Get/Document-150454/dspage03258996542835187127.pdf

Bill 43 criminalizing urinating and defecating downtown:
http://www4.honolulu.gov/docushare/dsweb/Get/Document-150455/dspage02291732910336576078.pdf

Bill 44 extending Bill 42 provisions to include downtown and increasing punishment to $1,000 and 30 days in jail:
http://www4.honolulu.gov/docushare/dsweb/Get/Document-150617/DOC002%20(16).PDF

Email testimony to Honolulu City Council (Use subject line to tell them you oppose Bills 42, 43, and 44):
http://www1.honolulu.gov/council/emailph.htm

Sign up to testify:
http://www1.honolulu.gov/council/testify.htm

Honolulu Council Calendar with links to agendas:
http://www4.honolulu.gov/docushare/dsweb/Get/Document-146114/2014%20Council%20Calenar.htm

mem card: "swallowed" : 25 june

The whole sky and whole earth are swallowed. I don't want to be swallowed, but I want my absence known. When he came to shake hands, we pulled back, put lines between us and his eyes. I'd feel swallowed; what stoppered me but a cork. Her family'd come from Cork. Looked in the phone book, saw her name multiply; every woman on the street wore her narrow face. Photos of mixed families do not include ours. Oh, she's the one with the haole parents, someone says. He's only afraid of white people, one girl tells another about her baby brother. I'm so glad I'm not, she adds, her audience the white girl who asked. She hesitated, but kissed my cheek. The crime is in the mouth, its particular wound to skin. I hear both of you in her.

                                                                      --25 June 2014

Note:
"The whole sky": Dogen

mem card: "ecstasy": 24 june

There is a world of sentient beings in fire. He approaches from the basketball courts, across the parking lot, calls out to us. What are your names, he asks, his right hand stuck out. Just the first, I won't remember the last. His shirt as open as his eyes. We shake his hand, offer up our names. I turn to see him kneeling in the parking lot behind me, forehead to the asphalt, singing about Jesus. Ecstasy, Glenn suggests, or meth. Bipolar, says Bryant. Assign them a name, his wide-open eyes. We see every day what we fail to notice: cloud, sky, red gas can. Title the poem so it can be hand-held, like a dog's rubber toy or a video cam. The dog eats dirt, pees on the deck. We forgive him because he's old.

                                                               --24 June 2014

Note:
"There is a world": Dogen

mem card: "particular of water": 22 june

When water solidifies, it is harder than a diamond. The particular of water is less water. Particulate anecdote. There's a blue guitar on top of the homeless man's burrow. I saw it slung over his shoulder, thought it a fishing spear. Those who don't know they're being watched, or those who watch themselves as if removed from others' eyes. She puked in a Colorado Rockies' cap at the top of Mount Evans. My mother said the novel smelled bad. Served him water in a jelly glass, the kind I always hated. The rim denoted lid: eye in the tunnel half-open, hyphenated.

                                                                           --22 June 2014

mem card: "thusness": 20 june

Water is only the true thusness of water. It's more than flowing, but flowing is more than itself. Why are all abstract paintings alike, he asks. My daughter needed to take the portrait of a stranger. When I download her photos, I see a college student seated at a bench, eyes at her level. Do not take pictures of the homeless. Better to witness their tents, their blankets, their coffee cups, their dogs. The Stranger is newly translated. How do you navigate “maman”? The same sun in French is not a son. The same sound is not sound, but the thusness of sound. Read this sonnet like a lawyer in love; the speaker makes an argument, after all. They used to rhyme, love and prove. Now we prove our love without sound's symmetries. Under that tree, or that one, I thee wed. You in your loaner ring, and I in mine.

 

                                                                     --20 June 2014

Note:

"Water is only": Dogen