Perjury of Apparent Light

 

The latest spam comes promising “augmented reality.” When they exchanged rings, they were giving them back; he was in love with a friend’s avatar and she adjourned to the bar to find another man. Real spouses are so dull he needs the Fight Club alternative, where fighting leads to sex near a temple or on a pier or in the street. My dog looks guilty when she eats her treats beside the bed. Does avatar feel shame for taking spouse away into the world whose only consequence is the loss of an off-screen marriage? 

 

Then there’s augmented authenticity, which guarantees some forms of capital. General Honore misspelled the word, so his hashtag went nowhere. We’ve reached the porous boundary between sickness and terrorism, politics and unattached rage. If you’re really good, you can feel compassion in the absence of an other, but most of us stay on this plane, feeling for each other, not for space or time or whatever holds us in our shavasana pose.

If I’m an authenticity operator, I know how to make PR real. Twitter is one compartment, and the other is my latest book, which feigns sincerity. Recent department meetings testify to an absence of wit. It might be the grenade to explode at the center of our remembered circle, now composed of rows of heads, some on and some off. If irony died after 9/11, what has perished since? Even slapstick resembles death by intentional pratfall. Otherwise known as terrorism.

I cannot watch the trial. But I see “highlights” of a man in a beautiful cream jacket and tie weeping on the stand. “May I approach?” someone inquires. A bottle of water appears at the edge of the screen and he takes it, drinks. Plastic chalice. If we watch to witness, what does it mean that we do so through screens and masks? The murderer’s mask is no different from anyone else’s; blue with white ear straps.

In the absence of mouth, give your eyes more work to do. Or notice the absence of puddle and shadows in his. Water requires depth to make the mirror of trees and ferns. His eyes’ have nothing to do with reflection. Not the testimony of a Noh actor, but the perjury of apparent light.

One man leaped onto the train tracks to save another, mid-seizure. Another found a baby on the subway platform. Who are you to take a life. The pet food purveyor sells trachea for dogs to chew on. A trachea, once blocked, can no longer testify to a body’s pain. So witnesses come, one after another, to cry in a state building, confess, report on what sticks to their eyelids each night. The trachea is transparent, like a hollow spine. Laid down alone on the table, it has nothing to add. Given a puzzle, you’d have no idea where to put it. Put it to your ear, like a straw.

Liabilities

 

“Tell me what you forget” is difficult, as it’s been misplaced, whether accidentally or by design. A poetry of trauma depends on unwanted remembering. The survivor is sometimes a suicide. It’s the coming back that’s the worst, blinds falling after an hour of light, the room’s eyelids shutting hard. The furniture migraines; you find yourself on the floor breathing carpet dust. After so many years, I still can’t write about it. Figures are as close as I can get. The time I went home to find my mother listening to ice skating on television.

I ask them what they mean by “it.” It’s a safe word, like a tiny house, abiding its own insignificance, haven against less ambiguous pronouns, those that pack some heat. An older poet gravitates toward allegory, I’ve found, preferring bog people to whatever they might mean. No, the other way around; it’s a loop that never closes. Figurative flight, moving into a monster house, lawn calling out to be mowed.

Lilith likes to go right, where the loop completes itself in a path through hibiscus and fern. A family argument ensued when he told her to turn left, without saying it required going right to get there.

Border crossers are aliens in one direction, homies in the other. There must be cosplay for this transformation. The word “transformation” fills administrative reports, strategic plans, memos, statements of goals. If our students survive their four years here, they will find themselves transformed into individuals with agency in their own lives, not to be confused with that of the institution, because it might be liable for damage or death.

Why grow up if this is where you are, plagued with debt and doubt? Get a gig job buying someone else’s groceries and you might end up gunned down in the supermarket. Violent disappointment is the American way, the desperation of not being a god in your own home, no matter how many square feet it covers. Gunmen used to leave manifestos, but now they shoot first. They used to kill themselves; now one asks a cop if he’ll spend the rest of his life in jail. The racist sheriff’s brother is Vietnamese.

The dead rapper said he asked for dictionaries for his birthday. The bigger the better. There are still not enough words for how fucked up we are. Verbs not transitive enough, nouns not vivid. Our actions have suffocated our vocabulary. “Hypocrisy,” anyone? Not adequate to the current task. “Ethics violations.” Puny. We talked about our favorite words in class; none of them knew mine. “Pusillanimous.”

He is at present just a shadow lurking in the courtyard, sending out his messages in Morse code because the language has thrown him out. We catch a whiff of his spray on tan, the blur of orange as he drives away in his armored cart. Everything has been taken from him except, sometimes, our attention. Like reverse nostalgia. “Remember when.” Tell me again what you forgot.

I was asked to review an article about my own work. When I asked if this was kosher, I was told I might have insights into that work. When I read the words, I half-remembered them, awakening into an early morning of bird song and bitter coffee, eyes checked at the door. I took my piece of square plastic so I could get them back when I left the museum that loved itself more than its paintings, whose edges were so sharp you might cut yourself on them. Last I saw that building on TV it was surrounded by a mob surging toward the Capitol. The only things safe that day were Matisse’s cut-outs.

 

 

The Sterling courtyard was awash in light. Tile roofs, statues, I can't remember much of it except the warmth on my skin. It was a good day to die, but I did not.

Trigger (Warning)

 

I'm realizing the meaning of the word "trigger" as I read through articles and tweets about a Yale freshman's suicide, Rachael Shaw-Rosenbaum. (That trigger is related to guns also seems more obvious than ever.) I went to Yale in the late 1970s and spent about half my time there severely depressed. I remember walking around New Haven my junior year wondering how or if to check myself into a hospital. I didn't get medical treatment until years later, when I was in graduate school at UVA. There I was given medication at Student Health and had good therapists in the community. So it pains me to see that Yale brought students to campus, isolated them, and then didn't provide the necessary mental health support. The twitter feeds are angry, and the young woman's friends blame Yale. It's impossible to put full blame anywhere, I know, but a strong mental health center at Yale--here--everywhere would certainly be of some help. I'm happy to read that students there are organizing to push for more support from their administration. Yale University sits on an endowment that could keep a small country running. But it perpetuates a culture of over-achievement at the expense of wisdom, of individualism at the expense of community. In that, it is a mere reflection of our culture of self- and other-destruction.

 

(off Facebook)

Forgiveness

 

When asked to describe a moment of compassion during an Upaya training, I remembered a Cambodian friend's story. He survived the genocide in the 1970s, but barely, and numerous members of his family did not. (He pointed to a blue building in Battambang and said nine of his family members had died in that "hospital." This was after we went to see the unmarked space in a field where his father had been killed.) After the Khmer Rouge were out of power, but still fighting, he was on a road in the center of the country, when someone came to him to ask for help. It turned out the help was needed by wounded Khmer Rouge soldiers. He took them to the hospital, disguised as civilians, noting only that the soldiers must have been surprised by his actions.

 

(off Facebook)

Some good news

My Meditations: December 2019-January 2021, are forthcoming from Talisman House. Many thanks to Ed Foster for his support.

The Surface World is Spring

“Tell me what you forget, and I will tell you who you are.” (Augé) They lie in wait, these forgettings. Not forgotten things, but the gerund that drives the car, avoiding all the after-storm potholes until one day it forgets to attend. Memory’s sink-hole appears, swallowing asphalt, parts of a sidewalk, a house, a small red trike. What appears to be absence (the hole) is substance. I knew it was there, but had not seen it in so long.

The surface world must be Spring. Daffodils, tulips, the carefully trimmed courtyards. She asked for a leave of absence, twitter tells me, but was denied. Spring contains our death, though it does not advertise it. Its flashy spread points more to cars to buy, the long and even road to drive them down. I borrowed a friend’s Volkswagen bug for one of my fugues. Connecticut in the wet dark.

Even the hole says there’s a future. Where do you put us, the young plants, the flowers, the monuments? I make words of my holes, as I bike around them, hoping not to teeter and fall in. Again. Words fill the holes, but they are like the rubber balls in a party castle. They never amount to a floor, only something like the wave that approaches and then goes home again.

What do you learn from your piece of charcoal? I ask my artist student. I don’t want to know that it’s only there to make your art.

Sometimes you don’t want to go there, sometimes it’s better to take a holiday from the hole, find a high point to stand on, a kind of reverse hole that holds you up high so you can see brightly colored balls circulating on the lawn. I saw that from Branford Tower, but the balls were students playing a game below me. From Diamond Head the cricket players became egrets, dancing in the park.

Yes, I tell Carla, melancholia drove my memory system. It’s the mechanism of retrieval, but out of control, leaving wide tracks on the road before a shoulder offers some it comfort. Who decided to mix the metaphors of the body with the road? It’s a system without a brain, like fungi or the octopus that, nonetheless, knows how to escape its tank. Nothing is less predictable than traffic patterns.

No filter. But still the eye hole, the mnemonic for a depression in the earth. Still the car swerves toward its mouth. An axle breaks, and so does the sky above you, lit in gray and white and blue like the flag to no country at all. I take still photos of impermanence. Buddha behind a rusty gate, abstract expressionist rust, Rusty a dog I adored.

Don’t start from wisdom, I tell another student, because no one else will find it without the object that was your muse. The guitar told him he couldn’t play that way. The surfboard said it couldn’t go straight down the wave. The screw is loose, but it knows where it fits. So what object gets you there, I ask. A cookie! We talk about how it crumbles.

6 pieces in Marsh Hawk Review, edited by Eileen Tabios

 https://marshhawkpress.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/MH-Review-Spring-2021.pdf

My work starts on page 27, but it's well worth looking at the journal entire--