Meditation 2
12/28/19
“This in-between condition,” Norman writes at the end of his poem. So that’s where we end this apprenticeship of time? Betwixt. Bewitched by memories that masquerade inside anxiety; a late night awakening to worry over an envelope. First objects blur, and then the persons you knew as clear cut silhouettes in your dorm room or grad school studio. The bits of conversation braid and then fray, winding like damaged DNA in some wacky helix like wisteria on a frame in Japan where the beer is cold as a nearby stream. You try to stop the stream of consciousness but all you get is the syncopation of rain on tin or brown wood, murmur of Chinese characters on a sidewalk, writ in water by old men. Water is another kind of sound, the viola’s evaporation in the living room with its plywood floors a marker of days that have fallen off the calendar, as if it were the flat earth and an army prevented us from getting close to the edge. I can’t see the day fall, but I know it’s happening from my safe room in the rain forest, where there’s storage space for memories only, and they keep spilling like hot potato water on my student’s foot, a painful red in her Birkenstocks. Birkenstocks are for white people, my daughter surmises, but she finds them fascinating nonetheless. I’m reading about a typist who’s lost her voice, and then lost the other voice box that dings at the end of each line, and then her agency (not Temp). The art of losing in this scheme of things involves a broken seam between object and feeling. Objects drop their feelings, even for those who first assigned them. Don’t pick up that handkerchief, or you might salvage salt from someone’s tears, without remembering when or why they wept. The night Baghdad was bombed. The night Trump was “elected.” Those are not objects, but they leave traces. He took a picture of a large round rock, laced with deep lines and green splotches. It seemed a talisman of something. Like the blazing of a trail you cannot find later on. To dissolve a bad memory (so-called), apply alcohol to the relevant synapses, the ones that over-fire at your favorite time of night. Aviations work well. They haven’t found the seventh body from a tour helicopter that crashed on Kauai, but they assume another death. To assume is to appropriate. I assume the authority to erase your memories of such trauma as kept you up at night, the years of abuse you cannot begin to abstract, as abstraction, like denial, is a form of semi-healing. Do not re-tell the story of a genocide unless you find yourself once again inside of it, as in a barrel full of nails falling off a cliff. The question is how to avoid as many of these nails as possible, pulling them out of either the barrel or your torso, dealing with the collateral damage to both. When this happens in the classroom, you are often unaware until later that your mention of suicide, say, hurt the student whose father threatens it, or the student who attempted it, or the atmosphere of it as a dangling participle in a sentence that’s bound to end badly. I used to over-use the phrase “as if,” as engine to imagine, but now the “if only” strikes a stronger chord. The ways of the Bodhissatva include gratitude for those who wound you. Family becomes the trope for laceration; to resume that conversation after so many years risks a drawer full of knives, applied randomly to the surfaces of your body. Almost an erotic exercise. It’s not the one person who wounds, but the others who witness the attack and detach its object from its subject (you, their friend!). It’s the magical contagion of ambition, the award system for emotions to be transmuted later into publishing contracts or jobs with s mirage-hope of tenure, for which we sacrifice everything. In this time you can relinquish sacrifice for offering. I left the homeless kits in their freezer bags in the car, smelling of Dove soap.
Meditation 3
12/30/2019
In the palace of forgetting an old orator walks toward the scene of a bloody hate crime, only to see it evaporate into marble. Dissipation into permanence: only memory loss qualifies. The woman down the street retired as a government wildlife biologist during Bush 2; her mother has dementia, lives in northern Virginia. Chit chat aggregates. Did I finally find a slot for a proper nominalization? To nominalize is to normalize, to normalize is the new ostrananie. It’s an avant-garde of realists, bending to take photos of tree ferns, so small you mistake them for mosses. The closer you get to the image, the less it can travel away from you, buying a bus ticket to the down hill town, route bending and swerving like a prism-prison. Light ascends and descends on the strand of a web that sways, stock market graph in real time, without the stocks or the market. A sprig of red ginger shines through the green leaf like a silhouette of thorns. Metaphors begin things, but seldom conclude them. Allegory hardly fares better: the movie about a bus in Japan starts in the middle and ends there; lacking plot, we still see a near accident, minor sexual harassment, geometries of flirtation. The driver is not the central character, though without him there’d be no movement, no turning into the tight corner that precedes another line that bends into another, going the way opposite. The bus maps non-narrative, its starts and stops and cigarette breaks. (Remember how cigarettes used to drive the plots!) Realism has none, only instances that promise one, then fail to deliver. The president condemns hate crimes in words he never uses. So far, this is all meta-talk, skating above the exigencies that detail lays out on a table, either to put together like a puzzle, or to slam with a hammer that divorces noun from verb, sill from syllable. The Americans on the bus made me feel ashamed. I hoped no one else spoke English, but of course they did. That was before Trump. When ugliness was still clenched in its bulb, aching to get out in the air to spread its filthy petals. It’s all performance, the bud erupting into color, the president exhorting his followers that the opposition “hates” them. (He otherwise talks way too much about love.) We call the one beauty and the other filth, though it’s a problem when they appear to coincide. The lovely fascist sprig in a vase by the door. Nothing clears the mind like climate change, Joe writes, unless perhaps it’s happiness, as the article suggests. “Is that what it’s called?” another responds. Can happiness be a form of cynicism? Or is N right when she says what we need is hope and cynicism together? In what order, I should have asked, do we apply this tonic? It’s hard to hold them together, like a political form of pathos, this building up in a era of destructiveness. Freedom of religion means we can keep you out, and freedom of press means their freedom to praise and praise only. If the novels disappear, we’re left with more bad plotlets, silences laid out like cutlery before we know which tool goes in which hand. After his stroke, he could not easily find his words. “Why did they invite HIM to speak?” But it wasn’t the speaking that was powerful, it was the not. There are wooden petal-pegs where the knots were in plywood on the floor. It’s not decorative plywood, Bryant says, it’s practical. Sometimes to mend is better than to make. Let’s institute a prize for good maintenance.
Meditation 4
12/31/2019
The woman in the book shop talks to her little girls in Hawaiian. When they leave, the shopkeeper tells her “the language is so beautiful.” You can find Hawaiian dresses for American dolls down the road, the plump white girls in lei and mu`umu`u who stand staring out at Kilauea Avenue. The tea room is in back, says another sign, its arrow pointing toward the street. Three years ago I saw racist graffiti nearby, took photos as a form of erasure. To preserve is to demolish the power of words, maybe. A verb might be a noun that blusters, or noun might be verb with a severe back-ache. The leaves of the invasive ginger slick with rain water, apapane chitter in the canopy. At 60, our ghosts come to keep us company. They don’t take up space, but circulate around us. I was always walking behind Marthe; as she was tall, I watched her well-toned calves take on another steep ascent. My dad’s scarred index finger ripped mostly off in an old washboard. My mother’s narrow chin. Those who are dead we imagine are anxious for their living, offering us warm coats and tea. A deep dishonest decade ends, but tomorrow promises no respite. It’s all golf and graft as far as our eyes can see. The woman who was talking to her daughters was asking them to come to her; they ran the narrow alleys between bookshelves, just far enough away to provoke her voice. “I can’t even listen to his voice!” my mother said of the first Bush, when he was the only one. Her sister’s grandmother lapses into silence, sleeps a lot. Does she still do her word puzzles, I ask. “She just put a line through the page,” her sister says.
Meditation 7
1/4/2019
The son bores a hole in his father’s skull, releasing his spirit as the body burns. Once charred, it's immersed in the river. Not to put it out but to send it on as product. Her poems were never as good after the one about bathing in the Ganges, feeling ashes and bones jostle around her. Because her mother demanded it. The flip side of spirit is ash. We’re doing our very best to create more of it, says no one at Raytheon, though they love their stock prices about now. If we see them as stock figures, they’re easier to take out with our drones. Put faculty in small rooms for 12 hours at a time to write free textbooks. Put middle Americans in small rooms for 12 hours at a time to kill a man in Baghdad. Put us all in examination rooms to take our obedience tests. And in lines for phones to prepare us for more deadly ones, but earn no empathy from the experience. Because the state demands it. The woman who dances at half-time still believes in perfection, though she knows it doesn’t exist. What does the drone-driver feel when her flying object hits its target? Is there a sense of a job well done, something created of her skill and training? Might she be a good reader of literature, one who finds the precise point the plot shifts and marks it with her pen? I missed the point of Henry James, hurrying to find it after the student with the southern accent performed it in our lounge. Association is a kind of stereotyping, as this next sentence wants to be about Mitch McConnell, slow talking his defense of the despot over whom a flock prays. He began his speech to the faithful by boasting he’d killed a man. They lean over to touch his jacket, bless him because he’s a vehicle of the Lord brought to save those unborn babies who are needed to fight our wars. It’s not the belief system they’ve attacked, but our capacity to feel productive doubt. Because, as she claimed, it was all in my imagination, I had a hard time solving the equation that generated anything beyond doubt as IED. We talked in class about what IED means, finally settling on “improvised” as the first word in the acronym. Acrid aid to memory. That was a decade ago, and now we say it again. Not to be found on the stock exchange of Iran, but stenciled on the streets of Baghdad, malign graph to our narrative, confusing climax with denouement, and always death for meaningful life. No arc this, but a more chaotic geometry that cannot be solved for any x. We know the needle on suicide points higher, but that’s no sign of order, just of good accounting. The study of gun deaths was banned. Those closing bells do toll for thee and me. So get out your silencers and work on your noise suppression techniques. The loaded gun has gone mute. A river of our blood contains no sacred ash; we’ve cut out the middle man. Save 20% on plots, a large sign reads at our local cemetery. It blew over in the last storm.
