Tiananmen

I was in Beijing just a few days after the tenth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. It was still closed to the public for “renovation,” in anticipation of protests and commemoration events. I could only get a few shots of the huge Mao poster above the gate before shuttling along to the next stop on our tour.

I was attending a conference on biography and life writing at Peking University, presenting a co-authored paper entitled “Politicizing the Trivial: Life Writings of Virginia Woolf & Slavenka Drakulić.” It was basically a comparison of Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and Drakulić’s How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed, an evaluation of how early twentieth-century capitalism and late twentieth-century communism had failed in gender equality and how those failures resonate with each other across geography and time. I was still surprised I had even been given a visa after the NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade the previous month.

Since I never technically saw Tiananmen Square, I’ll rely on the description from Jan Wong’s Red China Blues, a brilliant memoir that should be required reading in literature, politics, journalism, and cultural studies.

Tiananmen is gargantuan, the biggest square in the world. It is a hundred sprawling acres in all, flatter and bigger than the biggest parking lot I have ever seen. I used to get tired just walking from one end to the other. Moscow’s Red Square was intimate in comparison. Tiananmen could simultaneously accommodate the entire twenty-eight teams of the National Football League plus 192 other teams, each playing separate games. It could stage an entire Summer Olympics, with all events taking place at the same time. Or if you put a mountain in the middle, you could hold a Winter Olympics there instead.

Tiananmen Square made me feel tiny, insignificant, powerless. That was no accident. As the geographic and political center of Beijing, it was enlarged after the Communist victory to celebrate the grandiosity of Red China. In 1949, the Great Helmsman stood on the rostrum, in front of the Forbidden City, to proclaim: “The Chinese people have stood up.”

Tiananmen, which means Gate of Heavenly Peace, is also one of the least hospitable squares in the world. There is no bench or place to rest, nowhere to get a drink, no leafy tree to offer respite from the sun. Only the one-hundred-foot high Monument to the People’s Heroes punctuates it, and, after 1977, Mao’s white and gold mausoleum. Tiananmen is also one of the most monitored squares in the world. Its huge lampposts are equipped with giant speakers for crowd control and swiveling videocameras. The commercial photographers, with white pushcarts and colorful shade umbrellas, are actually plainclothes police. For a modest fee, they snap photos of Chinese tourists posing in the square and mail you the pictures a week later. That way, they have your name and address, too.

Here is a well written op-ed from the New York Times: China’s Grief, Unearthed by Mia Jian. For those of you less squeamish, here's an excerpt from a BBC report nineteen years ago:

Year of the Whirlwind

In honor of a Japanese tradition I recently learned about, I have chosen sempū as the kanji to represent the passing year. Sempū means “whirlwind” and is written thus:

From teaching new courses to conducting some of the most advanced research of my academic career, from hitting the gym up to six times a week to beginning to learn German, this entire past year has whirled about my dizzy, complicated, overly complex, and insomnious head.

My wish for 2008—itself admittedly a silly designation that has nothing to do with science or any other respectable metaphysical system—is for the wind to continue to whirl but that the center to remain forever (and always already) still.

Other things to look forward to this year: the first major move in more than ten years, the fortieth anniversary of my birth, a vacation to Istanbul, completion of my coursework and exams and the beginning of my dissertation, teaching new courses, conferences, writing projects, relaxation and meditation, better health (and less of me to love), and—the gods willing—more than a few nights of blissful sleep.

Happy New Year.

15 Songs for a Solstice

...to help keep the cold in on the first day of winter. (As if most of us needed help with that.) Here's to a new season of personal (and universal) growth.

For those of you not on MySpace, I'm currently reading Edmond Jabès' The Book of Margins. After only the first 35 pages, I can definitively state that it will be one of my most favorite books I have/will ever read:

The word is distance within non-distance, that is, the width of a gap that every letter stresses while bridging it. What is said is always said in relation to what will never be expressed. At these extreme limits we recognize ourselves.

This winter will (always already and yet again) prove the truth of the infinite distance I must travel in order to recognize myself in the extremities of the here and now. And now to the soundtrack that will be playing on that trip:

• "Hey, That's No Way To Say Goodbye" by Leonard Cohen
• "Winter Kills" by Yaz
• "Drink Before the War" by Sinéad O'Connor
• "Dreamer" by Toni Childs
• "All the Candles In the World" by Jane Siberry
• "Bells Ring"by Mazzy Star
• "25th December"by Everything But The Girl
• "Trouble In Mind (The Return)"by Marianne Faithfull
• "Mad World"by Gary Jules
• "Untitled 3" by Sigur Rós
• "New Lost World" by Chris Whitley
• "Soon This Space Will Be Too Small" by Lhasa De Sela
• "Baby In Two" by Pernice Brothers
• "Wo willst du hin?" by Xavier Naidoo
• "Archangel" by Burial

Excerpts

Something I've been doing for the past several semesters is offering excerpts of my academic work here at the end of the semester. When I'm not writing here--which is happening more and more frequently--I'm most likely working on papers such as these. The work I did this term just about did me in altogether: I started working on the first paper in May, but I was able to write the second paper in just a few weeks. It seems I always shoot my load on one project (usually the one for my major professor and mentor) and then do a second quickie. (And yes, all academic metaphors must be sexual; otherwise, you're not doing it right.) By the way, my first essay earned me a "gifted," and the second one was termed "brilliant." (I'm not braggin'; I'm just saying....)

In die Fremde der Heimat:
Celan’s “Schibboleth” and the Ethics of Translation

Mem’ry, in addition to being short, is also (always already) a matter of convenience. A covenant both enjoins and excludes. Our inclusion in a community is a function of how we enact our communal memory—which flags we pledge allegiance to, which political slogans we cry out, which language community we find ourselves born into—in short, how we embody our covenant. Memory is the shibboleth we use to segregate: it either allows passage or cuts off the return passage home. This scar—this syllable pain, this wounded word, this death sentence—bears the memory of our covenant, a circle of forgetting, bereft of a center. Memory, therefore, is what must be transversed, transported, crossed over, and translated; it is the liminal border between the alien and the homeland, the superliminal space where the blood of the Passover sacrifice demarcates between the Chosen People and the(ir) other. Memory is the shibboleth—mispronounced, death-bringing, inarticulate; the unsayable that demands utterance, performance, invocation. The promise—the sign of the promise—the promised covenantal sign scars the human body. This scar—a genital, genitive scar—wounded by the past, is passed on to future generations, to those also born of the wound, born of disaster.

The half-mastness on both sides of mem’ry bisects “Schibboleth” with a reference to a political act: commemoration of the dead, of national heroes. Yet this flag at half-mast (from the fourth strophe) is not (necessarily) the same flag to which the poet has sworn no allegiance (from the second strophe). Instead of being unfurled in the market square, demanding allegiance, this flag at half-mast signifies the presence of death. Yet Celan’s dead remain doubly absent: not only are they no longer present (having been murdered and reduced to ash) but neither have they been properly buried and mourned for. No national flag had been set at half-mast to commemorate them. They are absented in both language as well as cultural memory, and it is an inherent characteristic of Celan’s poetological project to call those absent dead back into presence through language and to rescue them from forgetting/forgetfulness.

But just as Heidegger wants us to think being as some thing other than beings, so we too are called to think the other as some thing wholly other, as something more than the sum of all others—uncoordinatable and incalculable, unbounded and aporetic, unmappable and undateable. The wholly other exceeds all Cartesian coordinates as well as any Cartesian cogito: all that I can know of the other is that I do not know.

Initiation into Redon’s Initiation to Study

The fifth and final work in Redon’s two-woman sequence is his circa 1905 Initiation to Study. This oil painting is marked by a flattening of the pictorial space as well as by a sharp delineation of line of the two figures. The priestess is clothed entirely in blue; the novice wears white. Instead of holding a red branch as in the 1896 oil painting, the novice casually holds a scroll that has been partially unrolled. It seems that the natural element from the first painting has been replaced with a cultural artifact; the mysteries of nature have given way to the mysteries of a secret society whose knowledge is written down on the scroll. But no text is exposed; to the viewer, the scroll is empty and blank.

Though the novice’s eyes are still downcast, we get no sense of her emotional state from her otherwise expressionless face. The priestess, however, appears somewhat sterner than in previous depictions: she is clearly frowning, and the severe profile line only accentuates her one visible eye. Redon’s noirs were often populated by round, globe-like eyes, but in this series, the women’s eyes are almost always closed, further resisting the viewer’s gaze.

The women appear within a space defined by heavy brown lines to the pair’s left and right as well as beneath their feet. The light brown floor recedes a short distance before ending at what looks to be a white plaster or stucco wall behind the figures. The pictorial plane, nevertheless, is further flattened with blotches of paint that transgress across all three strong defining lines. No shadow or shading interrupts this compression to give the viewer any impression of dimensionalized space. Redon flattens the vertical as well by repeating the light brown of the floor in the upper right. Moreover, the illusory depth is shortened by the dark pink tones of the oil paint: Redon uses the same tone for his signature and the dominant background behind the priestess. In this way, the surface and the background are the same color, disrupting any sense of depth and preventing any penetration beyond the work’s surface.

Tiempo libre

I became a free man again as of 1:33 yesterday afternoon when I submitted my grades and went through the official (and ever-so-asinine) “check-out” procedure at the college.

It’s a bit hard to enjoy the sweet relief that should be flowing my way after two nights of disrupted sleep, though. But yesterday when I got out of bed around 4:00 (after waking at 3:00), I spent the time fairly productively: I began working on a creative writing project I’ve been thinking about for a few months now.

And there are so many other projects that need to be started: cleaning (and possibly moving), planning my spring courses at the college (especially the online version), covering some ground in my reading assignments for the next term, and taking care of myself physically, emotionally, and spiritually. I’ve neglected those things for far too long; although I have made it to the YMCA three times already this week.

Last night when I woke up at 3:00, I was too tired to even get out of bed and try to do something. I have an appointment with my neurologist Monday. We’ll see what pills she tries to throw my way this time as I adamantly insist I’m not taking anything she prescribes.

Wednesday afternoon I met Shellie and Blake for lunch at the Polish deli/café in Plano. We shared plates of pierogi (blueberry and potato-cheese) and naleśniki. It is really nice to finally feel like I’m part of a cohort (of sorts) at the university. It’s been years since I felt like I was part of a group of like-minded people who enjoy each other’s company.

Since submitting my last term paper (the one the professor called “brilliant”), I’ve spent far too much time on MySpace, that horrible online (anti)social network. If anyone wants to add me as their “friend,” please feel free, but you’ll have to use “soleo” as my last name. I try to ensure that my students will (at the very least) have a difficult time finding me anywhere online. And if there are any bloggers out there who want me to add their site to my links, send me the URL.

Ah, so much housecleaning … and most of it metaphorical.

Bullet-Point Friday

• Ah, the last of the Bullet-Point Fridays!
• I started this segment when I returned from Germany and began the fall semester just to ensure that throughout the long and difficult term I would sit down at least once a week and post something on my blog. And now it’s almost over.
• Well, not quite: I still have to submit another essay Monday. My research on the Redon painting has been fairly interesting, but—ohmygod!—I have no energy to just sit down and pound it out. I wrote about half of it Thanksgiving Day. While most of my compatriots were stuffing turkey down their throats, I was fasting and writing—what I tend to do best on that holiday. And I spent more than three hours at the museum Wednesday, so I have plenty of information to write about. Just tired.
• I exhausted myself with the first essay due before Thanksgiving. And thankfully that proved to be worth the effort. My professor wrote that I was “gifted.” (And I’ve hence decided to start a “Gifted & Talented” program for my Ph.D. curriculum! Too bad few of my colleagues will meet the requirements….) Of course, I started the research and reading on the flight to Germany last July, so it’s fairly accurate to say that I’ve done some serious thinking about my topic over the past 4½ months.
• Perhaps I will start my Bullet-Point Fridays again come January. But I think I’ll change the name: no good ever came from bullets. And “bullet points” imply a reduction and a leveling that I hope to never be guilty of.
• I submitted my translation portfolio for the term this morning. I feel like after the first draft I was no longer doing translation but merely leveling, making the text palatable to the pack of illiterate philistines who were in the class with me. After several classmates complained that one particular sentence was “hard to understand,” I declared, “Perhaps I should just translate it back into Polish, and then we’ll see how well you understand it!” If nature abhors a vacuum, then I’m certain she would indeed hate my classmates as much as I do.
• So, it’s time to go to bed. I still have so much more work to do over the next couple of weeks: exams to write and grade, essays to grade, grades to submit. And my winter break is quickly filling up with things wanting to be done and read. (And I’ll try to write so much more consistently throughout the week that Bullet-Point Fridays will be unnecessary.)

Bullet-Point Friday

• Thumb drive? Check. I do, after all, need to record the grades of the precious students enrolled in the US history course I TA for.
• Stack of history quizzes? Check. I finished grading them over breakfast this morning, but I told my professor I wanted to re-evaluate a couple of them just to ensure I’m being fair (and consistent), so I’ll return them Monday. I’m still a bit perplexed by one student’s response: “Truthfully, I have no idea of what I should write because I haven’t read the book just yet. Fortunately [sic], there isn’t a way for me to pass this class having failed two of the last tests.” It continues for a couple of pages. I don’t like this conflicting sympathy-annoyance I suffer from: I really am too sensitive at times to be a professor, but I also work ridiculously hard for my courses, even the ones that only annoy me and waste my time. (After my last presentation, there was a hush before the professor exclaimed, “That was a damned good protocol!” I felt like crying, relieved after putting myself under that much pressure for a two-page paper.) But, of course, I’m not a freshman too lazy to read the assignment. (If I skip a required text, I have some deep-seated reason … usually. And I always make sure it’s one I won’t be tested over.)
• Sophie’s World? Check. I read it originally back in the fall of ’97 in Japan. When I moved into my apato, it was one of the few books left by a prior occupant. Because it was in English, I read it. I was annoyed because of its overly contrived narrative. I cringe when I feel like someone is trying to trick me into being educated. Now it’s a required text for my introduction to philosophy course I teach at the community college downtown. I had/have no say in the matter. But after drinks Tuesday evening with my brighter-than-average colleagues, I just may finally stop hating this book. Both of them swore that it was a more-than-suitable text for an introductory course. I’ll trust them (since they are so painfully freaking intelligent). Lesson learnt: stop fighting the flow and see what there is to learn instead of overly complicating things.
• Knitted skullcap? Check. In the mornings here, the temperature has been quite a bit more tolerable: in the mid-40s. It’s almost as if things are starting to cool down like they’re supposed to this time of year. In Poland I would’ve already had several days of snow by now.
• Crappy Apple laptop? Check. Thankfully it isn’t a problem connecting to the wireless here at this college campus (where I spend my “free days” writing, working, and doing research). I wonder how many other people here aren’t really supposed to be here? I spend more time at this school than I do at either the campus where I teach or the campus where I’m a student. But no one’s ever asked to see my identification or to justify my presence. At least I finally started bringing my own computer instead of using the one’s in the library.
• Internal (and upcoming) deadlines? Check. One paper due Wednesday. Another portfolio/project due on the 30th. And a final paper/presentation on December 3rd. Final exams in history to grade; five-page essays and final exams in philosophy to grade; eternal and continual paperwork to endure for classes taught as well as taken. Yes, I’m almost done with this term. But now I have to buckle down in order to check these things off. One by one.
  

Bullet-Point Friday

• Well, I kept my cell phone on buzz from late September until today hoping that I'd get that call either from the MacArthur Foundation or Sweden. No such luck. I guess I can switch it off (and hold my breath) for another year.
• Since besides keeping a fairly sophisticated monthly budget I don't dabble in economics, and since rarely do I delve into cutting edge scientific research, I thought I'd surely be shortlisted for either the prize in literature or maybe (as a last resort) the peace prize. I guess I need to write more than term papers and angry blog posts. And perhaps do more than save the world everyday from my utter disgust.
• Congratulations to Doris Lessing, whoever she is. I browsed through the table of contents of the Norton Anthology of British Literature last night and couldn't find anything by her. If Norton doesn't bother with her writings, why should anyone else? Perhaps she's just trans-canonical.
• Congratulations to Al Gore, whose name was in the news just a couple of days ago when a British court determined that nine statements in his film on global warming were in error. Thankfully he wasn't up for the Nobel scientific prize. Polar bears drowning, indeed! (Although I have to admit I chuckled out loud during that part of the movie when the computer-animated polar bear went kerplunk into the Arctic waters! Ah, good times. Of course, if you were in the audience and couldn't tell that that scene/scenario was designed purely for an emotional response, then perhaps you deserve a Nobel for naiveté and gullibility.)
• No Nobel. No Genius. At least I'm in good company.
  

Remembrance

One of the many blemishes part of Putin's blemished legacy, Anna Politkovskaya was murdered a year ago.

Visual Culture

After a relatively short run-through of the DMA this afternoon, I came up with the following six contenders for my project in Visual Culture. I'm really not ecstatic about any of them: I would much rather write about the work of someone I know a little bit about, like Anselm Kiefer or Magda Abakanowicz, but we've already been scolded for choosing only recent subjects (from the last 30 years). Since I have no interest in recreating the canon, I thought about either an Asian or pre-Columbian work, but I didn't find anything today that grabbed me. These six, despite being fairly canonical--hell, they're hanging in a Dallas museum!--caught my eye; plus I thought I'd be able to say something new and interesting about each of them, assuming that someone else hasn't already exhausted these works.

Thomas Wilmer Dewing's The Singer, 1924

Arthur Garfield Dove's Up the Alley, 1938

Edward Hicks' The Peaceable Kingdom, c. 1846-47

Max Liebermann's At the Swimming Hole, 1875-78

Odilon Redon's Initiation to Study - Two Young Ladies, c. 1905

Paul Serusier's Celtic Tale, 1894

Scivias

I remain
Together:t(w)o-gathered
A union w/o unity
Identity w/ difference
Singable yet always (yet) unsung remainder
Twinned coils twining through
Here & (t)here & no(w)here:now/here
Wo ist der Mensch?
W(h)er(e) ist der Mensch?
Here- her- he- ach
And a thou-
Sand hands to hold at night
And an eye
T(w)o-ward
Hath an ear
Near- 'ear 'ea- æ
Farawaywayawaywayaway
Let be--this subjunctive that terrorizes time
I'm set ... for now
Know- now- no-

Il y a / n'est plus

A hundred years of his undying death articulating as if the singular unsaid, unsaying, unsayable, in its fully exteriorized impossibility against the homogenized totalization of a text, an other. He always already (yet) exceeds his own excessive supplementarity. I hereby sign and countersign your centenary as we both recede in our mutually singular oblivions.

Poet/Novelist/Writer/Blogger/Scholar

toothpastefordinner.com

Guilty.

I wrote bad poetry until my poetry was published by a publisher of bad poetry. Then I was too humiliated that my heart-wrenching poems were enclosed in the same volume as this stellar work:

There once was a mouse.
He saw some cheese.
He went for the cheese.
But it was a trap.
There is no longer a mouse.

In college, when I was president of the English honor society, I organized Bad Poetry Readings. If you showed up with none of your own bad poetry, I would hand out that collection and have each person find an equally bad poem to read for the group. I haven't written poetry (too) seriously since.

A few years ago, when I was gainfully and woefully underemployed, I too participated in a "write a novel in a month" program. My novel remains unfinished--like much of my life--as I do actually concentrate on finishing the Ph.D.

Perhaps Dr. Skajlab will revisit that writing project at a later date, perhaps when tenure is not looming quite so large overhead. Perhaps retirement. Perhaps when Wendy Faris reads the last sentence of À la recherche du temps perdu I'll be walking to the post office with my manuscript in a brown paper envelope to send it to a respected and reputable publisher of fine letters. Perhaps.

Until then I have much work to do on my dissertation. And all those writing assignments for my last semester of coursework. And articles to submit for publication in peer-reviewed journals. So it looks like I'll be able to delay and postpone the fear that I'm really a shitty novelist for years.

Until then, I'll just focus on the fact that I'm a pretty shitty blog writer.

Simple Things

It really is the simple things that make life worth living. The complicated shit only makes me mad.

I’ve been spending much more time at the local YMCA. Lately I’m exercising at least five times a week, mostly there but also sometimes in the neighborhood. I’ve even been much more able to engage in the senseless chitchat with the woman behind the counter at the Y. I think it’s funny she wished me a happy fathers’ day and then asked if my father was still alive. Do I not exude the fatherly vibe myself? Am I (visibly) at that age where fathers typically die off?

I’ve been diligently reading since the spring term ended, preparing for the courses I’ll be taking as well as those I’ll be teaching this fall. I’ve read some really hard books. I wonder why all knowledge always comes in book format? To study music, you have to read books about music. To study art, you have to read books about art. I’m beginning to hate books more and more.

I’ve been slacking when it comes to studying German on my own. I’ve only gotten through the first six lessons in the Pimsleur program. Last summer I’d gotten through the entire Russian I course (30 lessons) in the same amount of time and had began Russian II. I hope my dedication comes back once I’m actually sitting in class in Germany next month.

Tomorrow I’m returning all the books I’ve checked out to the university library. I have eleven. And the Pimsleur German CDs. I need to get them back since I’ll be gone when it’s time to renew them online. And when I return, the fall semester will already be in its second week.

Today, the CIA released hundreds of pages of internal reports on assassination plots, secret drug testing, and spying on Americans. That’s nothing: you should see the secret reports I keep on the government.

What’s in heavy rotation on my iPod this week: “North American Scum” by LCD Soundsystem, “Everyman Everywoman” by Yoko Ono w/ Blow Up, “Hammering in My Head” by Garbage, “Girlfriend is Better” by Talking Heads, “Bump!” by Nylon Room, and “Guilt is a Useless Emotion (Mac Quayle Vocal Mix)” by New Order. Maybe I should write a book about it.

Marked by the trace and the testament

Derrida's Learning to Live Finally--his last interview before dying in October 2004--is a brilliant testament to learning, living, and loving. This little book arrived today, and I eagerly read it in its entirety this afternoon. Here are a few of my favorite passages:

I don't want to renounce anything, indeed I cannot. Because you know, learning to live is always narcissistic ...: one wants to live as much as possible, to save oneself, to persevere, and to cultivate all these things which, though infinitely greater and more powerful than oneself, nonetheless form a part of this little 'me' that they exceed on all sides. To ask me to renounce what formed me, what I've loved so much, what has been my law, is to ask me to die. (29-30)

At the moment I leave 'my' book (to be published)--after all, no one forces me to do it--I become, appearing-disappearing, like that uneducable specter who will have never learned how to live. The trace I leave signifies to me at once my death, either to come or already come upon me, and the hope that this trace survives me. This is not a striving for immortality; it's something structural. I leave a piece of paper behind, I go away, I die: it is impossible to escape this structure, it is the unchanging form of my life. Each time I let something go, each time some trace leaves me, 'proceeds' from me, unable to be reappropriated, I live my death in writing. It's the ultimate test: one expropriates oneself without knowing exactly who is being entrusted with what is left behind. Who is going to inherit, and how? Will there even be any heirs? (32-3)

[S]urvival is an originary concept that constitutes the very structure of what we call existence.... We are structurally survivors, marked by this structure of the trace and of the testament.... [D]econstruction is always on the side of the yes, on the side of the affirmation of life. ... This surviving is life beyond life, life more than life, and my discourse is not a discourse of death, but, on the contrary, the affirmation of a living being who prefers living and thus surviving to death, because survival is not simply that which remains but the most intense life possible. (51-2)

To get a lucid and direct taste of this philosopher "whose entire work pays homage to the subversive intensity of existence," I recommend this little book, this blur, this tear--a mere paper left behind when a great thinker ceased to exist.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Sen nocy letniej
by Wisława Szymborska

Już las w Ardenach świeci.
Nie zbliżaj się do mnie.
Głupia, głupia,
zadawałam się ze światem:

Jadłam chleb, piłam wodę,
wiatr mnie owiał, deszcz mnie zmoczył.
Dlatego strzeż się mnie, odejdź.
I dlatego zasłoń oczy.

Odejdź, odejdź, ale nie po lądzie.
Odpłyń, odpłyń, ale nie po morzu.
Odfruń, odfruń, dobry mój,
ale powietrza nie tykaj.

Patrzmy w siebie zamkniętymi oczami.
Mówmy sobie zamkniętymi ustami.
Bierzmy się przez gruby mur.

Małośmieszna para z nas:
zamiast księżyca świeci las,
a podmuch zrywa twojej damie
radioaktywny płaszcz, Pyramie.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Draft I)

The forest in Ardens already burns.
Don’t come any closer to me.
Senseless, senseless,
I was getting to know the world:

Eating bread, drinking water,
a gale grazed me, a drizzle doused me,
So be on your guard around me, get away.
Cover your eyes even.

Get back, get back, but don’t go by land.
Set sail, set sail, but not by sea.
Fly away, fly away my good man,
but don’t lay a finger on the sky.

Let’s look at each other with closed eyes.
Let’s speak ourselves with closed lips.
Let’s catch ourselves climbing the city wall.

We’re an insufficiently funny team:
it’s not the moon making the forest gleam,
and the blast tears off your lady’s shroud.
We are shadows cast by a mushroom cloud.

Memory of Loss

The dead will always outnumber the living.

One of my favorite works at the Art Institute was Chagall’s 1938 White Crucifixion. In it Chagall chooses to depict the crucifixion of Jesus (the “King of the Jews”), including this scene as the crux of a long history of pogroms against the Chosen—a history with its own chiasmus at the Cross, that damnable and lamentable inversion from Chosen to chastised, from blessed to bereaved. And somehow we good Christians (and post-1948, Judeo-Christians (if such a hyphenated beast/bestial identity exists; and why not Judeo-Christiano-Muslim?)) only remember the last 2000 years of victimhood and not the prior 5000 of gloating victors against all the other desert peoples (with their own desert gods). History will teach us nothing, for even the Palestinians (these new Philistines) will rise up and slaughter new innocents. It reminds me of a recent headline: “army battles militants,” and yet the unasked question still heard in the depths of language: who more militant than the military? And you too do not exist … nor I. Auch du und du. I’m reminded too of all those Japanese I befriended and loved whose fathers, and grandfathers, and great-grandfathers probably shot at my own grandfather, filling his mortal body with shrapnel and environmental detritus so that even weeks before his death metal was still winnowing its way from beneath his skin more than sixty years after the ceasefire. And when will this fire finally cease? And who will burn for more? And whose father, or grandfather, or great-grandfather was absent—absent in the way of a missing limb or a lastborn son—due to a shot fired from my grandfather’s rifle? How the missing trace their absence(s) down through the generations so that in my clinging I cling only to that which absences itself, that missing part, that lifeline of longing. Each near-death experience (and I know such a hyphenated beast exists) brings me closer to the death that awaits only me in its mortal vastness, in its singularity and solitude, for only that one death will make it all better by making us one.

Grocery List

Ham Salad
*Cheese Danish*
Fruit
Sausage
Gravy Mix
Milk
Clothes Soap
Foil
Bread
Ice Cream
Imodium A.D.
After Shave

I found this list in the men’s restroom at the grocery store this evening. It reminded me of the scraps of paper Jola would find on the streets of Warsaw and would spend several days attempting to decipher the personality of the person who wrote such a thing.

I image the man who composed this list to be a 57-year-old, 230-pound African American who walks with a slight limp. His face is marked by laugh lines that a less generous person would assume were solely wrinkles and by kind eyes that have seen both too much sorrow and too deep joys. He calls everyone sir or ma’am, and makes sure to tip his fedora to his neighbors as he ambles down the sidewalks. Sometimes he stops at the freedman’s cemetery to pay his respects to those who have passed on and over; he’s never too busy to listen to children sing songs.

He doesn’t much care for dogs: they’re much too hyper for his sensibilities. Cats are fine, but he knows they’re the enemies of the birds he feeds scraps and crumbs to off his back porch every day.

He’s worried about the pain he’s been feeling in his left shoulder for the past three days, but medicine is a luxury and only as a last resort. Maybe tonight after supper he’ll soak a little in the tub to ease out some of the ache from the past several weeks. His feet smell, and he still tastes onions on his breath from lunch.

It sure was hot this afternoon, so he’s planning to take it a little easier tomorrow. Maybe water the plants hanging from his porch, maybe a game of dominoes with his niece who always comes over for a visit after church.

He knows he’ll be fast asleep when his head hits the bed tonight: a good conscience is the only pillow he needs.

Uncovered (and recovering)

Last night at 10:00 I submitted my grades and officially ended the spring semester. Now (with head freshly shaved) it's time to rejoin the human race by returning to the gym, reading books and articles for fun, drinking and socializing--scandalizing--and fleshing out this virtual site.

Below are a couple of excerpts from my writing projects this term:

Irigarayan deinos and the Distance of Home

Our conception of nature—just like our grasp of masculine and feminine—is itself always already enculturated. That is, we cannot make sense of nature without resorting to culturally constructed tropes of intelligibility, without imposing human agency or scientism upon natural phenomena. Even when we attempt to make room for the inexplicability of nature (for example, relying on a “God works in mysterious ways” mindset), our conception of the mystery/mysterious is already encrusted by and ensconced within a cultural framework. We cannot conceive of nature that is not culturally formed/informed/deformed and is not a consequence of man’s greatest violence—the imposition of intelligibility. And yet “true” nature (physis) is first (at the beginning) and foremost absent of human beings. It just is—“measureless to man” and immeasurable. Only when man knowingly acknowledges that he neither has agency to grasp ungraspable being nor ability to run after receding being can he find his place, his home, as a resting place displaced—not at the center of being nor at its origin—but nearby, near-within, wherein man’s being calls forth being itself. At last being arrives but not according to man’s timetable, for it is only when man steps out from history, away from the act of historicizing, that he is able to attune himself to being’s already arriving. Only when man allows for a cultivation of the female/buddhic to be and accepts a position of repose, of rest and contemplation, does home—always already present even in its absence—draw close. When man’s fabricated home is no longer the site centered on the male to be, his true home opens up to the full belongingness of all beings.

Wounded Writing:
The Reticent Witness of Wisława Szymborska

From this lexical evidence, it seems that silence here has its own efficacy in opposition to names; silence, in effect, serves as a non-name that finds its own name in Szymborska’s poetry. Ultimately, there is no resolution to these antinomies; thesis and antithesis do not move gently toward synthesis in a semantically consistent form of Hegelianism. Instead, each image, each theme, each term flies free from any core meaning a reader might impose upon the text toward newly formed orbits of signification. This motion of silence and voice alternates back and forth like breath; every silence becomes a calling for(th), yet every shout is voiceless. This directed ambiguity resonates with the process of breathing: one cannot breathe by oneself; one cannot produce one’s own breathe. Similarly, the process of speaking and not speaking (that is, silence) alternates back and forth in Szymborska’s volume, always requiring the other and speaking through the other.

Becoming Pirate*

Two poets—
one male, one female—
walk into a bar.
The bartender asks:
What brings you here?
The male poet replies:
My ship. Arrrrrrgh.
The female poet: Squawk!

Two poets—
one male, one female—
walk into a bar.
The bartender asks:
See anything you like?
The male poet replies:
Your booty. Arrrrrrgh.
The female poet: Squawk!

Two poets—
one male, one female—
walk into a bar.
The bartender asks:
What can I get you?
The male poet replies:
Yo ho ho: a bottle of rum. Arrrrrrgh.
The female poet: Squawk! …
and crackers.

* with apologies to the staff at the New Amsterdam, 831 Exposition Avenue, Dallas, Texas.

Invitation/Reading

I'll be reading some of my new translations of Wislawa Szymborska's poetry as well as some of my own writings tomorrow evening (Thursday, March 29) at South Side on Lamar as part of WordSpace's Writers in the Universities program. It begins at 7:00pm at Opening Bell Coffee. If you are around, please come out and support us.

Betrayals

This is something I wrote several years ago and meant to post but apparantly didn't because I couldn't find it when I did a search.

To write is to betray. There is not a single word written that is not somehow a betrayal—a betrayal of something said, a betrayal of a feeling, a betrayal of the reality one foolishly attempted to capture.

Writing is an act of violence against time and space. (And meaning.)

But reading is no less a betrayal. My mother taught me that lesson when I was sixteen and she wrote to me a note in which she confessed to reading every word of my journal that I had been keeping for more than three years. She read every word. And then my mother wrote to me a note she included with the stack of papers and spiral-bound notebooks she dropped off for me when I was sixteen and living in a foster home.

She did not write that she was sorry for having read my private journal during a tumultuous and painfully difficult time in my life. She did not apologize in her note for any such violation. Instead she wrote that every word I had written was wrong and a lie. She could and would never understand how I was able to describe my father as a “fucking-ass bastard” practically on every page until I decided to abbreviate his presence in my notes to merely “FAB.”

Well, I thought, if my written words were wrong, then so were hers. And I proceeded to destroy every single word that I had written in the previous three years. I shredded all the lies, all the wrong impressions, and all the mistakes in interpretation on my part. And I tore her note to shreds as well, vowing not to ever start another journal.

Her violation of my mind and personal property were just as violently invasive as my father’s physical abuse. Not only was my own skin being used against me, my own words—words never meant to be read by anyone other than myself—were arrows that instead of being left alone in the quiver were shot point-blank into the core of my being.

It took years of fighting this urge to write, to put down on paper, to document the experience of life before I was able to begin another journal. And I eventually came to conclude that the only way to prevent my words from being used against me was to make the entire story public. I wrote and wrote and wrote. And then I began an online journal. Not bad for someone who at times becomes horribly shy and withdrawn, seeking solace in anonymity and private solitude.

I taunt my friends and lovers when I tell them I write about them. After I am threatened with perjury, I exclaim, “You wouldn’t recognize yourself anyway.” Of course, each person will recognize his or her own name as well as several of the personal details. But that alone is not sufficient cause for alarm to me. I remain convinced that people are ultimately unknowable, including one’s own self.

Just as I am at times incredulous when a photograph appears to include someone that looks like me but just cannot be me even though that stranger is surrounded by the people who surrounded me when we posed for the camera, I know that mere words alone can never reconstitute the reality of a life, not even my own. I am not quite sure that this first-person pronoun “I” could even ever stand for the reality that is this person writing, or the reality I seek in my life and in the documentation of that life. So you would certainly never recognize yourself. My own mother could not even recognize herself or the man she was married to in the words written by her only son.

Only questions remain at this point: whom do I betray by writing now? and whom do you betray by reading?