redux: 6am, 30 September 2007

My sister and I go dancing in Miami, two instead of three, us instead of we. Her departure is imminent; neither of us know. When the lights come on at 5am, everyone in the club becomes suddenly uglier. The bodies dancing in the dark grow faces, chiseled jawlines and beautiful silhouettes giving way to idiot words and various nervosas. We now see who was on what for how long and how strong; my sister and I become better looking.

We drive to South Beach to celebrate with pancakes:

At the booth behind us sit two large men, and it is impossible to discern whether they are siblings or lovers. Either way, there is a special intimacy as one berates the other. The hamburger sitting in front of the aggressor grows cold; eventually his performance causes the whole row of tables to shake:

(my sister turns around)

"Watch it buddy."

(the man jumps up)

"What the f_ck? What the f_ck?"

(my sister is from Baltimore)

"You're bangin' the table."

(bulging waistband implies gun)

"What the f_ck?"

(my sister is from Baltimore)

"[silence]"

(three men at corner booth stand up)

"Is there a problem here?"

(man turns to face three men)

"What the f_uck?"

(three men step forward)

"Is there a problem here?"

(lover/brother stands)

"What the f_uck?"

(three men in unison)

"We from New York."

(man steps forward)

"What the f_ck we care 'bout New York? "

(lover/brother steps forward)

"We from Camden."

[lapse]

We ask for our tab and leave for home, while unknown rappers exchange numbers in the corner booth of the café. Six months later my sister is gone.

on the obtuse significance of David Bowie

Do songs tell the future...

or only the past?

Gainesville bedrooms and

the clicking clatter of space heaters

the frigid February cold of early mourning.

Ziggy in the kitchen

Iggy in the bath

Nancy in–

Every rainy morning:

one year bloating into three

into six into the eternity of nothing.

Plastic bottletops

gas station parking lots

the smell of afterbirth in September.

reflections on a night spent listening to Rumi

Saturday night my yin and I headed down to Miami to listen to Coleman Barks, the most well-known translator of the poems of Rumi into English.  For those as yet unblessed by Rumi's acquaintance, he is a dead Persian, a man who lived in the 13th Century and whose poems possess a beauty, depth, and deceptive simplicity. Some artists' renditions also see him wearing a disturbingly phallic headdress... 

But this is beside the point.

The point is that I was first introduced to Rumi sometime during the late 1990's when UNC- Chapel Hill hosted its annual Rumi Festival.  I was running sound for the show, and I will never forget how amazing it was to watch two people, a man and a woman, spinning themselves towards God realization on either side of the stage.  Rumi is associated with a branch of Sufism known as the "whirling dervishes," a sect recognizing that the human body in motion can reach states of divine ecstasy just as surely as those achieved by motionless Eastern masters sitting in full lotus:

note: the author is neither Eastern nor a master...
but Sedona is beautiful

What I noticed this night, though, was not just the cellist, or the percussionist, or the (sometimes) whirling dervish, or even Coleman Barks' delightful Southern drawl. (He, too, it turns out, is also an alumnus of UNC). No, instead what I noticed was the odd assortment of people at the Gusman Theater: hippies, intellectuals, women in high heels, would-be poets, and sorority girls dressing like prostitutes dressing like sorority girls.  These same girls were in turn accompanied by 20-something graphic designers wearing eye glasses with thick black frames and thin clear lenses. 

I noticed how many people out of the 900 or so patrons downstairs are texting, even asking the woman in front of us to shut her phone off when the second act began.  The woman said yes, but rather than flipping it shut, she hunched over the cell phone like some deformed 21st century Quasimodo in order to shield the bright white screen from those of us behind her.  This was fine by me, but I marveled at the fact that the woman fundamentally could not put the thing away, that whatever 160 character communique she was reading was so important that it couldn't wait another 45 minutes for the show to end. 

That's what much of the whole night was for me: observing how people engaged with the performance. As a society we are not used to such gatherings, where dance and music and poetry and silence and storytelling blend together into a single mixture.  This was most notable after each poem.  For much of the first act, these interludes were largely silent, but as the night progressed, the audience seemed to grow uncomfortable with these lulls.  The energy - the space - grew larger and larger with each set of verse, and I truly believe that it became too much for the audience, too much for a room full of people plugged into cell phones and 3-inch heels, to just sit there and take it all in, to allow the words - and the spaces between the words - to flow through them.

The capacity to sit with the enormousness of the poems, the imponderable depth of the things not spoken, is not a trivial thing.  And so people, faced with an emotion too large for 160 characters, and unable to squeeze into the latest set of pumps – we respond in the only way we know how, the same way we would at a football game or comedy act or variety show: filling the empty space of the Divine with the noise of our own emotion.

on reading Rumi in Miami

Asparagus reeking
transcendence seeking
strangers seeping

        p

u

and

d

     o

           w

                   n 

t

a

i

h

s

l

e

e

s

counting the ratio:

high heels to flats

moths to gnats

[applause]

For some

the utter inability 

to sit in silence

in the presence
of the divine.



For others

the utter inability 

to sit in silence

in the presence 

of the divine.

"... I hope I didn't break it."

Yesterday morning I woke up, showered, and made my into work.  Nothing special, just your average day of focusing lights on an empty stage and inhaling mood-altering carcinogens. If not for the ventilator, I would have felt like a twelve year-old boy in his stepfather's garage, but this is beside the point.

It comes in classic black, too!

The point is that I have recovered entirely from my week-long bout with laryngitis, which began a little more than two weeks ago and lingered for nearly ten days. Apparently, the condition is caused by a virus not unlike the one that causes the common cold, and the only proven method of getting better is to stop talking.

(This, for someone who makes his living by running his mouth.)

More than once during that time, I thought of Jawbreaker's closing track from their seminal 24 Hour Revenge Therapy:

"I lost my voice, I hope I didn't break it..."

It's easy to forget how much we rely on our voice, easy to take for granted that virtually all of our "important" activities rely on the invisible framework of the spoken language.  The voice is simultaneously a measure of one's agency and creativity, an indicator of both uniqueness and our ability to connect with others.  In other words, it is our way of separating "you" from "me" and then putting "us" back together again.

As an aside, this woman once told me:

"The world is my echo."

There are innumerable scriptural references to the this progenitorial power of the voice, the most well-known of which (at least in this society) is the Genesis account of the Deity speaking the universe into existence, "And let there be light..."  

How many of us truly appreciate this?  How often do we recognize that our words ripple outward into our environment, subtly causing our surroundings and realities to take on the tones and textures that originate somewhere deep inside our chests? The glottiis, the bronchioles, the larynx – ugly names that sketch out a map of how our words come into being.

the end of summer, two years and counting...

The last day of summer passed without mention,
and I woke up in autumn,
wondering where it had gone:

was it

squeezed
between dreams
stretching inward
towards infinity?

or

was it

trampled
beneath the weight
of an endless
night?

or

was it

merely forgotten,

lost to

the celluloid

memory -

Bogart's Parisian Golgotha.

on (re)bullying Bill Shakespeare

Footnote:
(i'm glad we never kissed)

What decencies wrought, these bloated endless nights?
Ginger-soaked palliatives for longing, the wanderlust
of nightfall, and the madness of loving another man's wife.

I anticipate the kettle and glance at the petals; a flower accused
by a dead man of smelling as sweet regardless of its name.

But did he ever call it the wonderwork?

Did he ever encounter a redolence so sublime as a word unspoken?
Or cry Muhammadan tears on the Friday nights of Ramadan?
Did he ever face the dilemma of Dostoevsky:
eyes closed, mouth open in the dark?

Did he ever throw art into the void, knowing
the art, knowing the void, knowing that
he had done it before, that he would do it all again?

And, if he did not answer these questions,
can it really be said he ever lived at all?

William Shakespeare, dead Englishman and wearer of earrings

top 3 songs by black men, presumably about black women, that might as well have been written for my white Jewish wife

This song came on the radar sometime before our wedding back in February, popping onto the radio sometime during the drive back from school, probably during that nightly half hour from 9-9:30 when NPR switches over to Creole language programming.  Sometimes I listen, a little game to see how much of my French vocabulary is still lurking around up there.  As far as I can tell, the show is primarily a run-down of school board and public service announcements, but it could just as easily be discussing the price of tea in China.  Like most people who try to learn a second language as an adult, my fluency lags far behind my literacy.

But this is beside the point.

The point is that the Four Tops' "Ain't No Woman" is the most direct and accurate description of my yin.

This is another one I heard on the radio. just two nights ago on the way home from teaching my night class.  I've never taught this particular time slot before, and it seems to draw a much more diverse demographic.  Adults, high schoolers, soldiers, and blue collar workers trying to transition from jobs to careers – the night class at the community college pulls them all, which makes for some lively discussions. What unites them all, however, is there underlying desire to be somewhere else. 

But this is beside the point.

The point is that the Isley Brothers' "Who's That Lady", with its sinuous psychedelic guitar riffs, provides a reasonably accurate portrait of what it sounds like to see my yin dancing.

This song has been with me since childhood.  I am at the tail end of the once-ubiquitous Gen X, the generation that came of age when MTV played music and still thinks of Russia as the Soviet Union. This is the generation that saw hip-hop become the dominant musical force in popular culture, but can also remember seeing LL Cool J and Sir Mix-A-Lot videos played back to back with an unintelligible video for a song called "Smells Like Teen Spirit."  These postcards of urban life infiltrated not only the suburbs, but the rural areas as well, leading to the First Amendment battles of 2 Live Crew, Ice T's "Cop Killer", and the now laughable suicide scares surrounding Judas Priest and Ozzy Osbourne.

But this is beside the point.

The point is that LL Cool J's "'Round the Way Girl", with its chilled beats and understated braggadocio, reminds me of my yin's relaxed and virtually non-plussible demeanor...and this is precisely the point.

dream from the night of the 10th anniversary of 9/11

Dream of an activist being tortured: a battery is brought out, a question is asked, a baseline established.  With the control measures in place, one battery after another is brought out, each larger than the last.  There are four total.  On the top of each battery is a small green LED screen and sets of toggle switches.  The prisoner answers the questions on the screen by toggling the switches up or down.

At the end of each round, invariably, the prisoner has lied and receives a shock.  He screams and convulses, cries and cowers.  The questions are political.  This happens twice.

On the third round, the questions are no longer about political crimes, but rather about the activist's girlfriend - small, insignificant betrayals that she has perpetrated.  Deeds whose doing, even if true, are of no consequence to either the prisoner or to the jailors.  He panics - "How can I know the answers to these questions?" - and after answering them all, perhaps six, a yellow dome light like a miniature police siren flashes, indicating that one of the responses was inaccurate. The jailors tell the prisoner that, if he picks the right one and changes his answer, he can avoid the shock.  

The man chooses correctly; it is over.

But I, the observer of the dream, know that this is the question that has broken the prisoner.  When the pain still trembling through his body recedes, when the fear of future pain has left him, the gravity and true significance of his response will descend upon him sure as the night.

The prisoner goes to the bathroom, taking a small yellow and blue wire from the torture machine with him.  One of the jailors gives him a sideways look, but does nothing.  The observer of the dream wonders if the prisoner intends to kill himself by sticking the wires into the wall outlet in the bathroom...

redux: September 11, evolution of a day

2006

i
m
 age
 miss
 in
 g

2007

2008

Ladri di biciclette
(re: bicycles & towers, circles & thievery)

Aren't we all?

From the instant we take birth
until our last breath,
we steal one moment

after another

calling it our own,
trying to find our way home.

Wayward minds,
waiting wives,
and children's lonely eyes.

Lonely children's eyes
as they watch their fathers
abandon them on street corners
– for bicycles.

(the dharma can never be lost,
but neither can it be found)

It simply waits while
we run the Roman streets,
channeling Goths and Gauls,
watching movies on Wednesday nights
from the comfort of air-conditioned condos,
watching the rise and fall of post-war Empires
during election years.

Writing responses
to Italian neo-realism,
reminiscing about Luigi Galleani
on recommendation of beautiful Russians,
and looking for the Buddhahood in Mario Buda
seven years (to the day) since eighty-one years
after the first Wall Street attack.

2009

self-plagiarism and repetition along a vertical axis

(variation on "Ladri di biciclette")

From birth
to breath
we steal:

one moment.
one moment..
one moment...

calling it our own.

Children watch
fathers abandon
them for bicycles.

(the dharma
can never be lost
can never be found)

We channel Goths and Gauls
from the cinema-ed comfort of
condominiums, watching Empires fall

in post-election years.

Writing
variations
on responses to
Italian neo-realism,
no longer looking for
Buddhahood, Mario Buda.

Eight years since.
one moment since..
eighty-one years since...
one moment since....

2010

this morning i read:

"I met her near the end of September. It had been raining that day from morning to night—the kind of soft, monotonous, misty rain that often falls at that time of year, washing away bit by bit the memories of summer burned into the earth. Coursing down the gutters, all those memories flowed into the sewers and rivers, to be carried to the deep, dark ocean."

– Haruki Murakami

while drinking coffee in bed;

what happens when the sentence fails
to tether "her" back to the collaged
fantasy of Mardou in September 2007

or

the empty "her" i left the year before?

the intermittent, repetitive "her" of 2008

or

the composite "her" emergent the year after?

what about the "her" oblivious to
punctuation, beyond words and
seen only in the spaces between?

the
boundless
instability of
pronouns never
ceases to amaze
me, mimicking
the function
and folly of
memory
itself.

2011

10 

years, digits and superstition:

what is the value of silence

amidst

10,000

vows and proclamations

chiding us to remember

that

1

day in September
no one is capable of

forgetting

?

9/11, the New York Times, and fetish

A friend of mine posted an interesting article from The New York Times on her social networking page earlier today:

read it here

The article, written by Dan Berry with accompanying photos by Tony Cenicola, talks about some of the debris from 9/11 and how they have been stashed away in various drawers and closets for the past ten years.  He describes the way the objects have taken on additional meanings, meanings that have transmuted them into relics, as if they have been sanctified by History itself to stand guard over our memory of that day.

It's an interesting piece, and amidst all the brouhaha of this weekend (it still amazes me how superstitious our society is when it comes to the number 10), it was refreshing to read something that chronicled the small acts people have taken in an attempt to process and deal with their trauma.

As I read, my mind drifted to the idea of the fetish, that of Sigmund more so than Karl,  ever lurking in the shadow of Thanatos: the tiny artifacts that came to embody death and entomb numbers.  When was the last time you looked at a clock that read 9:11 without remembering?  We do not say "seven-four" not " twelve-twenty-five" nor "one-one" any more than anyone calls nine-eleven "Patriot's Day."

Freud posited that the fetishist forms his or her attachment to an object as a response to the trauma of the moment that came before.  Since he or she cannot process the trauma, the fetish becomes a stand-in, a constant distraction and reminder of the pain.  In the case of 9/11, it seems that the rift between the moment of trauma and the moment that came before is absolute; it is as if time itself is torn, one of those periodic schisms that divides history into "pre-" and "post-".

Unable to reconstruct what happened in the minutes leading up to the impact, those who lived through it are literally left to pick up the pieces of what came after, and then substitute them for those lost memories. 

What are we to make of these totems?  Do these mementos protect from the trauma, or simply reinscribe the pain in our collective memory, pushing us further and further from ever understanding what really happened?

poem recovered from Big Sur, 10 weeks and counting...

big

Sur

highway 

One

cassette tape

Nostalgia

sunny day Melancholy

fog bank Bankruptcy:

The priest dances for Rain.

A beauty so perfect

it saddens him to know

it will remain when He is gone.