A pandemic-related satire, with afterword

If I had ever read the dark “fantasy” called “The Mask of the Red Death,” it might have been in junior high in one of those Scholastic Book anthologies: Tales of Dread and Mystery by the Inimitable Poe,” or something of the sort. Be that as it may, I didn’t really remember the story when I encountered some citations from it in a pandemic-related commentary on the Consortium News website a couple of weeks ago, more or less.

The commentary and the allusion were compelling enough to me that I immediately rushed downstairs, grabbed my copy of The Unabridged Edgar Allan Poe, and browsing the Table of Contents swiftly located it. Turns out that, while the story itself has been consigned to the shadows and cobwebs of my cluttered literary memory, the title had once sounded familiar enough to underline.

So: “The ‘Red Death’ had long devastated the country,” Poe begins rather promisingly. But, if I may skip over the gory details and speed things along a bit, only when “his dominions were half depopulated” did the “happy and dauntless and sagacious” Prince Prospero finally do something about it.

And so what did he do about it, you ask? Did he, in his great and wise sagacity, send forth all the resources at his command – to tardily succor and assist the suffering masses? Well, no, of course not. No one, in those benighted times would have known what to do about it anyway. So let them die, if they must. Culling the heard, you know. Let them eat cake.

No, instead he “summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court, and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys.”

A gated community, you might call it, stop-gap on the road (enter Jules Verne, here) to first settlement on Mars, which surely the novel red-death virus could not penetrate.

“The abbey was amply provisioned,” Poe writes. “The external world could take care of itself. In the meantime it was folly to grieve, or to think. The prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure. There were buffoons, there were improvisatori …”

Stand-up comedians: “Two phantoms walked into a bar …”

“… there were ballet-dancers, there were musicians, there were cards, there was Beauty, there was wine. All these and security were theirs. Without was the ‘Red Death.’”

Until, of course, it was not. And of all times the phantom might have chosen to make his bloody appearance (“bloody” in every sense of the word, British oath included), it was the great masked ball which was to have been everyone’s delight. And was, until the uninvited presence of another masked figure was noted, and “at length” produced a general reaction “first of disapprobation and surprise – then, finally, of horror, of disgust.

In a gathering of ghastly phantoms such as Poe’s narrator paints (the description of which, with the layout of the great chambers, I hasten to pass over), you might well think that anything would be allowed. And so it would have seemed to everyone present, had this intruder not gone too far.

The figure “was tall and gaunt and shrouded from head to foot in the habiliments of the grave,” we are told, the face-concealing mask “made so nearly to resemble the countenance of a stiffened corpse” that you couldn’t have told the difference had you come right up against it. And yet still, all might have been almost forgiven had he not had the audacity to dress up as the Red Death himself, clothing “dabbled in blood” and face all “bespeckled with the scarlet horror.”

Allow me to pause, dear reader, while I gather my bated breath and give you the space to gather yours. And while doing so, perhaps we can all stop and consider who this masked invader might be.

Some illegal pilgrim, perhaps, foul cockroach from one of those pestiferous regions outside the Insurmountable Walls built up along our borders – who somehow found the means of over-leaping or under-tunneling them?

And how, pray tell, will the ever “happy and dauntless and sagacious” host respond when he beholds the sight?

“‘Who dares?’ he demanded hoarsely – ‘who dares to make mockery of our woes? –’”

Wait, whose woes? Aren’t all the woeful ones outside in that “external world,” somehow fending for themselves?

“‘ – Uncase the varlet – that we may know whom we have to hang at sunrise, from the battlements. Will no one stir at my bidding – stop and strip him, I say, of those reddened vestures of sacrilege!’”

But no one dare touch him. Until the prince, embarrassed by “his own momentary cowardice,” rushes at him with drawn dagger. But confronted with the reality that, only appearing to flee, suddenly turns to face him, our Naked Emperor – (oh, pardon! I’m dipping into someone else’s fantasy, mixing metaphors) – I mean, our not-so-dauntless prince screams, drops the drawn dagger, and falls prostrate in bloody death.

“And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death,” our undaunted narrator concludes. “He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall…. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.”

*

Thus endeth our dreadful tale. But without beating the horse dead, if you will, a brief afterword:

Am I hallucinating, or did the U.S. government just hand an almost bottomless slush fund to the same financial institutions who tanked the economy a dozen or so years past? With the Foreclosure King himself, Wall Street criminal extraordinaire, in charge of the Treasure? With toothless oversight by a token watchdog assigned from the Naked Emperor’s own court?

So, a dozen years ago we bail out the Top Dogs, the same ones whose greed and predation crashed the economy in the first place – and that worked out so well that we’re doing it again, only on steroids?

And how much of that ill-gained lucre trickled down to you? How much of it’s in your wallet?

Wait. Isn’t that the Naked Emperor, Himself, cozied up to the Socialist Trough? He and his emperors- and empress-in-training, looking after the bottom line of their Imperial Emoluments Foundation? (And why didn’t the opposition party’s leadership impeach a year or two earlier on the utterly obvious violations of that Constitutional clause?)

But we can’t direct the nation’s factories to mass-produce some protective gear and other important stuff for our nurses and doctors because that’s – what’s the word – Socialist? And we can’t have healthcare for all (whether we want it or not) because that’s Socialist, too?

Isn’t it funny how the ones who get shaken down and accused of theivery are always the ones on the bottom – the underdogs; los de abajo, as they say south of that Beautiful, “Bloody,” Border Wall –while those at the top make out like bandidos?

And how the ones leading the way and helping their neighbor- and even distant-countries in these times of pandemic are poor and/or Socialist ones like Cuba and Venezuela, or Iran and China? While the United States of America remain in various states of confusion, denial, and unpreparedness?

How is it, again, that my “Honorary Uncle” Bernie can’t be President because he refuses to say how he’ll pay for his Socialist programs? Even though he’s had a list of options up on his website for, like, ever?

And why can’t we let some lowly American workers get away with being paid a few dollars more on pandemic-related unemployment than they earned on the job? Or why can’t we spare a couple thousand per person per month until all the dust on this crisis has clearly settled?

Forfend that we even speak of canceling mortgage or rent payments and student loan debt and anything else that might make the average Jane’s and Joe’s lives easier!

Yet no one asks how we’ll pay to continue bombing foreign countries into submission for decades and decades on end? Or how we’ll pay for that Great Tax Cut for the Plutocrats? Oh, and that other one? And the one coming up? And …

Maybe it’s just a matter of “survival of the fittest,” of “culling the herd,” as leaders from our own Naked Emperor to his friend across the Pond have been heard whispering? And even some of our European partners on the Continent – inevitable deaths and all, but what’s to be done about it?

And how is it that we tell when a Socialist experiment has failed – like Venezuela’s, say; or Chile’s – when we kill it in the cradle and fight it in the jungles and choke it off with our brutal economic sanctions and blockades (which, pandemic or not, we only ever hunker down on!) and raise obscure opposition leaders to the throne – sorry, I mean seat of government?– well, you get the drift.

Is that how we build democratic nations, too? Is that what our planes or our drones are doing when they drop missiles on weddings in Afghanistan or finance the bombing by Saudi murderers of schools and hospitals and orphanages in Yemen?

Oh, and from the vantage point of that kid whose whole family perished in that drone attack in Afghanistan, who would you say are the terrorists and who the freedom fighters?

Have I left anything out?

Anyway, just asking. Because in the era of fact-free governance and timid, corporatist journalism, it may seem that we have no answers.But it’s the questions, then, that really matter, right?

Asking the right ones, I mean – “rude” as they might sometimes seem to Naked and/or Oblivious Power.

On My Recent Encounters with Angela Davis

Occasionally it happens, in my often random encounters with literature, that it dawns on me that it’s been a while since I’ve read, say, a book by a woman author, or by an African American. So it was that early last November I re-visited Mrs. Dalloway, my first volume (and first love) among the three that I’ve read by Virginia Woolf; and from there launched into each of the successive volumes (in Ann Goldstein’s translation from the Italian) of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet, which my wife Anita – for good reason – had so enthused over; and finally, by way of transition from Maya Angelou, landed on the figurative lap of the in-some-circles infamous Angela Davis.

My first encounter with her I owe directly to Anita, who caught the notice in our local paper for the first annual Africana Film Festival at the University of Southern Indiana, in Evansville. Thanks to her sharp eye, I showed up at 6:00 on the evening of Thursday, January 30 for the first of three monthly cinematic offerings: Free Angela and All Political Prisoners (2012), written and directed by Shola Lynch. Upcoming are Spike Lee’s Malcolm X (1992) and George Tillman’s The Hate U Give (2018), which I also hope to attend, in the latter case with Anita.

The primary focus of Lynch’s documentary is Dr. Angela Davis’s 1972 trial and acquittal, by an all-white jury, on murder and conspiracy charges related to a deadly shootout at a Marin County courthouse. I remember hearing her name mentioned – derogatorily, of course; she was a known political radical of the worst sort! – by my conservative Republican parents at about that time. We had lived in Torrance, a suburb of Los Angeles, during the years just prior to the initial controversy that broke out in 1969 when UCLA’s philosophy department hired her to teach an introductory course on Marxism, Kant, and such. The state’s newly-minted governor, Ronald Reagan, was at the center of that political melee; I vaguely recall having been taken along to a rally for candidate Reagan when I must have been going on eight years old.

Davis was the Vice-Presidential candidate on the Communist Party ticket in 1980 when I voted in my first election (for Reagan, though I would repent of my decision and vote against him four years later); I thought she had also run, another time, for President, but I must be mistaken in that regard.

It was in 1968, anyway, a year before Angela arrived as a professor at UCLA – fresh from doctoral studies in Germany – that my father moved us back across the country to Indiana. Davis was a brilliant young Black woman with a big Afro, acknowledged membership in the Communist Party USA, and some association with the Black Panthers, though she was too much of a feminist to ever join their organization with its militaristic and misogynistic hierarchy. In Reagan’s California, in the heart of the Cold War, her radical Marxist orientation was enough – this after a journalistic hit job that accompanied her arrival – to get the university’s Board of Regents clamoring for her dismissal before she’d even delivered her first lecture. She went ahead and presented it to a packed hall of two thousand attendees, but despite the objection of a majority of faculty members and at Red-baiter Governor Reagan’s instigation, she was promptly fired.

And from that moment she became a prominent and popular speaker and activist, but also widely vilified and feared. She immediately received a daily barrage of hate mail and death threats, so it is little surprise that, as a self-defensive measure in that gun-friendly state, she might have thought to arm herself. But when three guns, later shown to be registered in her name, showed up in the possession of a Black Panther who died in that fateful courthouse shootout, Davis was accused of masterminding the whole plot. Given the political climate and the presumption of guilt by everyone from local law enforcement and Governor Reagan to J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI and Richard Nixon’s White House, she felt that she had no choice but to go underground. The FBI hunted her down and she was extradited from New York back to California and charged, as stated above, with murder and conspiracy. The recommended penalty was death by execution.

Before she could be tried, fortuitously, the California Supreme Court declared capital punishment to be “cruel and unusual punishment,” and riding a wave of “Free Angela and All Political Prisoners” protests (it was she herself who insisted on the “and All Political Prisoners” part), her lawyers had her give the defense’s opening argument; thus was she introduced to the jury in her own voice, that of an educated and articulate woman relating her own history and the causes and motives that brought her to this moment.

One of the lawyers, when he spoke to the jury about the popular presumption that if she ran she must be guilty, asked its all-white members to close their eyes and conduct a thought experiment: suppose you’re Black (don’t worry, he joked with them; you can return, afterwards, to being White) and, given the long and inglorious history of slavery and Jim Crow, of whippings and lynchings and political and societal oppression, consider whether, with the hyped-up hysteria and pre-judgment surrounding the present case, you would have turned yourself over to the Law.

And the point was also made: you heard her speak, you know she’s an extremely intelligent woman; do you suppose that, if it was her intention to orchestrate such a murderous attack, she would have been so stupid as to buy those guns under her own name? But in any case, that was not what Angela Davis was about; her politics may have been radical, but it was never a politics of violence. And there was not a shred of forensic or other evidence directly linking her to the crimes.

The documentary contained numerous bits of black-and-white footage of her speaking at the time, and full-color footage of the decades’ older Angela Davis speaking in retrospect; among the many other voices, ranging from Reagan and Nixon to fellow travelers and admirers, were a close friend (white) and one or two of her blood sisters.

And what was my pleasant surprise to learn that on the following Wednesday evening, independent of the film festival that brought me there, Dr. Angela Davis was to be present in the flesh, speaking to attendees at Carter Hall on that very campus!

*

And thus we come to my second encounter with Angela Davis. On the afternoon of Wednesday, February 5, I drove through gray skies and steady rain to arrive an hour early for her keynote address, fitting conclusion to USI’s sixth annual Mandela Social Justice Day. She spoke on the theme of “Democracy and Civil Engagement.”

Carter Hall, located on the second story of the student center, is a spacious facility where I was once honored as co-winner of the 2005 Louis Schewe (pronounce: Loo-ee Shoo-ee) Essay Award for a piece on John Dewey’s concept of the ideal conjunction between work and play (at the time I was a high school Spanish and English teacher, commuting from Tell City and working on a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies degree). Leading up to the hall is a concourse that looks out of large picture windows at the Liberal Arts Center. When I arrived it was still lined with a variety of table-booths for the Social Justice Activities Fair that preceded the speech.

The hall was, indeed, packed. Just prior to the introduction, people were being directed to a nearby room with a screen set up so that everyone could see, as well as hear, the speaker. A screen was also set up in the main hall for the benefit of those farthest flung of us. As I walked in, the front section was filling up and I took a seat in the front row of the back section. I pulled out the book I was reading (Ta-Nehisi Coates’s debut novel The Water Dancer) from under my green serape and applied myself to it for a while.

Despite my just over twenty years in the classroom, where I had to be as much actor-comedian as teacher, I have always felt awkward showing up to these events. As far as I can tell, I was the only one alone, surrounded by strangers, though simultaneously among members of a potential community – an activist community, however limited my contributions to it might be. In such moments, engulfed in that initial anxiety, I inevitably wonder if I should have come.

But as Angela Davis warmed up, I was glad I had come. She is a remarkable presence and an engaging speaker. I imagine, even experience a little bit, I think, what it must have been like to be in that auditorium for her first lecture at UCLA some fifty years ago. Her face is more weathered, her hair more white than black, but her style no less dignified and her mannerisms essentially the same. She has a wonderful smile and a disarming personality that embraces the members of her audience as fellow travelers and equals (in her estimation, if not in our own) in the long road of resistance to the brute forces of ignorance, prejudice, and ill will.

I did not take any notes, but relying on what I managed to scribble in my journal the next evening (and on the further vagaries of memory) I can perhaps give a fair impression, at least, of her discourse and message.

A central principle in her thought is the idea of “critical resistance,” which is also the name of one of various activist organizations that she has been involved in organizing. She points out that the term contains a double meaning, but perhaps most essentially the positive sense that lies hidden behind the more common and popular: critical in the sense, not of casting aspersions or putting down or tearing apart, of identifying all that is wrong in a particular argument or line of thinking, but in the sense of probing a subject and daring to ask the bold, the potentially illuminating, questions. Within an activist community, then, and in its relationship with the larger society within which we all live, it is not a matter of any single intellect laying down and establishing what needs to be addressed, but of a collective questioning of each other’s and our own ingrained assumptions. Thus and only thus do we position ourselves to recognize and raise the questions that might – over time, if not immediately – upend the false certitudes that stand in the way of social advancement.

By way of example, Davis speaks of the original focus of her activism: the freeing of political prisoners. But when she and her larger community probed deeper into the “prison-industrial complex,” as they began to call it (borrowing the phrase from an essay by a fellow activist, with its felicitous echo of the very-much-related military-industrial complex), they realized that we need to concern ourselves with the very notion of criminality, which those concerned primarily with keeping order attach to the most marginalized among us: Black and Brown, but also impoverished Whites; LGBTQ communities, in particular trans and other gender-nonconforming people (and none more than Black trans women, who have been so courageous in claiming their space and raising public awareness in the face of horrific violence); Muslims, of course, and the so-called “illegals” swarming along our Southern border.

Anyway, her ultimate goal is not prison reform but the total elimination of a brutal prison system, a complete and truly radical overhauling of what we call criminal justice, but which for so many Americans is criminal injustice. But how is that going to happen, she asks, if we don’t fully and critically address the underlying causes of this mass incarceration?

This points to the interrelatedness, the intersectionality (in the MALS program, in the context of the divided infrastructure of American education, we spoke of interdisciplinarity), of all the existential crises that face us. So that when we work for climate justice or immigration justice or the abolition of prisons – for the establishment of more reparative rather than punitive justice, in other words – we are all engaged in a common struggle. While we may not each be able to address all of those and the seemingly infinite number of other apparently separate issues, we should recognize that they all belong to a single holistic ecosystem, all of it woven together in a single thread, as it were. And by making those connections, by being mutually aware of the larger web of relationships that we all operate within, by somehow discovering how to coordinate those efforts (as Dr. King tried to do by making the radical correlation between the evils of racism, poverty, and war), if we ask the right questions and listen to the concerns others raise to us, we will find ourselves well-positioned to whatever new opportunities might arise.

For instance, Angela asks, who knew that the killing of Michael Brown and the famous pictures of police in riot gear facing off against unarmed Black protesters would give rise to the Black Lives Matter movement, which would become the catalyst for the next stage in racial activism? Likewise, as Davis points out, when she and her comrades were first working on the problems of incarceration and police brutality, none of them were thinking about problems of gender; so that we owe a great debt to the trans and gender-nonconforming communities that have broadened our frame of reference. The more we learn, she says, the more we realize how much we don’t know and that, individually, we never will know. Hence the desperate need to think and act within an ever expanding web of diverse communities, and to engage ourselves critically with the questions that we each raise and that we raise to each other.

Those, roughly sketched, are the main threads of Angela Davis’s thought on the question of democracy and civil engagement. But among other things – of particular note, perhaps, given the associations that led to her original notoriety – I am interested in what she had to say about the important contributions of the Communist Party to a number of social movements in the United States, and in particular to the Civil Rights (or Freedom) Movement. Rosa Parks, for example, whose political biography is portrayed as having effectively begun when she refused to move from a seat at the front of a public bus in Montgomery, Alabama, was actually engaged in the struggle for voting rights as early as the 1940s. But we seldom hear of this, Davis suggests, because their activities were supported by the Communists.

*

While I began this essay musing about my readings in women’s and African American literature, I have to confess that I have not actually read a single page of any of Angela Davis’s several books. But now that I am alerted to the deficit, I am bound to get around to it at some not-too-distant point in my literary-rhetorical wanderings. Perhaps a good place to start – if not with Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003); or Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement (2015); or Feminist Family Values (1996); or Angela Davis: An Autobiography (1974) – would be the book that she says she is currently writing on the convergence of jazz (in her down time she likes to go out to as many jazz clubs as possible, she says) and civil resistance.

The above essay is adapted, drawn, and edited from my journal entries of Feb. 1 and 6 and with the consultation of other sources for occasional details and confirmation of fact. I apologize for any slight inaccuracy that might remain.

As for my long absence (around four months, by now), it can be at least partially explained by a planned left-hip replacement and, some six weeks later, a second surgery precipitated by the inconvenient discovery of an infection. Through six further weeks, from home, of daily trips to the local hospital for antibiotic infusions via a PICC line in my right arm, I rested and read a lot, but did no writing of any note outside of my journal.

Anyway, with this contribution, I announce my return to public literary activity. With any luck it won’t be another four months before you hear from me again.

“… a multitudinous, joyous, and peaceful march …”

These momentous words – spoken this Saturday morning, October 26, 2019, by Chilean president Sebastián Piñera – come in response to the more than a million peaceful citizens who yesterday, October 25, swarmed the streets of the capital, Santiago, and other cities throughout the country in protest against rising inequalities and punishing economic policies. I have just had the pleasure of listening to the crucial part of his speech in Spanish. Here my rough translation:

“The march that we all saw yesterday, a multitudinous, joyous, and peaceful march, opens great paths and hope for the future. We have all heard the message. We have all changed.”

He goes on to speak of giving “true, urgent, and responsible answers to these social demands from all Chileans”; he also promises, “that if circumstances permit, it is my intention to lift all states of emergency within 24 hours of next Sunday”; and then, perhaps most significantly, he has asked all government ministers to step down so that he can put together a new cabinet best able to put into effect policies to best address those “social demands” of the people.

There are a couple of caveats there. But before I get to them, and to some pertinent background, I want to make clear my reason for this writing: because I am incredibly inspired by this latest action of more than a million Chileans – an action now praised by that the same president who, days earlier, had declared that the police and military forces he had unleashed on protesters were “at war with a powerful and implacable enemy” (Wikipedia, “2019 Chilean Protests”). Now, having discovered that his government, through its social and economic policies, was actually at war with the Chilean people, he has had a change of heart. It moves me deeply to see what an ultimately peaceful uprising of citizens can accomplish.

Particularly inspiring to me is the glorious picture of the masses surrounding and ascending a statue, holding up flags – mostly, Chile’s national flag – against the brilliant colors of dawn, at the bottom of my primary source-article at commondreams.org (https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/10/26/over-1-million-chileans-take-streets-demand-political-reforms-change-countrys ).

And naturally I hope that similar millions (millions and millions, consistently and persistently) can produce similar results in my much larger and more populous country. The climate strikes on September 20 and 27 brought out six or seven million people around the world; can we get as many in Europe alone, and more than that in the U.S.? I was a small part of the climate strike, traveling to Evansville, Indiana from my small town in mostly rural Perry County; my ability to travel is at present restricted, so I can’t join the masses in much larger cities: perhaps my writing, at least, will have greater impact, if only for a few.

So I am also inspired by the mass movement that Bernie Sanders has started, and that has been taken up in their own manners by such as the much-maligned and proportionally effective Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib; and I hope that a mass movement of bodies in the streets and at the ballot box will fill the House and Senate, not to mention the White House (and the many state and local races from which change percolates up!), with progressive Democrats and/or Democratic Socialists: show me some progressive Republicans these days and I will root for them, too. But what makes the movement successful – aside from the radical commitment to nonviolence – is the eloquence and the clarity of the rhetorical argument: and I don’t think there are many greater or more eloquent communicators, at the moment, than Bernie, Alexandria, Ilhan, and, of course, Greta Thunberg.

But to get back to the caveats in the Chilean president’s statement: first, the “if circumstances permit,” which must refer, I imagine, to the unfortunate destruction of property and violent confrontation with the police and military. I have read that some civilian death came of people dying in buildings that protesters had set on fire, and I find that appalling. Again I emphasize that the only revolution I support is nonviolent revolution such as occurred in the streets of Chilean cities yesterday. And I regret the unleashing of violence and death from either side. I wish it were not so.

But a couple of points about that. One, violence against people is, according to my set of values, a greater wrong than violence against property; though it would seem, according to many courtroom sentences, that life must be considered much cheaper than property: in particular if the property is owned by the wealthy and powerful, such as when climate protesters destroy the machinery involved in building the pipelines that threaten the safety of their water and our air. Even if they only turn off the valves, or like the recently convicted Plowshares 7 who “‘prayed, poured blood, spray-painted messages against nuclear weapons, hammered on parts of a shrine to nuclear missiles, hung banners, and waited to be arrested” – and who were not allowed, in court, to speak of the moral and ethical reasons for their action; such as, for example, that even limited nuclear warfare, as our own government is quite stupidly considering, could easily lead to the destruction of all humanity (“Because Federal Government Is Allowed to ‘Weaponize the Law,’ Plowshares 7 Found Guilty for Anti-Nuclear Protest,” by Eoin Higgins, Common Dreams) .

Two, in respect to the senseless destruction of even the rioters’ own neighborhoods – of their community’s limited wealth – in riots, I think of James Baldwin’s essay “Notes of a Native Son” about, in part, the 1948 Harlem riots, where he also considers the waste of all that destruction, that “It would have been better to leave the plate glass as it had been and the goods lying in the stores”: “It would have been better,” Baldwin writes, “but it would also have been intolerable, for Harlem had needed something to smash. To smash something is the ghetto’s chronic need” (see my blog essay of Sept. 21, 2014 for a much fuller treatment of Baldwin’s essay).

Likewise in any community boiling with barely suppressed resentment over the vast income disparities that exist in places like Chile, Brazil, and even the United States: when it boils over, destruction is probably inevitable. Thus the necessity of a strong rhetorical argument, as I mention a few paragraphs above, coupled with strong community outreach and organization to channel and redirect that rage in directions – nonviolent directions, one would hope – that might actually yield a more positive result.

“If conditions permit,” then, is a possible escape clause that Piñera’s government might use to go back on his promise: any slight occurrence, even one provoked by police or military forces, or by saboteurs posing as protesters.

Then there is also the caveat of time. It isn’t clear to me if the “next Sunday” means tomorrow or the Sunday after tomorrow, but most likely the latter. That seems to me like an unnecessarily long time, one that adds to the possibility of some excuse not to go through with the promise. And there is always the question of who will the new cabinet consist of, and then what measures (or half or quarter measures) they will take to address those socioeconomic issues.

I remember how disillusioned I was when, at the beginning of 2009, Barack Obama assembled an economic team that consisted of the very criminals who had created the financial disaster: on the precarious assumption that, since they broke it, they were the ones to fix it. Even so, I gave him the benefit of the doubt and kept hoping for the best. Now I hear how he continues to boast to the oligarchs about how his policies sure delivered them the goods.

So the Chilean resistance will have to stay alert. Do everything possible to keep from a resurgence of violence, but also to call the government – with more millions back on the streets – on any bogus retreat from its commitment to change.

As do all of us. One of the sad lessons of history is that the same rhetorical arguments in favor of progressive democratic governance have to be reiterated, re-taught, and reinforced with each new generation. Because, without any doubt, the forces who oppose the people’s interest will be out in power to repeal any gains that we might have made.

That is the ultimate “forever war,” I suppose. The one that cannot possibly be escaped.

“All for one, one for all!”

One of the great pleasures of being a grandfather, for me, has been taking the grandkids to the theater. The latest of these excursions took place on the afternoon of Sunday, October 20 when Nadina, our middle child, and her two oldest, Adria and Max, joined Anita and me to see the University of Evansville Department of Theatre’s presentation of Megan Monaghan Rivas’s play – inspired by the novel of Alexandre Dumas – The Three Musketeers.

And the early reviews are in, starting with the youngest: “That was a great play!” said Max, who at almost-eight can be easily distracted, but was enthralled with the numerous fencing scenes – just as I had anticipated, which is why I thought this would be an ideal play for him. He is quite engaged himself in the martial arts.

Adria, for her part, at ten a more thoughtful and reflective viewer, commented to me afterwards: “It should really be named The FOUR Musketeers”; and to my comment that, well, d’Artagnan only became a musketeer in the final scene, her rather mature response: “But didn’t we all know from the beginning that she was going to be?” The girl does have a point; she isn’t a bad reader of the dramatic (con)text.

And to the alert reader of this essay I now answer: Yes, that was a she that we all knew from the beginning was going to become Musketeer #4! For, as Diane Brewer explains in her “From the Dramaturg” note in the program – in the spirit of Dumas’s comment that he had written “‘history as imagination would have it, not history as it really was’” – Rivas’s characters “live in a version of 1625 that accepts 21^st-century possibility: the workplace is categorically open to all women.”

The play is infused with this 21^st-century idealism. A particularly moving scene to me is when d’Artagnan first sees Constance and stops in her tracks: love at first sight, beyond any doubt, and later there is that sweet exchange of furtive kisses between two young women. How good and how natural that all felt to me! How happy I was to see it! (I have always been, for good or ill, something of a romantic.) And isn’t a woman’s or a man’s right to love whomever they will love, regardless of gender, as good and as natural as a woman’s right to equal status with a man in the workplace?

Be all that as it may, it is no small matter to find among the original three musketeers one woman, and in the fourth another. And then there is the heroic and ill-fated Captain Treville, who ably commands the lot of them, but loses her life in defense of their creed: “All for one, and one for all!” – she, too, is a woman. (The contract represented by that slogan, incidentally, does not apply solely to each other, but also to king and queen and to their realm: the all of their community.)

Which leads us to the bigger question, the larger one for which Captain Treville dies. In a late scene, when d’Artagnan has been unjustly slandered as a traitor to the crown, one of the musketeers tests her; and she answers eloquently, ingenuously, utterly convincingly, of her faith in that communitarian spirit of one for all, and all for one that is so absent in the corporatist individualism and economic tyranny that today deflect attention, from the profiteers’ theft and their warmongering, by turning the tread-upon masses against each other.

Perhaps most notable is this play’s distinct anti-war and anti-violence ethos. This is evident in the queen’s repeated admonitions to prevent France, her adopted nation, from being drawn into a disastrous and destructive war, but first of all in the early scene where one of the musketeers teaches the new applicant to control her temper, to learn to use her head and always to exhaust all possibilities in the effort to avoid bloodshed. I have not read Dumas’s novel; I suppose that something of this must originate in its pages. But in any case, the frequent bursts of sword-fighting practice among musketeers and musketeer-in-training exude a great sense of play, of competitive sports and sports(wo)manship, albeit in preparation for the negative potentialities of the bearing of arms.

Twenty-first century possibility, indeed, is colored by the increasing divisions and uncertainty of the present reality. “All for one, and one for all”? We seem to be a long way from any such communitarian ethic today, but then, so was the reality of Dumas’s and the historical King Louis XIII’s France; though at least they didn’t have to worry about the apocalyptic threats of nuclear war and climate suicide.

Brewer comments, anyway, toward the end of her note, on the specific historical moment of Rivas’s work on this play:

“Rivas was in the midst of writing her version of THE THREE MUSKETEERS during the contentious aftermath of the 2016 US Presidential election. The triumph of a leader who pledged to build a wall between ‘us’ and ‘them’ infuriated her. She saw the idealistic value of ‘all for one, and one for all’ slipping away. But, like Dumas, she foiled the pressure of despair and returned to her writing with a vision of a world that could – and should – exist.”

And so must I return to mine. Presently I am at work on some fragments of what might become a novel. We shall see. The writing itself is an act of hope, a sword-thrust against despair. Perhaps there has never been a better chance than now to reshape society into something resembling what it should be. While my contribution is small (I did also make the hour-long journey to Evansville on September 20 to attend the climate protest, though that is the least I could do), the writing has always intended to make a meaningful contribution to the artistic record of our times – to shine light on human meanness and frailty, to be sure, but also to illuminate the possibilities of a better collective future.

Never mind that we never quite realize that ideal and perfect society: if we imagine it together, why can’t we do far better than the dark path down which the moment’s prevailing powers have us careening?

BOOK NOTES: Apollo & Athena; River; Brewer’s Odyssey

Apollo and Athena Walk into a Bar (Art Meets Science) is the title and theme of volume #22 of the Southern Indiana Writers’ Group’s Indian Creek Anthology Series. The members of the group are, more or less annually, invited to write on a particular theme, which is reflected in the title. As a relatively new member of the group, I have had work appear in this and the previous two volumes. For the last two of those three I have also been the editor (see Dec. 19, 2017 and Oct. 31, 2016 blogs), though without the technical and artistic skills of T. Lee Harris, who is responsible for this beautiful cover and much else, the physical book would not exist.

As I write in the introduction to this volume, the boundaries between fact and fiction, like the border that divides science and the various arts, are often blurred:

“The success, for instance, of any prophet, or physician, or atomic physicist, might be fired as much by inspiration as by reason; as the invention of any fabulist or poet might be touched by reason as well as by imagination. The borders that seem to separate these and all things – including the many faces that we and the gods wear, over the course of a day or a lifetime – are confused, fluid, flexible.”

In respect to the many faces of the gods, the title story by Eli Cobb (author of The Guardian Series: Sacred Words; Lucifer’s Tears; Neptune’s Poison; Raven’s Conspiracy) is most direct, as I write after the asterisk:

“The Apollo and Athena who occupy the shadows of master-fabulist Eli Cobb’s title story would seem to be a more plebeian sort of god or goddess than those ancient inhabitants of Olympus. And Cobb’s Neptune (or Poseidon), who in her story has opened a bar ‘centuries ago, back when the Old Gods first fled the Mortal Realm,’ spends his evenings bringing wine glasses to a perfect shine and fulfilling the bartender’s roles of listening to woes and telling jokes. At center stage and no less vividly drawn is an all-too-human Cambion lawyer who, while continually interrupting Neptune’s joke, presents a mirror image to the joke’s subjects who remain offstage, never uttering a word but exuding, nevertheless, a distinct aura.”

My own contribution to the set is a hybrid story-essay called “The Map Is Not the Territory”: “whose uncommon mix of components includes the American Transcendentalist philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau; the perspectivist literature of Miguel Cervantes; the paradigm-shattering science of quantum physics; and the mystic yet profoundly pragmatic secrets of Eastern religion. But if that mixture sounds intimidating, relax: it all begins with the anonymous ramblings of a certain Everyboy, whose journey from boyhood to the dawning of old age provides the glue that holds all of those unruly elements together.”

It was by no means certain, as I entered into the thick of this story-essay’s content, that I was going to be able to make it work, but somehow – at least according to its readers, so far – it seems to have largely succeeded. The interweaving of this loosely autobiographical character and some of the texts that have mattered to me along the way (including my own early prose poems in a chapbook called Quixotics, excerpts of which appear on this website under “Publishing History / Book Excerpts”) was a deeply personal exercise woven into a fabric of internationalism, in much the same way (I hope) that Greta Thunberg’s very personal campaign for climate sanity has grown to such worldwide significance.

Certainly I am here concerned with the same big issues; and I have to tell myself that the tiny drop of my writing might have 100^th of the significance of that wonderful young woman’s reasoned yet emotional activism. As I write, I am planning to attend an event in Evansville, Indiana or Louisville, Kentucky (I am situated about half-way between those cities, in the midst of mostly rural or small communities).

But I digress.

“The Map Is Not the Territory” is a piece of my writing that I have been quite pleased with. So I hope that a few of this blog’s readers will take a look at it and the other fine material in these pages. The anthology also includes work by Jen Selinsky, T. Lee Harris, Brenda Drexler, Andrea Gilbey, Bonnie Abraham, Marian Allen, Jeannine Baumgartle, and Janet Wolanin Alexander.

*

(from my personal journal for 9/7/19; edited / adapted):

Waters of the Amazon

River, by Esther Kinsky, translated by Iain Galbraith. 2014/2018. Oakland, California: Transit Books. 357 pages.

This novel caught my attention, recently, by means of a review at the Reading in Translation website. It stood out to me because of the reviewer’s emphasis on its slow, meandering pace – a pace that gives precedence to close observation over plot. Indeed, it is definitely a book for slow, thoughtful reading. One of my first impressions was its being a worthy exercise in Thoreauvian mindfulness. Close observation, close reading. Read too quickly (or fail to stop and look back a couple of paragraphs – or even further – to clarify something: that is an important part of mindful reading, as good teachers of reading comprehension remind their students!) and you will miss some subtle transition from the present moment on the margins of bustling London to an earlier moment in the Big City itself, or some other memory of a childhood in Germany, on the Rhine – and back again, as often as not. So, perhaps unsurprisingly, it is a book that demands to be re-read – as I hope to do in the not too distant future. I am anxious to capture it whole, if still not swiftly, uninterrupted by the other books I was already into as I started this.

The plot, such as it is, the plot of the present moment, at least, involves an unnamed narrator who for vaguely defined reasons has abandoned her previous life in the city and disappeared into the semi-wild hinterlands, more or less between country and “town” among marginal beings living marginal lives in their poor neighborhood and in closer proximity to nature. The central plot, simply stated, is her life (and its intersection with a few others) from the perspective of this outsider among outsiders; her gradual and unassuming integration into that community and then its dissolution in a series of leave-takings, including her own to an undefined somewhere in Eastern Europe.

But this story is told in fits and starts, in seemingly but not entirely random order. And as happens in the real rhythm of ordinary lives, the past intrudes: the narrator’s memories, which can occupy whole chapters as jogged by circumstances and reflections. She reflects on her past, to be more clear, as she takes long strolls along the River Lea and its environs, in relation to other rivers where she has spent time. The central conceit, then, is a narrative that flows somewhat in the manner of a river’s rush toward the sea – and ours, transient beings as we are, toward death – which along with war and its resultant displacements and the question of borders, among other things – is a constant concern.

Borders

“Every river is a border; that was one of the lessons of my childhood,” our German-born narrator says, through the median of Esther Kinsky, our German author. “It informs our view of what is other, forcing us to stop in our tracks and take in the opposite side. […] What if the river, beyond its capacity as a border created solely by its own course, is also a border between countries? Could its flow, the incessant press of its water toward an estuary, be more powerful than its significance as a line fixed to determine belonging? Does the water carry something away with it, leaving the stateliness of state-borders diminished and apparently subject to depreciation? Isn’t it saying that what we really belong to is the gaze toward the other side?” (pp. 167-8)

Later, in a similar vein but from a different angle, our author / narrator writes:

“[…] I stood in the estuary between the sea and the river, between the rows of lights that were Sheerness to the south, and the gay blaze of colour that was Southland’s lit-up amusement park on the northern shore, between the enormous cupola of unbroken darkness over the sea in the east, and the distant glow of London in the west. Nothing began here, and nothing ended, and maybe that had been the message of the blinking lights I had seen from Sheerness” (p. 343).

Nothing began here, and nothing ended. The borders – arbitrary lines – between here and there, between river and estuary and sea, between one shore and the other, are blurred. The Río Grande (not one that our narrator visited, but what more vital one is there in our own national discourse today in the U.S.?), beyond its capacity as a border created solely by its own course, is a border between Global North and Global South. But could its flow be more powerful than its significance as a line fixed to determined belonging? Isn’t it saying that our gaze, in El Norte, toward El Sur – toward other – is what we really belong to? Isn’t it time we realize that our national boundaries are as arbitrary as the divisions we make of the human race into fictional races? Isn’t it time we realized that we are all inhabitants of our only planet Earth (there is no planet B – forget about Mars!) and that we drown or burn or go up in a nuclear haze together?

Into the ears of our national and international leaders, not to mention the media and the general public that is so busy (in Neil Postman’s words) “entertaining ourselves to death”? (That is, if not working to “make a living” until we drop.)

The real star of this literary show is the beautiful language. Iain Galbraith, in his translation, certainly captivates. Esther Kinsky’s German original, for its part, has won a number of prestigious prizes. It is comforting to know that there is still a market for thoughtful literature in no particular rush to reach its destination. And at least some market for literary translation in this country. We surely do need a broader range of perspectives than is presently allowed into the national discourse. River, for those who have mindful ears to hear, is a vibrant contribution to that potential dialogue. And perhaps, when or if I do get around to that second reading, I will stop on more examples of that beautiful language and on some of the episodes that have most touched me.

*

(from my journal for 9/8/19, edited and with additions):

Brewer’s Odyssey, by Michael Corrigan. 2019. 336 pages.

My personal acquaintance with Michael Corrigan (though we have never met in person) goes back close to a decade and a half when he was a fiction editor at New Works Review and my essays, fiction, and translations began appearing in its pages; and he continued to be during the year that my son Jonathan and I took over for a few issues. During those early years, I read an essay Michael published in those electronic pages and which would grow into his memoir A Year and a Day, about the initial year of grieving over the sudden death of his beloved wife. I found the essay, and later the book, profoundly moving. Subsequently I also read his earlier autobiographical novel, Confessions of a Shanty Irishman, which I also enjoyed (see my blog for Aug. 14, 2012).

This new book is fiction – a novel – though intimations of those other books are present: the protagonist, Thomas Brewer, has lost his wife, also suddenly; he, too, is Irish American; he too is based (when not in the United Kingdom) in California where Michael grew up, went to university, and learned about all the cut-throat decadence of life in and around Hollywood, where both have tried their hands at screenwriting (Brewer with one spectacular success, though he abandons that life fairly quickly; Michael, I don’t recall what modest success or failure).

Anyway, quite opposite of Kinsky’s slow-paced, meandering book, this one is action-packed, at its core a thriller-police drama involving, among other things, a couple of terrorist plots and violent conflict with the hired thugs (motorcycle gang members, who finally come over to Brewer’s side) of the movie mogul and transparent Trump figure who runs for and briefly becomes governor of California. There is also plenty of sex, love, and what ends up being a very poignant story of selfless and sacrificing friendship. I also appreciate all the allusions to literary writers from Shakespeare to James Joyce and from Homer to Virginia Woolf and even Franz Kafka, to name a few. But the novel reads like a popular one without putting on literary airs, though the protagonist is also toying with the idea of writing a serious literary work.

“‘They say my book-in-progress,’” we read at one point, “‘was neither a popular novel nor great literature but something in between’” (p. 64).

I wondered, at this point, if this passage might fit the present work. And perhaps it does, though by the end its literary heft has come through rather powerfully. I am persuaded that it is something of a literary novel in disguise. Though it probably does not rise to the level of great literature. Not in the way that Mario Vargas Llosa’s little police drama ¿Quién mató a Palomino Molero? (Who Killed Palomino Molero?), for example – in my inexpert judgment – does.

But the main thing to know about Thomas Brewer is that he is a man who violently dreams and whose dreams sometimes seem to predict an imminent future. It turns out, as neurologist and love interest Susan Fredericks helps him to see, that this condition may be partially explained by a neurological ailment called REM Sleep Behavior Disorder, which might lead to the debilitating condition – similar to Parkinson’s Disease – called Lewy Body Dementia; which is what Robin Williams had and which led him, rather than go down the terrible road he faced (and that he didn’t want to put his wife through), to commit suicide. But the neurological diagnosis does not explain the weird prescience, which seems to have something of old Celtic magic in it.

The novel’s first paragraph presents, in a sense, a perfect microcosm of all that will follow, and is mirrored by the epigraphs (by Shakespeare’s Hamlet who has bad dreams; by Bob Dylan who dreams of mermaids; and by Stephen King who fears losing his mind) on the facing page:

“Thomas Brewer has done this before, moving like a pinball through a surreal nightmare only to awake in a different physical place. In this dream, he is drowning in a natural rectangular pool until a dolphin pushes him toward the light surface and onto a board. Then Brewer lies in a fishing boat at sea, an old man watching as a topless woman with seal-like skin pulled up around her waist and legs breathes into his mouth, bringing an ocean scent. Something warm fills his brain. With a gasp, Brewer wakes up on the floor ten feet from his hotel bed. Feeling groggy, Brewer slowly dresses and packs. On the nightstand, a photo of Brewer’s late wife, Ruth – astride a white horse – looks back at him. In his mind, he hears Ruth’s voice: ‘My God, Tommy, these nightmares will destroy you.’ He will pack her photo last” (p. 3).

Some readers have found the introduction of the REM Sleep Behavior Disorder and Lewy Body Dimentia distracting. Indeed, when I first read the synopsis on the back cover, I wondered if it didn’t sound a little like a slightly moralistic movie on the Hallmark channel or something, which is faithfully followed by a public service announcement about where to go to get help or to read more about these terrible conditions.

But, aside from introducing the character of Susan Fredericks, psychologically intriguing in her own right, I think I have discovered a more important way in which the inclusion of this particular diagnosis is justified: the fact of all that the diagnosis does not explain adds depth and complexity to the plot; the particular dream that comes true in the good doctor’s life, and which may have helped her to avert a personal tragedy, is one example. Together, the inexplicable and prescient dreams are what – in juxtaposition to the medical diagnosis which proves true, in its progression in Thomas Brewer’s mind and body – fortifies the feeling of other-worldliness that ties the scientifically knowable to the Celtic mythology that becomes so vital: to matters of the heart and of imagination, in other words, from which science also takes some inspiration.

So, despite my early misgivings, I am not bothered by this medical intrusion into a story that seemed to be about clairvoyance: the trick is in the juxtaposition and then the reconciliation of the two. Nor am I concerned with the lapses of time that occur in Book Three, the novel’s shortest section and which serves the function, more or less, of epilogue or denouement.

Finally, it should be said that this is not a book without a social and political conscience, though this consciousness never overtakes the story itself. And while the Trumpian figure of Donald Morrison may seem a bit too transparent (at one point he even repeats, verbatim, one of Trump’s more infamous statements), the objective tone of the narration, and the distinctness of this figure from the one we know so well, save it from mere political caricaturizing and even show a bit of restraint. Likewise, while Brewer is himself horrified by the justifications people give for buying into Morrison’s authoritarian campaign, this segment of our population in the run-up to the 2016 election is given their voice and even their dignity.

Again, as with the juxtaposition of medical diagnosis and mystical / mythical perception, the novel’s presentation of characters within their sociopolitical condition is extremely complex. The CIA agent who at first afflicts and then seems to befriend our protagonist is one example of that complexity. Brewer himself is a complicated fellow, shaped as much by his near death in a terrorist attack as by his profoundly affectionate love and respect for several women, one of whom – a bisexual, but principally lesbian (perhaps pansexual?), Irish woman with a notably Celtic name – will become his end-of-life caretaker.

One of those women, too, his British literary agent, is a black woman who dies in childbirth and whose infant daughter might also be his. But she also might belong to a black African and Parisian student who is thought, initially, to be a terrorist. Without giving away any more than the back-cover blurb suggests, the question of whether he was – and if so, when he became – a terrorist is a disturbing plot element that lends much sociopolitical significance to the novel. The frank depiction of how black Muslims in France are racially and religiously profiled – distant mirror, perhaps, of the afflictions of black and Muslim people in our America – is excellently drawn.

I only worry that the way things do play out in Paris might only reinforce the prejudicial attitude toward every black Muslim as potential terrorist threat, worthy of constant surveillance and harassment, however circumspect and well-mannered they might seem. But the degree that Brewer is haunted, throughout the rest of his life, by his responsibility for those events might tend to redeem both himself and the novel from that weight of conscience. His actions are completely understandable and perhaps even partially excusable, within the complex web of circumstance in which he finds himself trapped.

Thomas Brewer, then, flawed and troubled as he is, emerges in my judgment as a man of integrity. Likewise, whatever the book’s flaws might be, I think that by all reasonable standards Michael Corrigan’s novel holds up pretty well. It is itself a book with a moral or ethical conscience, one that strives to be more than just another popular thriller, and for the most part succeeds in that endeavor.

So if a thriller-police drama with a heart and a touch of literary sensibility sounds like something you would like to curl up with of an evening, or if it sounds just right for someone you love, I think that Brewer’s Odyssey would make a fine holiday gift – for yourself or that other someone.

Saturday Afternoon Taffetas: new poetry by Lynn Strongin

Note: Today I am doing something out of the ordinary and giving my space over to Lynn Strongin, whom I worked with in my days as managing editor of New Works Review about a decade ago and whose work, since then, I have occasionally commented on in this blog. I have always found her poetry, in particular, stunning in form and beauty as well as full of significance. Beyond that, I will let the poet’s own brief introductory notes – and this wonderful series of linked poems that follows – speak for themselves:

Poet’s comments and credits: I got the inspiration for this from the Monterey Senior Centre’s flyer for summer. “Saturday Afternoon Taffetas” is the name of one event, or group. so it is nostalgic in impulse. But then I take a good hard look at that bland-land of the fifies and see it with an ironic sharper eye than nostalgia would encourage. As Roethke says, “I have stolen these things from sleep, partly”: This feeling exists partly in time, partly in dream. One floats thru the poems. There is the nickelodeon. There is also the desire to live “transcendently” or slicing thru time but not with a knife: with a soft rustle of taffetas so that the rainbow colors on this particular type of silk can shine over the whole scene. But the transcendent always slips away and we are left here on earth “to defend our toys” which are our books, our bicycles, our paintings: all that composite of earthly pleasures which holds us together.

I have had poems published this past year mainly in Australia’s Otoliths, edited by Mark Young https://the-otolith.blogspot.com. Brett Alan Sanders and Mark Young have chosen poems which have a strand of vision in common: these are poems which try for transcendence of earthy things by representing a visionary view of the whole. Call it magical realism in poetry. One of the poems in Otoliths (Issue fifty-one, part one, southern spring, 2018) is “Foundling Hospital,” which begins: “FOUNDLING HOSPITAL STANDS in Lamb’s Conduit Field / London” and this echoes my own hospital stay in 1951 upstate New York.

Saturday Afternoon Taffetas

 

Feelings exist in time, and in a dream

The things I steal from sleep are what I am.

                                                             — Theodore Roethke 

 

SATURDAY AFTERNOON TAFFETAS , the fifties, blandland opening out into depression

In wave upon wave

The carousel even greyed out:

An ash bloom covers all we love as if the war blew over from Europe and sifted its crematory ash upon us

Moving forward, passionately, desperately wielding pastel balloons like swords:

Here are boys with bright red ones like the blood they draw from a nail on a fall.

Here are pale pink ones for girls with rag curls a black nanny took half an hour to put in.

Put another nickel in to the Nickelodeon

All I want is loving you like music mowed music.

Nausea, the child clutching her stomach after the fair.

The Kewpie doll never greets to be hers

Nor does she ever

Ever grab the gold ring from the carousel’s center.

Always bridesmaid never bride:

Buck teeth

Which a mouthful of metal is too much for daddy to afford.

In fact, mummy can’t afford daddy any more

& shoves him out the back door

to be piled with the garbage in vast black bags.

Where is the gold?

Mother came home tired & took off her hat at the stove.

So the wrath, the colors Saturday afternoon taffetas

petrel flying south

like the deepest shove toward love may tire, but never grow old.

 

Credit: Pinterest

THE PETREL FLIES NORTH

Beyond birth

Before death

Old skills curling up like dried apple rings.

Your face darkens tenderly at what you see in me:

A quality of devotion that can make the secular sacred:

The lamp with rip in silk shade which mother bought in one of my bouts

Tearing in the shape of a country, what country? Maybe Italy, maybe Spain

Pay truly strict attention.

My poems just manage to be unwavering

As the quality of love’s gaze.

If it weren’t for you, the yearning for connection,

The instant of love I would want to lie down forever & a day with only iron city’s crown.

 

LIGHT DISAPPEARS IN YOUR EYES like an island, sinking:

Love’s strict, small land

Unwavering as a lit match

Its reflection a palsy, silvery tremor.

Compelling dramas come out of small moments, living as a foundling, “Is it true, a priest is a house lit up?”

Trying to become visible

After a life dependent on not being stared out.

Cattedrale de Redemptor

My recollections blur:

mirrored

by silver-nitrate water.

To endure vision one must burn.

To receive love one must turn

From all earthly things

Unto the road to Emmaus where Christ will be crucified

Until one realizes in a split-second it is the tawny, the barefoot poverty-stricken redeemer who has been casting a shadow, a holy linkage

finger tips touching, beside them all along,

 

I KEEP having visions re-visions:

Orangeries, southern country: France to the lower parts, Spain

Turning one page of my life from Italic back to Garamond, then Iowa book face

Yes! Nail on the head, hit the jackpot:

Plainness, like good stout Indigo cloth, is my home, my core.

Weather turns rain into ice leaves fail

The whole land is carpeted in brilliant chain-

Mail darkening at dusk.

There is a musk to the peach smell

Is it

In this room?

Thing links to think.

Voice to noiselessness

A caress to loss:

Like a monk’s almost barren life

Devoid of person

Aside from the one writing who will never see the self except in reflection.

 

COUNTING TIME LIKE LOOPS OF ROPE

I recall braiding my cousin’s hair, large curls of shiny coal.

This is the quiet that follows the storm session

Like shadow the child.

Congealed ice makes another child: the one I held

Now melted by early sun

But can be resurrected again at first touch of warmth.

 

Young Lynn

Once when I was free, unbroken

The words need hardly be spoken. . .

I turn back my French cuff you phone

Like the fool I must find the button: but instead am half-

Finding the right

Light bringing it home

(we are the shadows where the bees swarmed)

we are the smoke burned:

Counting loops of rope

Circle locked in circle

Like hope.

 

BLIND FORWARD

All thoughts of love which should, but do not, bring reprieve.

So, leave:

Misery, pain in the butt a rifle pointing me out of this room

Into an annex a messenger:

Like Carrie Ten Boom who was butted out & crouched for years till she re-formed her spine

Deformed into the letter “S” for Sorrow, for Salvation

By the time she unfolded herself like a giraffe from a nap

Like a tall person from a chair she had memorized a lexicon of poems

On cigarette-scarred vellum paper. Hence, she learned

The alphabet backward & forward

Stark bloody naked: and Carrie, she

went for the time in years having served her term

To enter the remains, blind-forwarded, to freedom.

 

I AM IN SEARCH of the transcendent,

Because I almost found it once as a child.

Slippery as a trout it would slide away.

That rare person, a quiet American, am I

Destined to live among shadows, be counted one of them

As I enter the labor of little roses to bloom

Musical tone, a voice with character

Skinny shadow like the kid I was: destined to

Bloom

By a sickbed

In a darkened room.

 

I MUST DO what I was born to do:

Make lightning flash with a question.

Why do we see each other so little?

Thru glass, thru morning, thru evening’s lightning

& nightfall’s burning off the chill sorrow with lamplight or oil.

But oil can ignite.

You are young in that you can lift a sparrow woman filled with oceans of love

Small lakes now

But shrunk as only velvet or silk does.

 

Can we ignite sand paper?

My virus is six-sided a crystal with voice

Like that of a choirboy before it drops

The crystal sings. His hands circling his mouth, his voice box unshattering:

Rings

Is the difference between human beings & God that God cannot stand continuance

Needs variety

Yet repetition

Makes the heart beat

The waterwheel sweep water blue as sky

Run, run.

No sooner were you a young man, happy than the nature of things rushed into fatherhood, martyrdom, now old age

Which is a disease.

All your life you were striving to hold fast the moment

Up against a major force: the art nothing but the trying to catch the one moment

Mood, one light, momentary beauty of one flower, one woman. You can still fish. Can still love.

In the true spirit of the Lord, leap up amid a whirlpool of change.

 

THE TRANSCENDENT ALWAYS SLIPS AWAY slides as silk, as the doe in your hands while you try to rescue her

Thus threatening the mother will fright & light away into further bushes.

Is God in back of it all?

Am I threatened with a fall?

A call from the beyond

Made me, as a girl, bound

Into boyish ecstasy.

Now at eighty

I count hoops for zeros all years: fears, tears

The transcendent slips away, a vapor, like a cup of tea.

 

On one side of the mirror me

On the other—do I know that thee

Less solid than vapor

But shimmering:

Must I step into the ring

Of cooling fire

After the burn of a life

Is scalded away:

Only the solid remains

Stainless

Trenchant

An unmistakable knife.

 

FLASH POINT a liquid’s lowest temperature of ignition

I step thru day, with the permission

Of heartbeat,

Genes,

Limbs:

Two lost in childhood one gained

Making memory freeze frames everlasting.

It is all wrong to imagine paradise as never-changing bliss:

It is the table set for two

Evening falling like a ladder we must climb

To get out of haze

Into light:

Two knives, two forks, two spoons:

It is anger cooling at loss running, a grayish thread, thru the hours:

It is hunger at nothing but bread & tea.

It is one memory after another climbing the tree

Like a celestial monkey.

It is the ponder

Heart which will rise

As the lover flashes on the eye:

Without tease

Or host but love

It is invitations:

Green lawn

Starched devotion

Pure allowance

Lower than longing:

Kiss, another kiss: it is nothing other:

It is this.

 

Tapestry, by Sofia Rodionov

ANY THOUGHT OF HUSBANDS vanished long ago

An elegant stave The Saturday Afternoon Taffetas:

Unwavering

Almost fixed

But not like iron.

Give me your undivided attention

Father said.

I did.

What came true was one of the tales in “Canterbury” but nun, cleric—all combine now

To tell me one brilliance, a stained glass fairy story.

 

I climb down the remaining one story of childhood

Into cool air

Milking over

Like mist on the limbs of a lover.

I ride the dream pony of night toward land further than sight:

These imagined gospels are not four

But many more.

 

I would not be outfoxed by paralysis.

I rose I rise I give a lover’s kiss:

I sink

I seize the tree branch as it cracks

Till broken

We both float in water: hair of coal, of flax:

Am I son? Or daughter?

By my voice, daughter. By my ardor something utterly other.

 

IF YOU HAVE TROUBLE OPENING YOUR EYES on waking

I do too.

If anxiety peaks like a roof I do too:

I have a slur in my speech, a halt like a boy readying to leap a hurdle, pumping energy

Heart hard-beating, a trip hammer.

When my speech broke was it a mini stroke?

That closet you flash open which looms & lights back a field of gold garments

Is collected against despair;

I bought, after a bout of spinal pain, that

Gold silk vest from twice-around assembled, like index card to read, quite near sweaters of every color for every soul food, each mood: in a mustard color from “My Sister’s Closet.”

I wear my tunic on dark days walking straight toward the rain:

It’s like two people falling in love separated by a border.

Couplets are like lovers: I speak the lines again & again.

Am I a Francis at heart, the holy fool?

To be the spiritual dumps requires energy: pumping biceps to pull yourself up

Where there is a glory like a halo about: here,

Holy weeds line my grandmother’s attic:

Each shot is a mystic’s dream-prayers, dream-shout.

 

I AM HERE TO DEFEND my toys

The petrel must fly north

Thru storm

Thru south

Thru birth.

We are born to die: you and I.

The kids here just discuss how to paint the past

Over a campfire

Flames reflected in canvas

Death on its way

But who could see

The stallion start & snort?

It was an ashen cindery day:

I could taste both.

We are the smoke when the bees disappear:

Saturday Afternoon Taffetas

Legs that walk before polio took soap to a pure reflection of a child

Her legs cut off like a paper doll’s

Yet I am here

At eighty still to defend my joys:

The Kewpie doll I never won

The boys untaken the untaken boys

The final gasp of a child crying, she could still walk

Her windpipe was being born: it was nonetheless God coming close, closer, ecstasy’s broken toys.

 

BELIEVE IN GOD THE WAY YOU BELIEVE IN ICARUS & starlight

Foolproof reading by authors for prize.

Who will be my companion on this grief journey?

Not thee, nor thee, nor thee

Eating Pride week pancakes: doted with sugar crunchies, rainbow speckles.

Send my roots rain.

We need each other.

Pilgrim, you are bruised & wounded

I am dreaming of stones

The heavy shoulders of a life with the cello.

After my year as a mystic I remember praying, why part?

She writes, aged over seventy “You never got over me. I thought I got over you.”

Is this a game of silence? Or throwing stones, small ones?

A heart which relents

observes Sundays which still exist in time:

We are moth-lovers

We pray in & outside. We pray in snow, in rain:

Between midnight & dawn

There are small talks with God

Until the belief in God & Icarus takes a plunge

Scatters stars of foam.

 

Lynn with birthday lilies

Lynn Strongin 

British Columbia, Canada

July, 2019

© Lynn Strongin 2019

Rumors of the blogger’s death have been exaggerated

The author among his books, ca. 1990

With apologies for my months’-long silence (I will not burden you, dear reader, with excuses or explanations), and with a promise of more frequent communications, I offer this potpourri of short pieces for this Independence Day holiday. The first three were published in or intended for local and regional newspapers; the fourth, excerpted from a book review in an old journal entry.

Perry County News (Tell City, Indiana / July 1, 2019)

On the state of our nation

On and around this July 4^th, perhaps we could pause from our celebrations to reflect on the actual state of our nation.

It does us no good to wave the flag and chant “USA! USA!” while refugee parents and children wash ashore on the Rio Grande; while infants and toddlers shiver on the concrete floors of concentration camps in our own southwest; while the chaos we’ve sown in the Middle East continues to spread like a cancer.

Before you dismiss me as a traitor to our republic, please know that I speak as a father and a grandfather whose heart breaks continually when I consider the future that we’re making for all of us.

When children misbehave, responsible parents don’t look the other way and pretend they need no correction. Nor should we for a nation in the throes of our more base and violent instincts. Instead of on the wings of our better angels.

Perhaps we have always been two nations, one that welcomes and absorbs the world’s downtrodden and the other that responds with fear and force of arms. One that nourishes and assists those already among us and the other who locks them up and casts them off.

Maybe it’s time we reconsider our thirst for empire. In how many countries do we need military bases? Why must we control everything and every place from the Gulf of Mexico to the Persian Gulf and China Sea?

How many hundreds of thousands (or millions) have to die before we consider the 3,000 dead on 9/11 fully avenged? How many cities do we have to “liberate” by reducing them to rubble?

George Washington advised his successors to avoid foreign entanglements and wars. President Eisenhower warned us about the dangers of our “military-industrial complex.”

Yet here we are, after almost 18 years, in an ever-widening and apparently endless conflict. Who are the profiteers in these forever wars? Why have we ceded to them the power of our national wealth and well-being?

What if, instead, we brought home those trillions of dollars to pay for all the social programs that we’re endlessly told we can’t afford?While the military budget gets yet another blank check. Is the value obtained greater than the value of free public education and medical care?

What if we were to stop making machines of war and instead build the infrastructure for a new green economy?

Because yes, there is a climate crisis. We’re already in the midst of it. The science is in. The Arctic is thawing, water levels rising, and the intensity of storms increasing – all of this more quickly than science predicted.

Instead of hiding our heads in the sand, what if we were to mobilize against this threat with the same energy and patriotism that we mobilized for WWII?

Perhaps we could even empty those concentration camps and our for-profit prisons; embrace our refugees and our better angels; become a nation to truly celebrate.

June 8, 2019 (unpublished)

On control of one’s body and one’s vote

Edith Hamilton, in her Mythology, tells of a time in ancient Athens when women could vote. In a contest between Athena and Poseidon to see which would be the city’s patron deity, the women’s vote went to the goddess and the men’s, to the god. Thus ended that feminist franchise.

So it goes. Now in Indiana, rules Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court, it’s okay to force women who have miscarriages to bear the expense of burying or cremating the fetal remains. Women in Indiana and around the country have already been prosecuted and jailed for miscarriages that may or may not have been deliberately or accidentally induced.

Likewise, in both northern and southern states,the effort to make it more difficult to vote – especially for black, brown, poor, and student populations – is rampant.

All of this is about power. About who gets to exercise it over whom. Do we want to live in a theocratic republic in which 6-week-old fetuses with fictitious heartbeats have more power than the women who carry them?

I wonder what would happen if, instead of waging endless global war and padding the pockets of profiteers, we showered that wealth on those who need it. If we make women and children more secure in their lives, might the problems of abortion and feticide take care of themselves?

Perry County News, December 31, 2018

Picasso’s Guernica was inspired by the bombing by General Franco’s forces, during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39),, of the town by that name in Spain’s northern Basque region.

No room at the inn?

I will be glad if our troops do come home from Syria. I will be happier if they return from Afghanistan, Iraq, and other foreign places as well. But I will truly rejoice if we give up the whole pretense of peace by perpetual war and really have a go at diplomacy, at respect for international law, and at laying the foundation for a moderate prosperity for all of our people – in a world presently threatened by massive economic inequality and by nuclear and climate extinction.

Yes, I know. I’m talking like a red-eyed liberal, a religious Utopian, even a democratic socialist. But consider that it was a Republican president and WWII general – Dwight Eisenhower – who warned us against the encroachments of the military-industrial complex that has all but swallowed our politics. And I challenge the masterminds of post-9/11 foreign policy to demonstrate how their bloody schemes have made us a more secure nation – or how the past century of wars to end all wars, or to save democracy, or for peace by show of brute force have made our world more safe for anyone.

So I agree with the President’s stated intention of bringing the troops home from Syria, if not with his murky logic. I remain horrified by the illogic of his “America First” doctrine, tinged as it is by fascist and white-nationalist history and ideology.

Let’s be honest about one thing: we cannot at one and the same time be a “Christian nation” and one that proclaims, to refugees the world over, that there is no room at the inn. How ironic that, after a century of battling the real or perceived threat of Communist totalitarianism, so many of us now clamor for the erection of our own Berlin Wall across the entirety of our southern border – migratory wolves, butterflies, and wretched humanity be damned!

The “caravans” of mothers, fathers, and children leaving places like Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador – countries that our foreign policy, military and economic, has helped to ravage – have banded together for mutual support and as a legitimate act of nonviolent protest against the hopelessness of the lives they flee. They have never been the band of rapists, murderers, and thieves that the President and others have claimed. They are scapegoats and political distraction from the real sources of our trouble, not least of which is a military budget that serves the interests of war profiteers before those of regular citizens and our all-volunteer armed forces.

The truth is that these problems and others are inextricably related. The longer we rely on a culture of punitive “criminal justice,” race and class bias, and military adventurism, the more remote and unlikely any chance of creating the kind of social and economic security we claim to value.

As our political leaders pretend that we cannot pay for social “entitlements” that benefit our elderly, our children, and our poor – yet somehow no sum is too much to throw at an already bloated military budget – we should remember President Eisenhower’s identification of guns made and rockets fired as “a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed.”

excerpted from Personal Journal (August 8, 2009)

The Accidental American: Immigration and Citizenship in the Age of Globalism, by Rinku Sen, with Fekkak Mamdouh, 2008, San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 248 pages.

“Where we enter this world,” Rinku Sen writes toward the end of this important treatise on U.S. and world immigration policy, “is an accident of birth; where we are when we leave it is equally unpredictable” (p. 120). Which leads to this equally vital summative point: “We are all accidental Americans in some way” (p. 221).

Rinku Sen, an Indian-American woman, editor of Color Living magazine and director of the Applied Research Center, is, I gather, the shaper and framer of the book, with Mamdouh’s collaboration. He is a Moroccan immigrant and co-founder, first, of the Restaurant Opportunities Center of New York (ROC-NY) and, later, co-director of the Restaurant Opportunities Center United (ROC-U), the first national organization for restaurant workers. Much of the book’s narrative structure is centered on Mamdouh’s experience as an (at-first) “illegal” immigrant, and the dramatic change it took after 9/11/2001. His life, through a gradual awakening to the need for activism for immigrant workers, in particular, and for all workers, generally, becomes linked to community organizer Saru Jayaraman, a first-generation Indian American.

A secondary, but no-less essential narrative follows the political work of Cecilia Muñoz, who, while Mamdouh and Saru are working for worker and immigrant rights within the restaurant industry, is working in Washington to push immigration reform on a larger scale as the national mood takes a sharp and hostile turn against it.

Referring to Mamdouh’s and Muñoz’s stories, Sen writes in her introduction: “Together, these two stories reveal an ironic truth: even as Mamdouh’s work on the streets of New York continually broadened his community, the discussion of appropriate federal policy went the opposite way” (p. 10).

The central thrust of the book’s argument is that while neoliberalism has globalized markets, it hasn’t done the same for people. The very concept of illegal people is flawed, she argues, and globalization won’t be complete until the borders are open for people and power equalized between industry and workers.

Seem like a naive position? Read the book’s well-researched and well-articulated argument – and consider with new eyes the unsustainable fantasy of a neoliberal economy that privileges markets over people and allows for that market’s deliberate distortion by and on behalf of the most powerful and moneyed interests.