Category: This Day in History

How It’s Going

Marginal notes from the killing season.

I keep meaning to write a thing but my bones ache with a fatigue that calls to mind the early months of pregnancy. If it was that, this would be a different sort of note. I am driving in the mid-afternoon, alternately pinching my nose and my earlobes to stay awake. When I finally park, I think I’ll just close my eyes for a few minutes, and then it’s dark.

Democracy in the US is being dismantled from inside the White House but naturally everyone in passing periods between bells keeps on asking one another the usual questions. That is, when we’re not having clandestine conversations in which we agree to either pull the fire alarm if ICE shows up or at the very least to put popcorn in the microwave, set it for ten minutes, and walk back to class. Even though we think that the members of that organization would, if they had any sense or were at all in communication with local law enforcement, know better than to wear their jackets around here. We smile weakly while rushing to get in line for the single working bathroom between passing periods and say How’s it going? Like we don’t know. 

Oh, you know, we say back to each other. In a certain tone meant to indicate a wry awareness of a mutual understanding of professional obligation to carry on. With preventable infections poised for a major uptick, now by some measures is no time to start risking a loss of health insurance––except. But anyway, the kids are still here so who are we to go leaving now?

Where news is still being reported with any measure of integrity, it comes at such a rate and speed that you may find yourself shaking your head with a face in the posture of the sort of disgust that appears to be on the verge of a maniacal laughter, in response to a story that in a time not long before this one would have left you weeping.                               

And you thought yourself to be hardened before, having seen so closely so many sides of men you wished your children would never know. 

But here they are with their slick tongues and weak eyes, coming. The age of changing regimes with tanks and masked soldiers charging into conference rooms is decidedly passé. These killers walk in with khakis and polo shirts, bring donuts for the staff and fist-bump with the confidence afforded only to those at a certain level of remove from the lives of other humans, for reasons that some of us may speculate over, in likely error.

They perform experimental surgeries with words meant to anaesthetize unwitting victims. They call their actions simple cost-cutting measures for the sake of efficiency. They assure everyone they are only after criminals and grifters. Silently, in remote areas, off camera, construction continues erecting maximum-security concrete fortresses capable of housing whole cities. 

One wants to avoid hyperbole in a time like this. The truth is raw enough. But I can’t help remembering histories less than a century old, of another regime overseas, who once used similar language and parallel means––adjusted for context, of course––until arriving at the inevitable problem of exceeding the capacity of state-of-the-art holding facilities. The ovens, when they fired, were not some green monster’s evil plan, but the simplest and most efficient way of dealing with the practical problem of too many bodies than the holding centers could––as the saying went, process.

Which raises the issue again, that monstrous reality of human life and its perpetual inefficiency. The officials shook their heads. Their stomachs turned at the thought of what it meant to stay the course. Yes, of course,they agreed. They could fix this. Just wait, they said. It’s going to be something like you never imagined.

i can believe it’s not butter

on what passes for sacred and current events

It only happened here––margarine, that is (though counterfeits like this are obviously too common to detail)––and the dye that went into it. And the marketing. The cigarette doctors spread it thick on Wonder Bread, and it was indeed a wonder. As was so much in the age of suspended belief––or disbelief, depending on the lens.

Flying cars were coming soon, so the age of advancement seemed like as good a time as ever to learn about the quaint past, like how Abe chopped down the cherry tree and Paul Bunyan sang a song and one of them had an ox, and there are those who will argue with apparent conviction, No, no it was George who did the chopping as though this is a crucial distinction––but it’s easy enough to concede, maybe he was harvesting vital wood for his teeth, and as anyone who spent any time in a grade-school classroom in the U.S. of a certain era can tell you, poor George had no business eating apples in any form but mashed, and that the careful preparation of these was a sensible act and arguably the lovingest thing to do for the man to whom you wish to offer something sweet without increasing the risk of your beloved incurring any variety of deadly oral infection most likely to spread to the brain in rapid time.

And yet, it doesn’t follow that whole histories––or even the accounts of current events, which by a certain logic are one and the same, depending on the extant understanding of the movement of time––should be treated this way, boiled and mashed into easily digestible baby food, unless the point is to hide the crushed contents of the arsenic pill that no one would swallow if they saw it whole.

Over Boneland

Fragments in wartime.

The bones had to set when we broke them and we set them in the earth amid the burn in the skeletons of former homes still smoking to grow new cells we needed––

hold still they told us meaning faith but without work it looked half dead in the mirrors 

we listened for wolves and saved the prints in boxes for someday when we would sort them all 

out into a proper display but what happens when the waters rise 

is that sometimes you have to jump to the next roof and hope it holds. 

Hey Siri, asked in secret, What do you know of shelter?

It was something to do when knowing you had no service did not preclude the need to speak 

we reached

ready for the next ledge she might have said you can wait until its dark 

Siri we might have answered, I believe, to heal our unbeliefs.

Legacy

With Salarrué.

Like a Polaroid shaken in the light, details of the once-beloved artist emerge. This happens just before the record of his life is erased by time and war. His students remember.

He was called unclassifiable, a sphinx without a riddle, a gentle man uninterested in greatness. He loved invented worlds and claimed Atlantis as his home country.

He loved the people of the land and not its titles. And they knew it.

***

In honor of the birthday of the celebrated Salvadoran painter, writer, and philosopher Salvador Salazar Arrué, better known as Salarrué (1899-1975). Reed Johnson’s 2005 article in the LA Times discusses a recent resurgence of interest in the artist’s life and work.

Painting Time

Lights over water.

Of all your characters, you were most interested in Time, the fifth elemental substance latent in all things. You aimed to chronicle its flow by detailing refractions of brilliance on the river and its bridge, one forever changing and the other reaching toward permanence. You noted symbols in the shadows where one overlapped the other: the river, the bridge, their people; the hope of construction and the tragedy of collapse; the continuance of water and this incomplete permanence in concert with all forms, its eye a chorus.

***

Inspired by the work of Ivo Andrić (1892-1975), whose birthday is today.

Between Worlds

With Graham Greene.

You wanted only something hard and certain to hold against the flux when the dark sky of your childhood pressed its wet lips against the windowpane. The heart of the matter, you suspected, was conflict: between this world and the next, sanctity and goodness, but the connection between these defied reasoning. Wanting nothing of the graceless chromium world, only sainthood or damnation interested you, with their questions about unknown and unobtainable Heavens on the other side of death. Yours was a world in slant, angled like the posture of  a desperate man with courage to frighten the flock, in clumsy prayer. 

***

Today is the birthday of English writer Graham Greene (1904-1991), best known for his novels, which often feature characters in states of existential and moral crisis. In honor of this day, I spent time this morning with these two articles: Graham Greene’s Dark Heart (by Joan Acocella, The New Yorker, March 2021) and The Two Worlds of Graham Greene (by Herbert R. Haber in Modern Fiction Studies, Autumn 1957).

Orphic Journeys

With Jan Carew.

In the dreaming month when sea drums echo, here come the opposing spirits of ancestral dead, and here is the body in-between. Also here, a motley collection of other spirits of various purposes and temperaments, each with their own will to interfere. Balancing between limbo and nothingness, the dreamer leaves, searching for an end to exile.

The first sign of trouble was the ignorance of proper names, and then came erasure in the land of wind. Now throbs the ache of missing limbs and thirst beside these drained reservoirs of memory. Dispossessed of a place in the sun, the dreamer enters the tombs, to gnaw at the bones of collected griefs in shattered time.

And then, trespassing through prehistory to recover a lost Eden, the dreamer returns to the hills, and then to the river and finally, to the same sea that was the beginning of looking out and beyond.

***

Today is the birthday of Jan Carew (1920-2017), Afro-Caribbean poet, playwright, scholar, and novelist of far-reaching influence. In honor of this day, I spent the morning with his essay, The Caribbean Writer and Exile, published in Journal of Black Studies (Jun. 1978). This post is assembled using images and phrases found in Carew’s essay. 

Risk of Becoming

With Antonin Artaud.

All he wanted was a change in the human condition. They can laugh at me, he said to the mirror. When it came to the question of what a human might be, he didn’t claim to know. Over time, he grew distant from those who did, and these were many.

All he could say, when it came to describing his predicament was, it’s possible. He sought reconciliation––between matter and mind, body and soul, fact and idea. But people loved their borders, and he kept being detained at the boundaries of his body.

Then he turned on words, preferring only sound detached from the old symbolisms, and he let these run through him, imagining that their resonance, after all, might affect some inside-out change.

Really? Someone asked. 

It’s possible, he seemed to respond, and he did not say a word.

***

In honor of the birthday of French artist, poet, dramatist, and writer Antonin Artaud, I spent some time this morning in Naomi Greene’s 1967 article in Yale French Studies, “Antonin Artaud: Metaphysical Revolutionary.”

Moon Solo

With Jules Laforgue.

You gave voice lessons to your followers, reminding them back to the poetic possibilities of their own idioms. You knew the absurdity of lovesickness, the hopelessness of waiting, and the dogged persistence of stubborn hope. You lamented time’s slow passage even when you found it making still too quick an interval between before and after.

How do you catch a heartbeat? Build a poem to break everything, until what is left is the syncopated feeling of forest voices, to polish the mirror where the Unconscious seeks itself. What escapes the lover’s reach?

You knew the maddening moon, your death, beneath the dripping branches, the work of the web undone; you heard the tragic anthem of the unattended sun . . . like a gland ripped from the throat, and still. You could not keep from singing.

***

It’s the birthday of Jules Laforgue (1860-1887), French symbolist poet whose work strongly influenced T.S. Eliot’s development, and who championed the expansion of free verse. The opening line of this post references an enthusiastic comment of Eliot’s, soon after he encountered Laforgue’s early work in an anthology of symbolists. Much of Laforgue’s later work was not published in his lifetime (he died at the age of twenty-seven, of tuberculosis). This morning, I read Moon Solo: The Last Poems of Laforgue, published by William Jay Smith in a 1956 issue of The Sewanee Review. Some of the images (and italicized phrases) above are from these poems.

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