This Day in History Archives

Real Talk with Dead Folks: Here’s to W.G., Absurdist O.G.

My interest to learn more about him was piqued when I learned he was described with the following words, not necessarily in this order: “exiled, absurdist, brilliant, perverse, singular.”

You can’t honor the living if you don’t honor the dead, and large swaths of the current death machine work towards erasing them. One way to erase the past is to erase history. Another is to sanitize it and put our heroes on pedestals. That’s why I like to engage in conversation and occasional correspondence with dead folks. From time to time, I will write letters to dead artists, writers, and other notable or unknown people. Sometimes, the occasion for this arises organically, from a question or reference in the air. Other times, I may discover that it is the birthday of a person of interest and be moved to strike up a conversation. This can be especially fruitful when it offers an opportunity to engage with someone previously unknown to me, as is the case with today’s entry.

Here’s something I learned this morning as I was wondering what today’s post would be about: On this day in 1904, writer Witold Gombrowicz was born in Poland. My interest to learn more about him was piqued when I learned he was described with the following words, not necessarily in this order: “exiled, absurdist, brilliant, perverse, singular.” I decided to make him the subject of my next “Real Talk with Dead Folks,” which is one of the Breadcrumbs exercises that I find generative, especially when I am tired of my own ideas.

Dear Witold,

I’m sorry we couldn’t do this in person. Perhaps you would not have talked to me, but I think I would have enjoyed listening to you, at least for a little while. Probably I would have found you a bit too obsessed with yourself and this question of authenticity, and perhaps you would have made assumptions about me when you learned that I worked in schools, which are the places that perhaps best fueled your sense of the absurd. We’d both have our reasons, I’m sure. Fortunately, when it comes to this sort of work, liking or not liking does not need to factor into capacity for deep appreciation.

You claimed that the best lessons of school were in the breaks, when your classmates beat you. Your education, you said, was reading ––forbidden books, especially–– and loafing. You were often ill. Puzzling over your dreams, the symbolism and possibility within them, you considered a possible way out. Of what? I wondered. And you said, The whole farce! Then I knew I loved you.

It was perhaps one long project you were on, a quest to get to the “real” of you. You kept a daily public diary also, but you preferred different lenses: sometimes polemic, other times self-absorbed lens. I am skeptical of claims to authenticity, but I have a soft spot for those committed to an aesthetic with relentless dedication. For this, I can love you also.

They called you “creepy as Poe” and “absurdist as Kafka” and you relentlessly criticized their forms––all of them, calling them covers for the conventions you despised. Refusing to be tamed, you cultivated immaturity as wisdom, imperfection as an antidote to the fake. Every artist has their obsessions; your grail was authenticity. “I am a circus,” you said, “what more do you want?” Hah! I thought. That’s all I need to know.

You raged at the teachers babbling clichés and poked at the nonsense of their often-hollow aphorisms, so devoid of meaning as to be deemed universally palatable substitutions for truth for anyone who prefers the easy nicety to real thinking. “Chirp, chirp, little chickie!” your hero announced.

Were any of your elders spared your criticism? You called out Schulz on his assent to conventions, you joked that Proust “found more in his cookie. . . than they found in years of smoking crematoria.” You called Kafka “unreadable” and lacking sex appeal. You called your diary the faithful dog of your soul. You did have a few nice things to say about Kierkegaard.

Rejecting institutions of honor, you baptized yourself a self-made man, planned a life of exile in obscurity, and were soon after celebrated. But Europe broke your heart. You were a bumpkin among sophisticates, and you died soon after.

Relentless in your quest not to be a type of writer, but yourself, you left behind a legacy at once brilliant, hilarious, dangerous, redemptive, perverse, irreverent, heartfelt, and voluminous. Today I celebrate your defiance of easy classification, and I celebrate your love of the absurd.

Titles, for example, you did only randomly. You chose names for your books like one names a dog – “to tell one from the other,” you said. You had, after all, the one faithful dog of your soul, your daily letters, and this was after all, the singular work of a life, continuous and ongoing in all of its embedded and wondrous contradictions.

You said, “Serious literature does not exist to make life easy but to complicate it.” You reminded, “Don’t be fooled by your own wisdom.” You honored paying attention, observing “the more profound the awareness, the more authentic the existence.”

Thanks for leaving a trail. I’m glad to meet you. I love the way you challenge people to examine contradictions, how you challenge pedestal-making with irreverence, and how you combat calcification of statues built as stand-ins for truth by dancing with the fluid and absurd.

I hope to see more of you in years to come.

Follow-up: It didn’t occur to me until this morning to make this a series on Breadcrumbs. Until now, I hadn’t articulated the impulse to be in conversation with dead people I never met, nor had I acknowledged that it’s something I tend to do in my notebooks and in my head fairly regularly. I’ve done this once before on the blog, in a memo to artist Hieronymous Bosch, posted here: “Curious Sends Memo to Dead Artist of Living Work.” I look forward to more of these.

The source I used for this exercise is Ruth Franklin’s excellent New Yorker article about the writer, “Imp of the Perverse: Witold Gombrowicz’s war against cliché.”

The Spectacle and the Living

In the day of the spectacle, paying deep attention is a radical act.

On this day in 1936, the Olympic Games opened in Berlin. Adolf Hitler presided over the opening ceremonies. He had gone to great pains to outdo the Los Angeles stadium of 1932, building a track and field stadium to seat 100,000 spectators, among other impressive arenas. It was the first televised Olympics, the first torch relay, and the Nazi Chancellor saw the games as a tremendous opportunity to promote his nationalist agenda.

He didn’t speak of killing or deathcamps. He just made sure that Jewish athletes were barred or otherwise prevented from competing. He tied the image of the noble and beautiful athlete to state power and his voice to high-minded ideals invoking language of unity, proclaiming, “The sportive, knightly battle awakens the best human characteristics. It doesn’t separate, but unites the combatants in understanding and respect. It also helps to connect the countries in the spirit of peace. That’s why the Olympic Flame should never die.” It’s fair to assume that if he couldn’t stir millions with invocations like this, he wouldn’t have been in a position to orchestrate the terrors that followed. With this in mind, it’s worth considering and reconsidering what moves us, in order to notice who and what gets erased when the primary motivating impulse is grandiosity.

After the games, the Olympic Village was repurposed for use by Nazi armed forces, as a camp, an infantry training school, and a hospital. Because of World War II, there would not be another Olympics for twelve years.

Also on this day, in 1981, MTV began broadcasting. The first video to be aired was “Video Killed the Radio Star” from The Buggles, featuring these famous lines:

In my mind and in my car

We can’t rewind, we’ve gone too far

Pictures came and broke your heart

Put the blame on VCR.

The line of connection is the power of the image. It calls to mind Marshall McLuhan’s reminder that “The medium is the message,” and it’s worth noting the relevance, considering the diverse anxieties of living in an age where the speed and proliferation of messages is so omnipresent. Many a would-be dictator has benefited from the reality of censorship through noise. From the standpoint of anyone doing creative work: of art, education, growth, a movement–– sheer noise is one of the chief weapons of the anti-life force of the machine that works to prevent this growth. Soul and species survival, in this era, necessitates certain questions: what invisible truths are living behind what is projected in this moment? Who and what is not featured? Who and what is erased?

Erasure is diffuse and happens most effectively when it can go undetected. Any ecosystem that supports the systematic erasure of certain life forms above others is by nature unstable in ways that threaten the entire ecosystem. Where certain lives are systematically erased, all lives live under constant surveillance and threat of erasure. It’s one thing to talk about fighting for life, about defending the threatened, but the problem with this rhetoric is that both invoke the same tired images of victory and conquest that support the erasure at hand. We can’t defend what we’re not noticing. To look well and deeply is an act of courage and humility. So is listening.

Also on this day, Carlton Douglas Ridenhour was born in Queens, NY. He would later adopt the stage name Chuck D., form the group Public Enemy in 1985, and rise to international fame while delivering a call to social consciousness and resistance against the forces of state-sanctioned violence and racialized social control. In the summer of 1989, the group released “Fight the Power” with this timely message:

You say what is this?

My beloved let’s get down to business

Mental self-defensive fitness

Don’t rush the show

You gotta go for what you know

Make everybody see, in order to fight the powers that be

Lemme hear you say

Fight the power

In an age of senseless invisible killing on a global scale, with the stakes as high as they have ever been, the act of paying attention becomes a radical act. It’s tempting and gratifying to the ego to invoke the same tired images of the fight, the raised torch, the path to victory. But the spectacle is not in service of life. The spectacle, as employed today, is generally in service of another agenda. Spectacle in and of itself is not necessarily the problem, but it’s not the solution, either. You could argue that the lyrics above, powerful as they are, are part and parcel with spectacle.

A spectacle designed to move people to resist corrupt power systems, in a world of spectacle, is important and necessary, but the real work is deeper. Children, for example, who need lots of care, will celebrate the wild, crazy uncle that comes to visit every so often, who raises them high in the air, gives piggy-back rides, speaks in funny voices, and feeds them candy before leaving. The kids are reaffirmed with a sense of magic and possibility, but they’d likely be in danger if they were left solely in his care. The care is the slow, unglamourous, painstaking work of the sleep-deprived parent, day in and day out, one ordinary moment at a time.

What to do with these torches, these stirrings to victory, the way they are all wrapped up in our idea of transcendence? A good symbol is better repurposed than neglected. One suggestion may be, to bring the torch lower–– maybe to the level of the campfire. To create a space for the opposite of spectacle, where the quiet magic lives, so real we can almost miss it. A place of listening and sharing, under the common sky, unified by a sense of being small beneath it. And against all the spectacles of false strength, to recognize a common fragility, and a call to protect what needs protecting, not with the posture of a blowhard pretend strongman, but through the patient, slow-moving, and restorative acts of the nurturer.

What They Said While They Were Leaving

Time to move some boxes, one said.
Another claimed he was missing a passport, unable to fly.

Artist Paul Klee, who died on this day in 1940, often invoked a childlike perspective when addressing matters of life and death. I’ve long loved the angels he painted, full of flaws and worries, trapped in human-like, sometimes animalistic forms. This morning I was looking at one of his last works, “Death and Fire” and the timing of this happens to coincide with my review of a book Words at the Threshold: What We Say as We’re Nearing Death, by Lisa Smartt. I bought it years ago. Thinking of a character was my official reason, but the interests of a character are always covers for the questions we carry. I pulled it out again today, because I have a character facing death, and I am struck by the inherent playfulness of so many of the last words recorded in Smartt’s accounts, culled from documentation of many hospice patients over time. There’s a sense of play in the voices of many of the dying, even at the “most serious” moment in life. I am always drawn to those for whom seeming opposites can coexist in the same space: joy and pain; life and death; wonder and heartache.

*Death and Fire* by Paul Klee, Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons.

The following are notes assembled partly from found phrases in the book and online, considering what people say as they are leaving:

Time to move some boxes, one said.
Another claimed he was missing a passport, unable to fly.
One claimed to be the master of his fate, the captain of his soul,
then called Bullshit! and left.
One asked for chocolate shavings on her tongue.
Another, a cigarette. Pancakes with whipped cream.

Then come the metaphors. Listen.
Get ready for the big dance!
Lots of new construction over there!
Magic time: watch me disappear!
See the little duckies now, lining up.
They are setting the table now.

The ones who saw it as a battle went hardest.
Another dreamt of being surrounded by crows.
It’s a murder! he said, laughing.

Some heard music, exclamations of wonder.
So many people! Can you tell me where the platform is?
Can you get the door for me?
Where do you want me to put these boxes?
Next stop, real hope! Look, they left the ladder.

Some saw butterflies, the number eight, the color green.
Others said nothing, but reached with their arms, up and out,
eloquent as infants in their expressions of need.

On Ratcatcher’s Day

It was the plague. Everyone was scared. Grief-stricken, too, but there was no time for mourning, what with the bodies piling up. They got angry instead, mean and stingy.

According to the Robert Browning poem narrating the legend of “The Pied Piper of Hamelin,” the 22nd of July was the day that the children of Hamelin were led away by the Pied Piper, as revenge against the townspeople who refused to pay the sum promised for ridding the town of its rats. As a result, this day is known as Ratcatcher’s Day. Learning this, I had to follow what breadcrumbs I could find.

“And so long after what happened here
“On the Twenty-second of July,
“Thirteen hundred and Seventy-six:”
And the better in memory to fix
The place of the Children’s last retreat . . .”
– Robert Browning, “The Pied Piper of Hamelin”

The clothes alone, let me tell you. They must have been made of stripes of six or seven different colors stitched together.

For real?

Someone must have really loved what he did with that pipe.

Well, those people should have paid him.

It was the plague. Everyone was scared. Grief-stricken, too, but there was no time for mourning, what with the bodies piling up. They got angry instead, mean and stingy.

Show us the bodies! They said. But he had none. He had led the rats to the river.

No one paid. So he played for the children next. They followed him and were not seen again.

To where?

Some say a cave.

I heard it was a mountain.

I heard Transylvania.

I heard the river.

Oh no! I heard what happened was that they decided to pay after all, this time triple the amount, in solid gold, and he brought them back.

Where was the last place they were seen?

“Pied Piper Silhouette” by Miki Jourdan on flickr under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No-Derivs 2.0 Generic license.

It’s called the street without drums. To this day, there’s no music or dancing allowed.

Yeah, but where does this story even come from. I mean, really?

There was a stained glass window in The Church of Hamelin. It’s gone now.

The window?

The whole church. Anyway, a record from the late 1300s reads, It is 100 years since our children left.

It could have been disease.

The Pied Piper as the symbol of death, the Danse Macabre.

Could have been a landslide, a sinkhole.

Might they have been recruited or sold to the German empire, to work the land in what is now Poland?

It’s possible. There are legends of those who would lure people away. Children of the town could be, after all, a term that applied to anyone, regardless of age.

What about dancing mania?

A well-documented social phenomenon, a relief from the stresses of poverty.

Ah, St. Vitus’ dance.

Or ergot poisoning from spoiled crops.

St Anthony’s fire.

Could be typhus.

Or an ancient ritual, long forbidden, disguised as illness.

Suggestions abound. Answers are few. But what is clear is that there were risks far greater and more mysterious than the more familiar illnesses of the body. There were diseases of spirit, of mind, and while it was common among those who preferred pretend certainty over more fluid depths of understanding, to minimize or dismiss certain risks outright, it is worth considering the costs of these errors, the sudden silence that must have blanketed the town like a stifling and otherworldly heat, when it was discovered that the children were all gone.

Landings

One small step, one giant leap. Magnificent desolation . . . Lunar dust like powder. It was no trouble to walk around, one said. Now the flag, now the rod. The surface resisted.

On this day in 1969, Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, followed shortly after by Buzz Aldrin, while Michael Collins maintained a solitary lunar orbit. The world watched. Meanwhile, the mother of Vivian Strong, shot dead by police at fourteen, was grieving. It’s the age of the Cold War space race, also Stonewall. Demonstrators in the U.S. and worldwide call for civil rights, an end to war, racial justice, housing and labor reforms. The U.S. has been at war with Vietnam for fourteen years at this point, and it will not end for another six. Millions dead, scorched earth. It’s the age of the Biafran war in West Africa, The Troubles in Ireland, a Lybian coup underway, the Weathermen gathering in Chicago, the Rozariazo in Argentina, the first U.S. draft lottery since WWII about to begin. John marries Yoko and Chicago Police officers shoot Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, among others. Medgar, Malcolm, King: all have been assassinated, now. Blind Faith rocks Hyde Park, Franco closes the border, The Stones release Let it Bleed. In a talk to teachers delivered that year, James Baldwin opens with an acknowledgement of the moment at hand. Let’s begin, he says, by saying that we are living through a very dangerous time. The following is a morning meditation on this moment and its lasting relevance to ours, culled from readily-accessible details about the Apollo 11 mission.

One small step, one giant leap. Magnificent desolation, one remarked.
Lunar dust like powder. It was no trouble to walk around, one said.
Now the flag, now the rod. The surface resisted. It got only two inches in.
There was fear the flag would topple on camera or fly off. It did neither
in the moment. I am not sure where it is now. Salute, phone call, prayer.
Then a sixty-meter walk, photographs. Core samples collected: here’s soil,
plus rocks. Three new minerals discovered, later found also on earth. Now
a plaque. We come in peace, if not in peacetime. There was a speech prepared
in the event of disaster; the ritual would mimic a burial at sea. Each, of course,
had their own, If I should die–

Meanwhile, one orbited the moon alone. Not since Adam, he said, regarding
the extremes of his solitude. Although, it’s worth noting that accounts of Adam
suggest he was surrounded by a kingdom of earthlings preceding his arrival, not
to mention sunlight.

The return was fraught, there was a long list of disaster scenarios. It landed
upside-down, for example, but there was a plan for this. Then came quarantine,
then the parade, prayers of thanksgiving, cheers.

It is possible to be awed, as Abernathy was, by a magnificent achievement,
while simultaneously enraged that it was pursued while other relatively simple
requests were denied. Care for the sick, shelter: for children, fathers, veterans,
grandmothers. Food, some relief for the caged. Some end to the caging of bodies.
Some recognition of the unnamed dead. To ask, voice hoarse with rage and grief,
who commands this mission, who makes this leap? Just as it is possible
to frame a gorgeous picture of a newborn and place it on a distant desk,
in a corner office, to profess love and mean it, but never change a diaper,
never walk a wailing body back to peace.

Circus Flames

It was a Friday afternoon, mostly women and children. It started right after the lions, during the Flying Wallendas.

On this day in 1944, the Hartford Circus fire broke out in a Ringling Brothers tent, during an afternoon show attended by thousands in Hartford, Connecticut. One-hundred sixty-seven people were killed. It was common practice at the time to waterproof the tents by coating them in a solution of paraffin wax dissolved in gasoline. The event is depicted by Stuart O’Nan in his 2001 book The Circus Fire: The True Story of An American Tragedy. The following is an imagined account from the perspective of a surviving member of the staff.

“Circus” by Joshua Zader on flickr under a Creative Commons attribution 2.0 Generic license.

We’d been short-staffed since the war started, always running behind.
A few years before, a fire in the menagerie had killed our lion. No one
could forget the elephant’s screams. You could call that an omen, or you
could wait until the trains ran late and our first commandment was broken
and the show did not go on. The land got a taint before we started, leaked
from the first audience, the one that never saw the show. You could feel
it, like the first notes in a film where the mummy wakes up, before it moves.

It was a Friday afternoon, mostly women and children. It started right after
the lions, during the Flying Wallendas. The bandleader
played Stars and Stripes Forever, our smoke signal for danger. Don’t panic
folks, but you know how that goes. The big cats got out okay, but their chutes
blocked the exits. Some just ran in circles, calling the names of the ones they
could not leave.

As the flames consumed the tent, wax dripped from the roof, burning tiny
faces, flailing arms in summer shirtsleeves. The papers
called it the day the clowns cried.

Juno to Jupiter

I am flying over you now. They warned me of your belts, threatening radiation, how you will blind me with them if I stay

On this day in 2016, NASA launched the Juno space probe, a twenty-month survey of the mysterious fifth planet in our solar system. The name was appropriately chosen in honor of the Roman goddess, Juno, wife of Jupiter and mother of Mars, the god of war. She is associated with may roles, including protection, pulling back the veil, and childbirth.

To mark this day, an imagined conversation.

JUNO to JUPITER
What formed you, anyway? All these years, you’ve never mentioned it. Do you even have a solid center, or are you all atmosphere and wind, gravity and radiation? You’ve drawn these clouds around you, hiding, but I see you, Jove.

They know you for your sky, your thunder, your place on the throne, but I’m not here for any of that. I want to know what you’ve got hiding under those blankets of clouds, and about your waters. Can they be breathed, and what moves you?

It’s taken me years to reach you. Eons before I left, I would wonder, watching, hearing tales of your thundering greatness. But I have to say, from a distance, you looked so small.

I am flying over you now. They warned me of your belts, threatening radiation, how you will blind me with them if I stay. That great red spot of yours, now like an eye, then a mouth. How easy to mistake that for a center, when it’s just your most dramatic atmospheric spectacle, nothing but a war of opposing winds,

a stage play for the battles that so impressed our son. I have to tell you, he has really gotten carried away. It’s all he can do, even when he calls it by another name––peace, containment, deterrence. Can you do something? Show him, it’s only a distraction, a relatively recent storm, a blemish on your surface and not the polestar of your magnitude.

Again with the thunder? Well, don’t say I didn’t tell you. Besides, they say it’s shrinking.

I’ve got to go soon. Before I do, I will take in your atmosphere, your magnetic field. You will cover me in dust again, answering as you always do, with nothing but weather and wind.

Writing in the Dark, and What it’s Like to Be a Bat

One of the best things about being a writer is getting to hang out in a space of researching these questions.

One of the interesting challenges of keeping this daily practice of posting here, is noticing how often I face a sense of having nothing to share. Earlier this week, I began some early notes for what I think are two distinct coming long-term projects, and I also revised a poetry manuscript. Those are unwieldy and not appropriate for publication here. I thought of sharing something I found this morning, but I had written it years ago and part of my intention in showing up here is with new pieces, ready or not. I want to practice what I am trying to teach myself, which is, among other things: that even when you feel like you don’t have enough, or feel unworthy, there is always something new to share. Just because. It’s hard to learn this because the world is so much. Mostly, I want to avoid walking out there, especially with some creative infant child in my arms.

So, baby steps. I am coming up on forty days into this practice (Hah! I think as I write this, The length of a Biblical desert fast! What’s next, visions?! Hang on!) and after an enthusiastic day one, I have been having plenty of good practice in noticing that every day there’s a block, and every day, something new. By this point, I have learned to expect that the next time I get writer’s block (either in five minutes, one hour or tomorrow morning), I’ll just keep writing through it. Sort of like breathing through the thing that starts to feel like despair or laughing while crying.

I feel mostly as though I never have anything to say (if saying means, “All must hear this!”), but I can’t know what I think (and sometimes feel) without writing. As a result, I have lots of backup techniques with which to treat such paralysis. My writing self, I have learned, must be treated like a terrified, sickly child in need of a lot of extra support. I keep books of prompts handy, and bookmark weird news sites and craigslist ads, also photography sites and art books. Many days, I look up “This Day in History” to see if anything kindles there. If I still come up short, it can be fruitful to try an erasure or a found poem of another text. The worst that can happen from that is that I will spend some time reading a text I might otherwise not read. It can teach me something new.

Juvenile Mariana Fruit Bat by USFWS-Pacific Region on flickr under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 2.0 Generic license

Thinking about what to post here today, I checked my usual places and seemed to be coming up with nothing. But then I learned that it was on this day in 1937 that American philosopher Thomas Nagel was born. I’ve been obsessed about questions of understanding and what can’t be understood, thinking and what can’t be thought through, and (always) with the question of how to be––here, in this impossible world. I jumped at the chance to return to his “What it’s Like to Be a Bat.” The only problem with using this text for found poetry is that I loved so many whole phrases and complete sentences, that I had to leave them intact. I thought about italicizing these sections, as though to give credit to the author, who might very well be appalled at the gross modifications and reductions of this excellent text, the focus of which is largely a question of certain inherent problems in reductionist tendencies. But then, I just italicized the whole thing. It’s an exercise. Consider the words stolen, the arrangement sometimes mine.

But, as I say to the child writer whom I’m trying to coax into writing today’s piece, “Oh, well! It was a good time, wasn’t it?! And no one got hurt!” I highly recommend the process, which if you cut out the time hemming and hawing over what to do, is entirely intuitive and basically involves trying not to think while you pluck out words and phrases of interest. Generally, something like this may be done in 1-15 minutes, which makes it great for a practice exercise. In this case, I made some attempt to honor the spirit of the work, but I took liberties with delivery and nuance.

Caveat: I still don’t know what it’s like to be a bat. But at least I got to hang out in a space of researching the question, which is one of the best things about being a writer.

Consciousness, the mind body problem, is intractable.
Current discussions get it obviously wrong.

Reductionist euphoria is designed to explain, but
problems are ignored. Philosophers share a human
weakness for what is familiar, hence familiar reductions.

Without consciousness, it seems hopeless.
Perhaps a new form can be, in the distant future.

Extremists deny this. It is impossible to exclude experience.
Ever spent time in an enclosed space, with an excited bat?

Now there is an alien form of life! Consider echolocation,
how they whisper with their shrieks, how different from
any sense we possess. What is it like to be a bat?

We cannot form more than a schematic conception.
If there is conscious life elsewhere in the universe,
it is likely that some of it will not be describable.
It would be foolish to doubt that there are facts

which humans will never possess, just as it would to be convinced that the bats’ experience, once thoroughly observed, may be known.

What would be left if you removed the viewpoint of the bat? Here is a general difficulty.There is an effort to substitute the concept of mind for the real thing, to have nothing left over which cannot be reduced. What next? What it is, remains a mystery.

The apparent clarity of the word “is,” is deceptive.
Suppose a caterpillar, locked in a safe, by someone unfamiliar with metamorphosis. Weeks later, a butterfly! One might think a tiny, winged parasite devoured the original, and grew.

Does it make sense to ask what my experiences are really like, beyond how they appear?
Proposal: it may be possible to approach from another direction, separate from empathy or imagination. It would not capture; it’s goal would be to describe.

One might try to develop concepts that could be used to explain to a person blind from birth what it was like to see, and vice versa. One would reach a blank wall, eventually, but still. Possible.
Red is not quite the sound of a trumpet. I am indebted to many people for their comments.

If one understood how subjective experience could have an objective nature, one would understand the existence of subjects other than oneself.

Note to artist-child-self: now go look at bats. If none are available, because daytime, birds will do. Watch. Then later, remember to write again. Do this impossible, necessary exercise of making something even if it isn’t sense, of what you may not know.

Under All the Stars I Cannot Name

What would the world be like, if more people walked around proclaiming their shortcomings in the face of grand ideals?

On this day in 1923, poet Wislawa Szymborska was born. A winner of the Nobel Prize who once observed “perhaps” two in a thousand people like poetry (“Some Like Poetry”), she is celebrated for the way she explores the layered mysteries inherent in everyday experiences.

Sometimes, a great poem can work as a blueprint for a much-needed ritual. In “Under a Certain Little Star” Szymborska explores the ritual of apology in new ways. What would the world be like, if more people walked around proclaiming their shortcomings in the face of grand ideals? It would have problems of its own, of course, but I can’t help but think that it must be a terrific improvement over a world where false certainty is celebrated as strength, apology maligned as weakness, and people are expected to be walking billboards for ideas and ideals, instead of as fallible and ever-changing creatures of flesh, blood, and dreams.

So today, I’ll be using Szymborska’s poem as a blueprint for enacting this ritual of apology, in celebration of the tremendous fallibility and impossible mystery of being human here.

My apologies to tenderness for vowing I could do without,
and to fasting in general for my terrible performance.
May joy not be annoyed with my stalker’s watch.
May those disappeared dreams forgive me
for pretending not to notice when they were
kidnapped.

My apologies to space for not taking what was offered
and appearing unintentionally ungrateful,
and to gratitude for so often making it look like a grocery list and not a flood.

Forgive me, misery, for still caring about the smell and chew of a fresh loaf of bread.
Forgive me, tender skin, for all of these oven burns, now scars.
My apologies to some great concertos I’ve never listened to,
and to those that moved me deeply, for not sitting still.

My apologies to the cold woman on the hard bench,
for savoring these blankets in the morning,
for returning to them with coffee, and lingering as long as I am allowed.
Pardon my reckless heart its sudden leaking breaks.
Forgive me, solemnity, for laughing in the house of death,
forgive me, composure, for my melting face.

And to all the birds whose names I never managed to learn–– trees, too,
all those branched beings I claimed to love but did not plant, to the plants
I claimed to want but did not water, or watered too much, or kept in the wrong pots,
choking.

To domesticity, forgive these blood-soaked fangs. Faith, please notice
when I lose you, how I am always losing you; please come looking when I do.
You can find me by my gait, like someone trying not to limp on a broken bone.
Bone, forgive my insistence on walking through your break.
Pride, forgive me when I can’t control the limp.
Endure, hunger, that I may continue to move, just to feed you.
Patience, don’t blame me for pretending we were sisters even when I didn’t return your calls.
My apologies to all those hopes I inadvertently inspired, which I could not answer.

And to love, for everything.
And to honesty, for the way my eyes so often grow heavy when you speak.
I am beyond excuses, sinking in the pit of my own making. Don’t hold it against me, words,
for crying so much about wishing I had more to give, and then,
when you give all you have, for guarding you in silence
like a dragon over captive virgins he may not know.

Einstein for Dinner Parties: A Post-Pandemic Primer

A little bit of relativity is bound to spice things up.

Hey everybody! On this day in 1905, during what he later called his “Miracle Year,” Einstein submitted his paper, “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,” for publication in Annals of Physics. If you were looking for a clever excuse for a get together (because “I haven’t seen you guys in fifteen months!” is quickly becoming passé), look no further.

Emerging from cocoons of pandemic-induced isolation, we are all obviously wanting to put our best foot forward in every way. It goes without saying that, in certain circles, no dinner party or backyard barbecue is complete without someone referring to one or another theory of relativity. Depending on the number of credentialed or amateur scientists in the room, it may be of only passing importance whether the speaker appears to have any concrete understanding of various details, such as the difference between special and general theories, Cartesian or Euclidean geometry, or any scientific or mathematical principles in general. In fact, broad strokes are often preferable in these situations.

With this in mind, I found an English translation of the paper and made some quick notes, which I am sharing here in the event that others with an eye towards personal growth might be as excited as this reader is with the possibility of making a grand splash in the social scene. Many of us have observed how, judging by the number of at-length discussions entertained, these past fifteen months, about the daily antics of various household pets, we may have unwittingly arrived at some unanticipated level of conversational stagnation. A little bit of relativity is bound to spice things up.

Below, find a collection of found phrases which may be sampled and remixed individually, or (depending on the intoxication and patience level of assembled listeners) in entirety as a sort of pseudo-scientific monologue bound to return you to fond memories of late-night pontifications of stoned peers in college dorms, with the wild-eyed, wild-haired scientist on the wall, extending his tongue (in a move that would later be imitated by Steven Tyler to wide acclaim), right next to a poster of John Belushi in a toga. Cheers!

Take a magnet and a conductor, one in motion, another at rest
and currents of electric forces. Examples suggest phenomena,
suggest the same laws will be valid, though apparently irreconcilable.
Postulates will enter.

Light is always propagated in empty space. Recall the velocity of C,
independent of the state of motion of the emitting body. A luminiferous
ether is superfluous! At least, inasmuch as special properties are concerned,
with a velocity-vector of empty space.

Let us take certain difficulties of time.
Let us consider a train. And my watch.
And the times of events in places remote from any watch.

We might, of course, content ourselves with time values,
as hands with light signals, but this coordination has a disadvantage,
as we know, from experience.

Assume a universal constant
between A time and B time
and a principle of constancy, the velocity of light.
Define the length of a moving rod in space, an observer moving with it.

We imagine.
We imagine further.
We imagine further with each clock.
We imagine a moving observer.

We cannot attach any absolute signification to the concept of simultaneity.
Note well: x, y, k, z –– and a simple calculation we will now imagine,
compatible with principles.

We now inquire
We give our attention
It follows
We envisage
It is at once apparent
If we assume
It is worthy of remark
We have now deduced
Evidently, as to the interpretation

––it is clear.

[Note: it is very important to leave the room at this point. Do not consider alternative views. Do not take questions. Especially do not give in to the temptation to further elaborate. Drop the mic. Exit. Refill!]