One of the Reasons Why

Your silence will not protect you. -Audre Lorde

Zbiegnew Herbert

(excerpted from Mr. Cogito:)

Mr. Cogito's Alienations

Mr. Cogito holds in his arms
the warm amphora of a head

the rest of the body is hidden
only touch sees it

he looks at the sleeping head
strange yet full of tenderness

once again
he notices with amazement
that someone exists outside of him
impenetrable
like a stone

with limits
which open
only for a moment
then the sea casts it up
on the rocky shore
with its own blood
strange sleep
armed with its own skin

Mr. Cogito removes
the sleeping head
gently

not to leave
on the cheek
the imprints of fingers

and he goes away
alone
into the lime of the sheets

Remembering my Father

His face severe in clouds above the waters of childhood
so rarely did he hold my warm head in his hands
given to belief not forgiving faults
because he cleared out woods and straightened paths
he carried the lantern high when we entered the night

I thought I would sit at his right hand
and we would separate light from darkness
and judge those of us who live

—it happened otherwise

a junk-dealer carried his throne on a hand-cart
and the deed of ownership the map of our kingdom

he was born for a second time slight very fragile
with transparent skin hardly perceptible cartilage
he diminished his body so I might receive it

in an unimportant place there is shadow under a stone

he himself grows in me we eat our defeats
we burst out laughing
when they say how little is needed
to be reconciled

The Envoy of Mr. Cogito

Go where those others went to the dark boundary
for the golden fleece of nothingness your last prize

go upright among those who are on their knees
among those with their backs turned and those toppled in the dust

you were saved not in order to live
you have little time you must give testimony

be courageous when the mind deceives you be courageous
in the final account only this is important

and let your helpless Anger be like the sea
whenever your hear the voice of the insulted and beaten

let you sister Scorn not leave you
for the informers executioners cowards - they will win
they will go to your funeral with relief will throw a lump of earth
the woodborer will write your smoothed-over biography

and do not forgive truly it is not in your power
to forgive in the name of those betrayed at dawn

beware however of unnecessary pride
keep looking at your clown's face in the mirror
repeat: I was called - weren't there better ones than I

beware of dryness of heart love the morning spring
the bird with an unknown name the winter oak
light on a wall the splendour of the sky
they don't need your warm breath
they are there to say: no one will console you

be vigilant - when the light on the mountains gives the sign- arise and go
as long as blood turns in the breast your dark star

repeat old incantations of humanity fables and legends
because this is how you will attain the good you will not attain
repeat great words repeat them stubbornly
like those crossing the desert who perished in the sand

and they will reward you with what they have at hand
with the whip of laughter with murder on a garbage heap

go because only in this way you will be admitted to the company of cold skulls
to the company of your ancestors: Gilgamesh Hector Roland
the defenders of the kingdom without limit and the city of ashes

Be faithful Go


(excerpted from Barbarian in the Garden:)

The sun gave him a stone
capable of speech and truth
so people called it a creature of the mountains

It was hard strong black and thick

its sides were marked with streaks which resembled wrinkles

So he washed the wise stone in the living spring
clothed it in pure linen
fed it like small child
made offerings as to a god

With powerful hymns he kindled life

Then he lit a lamp in his clean house
swayed it in his arms
as a mother embracing a son

You who want to hear a god's voice
do the same
ask him about your future
for he will speak the truth

(trans.1985)


....This man's poetry nourishes my soul.

Change:

a moment like a gun going off: too much, and too final, to ever guess the reasons why.

The Waste Land I

(courtesy of Bartleby.com)

I. Burial of the Dead

APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering	5
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,	10
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the archduke's,
My cousin's, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,	15
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,	20
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,	25
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.	30
Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu.
Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du?
'You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;	35
'They called me the hyacinth girl.'
—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,	40
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Od' und leer das Meer.
Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,	45
With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,
The lady of situations.	50
Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.	55
I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.
Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,
Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:
One must be so careful these days.
Unreal City,	60
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.	65
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying 'Stetson!
'You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!	70
'That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
'Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
'Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
'Oh keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men,
'Or with his nails he'll dig it up again!	75
'You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!'

Wire in the Blood

These are things only I can tell you.

The shape of your arms, for example,
carving through water, while behind you
the tangled seaweed of your black hair
shows you are drowning.

In this way I am selfish and have always been.
My passion, my desire, my fulfillment.
Not, as you recall, your privacy, your
childhood, which I raped
mercilessly, time and again,
looking for clues of you in a past you could not photograph.

Or, if you are musical, you know
phrasing can change with a breath.

What you do not know is that punishment is not limited
merely to a physical form; it may assume a guise
of phoenix-gold, though beneath its plumage is ash.
The fickle mind trades for comfortable peace, yielding up
the bounty of its ocean: the drowned-dead, the groping hands,
the clipped angels strung by wire to the walls.
And a voice behind me rambles on and on
about the skeletal branches of trees, the coming noxious New York spring,
and the electric power of the third rail.

I am told this is the good place,
where the cliff's edge seems to recede,
but the words begin to fail. What I have lost over the years
is not the stalking Darkness with its hobnailed boots,
but the slipshod ghost of Sympathy that used to wander these halls.
Oh, she puts in appearances, here & there, when least expected, or
so I am told.
Meanwhile her stepsister Pretense, rail-thin and meek,
has since grown fat and strong.

(In this case time is retrospection.
Darkness is the proper noun for the collection of demons I sow,
like wild oats in the thick night, when I deem it right.
Sympathy is what she has always been.
And Pretense is not her stepsister but, more horrible still,
her mother.)

Lithium.
Ativan.
Haldol.
Halcyon.
The last is a phoenix, and the first
possibly that phoenix's name.

You. You were the one
in the orange shirt and black glasses
that compressed your eyes into squares. I dreamt
your eyes would be beautiful and large without them, because
your name is an estate. I was the girl with the timid face,
the chewed mouth. I sat behind you.
For two long hours I considered stabbing you,
right above your clavicles where
bones and blood celebrate the long column of breath.

At a point in the upper arm the blood
beats with such force
that, if ruptured, a man will expire in two minutes.
It quickens my pulse, that.

So it is also with the image of that young man,
boylike in his sedate posturing
bent broken over the hood of a car,
his mangled face in the burst windshield.
Even now I can recall how long his back seemed
taken against the inviting nature of his left hip,
which flirted with the viewer, asking only
for one last handhold before we go.

The thing I need to know from you is how long it will take
before burning hounds appear on the roads again
and the elevators fill with blood
and my nose recalls the damp smell of lime
and every night, mercifully, we all cease--

Review: Regeneration

Regeneration
Pat Barker

"Rivers was roused from [his] thoughts by the crunch of tyres on gravel. He reached the window in time to see a taxi draw up, and a man, who from his uniform could only be Sassoon, get out. After paying the driver, Sassoon stood for a moment, looking up at the building. Nobody arriving at Craiglockhart for the first time could fail to be daunted by the sheer gloomy, cavernous bulk of the place. Sassoon lingered on the drive for a full minute after the taxi had driven away, then took a deep breath, squared his shoulders, and ran up the steps.
Rivers turned away from the window, feeling almost ashamed of having witnessed that small, private victory over fear." (9)


I finished this book all of two minutes ago. I feel the need to review this while it's still fresh in my mind, before I've "digested" it, and while I'm still fresh from my inexplicable crying.

I don't have the words to describe how impressive a read this was. I'll be the first to admit that books often drag all kinds of emotions out of me: love and sentimentality, fear and despair, a rare joy. I can count on one hand the number of books that have compelled in me a truly visceral reaction: Where the Red Fern Grows back in 4th grade, A Streetcar Named Desire in my freshman year or so of college, The Prince of Tides in that murky transition period between sophomore and junior year. It's interesting that the former two pulled an unstoppable flood of tears from me (which failed to make me put the books down), and the symptoms of the latter didn't manifest except in front of friends. Now to this list I have to add Regeneration, and unlike the other novels on this list, I can't trace a definitive thing that made my emotions tangle and snap. The seamless play of this novel, its unforgettable characters--even those who appear for only a paragraph or two--, the way their personal conflicts unfold and are shown to be inextricably connected in ways that seem unimaginable at the novel's outset: these elements and more place this book on a very influential pedestal for me, personally and as a writer.

The story is set during World War I and very loosely revolves around the committal of the noted poet and renowned British war hero Siegfried Sassoon to Craiglockhart War Hospital, an institute for soldiers classified "mentally unsound." Sassoon is committed for writing a declaration stating his belief that "the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it [...and...] that this war, upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest" (3). The narrative is told from several viewpoints, primarily that of Rivers, the neurologist and social anthropologist in whose care Sassoon (along with most of the other patients in this novel) is placed; Sassoon himself; the mutist and asthmatic second lieutenant Billy Prior; Sarah, a working girl who eventually becomes Prior's lover; the noted poet Wilfred Owen; etc. etc.

This is a work of historical fiction and it is brilliantly executed. The voice is in perfect keeping with the times; dialect is unobtrusive; the extensive knowledge and depiction of wartime shell-shock and various forms of war trauma and its treatment are incredible. I don't know how much research it took for Barker to write this; I know I never could. It is beyond my writerly understanding how Pat Barker managed to make so many of these characters so incredibly sympathetic without spending forever on each one of them. For instance, you never get into Burns's head, yet he was one of the most sympathetic characters for me, and not merely on account of his suffering and the revolting experiences and strain that led to his breakdown. The depiction of his room in rural Suffolk was enough for me to start crying (from there, I didn't really stop until I finished the book, just now).

Rivers himself is a compelling, heartbreaking character and I was with him from the beginning. His duty is to "cure" Sassoon of his anti-war belief and send him back to the war. He only does it because it is his duty. And Sassoon, who lacked a father figure and very quickly begins to look up to Rivers, is influenced... but I won't spoil the plot for you. Let me just say that I vehemently didn't support Rivers's so-called "duty," but it didn't stop me from sympathizing with him completely, and even from being a little in love with him by the end of the book, enough to have to give myself a few minutes to clear my eyes and catch my breath.

...Despite its subject matter, this book is not a depressing one. It is not melodramatic, it is powerful without asking for tears, it seems to entirely reject the idea of armchair-empathy and demands a more qualitative response that I have no background to give. What I'm saying is that this isn't a "tearjerker novel" and despite my near-public crying jag while reading, I'm inclined to believe it is anything but.

I am in awe of Barker's ability to juggle so many issues and themes in divers characters without being obvious or preachy. He addresses issues of writing, male-male companionship, and from there to the very veiled theme of homosexuality (Sassoon, Owen, and many minor characters in the novel are homosexual); he discusses friendship, surrogate fathers, heterosexual love; he takes the psychiatrist-patient relationship one step further by illustrating how like a father-son relationship it is, how intimately tied together the two are: Rivers, despite his contrary thinking, can't seem to break away from his patients, visits them when they ask him to do so even after they've been discharged; he goes on helping Burns after Burns has been discharged and seems for the first time truly deranged. Rivers's self-sacrificing is so believably real, it came as a great shock to me so I won't spoil it here. Barker's choice of placement of information and diction and pacing... incredible.

I could go on forever about this, also I'm still shaky and need to sit still for a moment or two. I wish I could write this book. As is, I can only go out and buy the two sequels in this trilogy: The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road. I strongly recommend you do the same.

Go Ahead and Laugh.

Carmen Sandiego is hottttt.

It's 3:30 a.m. right now, my weekend has been so mentally exhausting I crashed in my 20-person seminar at 6:00 p.m. and then again at 8:00, woke up at midnight, about to go back to bed... workshop submission still not done, but I'm a little woozy and unbalanced from weird caffeine intake (or lack thereof) today. I'm so brain-dead and tired I think I'm allowed to have some weird musings.

So I was fucking around online searching for a red trench coat and fedora--no, this is not an unusual thing for me--and got to thinking: 80s cartoon shows and video game media had some strikingly strong female characters grounded in intelligence and physical/moral strength. Seems like it should be the other way around, considering nowadays a lot of cartoon-character or video game women (granted, with exceptions) seem very physically stereotyped or play weaker/secondary roles to the male lead. Too brain-dead right now to think of many concrete examples, and now that I'm trying to think I'm just slowly horrifying myself at the sheer volume of anime-esque stuff the U.S. has assimilated. I guess Kim Possible is an awesome example of a strong woman character, even though personally I never liked that she was a cheerleader--but she pulls it off well, I guess, even if it does feel a bit cookie-cutter at times.

Maybe it's just that back when I was a kid and didn't know any better, Carmen Sandiego, along with a surprising number of her female henchmen, was the epitome of original "strong woman." Also, I was secretly in love with Carmen Sandiego and have been so since the third grade. (Seriously. If she were alive, I'd go gay for her in a heartbeat.) I mean, hey, she was damncool, and she didn't need to flaunt anything to pull off her coolness. She hid her figure under the trench coat and you only saw her face a coupla times in the cartoon series. And I mean, the basic premise for her ditching for a life of crime was that she was smarter than everyone at the mostly-male-run ACME Detective Agency. Looking back on it now, I kinda remember several of her female henchmen being billed as physically stronger than a lot of the men, some of them looking bulked-up and very butch in the dossier profiles (I think this was the "Where in the World" series?) Sarah Nade, the really butch punk-rocker, or those female "strong-women" who pulled off a lot of the capers involving hard physical labor. Bustin' up stereotypes left and right, man. And this was--1983? 'S pretty cool. Especially since the model for Carmen Sandiego was Indiana Jones, who's definitely high up on the Top 10 All-Time Coolest List.

Thing is, if you think about other prominent female characters of the time (and were there even that many...?) Daphne from "Scooby Doo" was very much the "delicate female," but Velma was very much the nerd so maybe that balanced out. Daphne very rarely participated in any of the conflict resolution, though, if I remember right... Judy Jetson in "The Jetsons" also just kinda seemed to be there as the random teenage girl character, though I didn't follow that religiously so I can't really say. Jessie from "The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest" later on is more the modern female, with an average bust and the same build as Jonny, but she tends to wear a lot of pastels and never puts her hair up even for the stickiest situations, though that might just be me being nit-picky.

Same for male chars, too--even the guys nowadays are sometimes stereotyped as super-macho or super-dorky. Again, floundering for concrete examples. I'll have to get back to this. But what happened to the more thoughtful or liberal or original/unique characters with a little bit of personality behind them? Back then emphasis wasn't so much on breast size or clothing style or ditziness or machoness; it took a little more to make a good character. Carmen and her henchwomen rocked the liberal/feminist agenda back then; Zack and Ivy weren't half-bad either. Jonny Quest (and I do mean the original 1986 one, although the Real Adventures wasn't so bad, and Jessie rocked) had a pretty good balance of physical/mental capability. Fuck, even "Captain Planet" had that one episode where Wheeler picks up a whore in New Orleans at Mardi Gras, and Linka goes off in a tizzy. But "Captain Planet" was chockful of overt stereotypes--Wheeler the apathetic, insensitive American for one, and Linka's reactions to his advances (she could be a bitch, but she acted like she liked it). Gadget in "Rescue Rangers" was pretty cool, but she got thrown into the distressed-damsel role way too many times. And speaking of Gadget, Penny in "Inspector Gadget" was awesome--a girl and a kid who pretty much solved most of the crimes going on and let Gadget take the credit. How cool is that?? And Punky Brewster... is annoying as fuck in retrospect, but I guess she did have her own thing going on.

And of course, before I get severely flamed, She-Ra was the coolest EV4H.

Of course, in terms of characters anyway, the 80s and before had a lot to apologize for. "Captain N"? That Ruby Spears Megaman cartoon? Super Mario? That Zelda spinoff? Okay, I admit to having watched all three out of sheer little-kid fandom, but Jesus H. Christ were they bad, bad enough that I knew they were bad at the time. But seriously, people. I miss those strong characters. In fact, I'll have to come back to this thought when I'm a little more rested and coherent.

Anyway. Carmen Sandiego is hot :-)

Celebrity Sighting #1

1:30 p.m., Claremont and 118th: I'm hurrying to campus so I can get one of the good seats for my lecture class, on the phone with Mom ranting about class and what will be my crazy-busy weekend. Feeling a little pissy and antisocial and hating humanity, and I haven't managed to down even half of the large coffee in my hand. So when I see the crowd of people on the sidewalk near the Barnard entrance I just angrily plow on through.

As I'm plowing through, I notice that most of these people have on headsets or are moving sound booms or cameras. Looks like the setup or removal of a film set. It begins to occur to me that maybe I shouldn't be walking through here, but you know, I've already come too far to go back, so I skirt people as best as I can while keeping a tight grip on my coffee. Almost run into some guy moving a sound boom, mutter an "excuse me" and dodge to the left, and then pretty much almost collide with Jesse L. Martin (Detective Green on Law & Order for all you non-aficionados, I think he was also in one of my fave X-Files episodes--the one about baseball, not to mention Rent and Timon of Athens on Broadway) and come perilously close to spilling said coffee all over myself and/or Mr. Martin. Thank God I am apparently not that much of a klutz. It does take me a moment to register who I just ran into though, at which point I blush, look like a moron, half-smile and apologize and turn around to continue onwards, to class... and stop just short of walking into Dennis Farina (in this scenario, Law & Order's Detective Fontana, but also of Snatch, Get Shorty, Manhunter, and Saving Private Ryan fame).

I can't say I get much into movies or star-worship or anything like that, but I have to say, Law & Order being one of the few television shows I religiously follow... I'm a teensy bit star-struck and happy right now :-)

Poetry: Mark Strand

Black Maps

Not the attendance of stones,
nor the applauding wind,
shall let you know
you have arrived,

nor the sea that celebrates
only departures,
nor the mountains,
nor the dying cities.

Nothing will tell you
where you are.
Each moment is a place
you’ve never been.

You can walk
believing you cast
a light around you.
But how will you know?

The present is always dark.
Its maps are black,
rising from nothing,
describing,

in their slow ascent
into themselves,
their own voyage,
its emptiness,
the bleak temperate
necessity of its completion.
As they rise into being
they are like breath.

And if they are studied at all
it is only to find,
too late, what you thought
were concerns of yours

do not exist.
Your house is not marked
on any of them,
nor are your friends,

waiting for you to appear,
nor are your enemies,
listing your faults.
Only you are there,

saying hello
to what you will be,
and the black grass
is holding up the black stars.

The Mailman

It is midnight.
He comes up the walk
and knocks at the door.
I rush to greet him.
He stands there weeping,
shaking a letter at me.
He tells me it contains
terrible personal news.
He falls to his knees.
“Forgive me! Forgive me!” he pleads.

I ask him inside.
He wipes his eyes.
His dark blue suit
is like an inkstain
on my crimson couch.
Helpless, nervous, small,
he curls up like a ball
and sleeps while I compose
more letters to myself
in the same vein:

“You shall live
by inflicting pain.
You shall forgive.”

The Door

The door is before you again and the shrieking
Starts and the mad voice is saying here here.
The myth of comfort dies and the couch of her
Body turns to dust. Clouds enter your eyes.

It is autumn. People are jumping from jetliners;
Their relatives leap into the air to join them.
That is what the shrieking is about. Nobody wants
To leave, nobody wants to stay behind.

The door is before you and you are unable to speak.
Your breathing is slow and you peer through
The window. Your doctor is wearing a butcher’s apron
And carries a knife. You approve.

And you remember the first time you came. The leaves
Spun from the maples as you ran to the house.
You ran as you always imagined you would.
Your hand is on the door. This is where you came in.

The Guardian

The sun setting. The lawns on fire.
The lost day, the lost light.
Why do I love what fades?

You who left, who were leaving,
what dark rooms do you inhabit?
Guardian of my death,

preserve my absence. I am alive.

(from the collection Reasons for Moving)

Review: Survival in Auschwitz

Survival in Auschwitz
Primo Levi
transl. Stuart Woolf

"[T]his was the sense, not forgotten either then or later: that precisely because the Lager was a great machine to reduce us to beasts, we must not become beasts; that even in this place one can survive, and therefore one must want to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness[.]" (41)


I am not going to review this book in the sense that I've done the others. I find it extremely difficult to pick apart narratives that "bear witness": The Reawakening, Levi's so-called sequel to this novel; Hope Against Hope and its sequels, by Nadezhda Mandelstam; Orwell's Homage to Catalonia with its killer last line. Anyway Survival in Auschwitz is a book that I think everyone has, or should, read, because Levi's language is simple and does not overdramatize or preach; he merely tells the story of what he lived through as he lived through it, and if he does often muse on the inner workings of man he does so in an unobtrusive fashion. He isn't out for pity or catharsis. This is essentially a work written to forever fix a terrible incident in history.

I will say that as a book I found The Reawakening to be more powerful, and I'm sorry I can't quote concrete examples; I left that book at home over break. Read as a pair, I think Levi's real power is in the simplicity of his expression, which (as I've been told) the translation tends to needlessly spruce up with extra language and/or descriptors. (Actually, I've heard this translation isn't so good, and that it's best read in Italian, so if you know Italian, read it in its original form and get back to me on that.) The fact that the reader recognizes that Levi doesn't have some ulterior motive in his language or expression, that he isn't trying to wring tears or provoke guilt, contains some kind of raw power.

That and the fact that (though this comes across more clearly in The Reawakening) he never fixes the blame on anyone. His capacity for forgiveness--no, that isn't right; his ability to understand and to explain with an objective eye how both the Germans and the Jews had devolved under camp conditions to something less than human; his ability to refrain from pointing the finger at Germany and leaving blame out of the question entirely--is what lends the memoir its most striking power. You start reading expecting some hint of anger that you never find. And actually, I think, in Philip Roth's Shop Talk Levi admits that he had no "literary intentions" but had an intense wish to understand. He takes the scientific chemist's approach to a lot of the material without sacrificing any of the emotional power of his story.

His accessible contemplations on man and the ways "in which a man can be transformed or broken down and, like a substance decomposing in a chemical reaction, lose his characteristic properties" (181) are what made the memoir work for me. Read it. It does make you think.