SUBTLETEA (POUR IN SPIRIT)

The great poet Louis Daniel Brodsky passed away in June 2014. Aside from 83 volumes of poetry, he authored William Faulkner, Life Glimpses (University of Texas Press, 1990), shared his Faulkner scholarship in publications such as Faulkner Journal, Southern Review and Studies in Bibliography, co-edited several bibliographical works about Faulkner, amassed the largest Faulkner-materials collection in the world (before giving it to Southeast Missouri State University) and penned over a dozen prose collections.

I want to sustain part of L.D’s artistic spirit by sharing some of his works with others, so I plan on featuring selections here in the Tea periodically. Here is an unpublished 18-page poetry suite that Brodsky completed in the summer of 2012. The suite is called New Germania, and it chronicles his visit to Berlin. 

After previewing the work, I wrote this to him: “First of all, I have to say that this suite is further validation of how I think, or, rather, how I can’t help but process experience. There are layers and layers of meaning and historical strata under everything – especially places that have been spiritually scarred by true man-made catastrophes. It didn’t seem as if you’d toured modern-day Berlin. You broke the illusory time barrier and walked through swastika-shadowed streets.  And those three stones you took from the former concentration camp might as well have been there, in the same position you found them, when inmates shuffled toward their unsung dooms.  In a sense, you liberated those stones from their damnation. They are no longer part of that haunted earth. I needn’t go into how symbolic and mystical stones are, or the context of stacking stones on Jewish graves (as seen at the end of Schindler’s List), but I’m reminded of what Rabbi Yose wrote: ‘[Foundation Stone] stands over the abyss.'” I hope you enjoy these poems even a fraction as much as I did.

I. Street of the Dead

We take a four-hour walking tour, from the Hotel Adlon,
Easterly, along Unter den Linden,
Past Humboldt University, the statue of Frederick the Great,
Beyond the Bebelplatz, where, in 1933,
On orders from Nazi propaganda minister Goebbels,
Students and professors from the university across the street
Burned twenty thousand books deemed verboten,
Past the island of five museums, the Berlin Cathedral,
And eventually to the Alte Synagoge’s empty lot,
Then on to the oldest Jewish cemetery in the city,
On Grosse Hamburger Straβe,
Which has come to be known as the Street of the Dead.

On this peaceful side street in Spandauer Tor,
Viennese Schutzjuden settled, in the late 1600s,
And soon allocated a sacrosanct space, for a cemetery,
Where they’d bury almost three thousand of their dead,
Until, by the 1820s, they’d filled it up.
Later, they built a Jewish boys’ school and old-age home,
Both of which, during the 1940s,
The Gestapo converted to internment centers to hold Jews
Before trucking them to Grunewald, for deportation;
They also converted the cemetery,
Desecrating its gravestones and appropriating the land,
For an underground air-raid shelter.

The two of us linger, beneath a convenient tree,
Meditating on the graves, which are nowhere to be found,
Not even in the air, which, as we stare into the sky,
Turns suddenly cool, begins to swirl, ever so briefly,
Into a gentle drizzle that lasts less than five minutes.
Standing in the leafy shadows of this tree,
We listen to myriad whispers awakening from the earth,
Lifting into the merciful isolation of this side street,
Where, once again, a Jewish school is in session.
As we leave, we hear the girls and boys at recess,
Wiling away their hours, days, generation,
As if nothing will ever disturb the equanimity of their play.

II. Reichstag-Rooftop Lunch

Our first full morning in Berlin begins with us standing in Pariser Platz,
At the symbolic heart of the nation:
The Brandenburg Gate, close by the Reichstag,
That restored avatar of unified and reunified Germany,
Before whose monumental grandeur we’ll end up, four hours later,
Just in time for our precisely scheduled 1:30 lunch, atop its roof,
In the Käfer restaurant, where we’ll have a 180-degree panoramic view —
Semblances, traces, shimmers of the sights we’ll have visited.

Neither our legs nor eyes realize that those four hours have now passed,
Yet here we are, at the Reichstagsgebäude,
Surrendering our American passports, to an armed female security guard
Stationed in a hut by the driveway leading up to the front entrance —
That marble-stepped staircase I’ve so often seen depicted in movies,
To whose base shiny black-enameled Mercedes-Benzes, with tops down,
Delivered  Nazi military and diplomatic dignitaries,
Sitting in stiff-backed solemnity, in their ribbon-bedecked uniforms,
Those mythic stick-figure gods, legendary heroes, epic representatives
Of the greatest nation ever to have anointed itself savior of mankind . . .

An armed female security guard, who looks at us suspiciously,
As she scans our faces, for an exact resemblance to our photographs,
Before methodically checking our first, middle, and last names
Against her multipaged list of visitors who’ve made reservations
To enter the dome as well as those who’ve paid the high price
For the privilege of dining in the hallowed confines of this historic place,
Whose Neo-Baroque shell is all that remains of the original building.
Checked, vetted, determined not to be enemies of the state,
We’re discharged from the makeshift security hut,
Made to wait, by the driveway, for the next pair of guards,
Who escort us up the stairs, through two sets of sliding doors,
Observed by other guards, who scutinizingly approve our status,
Free us into the foyer, signal us to line up, again,
Submit our names, so that they might be checked, again,
Ensure that we’re being shunted in the correct direction —
Parliament chambers, dome, rooftop restaurant —

Where, again, we wait, this time for a cattle-car-sized elevator
To descend, disgorge its captive passengers,
Make room for our obedient group — no fewer than fifty of us,
Pressed, now, so tightly against one another
That even breathing is rendered self-conscious, difficult, thick,
For the seemingly interminable seconds the glassed-in cage takes
To arrive at roof level, where, at the behest of yet another guard,
We step out, gasp for a few fresh breaths,
Before walking several paces, to the guest-information desk,
Where the two of us ask about the location of the restaurant . . .
“We have a 1:30 reservation for lunch,” I hesitatingly state.

Once inside the Käfer dining room,
Our credentials are checked, for the fifth and final time,
By an efficient hostess, who seats us close to the tall windows.
Chilled tomato soup with shreds of basil, green salads,
And dark, thick-crusted, grainy bread, with olive oil, for dipping,
Gratify our appetites, allow us to relax for an hour and a half,
Scan the city’s skyscape, contemplate its ubiquitous tower cranes
Everywhere turning, turning, their pulleys straining soundlessly,
As they raise the new Berlin, piece by piece by piece,
From the dust- and debris-encrusted memories of seven decades.

Soon, all that’s left of our adventurous lunch
Is the fifty-person cattle-car elevator descent to the ground floor,

Past the two sets of sliding doors
Monitored by armed guards behind glass,
Down the marble stairs, to the driveway,
Past the pair of guards located behind the security hut,
Down the ramps that lead into Platz der Republik,
And the short walk back, along the Spree River,
Past the four daringly modern glass-and-stone buildings
Housing the Bundestag and federal-government offices —
Bulwarks against the resurrection of fascism, race hatred, genocide —
Until we’re standing, again, in the Pariser Platz,
Then in the lobby of the Hotel Adlon, on Unter den Linden,
Then home again, in our suite, staring out at the crowds
Milling beneath the iconic aura of the Quadriga,
Which surmounts the Brandenburg Gate,
Both of us overcome by a compelling need for a brief respite
From the gravity of the last seventy years checking on us.

III. After the Aftermath

Today’s Berlin
Is the calm after the Nazi storm,
A colossal Platz for all Earth’s humanity,
Tolerant, open, peaceful,
Boasting a pervasive respect
For those who were murdered,
Without euphemizing “murdered,”
With words
Like “perished,” “disappeared,” “lost,”
Craving contrition, forgiveness, absolution —
An insatiable necessity to erase
Without ever forgetting.

IV. Sachsenhausen

Not a twenty-five-minute drive north, out of Berlin,
Is the pastoral, palace-graced town of Oranienburg,
Where hides, in inconspicuous obsolescence,
The Third Reich’s concentration camp named Sachsenhausen,
That sublimely timeless ur-version, matrix, inspiration, prototype
Of Hitler’s system to achieve his colossal design of Judenrein,
Prove that Deutschland’s Über Alles Final Solution
Could bear the fruit of the Vaterland’s universal truth
That Aryan purity was not just an ideal but could be a reality,
A fait accompli of Germany’s majestic destiny,
If only enough Völker could be indoctrinated, intimidated —
Those who’d inevitably dominate those who’d ultimately succumb.

Entering this bucolic Hölle, through its “Arbeit Macht Frei” gates,
I traipse over the gravel paths, which collaborate in the hoax
That nobody who ever came here was designated as doomed on arrival
And, therefore, no human being of meticulously documented record
Ever had to leave here or, if so,
Had to be transported, easterly, on the ghostly underground railroad
Leading to those camps waiting, with eager open maws,
To greet the sleepwalking bones entering their fiery resting places
In spaces below and above the days passed and nights to come.
Now that I’m here, it seems incumbent on me to expose the hoax,
By spending the night in the one remaining barracks with bunks
And discovering sleep that knows it will never awaken.

V. Here and There

What could be more incongruous
Than you, a Jewess from Brooklyn,
And I, a Jew from St. Louis,
Being here, in Berlin,
Celebrating our three years together?

I know what:
That the year could be 1943
And you’re on a train to Ravensbrück,
I on my way to Sachsenhausen,
Yet we’re not separated.

VI. Breakfast Buffet at the Restaurant Quarré

Why is it that in every young, handsome, clean-shaven face,
In every pair of squirrel-alert  eyes — Aryan blau —
In every precision drill movement of the strapping waiters
Replenishing a cog in the cornucopian breakfast spread,
Whenever a bowl of strawberries or kiwis or mangoes
Or hot server brimming with scrambled eggs
Or miniature vat of honey-saturated muesli
Or platter of schneken and fruit cakes and strudel
Or carving board of smoked salmon, venison, roast beef
Is no longer overflowing its perimeters, limits, edges;
Fetching patrons a second set of silver pots
Steaming with coffee or scalding water, for tea;
Meticulously, fastidiously, methodically
Eradicating accumulating stollen and toast crumbs;
Or rounding up, from the starched white tablecloths,
Every dirty dish, impure plate, stained saucer,
Sullied water glass, filthy, encrusted piece of flatware,
Whenever it’s served its purpose, outlived its usefulness,
Needs to make living room, breathing space — Lebensraum —
For the next complement of eating utensils,
As the diners repeat, endlessly,
The gluttonous consuming of food, food, food,
Simply because it’s there, on never-dissipating display . . .
Why can’t I see, respect, and appreciate,
In all these orderly, synchronized, duty-bound attendants,
Just the flawlessly trained, highly disciplined staff — Schwadron —
Of the Hotel Adlon’s Restaurant Quarré,
Doing everything it can to make the guests comfortable
And absolutely satisfied, gratified, happy, beholden,
Knowing they’re receiving the very best service — Über alles?

VII. Wannsee

Best known for his exquisite, softly rendered Impressionist canvases,
From the 1870s until the end of his life, in 1935,
The same year Adolf Hitler introduced the Nuremberg Laws,
And for serving as president of the Prussian Academy of Arts,
From 1920 until his resignation, in 1933, due to utterly helpless disgust
Over its members refusing to exhibit the works of Jewish artists,
Max Liebermann had reached the highest echelons of success,
In the decades before the Nazis catastrophically grasped the fasces,
Appropriated all semblance of democracy, in the name of the Third Reich.

Not a day has passed, during our trip, that we haven’t acknowledged him,
By standing in front of his commanding family home, on Pariser Platz,
Situated immediately to the right of the Brandenburg Gate —
The estate he purchased with the enormous inheritance he’d received
From his businessman father’s bequest, funds which, in 1909,
Also allowed him to buy the last available parcel of waterfront property
In Berlin’s most affluent and picturesque villa colony of Alsen,
At 24 Grosse Seestraβe, on the western shore of Greater Lake Wannsee,
Then hire architect Paul O. A. Baumgarten, to design his summer house.

Not three hundred meters away, a mere six years later,
When Gentile manufacturer Ernst Marlier commissioned Baumgarten
To design his private residence, at 56-58 Grosse Seestraβe,
Liebermann and Marlier, proud owners of exceptionally elegant homes,
Unknowingly became neighbors,
Neither one dreaming that the final destiny of their beloved residences
Would be decided not by God but Hitler’s National Socialist Party,
Villa Marlier becoming branch of the Reich’s main security office, in 1940,
Where, in 1942, Heydrich finally solved the Jewish riddle,
The Liebermann house, in 1938, loaned to the Deutscher Reichspost,
The property used as an entertainment spot for its female party members,
Then forcibly sold, two years later, for a sum Max’s wife, Martha, never got.
This cool, breezy, seventy-degree August afternoon,
Itself almost a scene from one of Liebermann’s brightly hued landscapes,
Sixty-seven years after the cataclysmic closure to World War II,
You and I tiptoe stealthily, deferentially, through both these villas,
Reprising the sad, sickening, heartachingly fading history
That forced such tragedy to claim so many maliciously targeted victims,

And holding hands, we forget, for a few precious moments,
While strolling in the Giverny-like gardens of Liebermann’s restored villa,
How Martha, in March of 1943, at eighty-five,
Eight years a widow and bedridden, from a stroke,
Was notified, by the Gestapo, that she must pack a suitcase,
For deportation to Theresienstadt, and chose, instead, to commit suicide;
Rather, we see the Liebermann family, in the teens and twenties,
Dining on the veranda, swimming in Lake Wannsee,
Mother and father tending their front yard’s Impressionistic flowers.

VIII. Hallowed Space

As I sit at the faux-Biedermeier desk, in our exquisite suite,
This autumn-tinged Thursday afternoon, in Berlin’s Hotel Adlon,
After returning from Wannsee, where we wandered through the villa
In which Reinhard Heydrich and Adolf Eichmann,
Along with thirteen NASDAP and SS elite,
Encouraged by a surfeit of the finest cognac, for an hour and a half,
Articulated the ultimate euphemistic arabesques and prestidigitations
For the nagging subliminal implications of the Final Solution,
Conclusively reconciling the ambiguities defiling the Jewish Question,

I gaze out through the three sets of floor-to-ceiling double doors,
Which open onto the Pariser Platz, two stories below,
Peer at multitudes lingering, their presence praising reunified Germany,
Or waving flags of dismay, brandishing invisible fists of dissidence,
Or chanting strident phrases, calculated to raise consciousness’s hackles,
For miscellaneous causes gone wrong, ideals unfulfilled,
In this or lands distant from this hallowed space dedicated to peace,
Watched over by the nearby glass eye of the resurrected Reichstag . . .
The Platz is ablur with white and black on a sea of crimson.

IX. Three Stones

The three stones I brought back to our weeklong home in Berlin
Focus on me, in their faraway, elegiac muteness,
From the desk, where I placed them, two days ago,
After bending over, gathering them up,
At the six-decade-abandoned Sachsenhausen concentration camp,
Off of paths stretching, like threads of a black widow’s web,
From disappeared barracks hut to barracks hut to barracks hut,
And stuffing them into my pockets, for safekeeping,
As we waded, stumbled, drifted, like dazed, glazed-eyed somnambulists,
Through the gravel of that infamous, sinister desolation,
Weaving in and out of the suffocating crush of 200,000 ghosts . . .

Three spirits, rousted out of their houses,
In earshot of their spouses’ and children’s agonized cries, screams,
Whisked away, like scrap paper caught in history’s bad breeze,
Not even at gunpoint, just by means of a simple hand gesture,
Which said, in its histrionic silence, “You’re a dead person, dirty Yid” . . .
Three souls who compelled me to lift them, from their resting places,
As if I might set them atop their own gravestones —
Stones atop stones — in a display of desperate reverence,
To let them know that I came to visit them, stay with them . . .
Three stones I’ll take with me, when I’m buried,
So that, beyond forgetting, I can return them to their rightful owners.

X. Stelae

Contiguous with the back of the Unter-den-Linden-facing Hotel Adlon,
Where we’ve been living in a palatially spacious suite
Facing Pariser Platz and its dominant Brandenburg Gate,
Is situated the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe,
A curious faux cemetery of imaginative sorts,
Consisting of a numerically insignificant aggregate of 2711 markers,
Termed, by their American Jewish designer, Peter Eisenman, “stelae,”
Which, in fact, are hollow concrete blocks, modern sarcophagi,
Whose already-cracking gray-hued surfaces are coated with a chemical
Created by a subsidiary of the former IG Farben company
(Suppliers of the Third Reich’s Giftgas prussic-acid crystals,
So vital to maintaining the efficiency of Hitler’s death-camp exterminations),
To make for the easy removal of graffiti blooms that might rise from seeds Sown by neo-Nazis, who revel in desecrating such sacred gardens.

This late Sabbath afternoon, having taken an hour’s cruise on the Spree,
After sitting inside Berlin’s recently completely rebuilt main cathedral,
We surrender to the gravity of the memorial, enter its labyrinth,
In which we encounter other visitors maneuvering bewildered,
As well as those leaping from slab to slab, like Tyrolean mountain goats,
Others sitting on them or assuming supine positions,
Using them as convenient beds, to rest their tourist-weary bones,
Study the scudding clouds, or unabashedly kiss and hug each other,
Yet others lost inside the reciprocity of their own boisterous laughter.
But nowhere is the reverence we assumed would pervade this holy place.
Distracted, disconcerted, we escape without meditating on the six million
Murdered by the Führer, who took his own life, in 1945,
In his bunker, buried under a parking lot not two hundred yards away,
Goebbels and his family still residing in theirs, thirty feet below us.

XI. Learning German

I’ve only learned two words of German,
On this weeklong trip to Berlin,
My first and my last:
“Achtung” = “attention, I’m about to murder you”;
“Danke” = “thank you, for warning me
That you’re about to take me out of your misery,
For my being Jüdischer.”

XII. “Dear Guests”

After returning from a cabaret-like variety stage show
At the fabled, newly relocated and rebuilt Wintergarten theatre
And having late dinner, in the sumptuous lobby
Of the storied contiguous-to-the-Pariser-Platz Hotel Adlon
(Whose every detail has been fastidiously facsimiled from the original,
Which was burned by Soviet troops, in 1945),
Dining to the American standard songbook tunes
Descending from a piano located on the mezzanine,
Feeling relaxed, having gotten to know Berlin another day better,
We open the door to our suite, overlooking the Brandenberger Tor,
As well as the stunningly reconceived glass dome of the Reichstag
(Which peers into its modernistic, democratized insides),
And find a note that’s been left beside our nightly chocolates:

“Berlin, August 10th, 2012

Dear Guests,

            We would like to bring to your attention that due to a demonstration on Saturday, August 11th, 2012 there will be street closings in the area ‘Friedrichstraβe’, the Boulevard ‘Unter Den Linden’, ‘Wilhelmstraβe’ as well as ‘Straβe des 17.
Juni’ .
            Please note that there will be possible traffic-delays during 11:00 a.m. until 10 p.m..
            Please allow yourself more than the usual time to reach your appointments.
            We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and thank you very much for your kind understanding.
                                                                                                                                                                  The Management.”

We wonder if a note of similar dimension might not have been issued
By the management of this splendid hotel, on Tuesday, November 8, 1938,
The night before a vast, catastrophic, glass-shattering demonstration
Would create street closings and traffic delays, in the area.

XIII. Gleis 17

Because it was set in an inconspicuous wedge of lush, dark-green forest
Sufficiently west of fastidiously war-preoccupied Berlin,
So as to call no undue attention to itself —
An enchanted forest boasting villas and mansions with extensive grounds,
Fit for Deutsche princes and princesses,
Who made the easy commute to the capital, for work or the opera . . .
Because the luxurious suburban village of Grunewald
Was compactly tucked away, in its exquisitely inviolate silence,
Its railroad station made a perfect collection and distribution depot,
To which trucks and vans leaving Berlin, with their hideous cargoes,
Might be received, at all hours of the Morgen, Mittag, and Nacht,
Without being detected by the unsuspecting villagers
(Or so they claimed to be, repeatedly, to each other and the world),
Since it just made uncommonly good Nazi common sense
Not to have those degenerate refugees be seen boarding the trains —
Mainly Juden, with a smattering of Gypsies, homosexuals, the demented —
By Berliners in the vicinity of Friedrichstraβe and Unter den Linden.

And so it was that number 17, a nondescript “platform” or “track”
(Depending on who might be translating the noun “Gleis”),
In an out-of-sight-out-of-mind village half an hour’s drive southwest of Berlin,
Could become such a pivotal, crucial, strategic starting point
For a ragtag confederation of helpless, hapless, hopeless souls
About to make their penultimate journeys —
Ravensbrück, Auschwitz, Theresienstadt, Sachsenhausen, Treblinka —
Before reaching the ultimate destination: thorough earth or ravenous sky . . .
A notorious, stark, infamously indifferent pair of cast-iron rails,
Which shouldered the weight of thousands of starving cattle cars
Waiting, impatiently, to be fed human fodder — Jew straw, grain, grass —
And dragged away, bellowing, shitting, grunting, pissing, lowing,
By growling, roaring, belching, imperiously raucous steam engines
Working that territory, in all seasons, for more than four bountiful years . . .
An active station, today, seven decades later, with an ice-cream shop
And an abstract marble-sculpture memorial leading up to Gleis 17,
Where you and I stand beside a truncated segment of two rusted tracks
With adventitious trees growing out of their gravel bed,
Our eyes following the rails easterly, to the roof-obscured horizon,
Where we see white clouds turning into black puffs
Lifting, lifting, lifting from locomotive stacks chuff-chuff-chuffing.

XIV. Pariser Platz

Having focused on the imposing Pariser Platz,
Through the three open double doors of our second-floor suite,
We weave through the obstacle course of overstuffed lobby chairs,
Then out the revolving door and into the cobbled square,
Amidst the hundreds of congregating tourists,
Who’ve come here to appear in the roll call of awestruck pilgrims
Apotheosizing the iconic symbolism of the Brandenburg Gate —
All of this in a naked state of primal Semitic nature,
The two of us being seen, in all our unambiguous nudity,
As Jews, in no way able to be confused, conflated, with Aryans,
Both of us prepared to sacrifice the last shreds of our flesh,
To the disdainful, grimacing gazes of red-hot racial hatred
Flaming from the muzzles of machine-gun eyes.

Only, at the last second, peering out the three open double doors,
We decide, instead, to dress in destiny’s gesture of serendipity,
And leave our suite, slip through the lobby, into the Platz, undetected,
Before August 12, 2012, can fade into 1942’s abysmal haze,
When Juden like us were shorn of our spirits’ clothes,
Consigned to the chambers of the Nazi desperation for bodies,
Where they could shower us,
With the aromatic essence of their indomitable power.
But long after twilight descends, our delusion lingers,
And night catches up with us, detects our Jewish chromosomes,
Sewn, as yellow Stars of David, all over our naked souls.
Suddenly, the late-night revelers in the Pariser Platz
Smear swastikas on their bare arms and chests, with our blood.

XV. Berlin 2012

While here, in redefining-itself-by-the-second Berlin,
Amidst all its traditional and modernistic architectonic transfigurations
And all its necessarily apparent manifestations of democratic transparency
(So that its citizens might justify their being invited back into civilization,
Back into the family of peace-worshiping nations,
Back into the holy sanctuaries of their pre–Third Reich souls)
And all its memorials, proliferating on every meter of bombed-out space —
Done not so much to express complicity in genocide but contrition,
Acknowledging that though they’ll never be able to go back
To that era when “Untermenschen” and “Endlösung” weren’t words,
They must yet hope they’ll progress to a lasting redress and acceptance,
Say yes to the blessed sovereignty of each and every human spirit . . .

While here, in Berlin, this cool, cloudy-blue-sky August afternoon,
Walking through the sunny shadows of a millennium of Germanic heritage,
I postulate questions whose answers must discover their own truths
If they’re to have a chance of making me understand how the beast’s name Corresponds to the number 6,000,000, on its forehead:
What if the Nazis had offered blanket reprieve, from the gas and ovens,
To all Jews who would expose homosexuals, Gypsies, crazies, Gentiles?
Would they have eagerly donned SS, Sicherheitsdienst, Gestapo uniforms?
Had Hitler been Jewish, would he have persecuted and murdered Aryans?
Had I died in the Shoah, would I still be composing this poem,
Trying to enlighten myself as to why answers keep answering with questions
That only heighten the ruthless truth of mankind’s inherent misanthropy?

XVI. DeutscheBahn

Berlin is a reverberating, interweaving, sprawling network of steel wheels
Gliding precisely, with near-silent susurrations, over glistening tracks,
Into and out from recently constructed stations,
Drawing their pollution-free energy from overhead wires and third rails,
Running above ground, on the Schnell-Bahn and Strassenbahn,
And beneath the streets, on the Untergrund-Bahn,
In a perpetually smooth, fluid blur of yellow, red, and beige cars,
All the city’s 3.5 million citizens
Able to interface with even its least reachable places, spaces,
In a display of the world’s most efficiently operated technology,
Staying continuously interconnected, as it did seven decades ago,
When Germany came to rely on its steel wheels and cast-iron tracks,
To transport its Aryan superiority to the farthest regions of Evil,
So completely beyond the limits of reason, decency, and mercy
That not even the Prince of Lies could have conceived such malignity,
Such inhumane dominions of mass depravity, sadistic apocalypse, rot…
A city yet relying on its trains, to restore the greatness it was promised
When the Führer und Reichskanzler enticed its mesmerized residents,
With visions of the DeutscheBahn connecting the kingdoms of the world.

XVII. Home, from Berlin

Home, just a few hours more than two complete days,
From our weeklong vacation, odyssey in Berlin,
I’m still reeling, feeling, if not shock waves from Nazi Germany,
Then the temblors from its seismic scourge of European Jewry —
The war it waged, as a heeltap to the Führer‘s personal vendetta
Against Elohim’s Chosen People,
Those lower-than-earthworm-dirt vermin Martin Luther had abominated,
Advising his Reformation-minded parishioners
To burn down their houses, run them out of town, murder them.

How all that bilious ill will could still cast such a chill spell,
I can only believe is the legacy of Revelation’s Beast,
The monster’s second coming, in its reincarnated Führer-skin,
Its diabolical, infernal visitation on Abraham’s meek tribes.
How else might I reasonably explain the merciless insanity
Requisite to killing six million of humanity’s innocent beings?
Since I’ve been home, I’ve not known an hour’s, a second’s, respite,
For having stayed seven days in the abyss of Satan’s hissing Hell.
Will my cells ever quell the smell of those smoldering bones and flesh?

XVIII. A Week’s Sojourn

Back in St. Louis, after a week’s sojourn in Germany,
Where we stepped inside that infamous villa at Wannsee
And registered the jackbooted pacing of Reinhard Heydrich;
Wandered through the last of the Hohenzollern palaces
(Half-timbered English Tudor Schloss Cecilienhof, in Potsdam),
Eavesdropped on Clement Attlee, Harry Truman, and Josef Stalin,
As they reapportioned the Vaterland and Europe, in its Grosse Halle;
Had a white-tablecloth lunch of greens and cold tomato soup with basil,
On the rooftop of the recently revitalized Reichstag,
Where I overheard Hitler’s whisperous asides to Himmler and Göring;
Climbed the incline leading from Grunewald’s train-station entrance,
To Gleis 17, from which I witnessed the deportations
Of thousands of mute, humiliated, doomed Jewish wraiths,
To death’s sepulchral abattoirs, in the east, home of the setting sun;
Traipsed over Sachsenhausen’s gravel pathways, leading me nowhere,
Between gone barracks, factories, medical-experiment rooms,
Stood with those ghosts, at roll call, as the snow fell on their flesh,
Before they entered the trench and were shot or hanged;
Toured the Disney World Magic Kingdom of Dresden’s facsimiled history
And listened to Martin Luther, outside the Church of Our Lady,
Fomenting venom against Jew-rodents, while seeking God’s blessing . . .

Back in St. Louis, after a week’s sojourn in Germany’s darkest heart —
That no-man’s-Berlin of memorials, memorials, memorials,
Whose skies are filled with tower cranes rebuilding, rebuilding, rebuilding —
I’ve begun seriously wondering if ever again, in this existence of mine,
I’ll be able to breathe easily, free of anxiety, stress, fear,
Without feeling angina’s pain stabbing both sides of my psyche,
Be invisible to Gestapo agents, who, I know, have been closing in on me
And are now about to shout, “Juden raus!,“ rout me out of the safe house
In which my soul has been hiding, for the past five decades,
Behind the wall my creative imagination has been building
Around the ghetto in which my mind has been starving, freezing,
So that when those Aryan-indoctrinated soldiers invade my spirit,
Searching, with their frothing dogs, for my subversive Holocaust verse,
I’ll have time to bury the poems, in history-proof containers,
Hoping they’ll weather the worms and rain and tree roots
And, most threatening, those who’d deny the Shoah altogether
(That anyone ever died from being shot, gassed, burned,
Purely as a matter of pragmatics, mathematics, statistics, triumphal will),
And survive till the time is right, again, to unearth them, publish them,
To remind brave new youthful worlds, every succeeding generation,
That genocide is the Final Solution to the Human Question.

Related: Brodsky’s Rabbi Auschwitz

Lucifer

When I went to pick my daughter up at pre-school,
the kids were on the playground. Her teachers
eyed me and glanced across the slide at each other
before one finally explained that they had asked
the kids, earlier, what sort of pet was their favorite.
My daughter had said she wanted a dog. When they asked
what its name should be, she’d said, “Lucifer.”
They went quiet to see my reaction. I laughed
and explained that the name came from Disney’s Cinderella.
Forced, relieved chuckles followed. “That must be it,”
one said. I corralled my daughter, making sure
to have her say goodbye to the teachers, and tried
not to remember growing up in the Bible Belt,
being labelled a Devil Worshiper because I didn’t go
to church, how that meant ostracization, police harassment.
She ran ahead to the tiny bench by the school door, sat,
and asked me to sit beside her. “I’m too big,” I said. “But
I’ll watch you.” We could hear the remaining kids
screaming, the roar of engines from the interstate.
She turned her face to the sun and smiled out at the world.

CL Bledsoe lives in Alexandria, Virginia.

purchase the book
Kindle edition

As I wrote in my endorsement blurb for the book: “Though Brightness casts shadows, the book is a celebration of Light.  Lara performs a solo danse de caractère, glissading through highs and lows, artistic and soulful striving, and familial reverie with an unselfconscious consciousness of self.  It isn’t difficult to tell that Brightness is written by an artist who understands the conjugal dance of colors and emotions, who knows that existence is a living canvas.”

At the risk of sounding self-satisfied (something I could never achieve), I’m not sure how to go beyond that statement in promoting Lara’s debut poetry book.  There’s a skimness to the poems; one doesn’t get lost in cream and calories.  What is her father’s smile and laughter?  Her “true north.”  She’s anxious for the sunrise that seems to never come, and the shadows advise, “wait.  breathe.  wait.”  Two women return from Florence: one filled with Giotto and Botticelli, the other filled with Versace, Ferragamo.  No odes to Grecian urns – but to wildflowers and a redhead (who happens to be a lovely painter and one of the author’s mentors).  How does she revere her aunt?  By celebrating her special lasagna.  “Soup/simmers memory” opens a piece entitled “Nilaga.”  In “Out of Richmond Mornings” she translates birdcall into human sentences.

Though Lara’s language tends toward quaintness (not in the bad way), it’s usually presented freshly.  She’s not afraid to use dance motifs, to ask poesyish questions such as “could I/would I, should I/love you” (without a question mark).  In “Not Dancing” she is unabashedly poetic: “You may think me a sylph/or some raptor unfettered by gravity.” Likewise when she calls a tree “the Rooted Guardian.”  But in “Colors From a Past Life”: “[Y]ou’ve chosen lies, not life force -/that pixel sun,/that jpeg sea,/those plasma blooms…”

Fourteen plates of Lara’s original paintings and sketches (and some photographs) enliven the text and deepen the sense of the poet’s love for her subjects.  They also show off her (primary) talents in the visual arts.  Many of the pieces are studies, which seem more touching due to not being full-blown compositions, especially when they portray her family.  What a treat to see the poet’s father laughing while reading about his laugh.  (A “true north” if I ever saw one!)

Brightness chronicles Lara’s confessional fluctuations through shadows and light while sustaining a rare and enviable underlying exuberance, a…joy (what an appropriate namesake!) even in the loss of loved ones and the frustrating duration of learning, becoming.  In one of the opening poems she is “tired/of dreams remaining dreams;” in the closing piece she vows to be “the one who peels the rainbow off the floor/and hoists it/onto the worldwearied lines of sight.”

– review by David Herrle 1/2012


 

Author bio: Visual artist and writer Joy Ann Cabanos Lara grew up in Manila, the Philippines.  She moved to various cities in the US, lived in the UK, and traveled in England, France,Greece and Italy.  She is a member of the Westfield Art Society Drawing Group, the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, and the Contemporary Art Group (NJ).  Joy’s  last solo art exhibit, New Eyes (at Windsor Street Gallery, Chertsey, UK) featured her paintings and poems together with great success.

published by Kind of a Hurricane Press, 2014
download here 

Walter Ruhlmann is a softie.  Oh, yes he is.  But a hard softie.  He keeps on keeping on, as Curtis Mayfield sings, despite heartbreak and extreme loss.  He knows how to express his sorrow and ennui, but there’s a resilience and lust for life evident in much of his work.  I don’t know how he does it, but Ruhlmann pumps out a lot of poetry each year, without losing his depth and emotional poignancy.

His latest collected work is called Twelve Times Thirteen, a title that rings like a name of a Twilight Zone episode or a show from America’s golden age of radio.  In the book’s prologue Ruhlmann explains that it’s partly inspired by 5×2, a film directed by François Ozon, and that the poems cover the twelve months of 2013, of which “the first six were about the worst [he] had ever lived.”  Each poem title is made up of its month’s number (“Three Times Thirteen” for March, for example) and the name of the song that inspired the piece. 

While at first the concept of including actual song titles in poem titles jarred me, I came to appreciate it.  If anything, it bolstered my almost obsessive insistence that all titles should be works of art in themselves, so seeing titles selected by a variety of bands (from Boney M to  Nine Inch Nails) reinforced in me how important it is to have cool titles.  I’m sure Rene Magritte would agree.

Also, presenting poems with corresponding songs invites one to become familiar with the songs he or she hasn’t heard, as well as suggests that the poems would be enhanced if the songs were played in the background while reading them.  We all keep a running “soundtrack of our lives,” don’t we?  (See the film adaptation of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity.)  You folks around my age still remember the mini-religion of “mix tapes” like they were yesterday.  (What do the youth court each other with now: mix playlists?) Consider Twelve Times Thirteen a mix tape with extra lyrics, the poet’s words overlapping the band’s.

Ruhlmann sums up his 2013’s doldrums and grief immediately in the first poem, “One Times Thirteen: Tesselate, Alt+J”:

The gap between two winters elapses so slowly.
January –
hatred is such a hard feeling when the slowness, the harshness hardens your blasted heart…
Despising the land you dwell in, longing for something else, again, as if the road you started
walking on would never end.

He metaphorizes the 31 days of January as “broken windows to go through,” and that window motif recurs at least one or two more time later in the book.  This subverts the sappy positivity in The Sound of Music’s Maria’s “When God closes a door, He opens a window” line.  We all know what can and most likely will happen when climbing through jagged pieces of glass.  A journey through a year becomes a bloody Via Dolorosa of the spirit.

Though Ruhlmann’s style tends to veer into the esoteric, acclimation comes easily, and Ruhlmann narrates perfectly coherently when the time is right and directness is needed.  The horrible year of 2013 can be expressed in translatable language only so far, after all.  How does one at Ground Zero describe a mushroom cloud?  Truly, this book is a gloomy cousin to Ruhlmann’s preceding book, The Loss and GMO (Greats Moments of Oblivion).  Esoteric or not, his stuff shines best in golden lines (and anyone who knows my artistic preferences knows that I’m usually a sucker for lovely lines rather than waddling wholes). 

What a creative and therapeutic way to assess a hellhole of a year, to process twelve months of broken windows.  Ruhlmann has left us with a painful and touching mix tape as memorial.  I synced the songs with their poems (or the poems with their songs) – and it worked, almost as convincingly as the Dark Side of the Moon/Wizard of Oz trick.  (Google it if you don’t know what I mean.)  Also, I had a very pleasant side-effect from the experience: I’m now a fan of Alt+J and Gold Frapp. 

So, in honor of Twelve Times Thirteen’s format, let me end this review with clips from a mix tape of my own.  Here are some favorite lines and passages.

“Two Times Thirteen – No I in Threesome, Interpol” (which contains quintessential Ruhlmann sexuality):

…these secrets – moist and dark – hiding at the back of this drawer,
concealed behind your socks, sucked cocks, licked asses and flesh masses.

“Three Times Thirteen – Black Balloon, The Kills” (which emphasizes the ephemerality of our day-to-day bodies, which are kept going only by constant consumption, and the totally independent state of death):

The food you eat is not the one that will sustain the corpse you bear.

“Five Times Thirteen – Desire, Anna Calvi” (which admits our failure to fully suppress our deepest emotions and desires):

Maybe I’m wrong but I believe that no one can fight feelings coming from one’s depths, from the
moistest part of part of oneself, the bottom of the well…a whore of a pressure that pushes against you and won’t leave      you at rest.

“Six Times Thirteen – Abnormally Attracted to Sin, Tori Amos (which echoes The Brothers Karamazov’s Dmitri’s spiel about the beauty of both the Madonna and Sodom):

…when Hera still believed
I could have performed the most splendid deeds
when all I wanted was some sordid filth.

“Seven Times Thirteen – Closer, Nine Inch Nails” (which contains one of the best metaphors for acute arousal and sexual selfishness ever; no “softie” here):

July shouted word in my ears…
aroused the razor blade hidden inside my shorts.

…The bulging beast went stuff and stuffy and spurted all its spores,
all over the soft face of the source of my bliss.

“Nine Times Thirteen – The Price of Gasoline, Bloc Party” (which more than hints at flirtation with a married man and the narrator’s self-diminishment that’s symbolized by a miniscule and limp-prone penis):

Don’t flirt with the bearded man.
His wife will be upset.
Especially if he accepts some hot business.

…They made you think you were fitted with something huge and uncanny but all you can see is
a pin hardly able to remain stiff.

“Ten Times Thirteen – Sand River, Beth Gibbons & Rusty Man” (which continues the theme of self-diminishment and impotence, but in regard to doubtful reception of the narrator’s writing this time):

Forty next year. Will this lead you to write more than you already do and share this infamous
wording, logorrhoea, verbal diarrhoea that would bore even your closest friends unable to read
it through?

“Twelve Times Thirteen – River, Joni Mitchell” (Mitchell’s introductory piano riffs off of “Jingle Bells” and the song refers to Christmas, but there is no holiday cheer or tidings of great joy here):

Dystopia is your fuel, you can envisage nothing else than an apocalypse.

Walter Ruhlmann works as an English teacher, edits mgversion2>datura and runs mgv2>publishing. His latest collections are Maore (Lapwing Publications, 2013), Carmine Carnival (Lazarus Media, 2013), The Loss and GMO (Flutter Press, 2014) and Crossing Puddles (Robocup Press, 2014). Visit his blog.

The great poet Louis Daniel Brodsky passed away in June 2014.   Aside from 83 volumes of poetry, he authored William Faulkner, Life Glimpses (University of Texas Press, 1990), shared his Faulkner scholarship in publications such as Faulkner Journal, Southern Review and Studies in Bibliography, co-edited several bibliographical works about Faulkner, amassed the largest Faulkner-materials collection in the world (before giving it to Southeast Missouri State University) and penned over a dozen prose collections.  His daily output of poetry was dizzying: the man literally lived to write.  As someone who creates only after much crawling and many migraines, I marvel at LD’s prolificacy.  And the man seemed as if he could write about everything: from the most bizarre, Swiftian humor to the soul-splitting Shoah, from Thoreauvian nature worship to September 11th, 2001.  (Hell, he even wrote a poetry book about writing poetry books!)

I want to sustain part of L.D’s artistic spirit by sharing some of his works with others, so I plan on featuring selections here in the Tea periodically.  Below are several poems I transcribed from some of his key poetry books: At Water’s Edge, At Shore’s Border, Shadow War (volume 1 and 2), The World Waiting to Be, Rabbi Auschwitz, Unser Kampf and The Words of My Mouth and The Meditations of My Heart (which is his final book, about convalescing after glioblastoma removal and during cancer treatment).  Below the poems is part of something I wrote the morning after I heard that LD was no longer among us, that my colleague and friend would write no more.  However, I’m sure he’d be amused to see that he left enough work to keep us busy and edified for quite some time.

Brodsky showing one of William Faulkner’s typewriters at Southeast Missouri State University’s Center for Faulkner Studies.

Black Box

Piloting his flying machine
Is a profession he’s been plying
For more than forty-five years,

Without experiencing a mishap,
Suffering a midair collision
With a low-gliding spirit.

Always aware
That the time will come
When a runway won’t be under him,

Rather a cold abyss
Into which his life-force will lunge,
All systems silenced,

He files a flight plan,
Before every takeoff,
So his remains can be located –

The black box,
Containing the data of his days –
That others might know his flown soul.

–      from The World Waiting to Be: Poems About the Creative Process (2008)

Raindrop

Too often, I catch myself lost deep in thought,
Meditating about death, afterlife, eternity,
Despite not wanting to spend any more of my treasured time
Contemplating such overwhelming distractions.

I’d rather exhaust the remained of my restless spirit’s days
Exploring only the myriad now and here,
Feeling, holding, embracing, caressing nature’s wonders
Just under my eyes’ close focus,
Within my sensitive nose’s range,
Amidst my vibrant ears’ circumambience,
Beneath my curious hands’ gentle touch,
Behind my wandering mind’s wisdoms and intuitions,
Inside my imagination’s unschooled way
Of perceiving tiny and grandiose souls
Which know, by instinct and conditioning alone,
The complexities that distinguish the fittest from the weakest –
Realities only the blood can taste,
As it flows its course,
From one existence to another, millennium to generation,
Down time’s grand tributary, to death, afterlife, eternity…

Maybe, after all, losing myself to such overwhelming meditations
Is the only true calling I’ve ever been meant to pursue,
Down to this very Thursday noon’s hike,
As I venture into Camp Nebagamon’s woods, again,
And find myself lost deep in thought,
This time inside the mind of a falling raindrop.

–      from At Shore’s Border: Poems of Lake Nebagamon, Volume Three (2012)

Meditation #196: Where Would We Be Without “It”?

Why I’ve awakened with death on my mind,
I can’t really say, fathom, dug up, exhume
Though it must be attributive to, have something to do with, non-vaguely,
The glioblastoma that was removed, more than seven months ago,
From the right temporal lobe of my brain.

 
Oh, I’m kidding, joshing, joking, jesting, ribbing you, pulling your third leg…
Only I’m not kidding.
I guess death must never get a rest, when it comes to cracking wise;
It’s got to be exhausted, flat on its back, dead on its ass,
Indefatigably fatigued, fagged out, for the life of it.

It’s what those sleazy comedy-club, striptease-joint,
Borscht Belt-schtick one-liners are all about –
“I’m going to live forever”;
“Where do you get off with a meshuggeneh name like Methuselah?
That doesn’t even sound Jewish”;
“Did you ever ask yourself why a guy’s just being a putz, a schmuck,
A schmegegge, a schmendrick, when he shrugs and hammers ‘it,’
Knowing the whole audience knows ‘it’ is it, which is death?
Like ‘Why doesn’t it ever happen to the other guy?’;
Then he burps, ‘The older I get, the better I was’;
And then, he burps, ‘We’re not going to get out of here, alive’;
And then he farts, ‘It’s a goddamn shame, I tell you.
Nobody can get into Lon Guyland cemeteries, these days,
Without reservations.  Everyone’s dying to get in there.’”

I probably should confess this, now, being a poet:
If I didn’t have the word “death” and its synonyms, in my lexicon,
I could never compose something true to life.
I mean, as “yin” needs “yang,” “here” needs “there,”
“Is” needs “was,” and “now” needs “then,”
So “life” needs “Uh-oh, I’m fucked!”
All of these polarities need each other, to achieve completion, closure.
“Immortality” needs “mortality” and vice versa – get it?  Rigor mortis?

Imagine if we could outlive our souls.
We’d always reach eternity way too late.

Lord, thank You for Your unique creation of death, in the beginning.
Look how, without it,
We’d not know what we were missing of the premise of Your Promise.

As a poet, I have to say this: if death didn’t exist,
My lines about life would be lamentably pedestrian, plebeian,
As boring as doing crossword puzzles, Sudokus, Words with Friends,
Writing notes in condolence cards,
For husbands, wives, mistresses bosses, dogs, gerbils,
Composing verses about love.

And what’s to look forward to, after we master death
And get ready to go off, to our final, deathless resting place,
In Heaven, Paradise, Eternity – those green pastures
With rivers of flowing milk, honey, bagels, lox, chopped liver,
Kreplach, gefilte fish, derma, kishke, tongue, schmaltz?
I’ll tell you what’s to look forward to:Nothing but a fermisht stomach, constipation,
And God, Who sprays MiraLAX,
At your punim, kishkes, and farbisseneh wife,
From a Goliath-sized seltzer bottle.

 
–      from The Words of My Mouth and The Meditations of My Heart (2014)

Speechless

Stunning! Amazing! Audacious!
Fantastic! Unreal! Surreal!
Unethical! Immoral! Unprincipled! Unscrupulous!
Unbelievable! Inconceivable! Unimaginable! Unthinkable!
Outrageous! Preposterous! Impossible!
Grotesque! Obscene! Horrendous! Horrific! Abominable!
Heinous! Despicable! Cowardly! Repugnant! Intolerable!
Crazy! Lunatic! Mad! Sick! Insane!
Sociopathic! Psychopathic! Megalomaniacal! Inhuman!

None of these desperate modifiers,
Adjectives uttered and muttered in shock and terror,
Words too imprecise to describe dread,
Whose Hydra heads have yet to coalesce
For sheer confusion about the future,
Doubt about right now…
Not one of these ineffectual qualifiers,
No matter how thoroughly we explore its roots,
Can adequately encapsulate meaning.

Express a plausible answers, as to how one man,
With nineteen identified hijackers
And a network of operatives in America,
Can knock a nation of 285 million people
So completely off its feet,
Bring it down to its bloody knees,
Bury it under acres of glass, cement, and steel –
Thousands of pulverized bodies –
Create colossal chaos where order thrived.

Yet, lacking better solutions to our problems,
Better responses to the unknown,
Better mollifications of our insecurities,
We insist on platitudes from our president,
Bombast from our senators,
Obligatory indignation and venomous resolve
From our Joint Chiefs of Staff,
Jargon from technical and strategic advisors,
Cant from our spiritual leaders.

Since Moses received from God
The Word made palpable, visible, audible –
Ten covenantal commandments –
We’ve faithfully relied on the power of the word.
But what should we do when words don’t work,
And all we’re left with are rubble and bodies
Transported, in dump trucks,
To the deepest reaches of speechlessness?
Cutting our tongues off would hardly be enough.

Turtles

Who hasn’t driven down a summer road,
A sporadically traveled passage
Between small country towns,
And seen at least a turtle or two,
Taking their trusting time to cross from one side
To some vague approximation of the other,
Guided by instinctive reptilian design?

Who, witnessing their unnerving progress,
Their reliance on blind faith, dumb luck,
Hasn’t wondered why so few die,
Don’t end their plodding existences flattened?
And who hasn’t imagined himself in their place –
The oblivious grace of fearlessness,
The inarticulate innocence of determination?

The attacks of fanatical terrorists on America,
Which leveled some of our proudest towers
Two persistently present two weeks ago,
Have awakened us to our precarious lives,
Transformed s into frightened turtles,
Withdrawing into our own personal shells –
Our neighborhoods, houses, heads.

But we must keep crossing the highway
Between birth and death
And not think about being hit by jets
Or stopped in our tracks by anthrax or smallpox.
We need to keep crossing our roads,
Believing that reaching the other side
Is our inalienable right.

–      from Shadow War: A Poetic Chronicle of September 11 and Beyond (2001,2004)

Real Tears

All the interminable drive, this Sunday morn,
From Lake Nebagamon to Duluth’s airport,
I feel palpable sadness, weep real tears.

Finding myself caught between my recent happiness
And this unhappy vacuum
That’s leaving me lower than anything I’ve known

Since those last moments, four weeks ago,
Which I spent in this tranquil, unhurried land,
Resigned then, as now, to having to go home.

With my visits growing more frequent,
These woefully distressful episodes
Seem to bedevil my spirit more readily, of late.

I’m not quite sure
Just what to make of such shows of emotion,
Why departures keep cutting closer to the heart.

Could it be that mortality is getting the better of me
Or, possibly, that there’s yet hope
For my soul to grow, with the water from its tears?

–      from At Dock’s End: Poems of Lake Nebagamon, Volume Two (2011)

Gold Medalist

Through most of your life,
You never knew or cared exactly where you were.
Only in old age has it become imperative
For you to master triangulation,
Get your geographical bearings,
Coordinates that locate you in the solar system,
On planet Earth, in your state, city, neighborhood,
Your residence in Delmar Gardens –
The “old folks’ home.”

In part, it had to do with your sense of immortality,
Who you were as a college youth:
A robust, vigorous sort,
A massively powerful human being
Who rowed, for Germany,
In the 1936 Olympics, in Berlin,
And won the gold medal.
In part, it was due to your time in Auschwitz –
A Jew with a Teutonic tattoo.

Oh, how painful it’s been,
Growing old with those memories of glory and travail
You accumulated in your “prime of life.”
(Euphemisms tell gigantic lies,
Rise, like corpses, to the surface of slime ponds.)
How sad to be cooped up, here in this compartment,
Relying on Meals on Wheels,
Watching TV, from sunrise to sunset,
Through cataract-clouded eyes.

The fate of refugees, even in the land of the free,
Isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.  You know.
For years, you made minimum wage,
Working as a salesclerk for Sears, then JCPenny,
Ringing up cutlery, men’s suits, power tools.
These days, at eighty-eight,
You sometimes let your mind wander
Back to the single-sculls final you won,
And you long for another victory, in your defeat.

–      from Rabbi Auschwitz: Poems of the Shoah (2009)

Mist

The demarcation of weeks into days means nothing.
Nothing to you, anyway,
Since time is just a serialization of changelessness

And you consider yourself but a piece of straw
In a frenzied eagle’s beak,
Destined to line its nest, beyond forever.

Time is as irrelevant to your existence
As summer and winter, left and right,
Memory and forgetting, life and demise.

For all intents and purposeless pretenses,
You can barely distinguish light from darkness,
Such is the mist in which your oblivious spirit operates.

That you’re a recluse is obvious enough.
You can’t even recognize yourself
In a mirror scribbled with your name, in Gothic script,

You, a spectral leftover of something too horrific
Even for God to resurrect from humanity’s ashpits –
History’s invisible misfit,

Issue of Yiddish-speaking Polish ciphers
Spit out of evil’s toothbrush-mustached,
Schnapps-fouled mouth,

Shipped off to the matzah bakery,
To propagate the zombie population,
Destined to line the nest of the crooked-wing eagle.

At eighty-eight, you have some right to complain.
After all, had you just been gassed,
The past sixty years would have spared you this death.

Ask the Rain

How could it have taken tonight’s rain shower
Sixty-five years
To find my shadowy silhouette slipping through the trees,

Trees which, for the past half-century, at least,
Have concealed me from grief’s argenteous spirits,
Protected me from death’s saber teeth?

Could it be that I eluded the clouds’ storm troops
Simply by pure fortuitousness,
A sheer matter of simple, godless probability?

Or was it a case of mistaken Jewish identity
That accounted for my unexplainable escape
From the roll call that devoured Europe’s 1940s?

How can I exhume adequate words, appropriate phrases,
To express my ineffable perplexity?
I don’t have an answer as to why I’m still breathing

Or whether being alive is better than dying might have been,
In that time of spiritual rot,
When decent Germans turned into demons,

Poltergeists who, once upon a civilized time,
Composed symphonies, concertos, sonatas, for the gods,
Created poems and paintings, dreamed millennial Reichs.

All I know is that in these days of my late eighties,
I’m very sensitive to the rain.
Tonight’s drops remind me of bleeding glass.

Could it be that Kristallnacht never happened, never passed,
And that those trees forming the forest beyond my soul
Never sprouted, never provided me with shelter,

That, in reality, I failed to survive the last sixty-five years,
Expired with the rest of my family, my people?
Ask the rain.  Maybe it can tell you why I’m still here.

–      Unser Kampf: Poems of the Final Solution (2013)

Now and No

The dramatically vast distance between now and no
Is no greater than the width of “w” —
A star illuminating the cosmos, with its lambent light.

I, an inhabitant of the planet Earth,
Know, authoritatively, of what I say, speak, postulate.
After all, I’m of the species Homo sapiens,

A member of human civilization,
A dust mote who’s fated to be born, live, and die,
Relinquish his paltry mosaic of flesh and bones,

Acquiesce to burial in dirt
Or transmogrification into cremated ashes —
Hardly sustenance for worms.

If only man, with all his astonishing genius,
Could devise a methodology, technology, science
For closing the gap between now and no, erasing it,

Creating a treaty, confederation, pact
Between life and transience, ephemerality, evanescence,
Existence and irrevocable nothingness,

Perhaps he could bloom into an immortal flower
That would blossom daily, even nightly,
Like a belladonna, datura, nicotiana, paper-white.
But if he can’t, dear God,
Might it be within Your humbling prescience
To let now subsume no, for the rest of man’s destiny?

The following is part of what I wrote the day after I heard of LD’s death.

I’m proud to say that a mutual long-distance respect grew between LD and I.  Our art brought us together despite being separated by at least three states and a few decades of life.  We trusted each other’s writing, even the poetic personae we created, to fill in the particular blanks.  LD put this miracle of knowing-through-art perfectly in the Welcome section of his official website: “If you’re willing to journey far enough, you might end up knowing me better than I know myself and, in the process, knowing yourself better than before.”

Honestly, LD became an important mentor to me, whether he knew it or not.  His guidance, encouragement and respect for my own work were priceless gifts.  I appreciated not only his superior experience, literary output and scholarship, but his peculiar vision and insight into all manners of things, from the horrible Holocaust to the love of a lady-like lake called Nebagamon.  Above all, I will remember him by his art, especially since he seemed to prefer having his art speak for himself.  So my last words will be LD’s words, from a poem called “Disciple” in his The World Waiting To Be:

…I’m the celebrated one,
The celebration itself.
All else falls away, for the moment,

As I proclaim, to the uninitiated,
That poetry saves,
Redeems the overloaded intellect from emptiness,

Resurrects its devoted novitiates from earthly notions.
At least for me,
It’s given dignity and purpose to my anonymity.

My Most Memorable Birthday

Sometimes I think I remember
my first birthday, fifty-three years ago,
my family’s told me about it so often;
it’s like I was there!

A warm day the beginning of November,
all the kids out back,
friends of my brother and sister, mainly,
trading the blindfold
as they all took turns swatting at the piñata
swinging like a hanged man
from the maple tree,
each one lunging in turn
with the long broom handle,
parents drinking coffee and lemonade
while the kids screamed in delight.

They all heard the sharp snap of a gunshot,
or claimed they did,
and the almost instantaneous shattering
of the storm door out front,
a squeal of tires.

There wasn’t panic
so much as disbelief and disappointment:
the kids all wanted the candy, the cake,
the party favors,
but my mom called the police.
Everybody stayed, witnesses
who didn’t actually see anything.

The cops found the bullet in the kitchen.
It must have driven through the living room wall,
slowed by the resisting plaster and wood,
hit the refrigerator and dropped.
Nobody ever found out what happened;
my parents didn’t have enemies they knew about.

Me? I was asleep in the nursery upstairs.
“A birthday party for a one-year old?
He’ll never remember it.  Why bother?”
How many times have I heard that over the years?

The Exile’s Return

Two months after I retired,
I had lunch with a former colleague,
meeting at a modest restaurant
in the neighborhood where we’d worked.

The closer I got to our rendezvous,
the more I felt
like an animal that had escaped its cage,
only to be recaptured,
tugged back by the leash.

Simon was his old jovial self.
We embraced when we met,
long lost comrades –
we’d always been on the same side
in the endless games of office politics.

But over our sandwiches,
as he recounted the office intrigues,
caught me up on projects
that once brought on anxiety
like a stretched rubber band,
my eyes watered
as I tried to suppress my yawn
while keeping my mouth closed.

“We all missed you at Bernie’s funeral,”
Simon murmured into the silence.

“Bernie’s funeral?”
Gaping, mouth full of egg salad.
Suddenly alert.
Bernie Knapp?  Dead?

“You didn’t know? 
Heart failure at the Jersey shore,
visiting his son’s family.
He was buried last Tuesday.”

Bernie dead!  Buried!
We’d shared an off ice for years.
I felt the bite of the leash on my throat.
So much for escape.

Perspective

“You’re the kind of man
who’s not taking hair loss sitting down.”
The voice on the television commercial 
sounds like a Marine recruiter.
It’s six in the morning at the gym.
I’m in the locker room,
changing into my swimsuit.

The authoritative voice speaks
of omega-3 fatty acids,
different kinds of hair follicles,
anemia, metabolic disorders,
technical language meant to impress.

I remembered my anguish,
hair starting to fall out at eighteen,
in an age when the Beatles and the Stones
were popular, hippies all over the place,
long glorious hair down the back,
sprouting out all over the head.
Me?  I felt a sick helplessness when I found
strands on the shoulders of my shirts,
coating the pillowcase in  the morning,
thick clumps in the shower drain.

My twin brother was in the same situation;
our mother’s father,
gleaming sleek-headed,
our fates sealed by the maternal gene.

Now my brother savors each day he’s alive,
having been diagnosed
with stage 3 lung cancer.

Charles is the author of A Convert’s Tale (Pudding House), i don’t think god’s that cruel and Go to Hell (March Street Press), Fire Drill!, All Hallow’s Eve and FAME (Snark Publishing), and Mixed Signals (Finishing Line Press).  He edits The Potomac literary journal and serves as fiction edition of The Pedestal, as well as writes reviews regularly for Chamber Four.

BUILDING ARTS
      for Christopher

A man
with the spirit of development

extols mortar
and exudes cement

He extols cement
and exudes brick

A man
with the spirit of development

conceives the foundation and
pregnant with the cornerstone

gives birth to the top stone

and the keystone
while he’s at it

The man
with the spirit of development

is the soul of architecture
and the heart of wit.

BIVOUAC

Pitch your tent
each day
one day closer
to home

remembering

home is where
the heart is

well grounded

Strengthen
your tent stakes

lengthen your cords
and broaden your tent flaps

Fill them
with good things
withal

good food
good friends
good times

remembering
that larger canopy
the sky
enveloping us

and that greater
base of operations
the earth

now one day
closer to home

where the heart is

well grounded.

TWO MOTIFS

What if Justice
is set in cement

her blindfold
and scales fixed and rigid
set in cement?

What if the king
her consort
like his concubine
is fixed and rigid
set in cement

the heavens his headrest
his footstool the earth?

Grovel at his feet

He holds all the marbles.


 

The Tao of Barbour County

          I’d like you to pray for me. – George Wallace to Jesse Jackson, 1987

Barbour County roads all led down to the river
past bad times at both ends. Two catastrophes plus
the boll weevil and revenge would later ricochet blowback
firing weapons with uses beyond the then present
technology, when scars ran wet and black smoke obscured
the noose the poplar the walnut the water oak of Chattahoochee Valley.

Revolution always has a scapegoat. Still, defeat carries a responsibility
because the defeated often direct the conversation for good or not.
Abject poverty was on both sides of the issue because everyone lost
his ass, and some never recovered except darkly, through ideology
straight lines and victims in rooms; those same victims,
though much transformed, who by equal hatred, unforgiveness,
used night against the other.

It was into such a world of the defeated and easy targets that Wallace was born.
Vicarified memories of foreign occupation, a nation, a culture fallen,
recharging its wrath like old batteries to inflict retribution where woods begin,
where it’s hard if not impossible to see after sundown. 
That’s why people look for fires after dark. Sometimes it’s for survival.

Lake Eufaula at night proves it. Proves that peace is something
separate from people. As George passed by the fields
the woods ripe for breeze, or seeing muddy roads or broken rocks,
there was a storm in his mind, an out-of-focus broil with glad-handed
self-evidence, logic in loops.  The lake was calm many a night
while he raged and screamed to Yahweh. But God chooses sides.

Maltreatment begets equal opposite causes if born in vengeance,
compromises the Christian way, as up is down and right is not.
Yet, like blue sky in a rainstorm, there’s always the firefly:
millions combined can light up fields together;  a solitary one can
give a point of reference for those without due process, hope,
confused by the facts, disappointed by ideals, who wrongly
dismiss the healing properties of light.

So eras begin. Damaged ones like his. Yes, revenge times. They start from  
ruin received, grow in the womb of blood like spinal cord bullets,
live among putrefied soldiers lying along fence lines.
But they always end with a come-to-Jesus moment,
when clarity and wisdom coincide even if for a nanosecond,
and the parted clouds allow the model for all music to transcend.
When a man like George Wallace, the Tzu Lao of sinners,
is forced to greet his wounded opposite on the fall line. 
And in that radiance they finally pray together.

The Stealth Center

You passed over the mile-wide river
like a dandelion bird
lighter than weather and longer lived.
I decided to follow along.
No one even noticed us.
Just think, I thought,
here we are the center of everything
but through without a stir.
Before then I was sure I could elevate
the conversation.  Later though
I grew more accustomed to listening.

L. Ward Abel, poet, composer and performer of music (Abel, Rawls & Hayes), teacher, retired lawyer, lives in rural Georgia, has been published hundreds of times in print and online, and is the author of Peach Box and Verge (Little Poem Press, 2003), Jonesing For Byzantium (UK Authors Press, 2006), The Heat of Blooming (Pudding House Press, 2008), Torn Sky Bleeding Blue (erbacce-Press, 2010), American Bruise (Parallel Press, 2012), Cousins Over Colder Fields (Finishing Line Press, 2013), and Roseorange(Flutter Press, 2013).

published 2014 by Sybaritic Press 
188 pages
order a copy here

Learn and run.  – Dawn

(The actual review follows this section.)
 

Finding Octavia

Anybody who grew up with Star Wars should be a science fiction fan. The adult intellectual in me appreciates the mixtures of Kurosawa, Flash Gordon and archetypal mythology in original trilogy, but the evergreen child in me still thrills at the ultra-exoticism, dashing heroes and ultimately doomed villains. Next to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Wars has become the sci-fi nucleus for cinema, and my adoration of films such as Alien, Solaris (1972), Vanilla Sky, Europa Report, Gravity and the Matrix trilogy stems from that original childhood fascination.

As for sci-fi/speculative literature, I’m not an especial fan, and though I’ve stuff by Robert Asprin, Alan Dean Foster, A.C. Crispin, Isaac Asimov, Tim Sullivan, William Gibson, Philip K. Dick, Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven (The Mote in God’s Eye is a masterpiece) and Arthur C. Clarke under my belt, my few favorites have been, are and always will be Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury and Michael Moorcock. From now on Octavia Butler will be included in that few. A huge honorable mention goes to C.S. Lewis’ underrated space trilogy, which includes Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra and That Hideous Strength.  In fact, much of Butler’s imagery and tone brought Perelandra to my mind more than a few times.

Though I’m familiar with works of some black writers who contributed to the sci-fi genre (including W.E.B. DuBois’ “The Comet” in Darkwater, Virginia Hamilton’s The Magical Adventures of Pretty Pearl, Sam Delany’s books, and even George Schuyler’s Black No More – which could have inspired Dr. Seuss’ The Sneetches), I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m relatively new to Octavia Butler. Many may blame this on her unlikely gender and race in a literary genre that tends to be manned by, well, men – and many who happen to be non-black.  I don’t think so, but nor do I care. However, in order to have more authority to even think of writing a review of Near Kin, I insisted on familiarizing myself with Butler’s books, including Kindred, Survivor (the novel Butler herself repudiated), Parable of the Talents, Fledgling and Dawn. During my power-reading I also watched and read Butler interviews, as well as explored some related criticism. Needless to say, I was quite impressed, not to mention predisposed to be able to listen to her voice for three week’s straight if ever necessary. And her face. Butler had a remarkable face.

I picked Kindred as my virgin voyage since I’m a fool for almost anything to do with time travel. Back to the Future is my mini-religion, and Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys continues to fascinate me. I’m even one of the few goofballs on this planet who love that 1994 Van Damme stinker, Time Cop.  Kindred is up there with books such as Jack Finney’s Time and Again and Time After Time (of which Butler’s book reminds me), Daphne du Maurier’s The House on the Strand, and Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife (which had to have been partly influenced by Butler’s novel).  It cleverly and bravely takes time-travel literature to a different level by locating the main (and only) past location in the pre-Civil War South, smack-dab in the midst of American slavery, one of the most atrocious stains on U.S. history, not to mention world history. 

The central protagonist, Dana, is torn from the 1970s to 1815 Maryland every time Rufus, the son of a plantation/slave owner, is in mortal danger as he matures from boy to man. Dana learns that Rufus’s existence is crucial to her own existence, since he eventually impregnates Alice, a slave, with a daughter who Dana’s key maternal ancestor. This is one of many examples of Butler’s interest in symbiosis rather than black-and-white (so to speak) user/used dichotomy. Like Marty McFly in Back to the Future, Dana must act in her own ultimate self-interest: set up the eventuality of her own birth. She does succeed – with a price. Aside from learning first-hand that whites and blacks are inexorable in U.S. history, she literally leaves part of herself in that sinful, horrible era, and that era marks her with the truth of that past for the rest of her days. On the final return from the past, her arm becomes fused with a wall and must be amputated for removal.

Which brings us to the elephant that seems to be in every room in which books by black authors are read: race. Honestly, like John Coltrane, I like to judge an artist by his or her “sound” rather than skin color or heritage, and I’ve long since grown bored with the artistic segregation of so-called black literature, no matter how good the intentions for such a categorization are. Black History Month is twelve months long.

There shall be and should be no forgetting of American slavery, but there are those who question how long society should wear its sackcloth in morose memory of that mass sin. That question oversimplifies the matter. Kindred’s Dana says to her husband at one point: “You’d think I would have had enough of the past,” but as she becomes more and more immersed in the real history of her doomed ancestors, she realizes that it’s not necessarily a one-sided decision. As the line goes in P.T. Anderson’s film masterpiece, Magnolia, “we may be through with the past, but the past ain’t through with us.” “I want to suggest that history is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history” James Baldwin write in “Black English: A Dishonest Argument.” Atrocity stains deeply; it cries from the soil. This is why Faulkner was obsessed with his Southern heritage that belonged to both free whites and captive blacks.

While Sori, the female protagonist in Fledgling, Butler’s vampire novel, seeks to restore the lost memory of her past, Dana’s ancestral past is forced on her by inexplicable circumstances. With her direct experience and undeniable knowledge of such barbarism, she is no longer content in her relatively civilized, sanitized present:

“You might be able to go through this whole experience as an observer…But now and then…I can’t maintain the distance.  I’m drawn all the way into eighteen nineteen, and I don’t know what to do.  I ought to be doing something.  I know that.”

The sin of slavery (which was once Earth’s norm, and is still aching in the human heart to reign again) is as worthy of reiteration and analysis as the Shoah, but there shouldn’t be some unwritten rule that black writers must always address the “black experience” in her or his works any more than every Jewish writer needs to write a Holocaust book. Yes, “racial” writers often pigeonhole themselves, but narrowing Octavia Butler’s awesome contribution to science fiction down to the rarity of her race and gender in the sci-fi field just sucks. “Black history” is inexorable from American history; “black art” is inexorable from American art; Butlerian sci-fi is inexorable from American sci-fi. Butler certainly tends to focus on race both literally and symbolically in her work, but her overall theme is humanity and what it is to be human – and this takes place in particular individuals rather than representative masses. When Joan Fry wondered about using the term “black” or “African American” in an interview with Butler, Butler exclaimed, “Oh, Lord!  Labels again!” Her primary goal was to write a good story, but her work has more than one level, and some of those levels certainly play with issues of being black and the history of the Atlantic Slave Trade. “I have no idea who picks up on them and who doesn’t,” Butler said. “I think some of the academics do, because they expect you to do things like that.”

In a 1963 interview Ralph Ellison said that “all novels are about certain minorities; the individual is a minority.” Ayn Rand said as much in her famous “The smallest minority on earth is the individual” line. “If the Negro, or any other writer, is going to do what is expected of him,” Ellison went on to say, “he’s lost the battle before he takes the field.” He also summed up what I’ve come to believe and what Kindred and many of Butler’s other books seem to imply: “One ironic witness to the beauty and universality of this art is the fact that the descendants of the very men who enslaved us can now sing the spirituals and find in the singing an exaltation of their own humanity.” This is why nobody owns the blues and everybody owns the blues. And why jazz (that messiah of the prophet blues), is as ubiquitously American as superhero comic books.

A very refreshing aspect of Butler’s insight into race is her fairness about who can exhibit racist or, at least, prejudicial behavior. We tend to always hear about white people who find interracial dating and marriage odious, but what’s behind closed doors of the black family is rarely revealed. Often, what both old-fashioned white and black fathers can agree on for sure is that they don’t want their kids hooking up with each other. In Kindred, Dana, a black woman, asks Kevin, a white man, what his sister thinks of the prospect of their matrimony.  He admits that she, despite her liberal sensibilities, disapproves – but soon we learn that so does Dana’s uncle and, to a lesser degree, her aunt:

“She doesn’t care much for white people, but she prefers light-skinned blacks.  Figure that out.  Anyway, she ‘forgives’ me for you.  But my uncle doesn’t…He wants me to marry someone like him – someone who looks like him.  A black man.”

This honest revelation reminds me of the black side of the conflict in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. John Prentice, Jr., played by Sidney Poitier, rejects his father’s old-fashioned prejudice against his loving and wanting to marry a white woman – and self-prejudice: “You think of yourself as a colored man. I think of myself as a man.”

In a critical essay on Kindred, Robert Crossley (University of Massachusetts at Boston) does a brief but worthy study of the book.However, he loses me when he says things such as this: “Some of [science fiction in the 1940s and 1950s] was provocatively racist, including Robert Heinlein’s The Sixth Column (1949), whose protagonist in a future race war was unsubtly named Whitey.” First of all, a scholar spieling about sci-fi literature should be a little more nuanced and less obtuse. Secondly, I think it’s ironic that Butler probably owes a lot to Heinlein. I almost refuse to doubt that she read his Methuselah’s Children, for instance. The controversial Farnham’s Freehold (1965) was not his story to begin with. Rather, it was a cleanup job for a story called “All” by science-fiction editor John W. Campbell, who undeniably had some pretty problematic views on race and blacks in particular. Far from originating a racist tale, Heinlein actually reformed the story in order to flush out a lot of racist elements. The race stuff that’s left shows bigotry on both the heroes’ and enemies’ sides, particularly on the part of the PanAsians who consider themselves the superior race and view white folks as slaves. Politically incorrect by today’s standards, the characters’ epithets and jingoism (again, from both sides) can be offensive, but this was published during World War II, while suspicion of the Chinese and Japanese was high and, ironically, shortly before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor fulfilled a surprise attack by Asians that the book prefigured.

Heinlein was very conscientious about racism, and a lot of his positive characters were of non-white descent (Rico, the Filipino of the popularly misunderstood Starship Troopers, to name one). Farnham’s Freehold, which reiterates the Sixth Column theme of an enemy that thinks it’s the superior race, is often slammed for emphasizing racist stereotypes despite its apparent anti-racist premise. A manmade cataclysm causes a warp in time that relocates Hugh Farnham and his family about 2,000 years in the future. A dystopia in which whites (called “savages”) are victims of oppressive racism is run by a regime made up of a conglomeration of non-Caucasian races, the Chosen, who inherited the world whites destroyed (an ironic prefigurement of Manson’s warped Helter Skelter eschatology).

Some critics point to the cannibalism of the Chosen to be racist in its echoing of black-as-savage paranoia. (My mind goes to the misinterpretation of Evelyn Waugh’s Black Mischief, which satirized aristocratic white liberals rather than denigrated African natives.) One of the points of the book is that humanity at large tends to slip into such madness when power corrupts; the violent and abusive wheel turns. I’d bet that many of the folks who disdain Farnham’s Freehold wouldn’t be so fastidious about, say, Darius James’ rather insane Negrophobia, or by Bernardine Evaristo’s re-imaging of American slavery in Blonde Roots (2010), a novel that depicts whites being kidnapped and taken to the made-up continent of Aphrika to be enslaved and dehumanized in every way Africans were during the real thing. The female protagonist is branded with “KKK” (for Kaga Konata Katamba, her black master’s name) and forced to serve as a “house wigger.”

Consider the female protagonist in Heinlein’s masterful Friday (1982). Friday is an Artificial Person (AP), probably genetically engineered, who is an agent fulfilling clandestine missions for a wisecracking old genius known to her as Boss. She’s indistinguishable from actual humans except in physical prowess, resistance to pain, deadliness and mental acuity. The question of what is human and who is equal pops up again and again throughout the novel, and Friday becomes rather sensitive about implied and overt discrimination against APs as the story progresses. When her secret is revealed to her human polygamist family, one of a few sister wives castigates Friday for deceiving them: “I’ve never had to deal with a creature not of God’s Law before…[U]nder our laws…a nonhuman cannot enter into a marriage contract with human beings.” Before this blowup, Friday defends a stepdaughter’s decision to marry a Tongan man. Sister-wife Vicki states her case plainly: “Mixing the races is always a bad idea.” And Friday, deflated, replies: “You don’t know any better. You’ve never been anywhere and you probably soaked up racism with your mother’s milk.”

I can’t help but think of a similar passage from Octavia Butler’s Survivor, in which a character named Bea suggests that Neila, the stepmother of mixed-race protagonist Alanna, should consider allowing the child to be raised by “her own kind.” Neila, of course, is appalled.

The older woman sighed. “Oh, my. I knew this was going to be difficult. But, Neila, the girl isn’t white.”

“She’s Afro-Asian from what she says of her parents. Black father, Asian mother.”…

…”I thought that after you’d had a few days with the girl, you might… reconsider.”

There was the sound of Neila’s laughter. “Come to my senses, you mean.”

“That’s exactly what I mean!” snapped the older woman. “Several of us feel that you and Jules ought to be setting a better example for the young people here – not encouraging them to mix…”

In the world of Heinlein’s Friday, human suspicion of Artificial Persons serves as a metaphor for racism, obviously, but, more importantly, Boss’s repeated admonishments against Friday’s self-consciousness of artificiality are an excellent example of science fiction’s – certainly Octavia Butler’s – tendency to kick at basic traditional foundations to the point of extending “humanity” beyond “homo sapiens.” When Boss makes a comment about Friday’s birthright, she corrects him:

“Birthright.”  Don’t make jokes, Boss…‘My mother was a test tube, my father was a knife.’”

“You are being foolishly self-conscious over an impediment that was removed years ago.”

“Am I?  The courts say I can’t be a citizen; the churches say I don’t have a soul.  I’m not ‘man born of woman,’ at least not in the eyes of the law.”

“’The law is an ass’…You are not only as human as Mother Eve, you are an enhanced human, as nearly perfect as your designers could manage.”

Again and again questions of the essence of humanity, genetics, cross-breeding, evolution and tension between the familiar and the Other dominate most science fiction, often with the intensity and radicalism found in, say, Donna Haraway’s breakthrough posthumanist essay, A Cyborg Manifesto. Another very successful and ingenious science-fiction author, Samuel Delany (whose novels Octavia Butler could never get into, by the way), takes these themes to the nth degree in his complex novel The Einstein Intersection (1967): genetically dynamic and volatilely mutating aliens take over a humanless Earth and try their damnedest to reach and maintain some sort of “normal” physical form and society, in emulation of the long-gone humans and their cultural scraps. This results in exploration of difference, the Other, assimilation, humanity, and the weird drama of DNA. As in Butler’s books, and perhaps more so, these themes needn’t be relegated to the black/white dichotomy. Believe it or not, more than black writers are concerned with these things. Humans are concerned with these things.

Butler has some pretty stark pet themes in her novels: problematic religions, captivity, pivotal female characters, characters raging against impossible odds and so on. But the problem of familiar versus Other (usually human versus superhuman or alien and explored through the literal and symbolic act of miscegenation, which dear William Faulkner beat almost to death in his wonderful masterpieces and less-worthy works) seems to be the deepest theme. Nikanj, a key alien in Dawn, the first novel in Butler’s Xenogensis series, says that “different is threatening to most species. Different is dangerous. It might kill you.”

Obviously the theme of the Other is prime ground for addressing racial barriers, and there have been many books that involve characters of the black and white races role-reversing in order to reveal something about what it’s like to be the Other, usually for the sake of imparting empathy and tolerance – even love – if not just holding a mirror up to what’s considered to be a self-blind racist society. Several examples include Mark Twain’s Puddn’head Wilson (1894), James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), George Schuyler’s Black No More (1931), John Griffin’s true-life Black Like Me (1961), and Bernardine Evaristo’s Blonde Roots (2010).

I must admit that Butler’s attention to color, kind, insider/outsider, etc., borders on tiresome but never really elicits more than a half-humorous eye roll. Oh, Shori is the only black vampire among the Ina kind in Fledgling? And Ina are otherwise invariably chalk-white and blonde? What a surprise. The more interesting thing is that Sori must be told she is black, similarly to how Adam and Eve are said to have not known their own nakedness in Eden until the Serpent spilled the beans. A passage from Fledgling:

He started to leave, then turned back, frowning. “Ordinary sun exposure burns your skin even though you’re black?”

“I’m…” I stopped. I had been about to protest that I was brown, not black, but before I could speak, I understood what he meant.

Days of Future Passed by Cacy Forgenie

Much to my delight, it seems that Butler is too wisely pessimistic to believe in utopia as curative for human ills such as race-based prejudice.  Instead, she acknowledges more genuine and palatable microcosmic healing rather than macrocosmic schemes.  “It’s safer for people to overcome the feeling on an individual basis than as members of a large group,” said Ralph Ellison. How true. The breakdown of societal walls happens bit by bit and episode by episode. More generally, sincere love between humans happens on a heart-to-heart basis rather than by lofty edict. Neighborhoods on the sides of railroad tracks will always self-isolate while the brave and curious individuals who dare walk across those tracks will find that neighborhoods also can be neighbors.

Such microcosmic success is shown in the sexual intercourse between and marriage of human Lanna and alien Diut in Survivor. I always say that miscegenation is one of the keys to dampening racism, and here it is analogized in the love between different species. Aside from the hateful rivalry between two communities of the Kohn species (Garkohn and Tehkohn), tribal intractability is overtly shown in tension between Lanna and her Missionary foster father, Jules.  Lanna reveals her coupling with Diut, and, despite his basic kindness and goodwill, Jules can’t justify these things with his Missionary religion. He questions the existential worth of the Tehkohn in general. In response Lanna insists on the “humanity” of her husband’s kind: “You know how human they are.” And Octavia Butler’s recurring problem with monotheism is evident in Jules’s reply:

“Physically humanlike, perhaps.  But spiritually…what god do they worship?”

“…none.”

“On Earth, even the most primitive savages recognize some supreme being or beings, some power higher than themselves.”

“That might be true – on Earth.”

“Only animals were completely without spiritual beliefs.”

“On Earth!”

In Dawn protagonist Lilith is horrified by a master plan of joint procreation of hybrid children between captive humans and captor aliens. (The consequences of this master plan are shown in Adulthood Rites and Imago, and the Patternist series and Fledgling, also involve the theme of genetic manipulation and human evolution.) Loss of true humanity is what Lilith fears while her alien counterpart, Nikanj, thrills at the intended result:

“Our children will be better than either of us…Our children won’t destroy themselves in a war, and if they need to regrow a limb or to change themselves in some other way they’ll be able to do it.”

Lilith speaks for every anti-utopian when she replies:

“But they won’t be human. That’s what matters. You can’t understand, but that is what matters.”

As Nikanj observed earlier in the novel, humans “are horror and beauty in rare combination.” (I’m reminded of something Dmitri says in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov: “The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.”) This sums up the basic catch-22 that arises in all worthy dystopian works: the folly of throwing the baby out with the bathwater in the quest for perfection, absolute equality, and peace. In A Clockwork Orange, Alex’s Skinnerian/Pavlovian conditioning squeezes out his love of music, particularly Beethoven. In the superior 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers film love is the bathwater baby. Consider the eerie assurance of body-snatched Dr. Kibner: “We don’t hate you.  There’s no need for hate now. Or love… Don’t be trapped by old concepts, Matthew, you’re evolving into a new life-form.” Even if some type of conditioning or deep sacrifice of human nature could vanquish racism Butler would reject it. “Ridiculous” was the word she used to describe utopias, and she admitted that perfect societies not only require perfect people but they’d be boring if achieved.

Of course, racists see race mixture as something just as extreme and traumatic as body-snatching. Consider many of the Nazis’ obsession with blood and eugenics, or Nation of Islam founder Fard’s tale of mad-scientist Yakub and the lab-originated white-devil race. The old “one-drop rule” is still alive and well in the world, particularly in America, and its “positive” mask hardly hides the basic racism. All racial chauvinism is poison.

It takes no genius to realize that Butler’s work tends to bring to mind the slave-narrative tradition. Characters face and work through captivity; some are even actual slaves. Novels such as Mind of My Mind, Survivor and The Parable of the Talents recapitulate the author’s fascination and concern with oppression, power and control. The recent film adaptation of 12 Years a Slave, Solomon Northup’s factual account of his kidnapping and unlawful sale into Southern slavery back in the 1850s, pleased me very much with its accuracy and near-verbatim treatment of the author’s confounding and deeply touching testimony. Reading of Kindred’s Dana’s struggle to get a letter that could lead to her manumission reminded me of the Northup book. And Butler’s Parable of the Talents (whose obnoxious journal format and monotony had me trudging uphill to its ending) deals with a future slavery rather than a past one. 

Lauren Oya Olamina, co-narrator of the book (along with her daughter many years later), “hyperempath,” ex-Baptist (like Butler herself) and founder of a philosophy/religion called Earthseed, keeps a secret account during her people’s captivity under the fanatical (and annoyingly caricatured) Christian Crusade in a manner similar to Solomon Northup’s clandestine letter-writing:  “I’ve hidden my writing paper, pens and pencils away in our prison room.” (Captive Lilith in Dawn also lobbies strongly for writing materials.) Olamina voices the general anguish of enslaved people and the particular injustice of violently amputating Africans’ heritage after bringing them to the so-called New World:

We’re expected to feed ourselves and our captors.  They eat better than we do, of course…They’ve burned all that they could find of our past.  It’s all ungodly trash, they say.

The imagined sci-fi future echoes and speaks for the real-world past, and Olamina reveals the deep price for both manumission and diaspora:

But we’re not slaves anymore…I’ve done this: I’ve sent my people away. We survived slavery together, but I didn’t believe that we could survive freedom together. I broke up the Earthseed community and sent its parts in all directions. I believe it was the right thing to do, but I can hardly bear to think about it…I’ve torn a huge hole in myself.

This figurative hole reminds me of the figurative and literal maiming of Dana at the end of Kindred. Butler explained her choice to have Dana lose her arm:

I couldn’t really let her come all the way back. I couldn’t let her return to what she was, I couldn’t let her come back whole and that, I think, really symbolizes her not coming back whole. Antebellum slavery didn’t leave people quite whole.

There is no total solution to the insoluble fact of atrocity and humans’ inhumanity to humans. And, as far as Butler is concerned, without a doubt, the answer certainly doesn’t lie in monotheistic religion, Christianity in particular. (Robert Heinlein also tends to sneer at religious fundamentalism, especially in Revolt in 2100, which features a dictatorial regime called the Theocracy.) Though her Baptist past informs her and a lot of her criticism of organized religion is right on and inarguable, much of Butler’s characterizations strike me as oversimplified and hackneyed. An odious creep named Andrew Jarrett – who’s from Texas, of course – embodies the Christian Crusade, a regime that is extremely oppressive and self-righteous as much as self-blind, an extreme and meaner version of Survivor’s Missionary sect. 

The religion (non-religion?) of Earthseed, which is in tune with the natural unfolding of things and therefore right (a notion that is a distant cousin to de Sade’s nihilistic determinism, really) is pitted against the rather sophomoric Christian-chauvinist dystopia that has about as little real-world possibility as do Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale or Alan Moore’s V For Vendetta. “God is Change” sums up the credo of Earthseed, and a lot of bubblegum religiosity and what I call Zen-lite flows from that.  Earthseed encourages adherents to help give shape to constant change, and doubters or Christians are seen as dumb dams butting up against creative rivers. Tellingly, Olamina negatively recalls a sermon from her childhood that hailed Jesus, who is “the same yesterday, today, and forever.” In Earthseed terms, the static Jesus is the opposite of God.

Olamina’s condescending brother protests: “You can follow Earthseed, build your way to go to the stars, fall down into chaos, and wind up in hell! Or you can follow the will of God.” And her friend Dan typifies the closed-minded, condescending Christian dogmatist: “It isn’t really religious – your service, I mean.  You guys don’t believe in God or anything.” Personally, I shy away from both dogmatism and naturalism. I appreciate – need, can’t help but be both an agent and subject of – change, but I’m a willy-nilly child who doesn’t wish to have a willy-nilly parent, a wobbly wheel that wants a stable drivetrain. Improved civil rights is change, yes, but so are cataclysm and cancer.

G.K. Chesterton wrote that “satire may be mad and anarchic, but it presupposes an admitted superiority in certain things over others; it presupposes a standard.” Can’t that be applied to just about anything? Can change be change without a flux-resistant thing or concept? In a similar vein G.K. wrote: “[Y]ou cannot praise an action because it shows will; for to say that is merely to say that it is an action.” If God is change and change is God, then I’d hate to meet the devil.

I don’t want my personal thumbs down to ruin my praise for Octavia Butler, however. She belongs on the bookshelves of anyone who loves good science fiction and excellent literature in general. As author DL Warner says in Near Kin, “[Butler] presented universal themes on a down-to-earth level.” That’s Butler’s greatest strength, I think.  The bottom (bottomless?) line for Butler is the question of humanity. What constitutes a human? What makes certain types of humans “worth more” than others? What happens when “human” is a judgment call made by beings – human or not – in power or with more power? In a sense, these are the same questions involved in thinking through the age-old institution of slavery – and I dare say that no eras of that once worldwide institution have been written of and studied more than the American one. This is just another reason to consider Butler a dyed-in-the-wool American writer, and a darn important one at that.

Near Kin

To be honest, I’m usually not a fan of tribute anthologies.  Here’s what I wrote at the beginning of my review of From the Four-Chambered Heart: In Tribute to Anais Nin (another anthology published by Sybaritic Press):

Having heard and been disappointed by my share of tribute music albums, I often approach tribute literature with a grain of salt in one hand and keep the other hand free just in case I have to yawn.  Maybe this attitude stems from my lifelong indifference to dressing up for Halloween, and emulous songs or writings seem like costumes rather than unique ensembles.

However, I ended up appreciating that book and speaking very highly of it, and I’m pleased to do the same for Near Kin: A Collection of Words and Art Inspired by Octavia Estelle Butler.  The book is the only of its kind, as far as I can tell.  When I first heard of the book, I wondered who the heck came up with the idea to do such an unlikely tribute.  But that’s just what Near Kin’s charm is: someone showed due respect to Octavia Butler, and it’s about damn time! 

Marie Lecrivain, poet, author, editor-in-chief of poeticdiversity and “editrix” of Sybaritic Press, edited the anthology and wrote its foreword in which she praises “[Butler’s] scary and wonderful worlds” and “her vision, bravery, artistry, and…her wish to fashion a better world than the one we live in now.”  Mentioning Butler’s accomplishment of becoming the first black woman to win a MacArthur Genius grant, Marie makes sure to emphasize the author’s expertise rather over her genetic makeup: “I briefly pondered Butler’s racial origin, then cast it aside…I loved her writing!”  This calls to my mind something that Ralph Ellison wrote in “The World and the Jug”: “While I am without a doubt a Negro, and a writer, I am also an American writer.”  Marie reveals that Dawn is the book that inspired her to explore more of Butler’s work.  I can see why.  The book is extraordinary.  (I am disappointed, however, that Marie didn’t include her own work in this collection.)

As with the Nin anthology, I can take or leave the interspersed illustrations and photographs in Near Kin – which is not to say that I don’t dig them.  My favorites include Cacy Forgenie’s Days of Future Past and Justus (the front-cover image), Lance Tooks’ Kindred (taken from the front cover of his graphic-novel adaptation of the novel), Fabiola Jean-Louis’ lovely Balance and Birth of the Seed (which is on the cover of the Kindle edition of the book) and Marissa Lafferty’s Space Lady (which looks like a sci-fi version of Josephine Baker).   I do think that I’d be more partial to the inclusion of the visual art if color printing and/or glossiness had been feasible or affordable.  Fabiola’s paintings could have especially shined.

Though I liked some pieces more than others in Near Kin, I must congratulate every contributor for her or his enthusiasm and care for the inspiring author.  Octavia Butler deserves both the admiration and emulation.  The works range from intentionally derivative to very vague (as far as reference to Butlerian writing goes), and I have to say that perhaps I appreciated the stuff in between those poles. 

The prose piece that impressed me the most is Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ “A Litany for Survivor: The Book That Octavia Didn’t Want Us to Remember,” the text of a presentation done at UC Riverside’s Critical Ethnic Studies: Settler Colonialism and the Future of Genocide in 2011.  The essay, on the whole, is excellent, though I diverge from some of its core notions.  Gumbs shares some theories on why Butler ended up repudiating Survivor and wanted it to fade away.  Her first guess is that the author shied away from the premise of humans living among “a somewhat humanoid species of folks who are hairy, and deep blue, or green.”  Then she reiterates what is probably the most popular theory (since Butler herself expressed it): that the author was ashamed of the “little green man in outer space” cliché.  Finally Gumbs builds on the initial theory and wonders if Butler feared “danger in a racist society” in response to depicting the communal, “very hairy” and “darkest blue people had the most power.” 

First of all, I can’t accept Butler’s own “little green man” rationale.  It’s so weak and unsubstantiated, since so many of her books star the equivalents of little green men, and so does the science-fiction tradition in general.  And the basic things that save any sci-fi work from failure due to the “little green man” cliché are a good story and good writing.  Butler had both of those locked.

I also reject the fear that a majority of white society (“vastly racist” is problematic) would scorn or, at least, ignore, a science-fiction novel in which the most endowed beings have a lot of hair and dark colors.  Here’s how Gumbs puts it: “[Butler] feared the blacker-the-berry logic she employed would be misinterpreted.”  On the contrary, I doubt that, by the time of Survivor’s publication, the majority of contemporary readers, particularly sci-fi fans, were so meticulously bigoted as to be insulted that gorilla-like beings that constantly change colors (note: including bright ones) were physically stronger and more savvy than white colonists on another planet in some fantastic existence.  That’s a stretch I can’t accept.  (The popular Planet of the Apes movies had just culminated five years earlier, after all.)  If anything, wouldn’t the scenario of a black woman repeatedly saving, castigating and eventually killing a white man incense racist whites and also render the Kindred novel unsavory in Butler’s eyes?  I just don’t think she had such a weakness in her.  (And I think hairiness occurs among both blacks and whites.)

However, I’m somewhat in accord with Gumbs’ thoughts about “commodification of black women’s creativity” and her note that Butler herself worried about being “tokenized.”  (Humorous aside for Survivor fans: one might say that Alanna wasTehkohnized.)  Gumbs points out that Butler was frustrated by apparently being “the only black woman science fiction writer” and encouraged others like her to get into the genre.  That’s understandable, but I think too much of a big deal is made about quantification of kinds in different fields.   Not every low count is an unjust or undue dearth.  Often it’s a matter of cultural patterns.  Why does there seem to be a preponderance of Jewish people in comedy?  Why are there so many Hispanic males and so relatively few women in comic-book art?  And, at the risk of flippancy, I ask: why else are there so few hockey players of Asian descent?  

Gumbs does go into the chronic tragedy of an alarming number of black women being slain in their own communities back in the 1970s, particularly in 1972 Boston, as well as the 1979 Atlanta Child Murders.  She ties the outrage and ignited activism of many black women to the term “survivor” and wonders if the connotation of that word soured Butler to the very title of her novel.  The word is justifiably more important to Gumbs and black female activists, I think, because in a racial context it not only defines those who stand against and live in spite of racial oppression, but, as Gumbs says:

By claiming my survival, and my survivorhood, I’m placing my life in the context of our collective dead whom genocide sought, and seeks to destroy, but cannot erase, because I’m here continuing to witness our dead by saying, I am a survivor.  Saying “I am a survivor,” is a ritual that invites the dead to continue participating in the creation of the present moment, and the future.

A powerful thought indeed.  Butler didn’t think that blacks had made peace with themselves, and whites still had yet to make peace with blacks, but, as Gumbs admits, Butler isn’t on record as addressing this angle in regard to her apparent disdain for Survivor at all.  However, there is one thing Butler said that comes close to what Gumbs posits.  While discussing the irresponsible behavior of the black man who’s paired with Lilith for sexual intercourse by the Oankali, she explained that “his situation is reminis­cent of the survival characteristics that black people developed as a result of slavery, characteristics that were useful in slavery but detrimental later.”  Perhaps the old but persistent and now negative modes of survival ruin “survivor” as a positive term?

I’m in line perfectly with Gumbs when it comes to desiring that others read Survivor though its author wouldn’t want them to.  Of this artistic violation we are both complicit.  Do we know better than Butler?  Is Gumbs seeing the novel’s worth in regard to black heritage and “keep on keeping on” in the face of hatred and obliteration, while I see so much more than a Star Trek novel and think that Survivor is an integral piece of the Butlerian puzzle?  Whatever, Survivor survived death, even after its very creator tried to kill it.  And now the book continues as a witness to the deceased author, inviting her to participate “in the creation of the present moment, and the future,” as Gumbs puts it.  Similar to Dana’s wall-fused arm in Kindred, it seems that the novel stays with us despite its artistic amputation by the author.

(By the way, I also agree with Gumbs when she says “I really don’t think the way she writes dialogue is all that convincing, or great.”  This was particularly strong for me in the speech of the characters from 1815 in Kindred.)

Another favorite piece in Near Kin is DL Warner’s “Identity,” which is a brief essay on how Octavia Butler inspired embracement of her identity and to apply that identity honestly and fearlessly to her own writing.  Warner is always outspoken about her belief that well-written erotica deserves more respect than it gets.  I agree with her wholeheartedly.  While explicit violence is overlooked or justified in the critical world, explicit and unconventional sexuality tends to be shunned or minimized as pornography. 

Comic-book maestro Alan Moore and feminist artist Melinda Gebbie collaborated on the epic graphic-novel series, Lost Girls, in order to counter the prejudice against erotic art in both the written and visual fields.  X-rated and then some, the result is a delicious, surreal and mores-traumatizing explosion: literary, contextual and high-quality, which is what Moore and Gebbie intended, and what DL Warner also intends.

Warner relates an incident that happened while Warner participated on a Star Trek panel in which a snooty sci-fi novelist objected to her calling the Trek universe on its frigidity, its lack of sexuality.  When he quipped that injecting sex into science fiction didn’t make her “a second rate Octavia Butler,” she replied that just as “being brown, female and a sci-fi writer” didn’t necessarily warrant identification with Butler, “his being pale and doughy [didn’t make] him Alfred Hitchcock.”  I hope she took a bow after that one!  However, Pasty Doughboy unwittingly emboldened her trust in her art. Considering Butler’s pride in her subject matter, Warner decided to forge ahead without shame or shyness about her own work: “Thus, I stepped out of the shadows, assumed my true identity and hid my erotica no longer…I am forever grateful to Octavia Butler for that freedom.”

Well, DL Warner has to like M. Justine Gerard’s very erotic “Small Talk,” which is one of my two favorite fiction pieces in Near Kin.  It’s a subtle sci-fi story that takes place in a society that puts a premium on speech.  Yes, speech.  Forget the saying “Look but don’t touch.”  This story involves “Look, touch – but don’t talk.”  A man named Niall propositions a reluctant prostitute named Benaya, and the reader eventually learns that in this society citizens can tongue-kiss and engage in oral, anal and any other kind of sex – but conduct no conversation.  This law isn’t obvious until the end of the story, which makes its assault on our talkative sensibilities that much more impactful.  For example, not knowing the clever gimmick until later, one might be both confused and curious during the preliminary “interview” between Benaya and Niall:

“Kiss?”

“Yes.”

“Tongue?”

“Yes.”

“Blow-job?”

“Condom.”

“Anal?”

“Condom.”

“Bare-back?”

“Condom!”

He smiled.  She realized Niall was teasing her.

“Words?”

Red flag.  Benaya raised an eyebrow.

“No,” she declared.

If Niall had asked “Talk?” there wouldn’t have been as much mystery, since it’d be understandable that a prostitute would want to avoid much verbal involvement.  But “Words?” is an odder request.  Niall might be interested in tongue-kissing and both oral and anal sex, but he requests words specifically – without joking.  In fact, the request worries Benaya.  Why?  The no-words concept is quite clever in its playing with prostitutes’ mythical “no kissing” rule (which was probably popularized by Pretty Woman) and its turning “Talk is cheap” on its head.  Imagine how much we take words for granted, let alone the luxury of open-ended discussions or even ecstatic exclamations during great sex.  Much to both her dismay and delight, Benaya learns quickly that Niall is not only well-hung but he can deliver the goods.  She avoids alcohol because it loosens the tongue and might waste precious words in a talk-regulating world, but it’s next to impossible to stay mum when a lover hits the spot.

Benaya moaned.  Niall was massive.  She bit her lip and did her best to keep silent.  Clearly, he can tell how much I like this.  Fuck, I have to keep my mouth shut!

 Niall flexed inside her.  Surprised, Benaya opened her mouth.

“Ohg…”

I love how Banaya suppresses even the during-sex cliché of “Oh God!”  What would make people so afraid to talk – or even moan words ecstatically – freely?  How did such self-censorship – worse: self-silencing – become such powerful policy?  Gerard doesn’t explain, and I’m pleased that she doesn’t.  As far as we know it just is, like the sudden time-travel in Octavia Butler’s Kindred or the worldwide stoppage of male sperm count in P.D. James’s Children of Men.

After some mind-blowing fucking the Benaya and Niall fall asleep together.  When they’re both awake Niall presses her on his forbidden request again:

“Say something to me.  Please.  Say anything.”

Benaya cringed.  She felt trapped.  This was not part of their agreement.  Quickly, she jumped out of bed, grabbed her dress and her shoes…

…“I need to speak.  More than I need art, food, sex, money.  I need to save myself from the silence.  Please, speak to me!”

“No!”

“Why?”

“Death!”

Interestingly and tellingly, the last – and probably most poignant – word Benaya says to Niall before fleeing is “sorry.”

“Small Talk” is a splendid example of what DL Warner spoke about in “Identity”: “erotica [as] a valid subject to explore artistically.” Gerard incorporates rock-solid (I can attest!) erotica, which is explicit enough to be called pornographia, into a solid science-fiction story.  The formula works.

My other favorite fiction piece is Alex Hernandez’s “A Thing of Soft Bonds,” out-and-out science fiction without a doubt.  It has the smoothness and technical elaboration of Robert Heinlein and the feminist/metamorphosis tropes of Octavia Butler.  (Both writers tended toward ethnodecentralization, and the characters in this story have a good handful of diverse names: Villaneuva, Chen, Puig, Sousa-Cruz, Foluke, Jackson and Rodriguez.)  If I had to teach a class about what makes a good short story in general I’d probably use this one as one of the primary examples.

“A Thing of Soft Bonds” contains all the goodies: a spaceship in distress, a crew at the point of no return to safety (in this case a space station), an outside threat (in this case a violently horny all-male penal colony), dystopian desperation (in this case a shortage of women), mind versus might (in this case a geneticist against a brutish General), the primitive consuming the so-called civilized (in this case overstimulated neurotransmitters enslaving an enemy), science’s fine line between help and harm (in this case knowledge of and experimentation with biology and genes giving otherwise helpless women a chance at survival), and gender-bending and tampering with what it is to be homo sapien (in this case a “man” without a Y-chromosome and a female-to-male transgendered man, as well as…well, you’ll see).

The spaceship Ashaba is under assault by the leading General of the penal-colony planet because he wants to commandeer any women on board for recreational rape to serve as a pressure valve for the prisoners.  While the leading men of the Ashaba are fatalistic about the inevitable horrors the ship’s women must face, Barbara Villaneuva, Chief Scientist of the mission, immediately starts to brainstorm an alternative to either gang rape or execution once they’re overwhelmed and taken down to the criminal planet.  The ship’s captain commits suicide, and there are no weapons with which to defend the crew. 

The very Butlerian feature of the story is the central reason for the space mission: collection of alien tetradecapodal animals.  With all the odder-than-oddness of Butler’s Oankali, each one of these creatures looks “like a furry, arboreal octopus with fourteen arms.”  And each one is not really a one but “a colony organism, made up of fifteen individual-but-connected specimens.”  See, the species’ immobile female, who is all brain and sensory organs – “and fourteen clasping vaginas,” eventually drives fourteen males into a “mindless, writhing” state with her mature scent so that they are driven “into on orgy that would forever bind them in perfect union.”  This symbiotic relationship provides the female with strength and the ability to ambulate “with the nimble elegance of [a] gibbon[.]”  What can Barbara do with no weapons and nothing but her alien specimens and laboratory?

You see where this is going.  With a marvelous deftness and lexicon Hernandez presents a surprisingly believable (though not necessarily fully understood) gambit thought up by the quite resourceful and brave Barbara: she decides to use available genomes and nano-bacterium (I think) to concoct a biochemical defense against the approaching threat.  After injecting herself with chromosomes containing “genomic snippets from bees, ants, termites, naked mole rats” for a few weeks, Barbara’s appearance and body chemistry changes drastically, to say the least.

The athletic body she had prided herself in was no avocado-shaped and glistening with perspiration…Stretch marks split her brown skin like lightning…

…“What is that smell?”  Helen Chen froze at the entrance, aghast.  “It smells like rotten meat and stale piss in here!”

 “That’s me,” Barbara said, facing the ship’s coordinator…

Barbara then explains to Chen – and us – the logic in her seemingly mad experiment:

“My endocrine system is quite extraordinary now.  I’m secreting powerful messenger chemicals – it’s what you’re smelling – they elicit the over-production of neurotransmitters in men: dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, vasopressin and others.  To their unsuspecting minds, I exist both as loving mother and magnificent lover.”

Barbara’s reek, while seeming to be repellent at first, is really an attractant.  And it comforts her students, who have voluntarily accepted transgenic modifications in order to have a chance at being spared rape or death by the coming prisoners.  The students’ changes aren’t as evident as Barbara’s but if separated from her and her comforting scent, they too will become the enormous, “curvy” being that takes the fertile rotundity of Paleolithic Venuses to a whole new level.  Barbara wants the rest of the crew, including the questionably gendered Rodriguez and the female-to-male Jackson, to inject her blood in order to complete the clever standoff.  Later, Jackson participates enthusiastically, but Rodriguez refuses, echoing a protest that is usually likely to come from an Octavia Butler character, not to mention countless characters in sci-fi/speculative literature.  And he learns another of Barbara’s…enhancements:

“So my choices are to live like a subhuman or become something less than human?  Fuck that!  I choose to be my own person!  Even if that means dying.”  He took a swing at Barbara, but she easily caught his wrist.  He struggled and tried to pull away, but the muscles beneath her flab were now incredibly dense.  She was twice as strong as any man, even a carefully crafted one.

Eventually the men led by scumbag Sousa-Cruz breach the Ashaba.  Gushing with stinky sweat, Barbara simply reveals her mountainous naked body: “Everything slowed as biology took over.” 

Barbara only stood there, enthralled by the sight of the men swaying like blades of grass in a breeze.  They literally vacillated with anticipation, their gun barrels wavering from their mark. 

Does Barbara’s plan succeed?  Sniff, sniff, sniff…

A lot, if not all, of the other Butler-inspired fiction in Near Kin is pretty good.  Some titles that surface when I think of it are “Waking Dr. Wexler” by Angel Uriel Perales (a wonderfully written story that seems to involve a sort of time travel, at least via madness or dementia), “No More Stories” by Jordan Alam (in which characters experiment with a device that allows for the virtual piggybacking on other people’s dreams), “In the Beginning” by Meghan Elison (which seems to be an excerpt from or an offshoot of her dystopia novel, The Book of the Unnamed Midwife), “Sweet Autumn” by Charie D. Le Marr (which involves empaths, probably in honor of Butler’s The Parable of the Sower/Talents), and “Saint of the Unknown Universe” by Linda Ravenswood (in which a woman kills her abusive man, discovers that he was a robot all the while, and wonders how she’d ever become pregnant).

Balance by Fabiola Jean-Louis

Much of Near Kin’s poetry is very worthy as well.  “Dreams of the Slave” is written by Walidah Imarisha, a teacher, writer, spoken-word artist, “historian at heart, reporter by (w)right [and] rebel by reason” (her words). The format of the poem is quite…vertical, which helps one imagine it being performed by the author.  The narration is full of slave imagery and the plaintive patterns of the oppressed; the narrator mourns the loss of her sold love.  She remembers his wise words of hope and assurance, but in the absence of her love she wants “the night sky to go black./Suck up the light/and leave only darkness.”  Her despair turns to joyous rejuvenation when her love directs her toward freedom, symbolically pointing North and evoking the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman and the bravery of both escapees and the whites and blacks who pitched in despite the great risk. That freedom was earned in part by the slaves whose blood was shed and still cries from the ground, and it seems to be symbolized in what I interpret as a vision of an old ex-slave woman who holds out her hands to show scarred wrists but no chains, a sort of transfiguration.

The weight of hope
is crushing me,
and I no longer
care to struggle
for breath.
But when I look to the heavens
my love is there.
Smiles,
teeth pinpricks of light.
My love
points north,
and I see
the stars take another shape:
round face
intense eyes –
hair growing like
untamed cotton.

Her broad lips
the shape of freedom.
I look at her wrists:
No chains –
There are scars
but no chains…

…And I heard the whisper:
It was not in vain.
Nothing was in vain…

…You
will not
be lost…

Sticking with the subject of slavery, Sherese Francis had Kindred as her inspiration for “Give Me Your Hand”:

You pull me
back in need of saving
But I am pulled
for me and you…

Your survival
hinged on my back,
and I have the leathery scars
to remember
our strange symbiosis…

There are many kinds of slaves, of course.  As we saw earlier, slavery can result from biochemical perfect storms, as it was posited in Alex Hernandez’s “A Thing of Soft Bonds.”  Michelle Angelini unwittingly sings Hernandez’s tune in her poem “On Becoming Part of the Crowd”:

I transition
as if turning from a teenager
to an adult with a more
intensive hormonal overdose,
It is exquisite torment – too much…too much…
Will I survive going through it?

I belong
Now I’m inside the circle and have power
over others.  They are slaves without
knowledge and I gained
a unique power.
What will it be?…

“There Is Nothing Inconsistent” by David Scriven is deceptively simple but resonates (how I hate that term!) long after it’s read.  At once surreal, animistic and metaphysical, it has a slight Octavia Butler feel: weirdness, nature, the ever-present threat of death, the grayness rather than stark contrasts of the human heart.

…There is nothing inconsistent
About believing that
The smell of rotting flesh
Tells the presence of a ghost…

…There is nothing inconsistent
About believing that
A man is evil,
Or good,
Or that words cannot hurt you.

Julia Stein indirectly celebrates Butler’s feminism in a poem called “1996.”  She reveres women protesting a clothing business propped by Thai sweatshop workers, martyred union-activist Fannie Sellins, Russian-born unionizer Sara Plotkin, whose championing of laborers once touched the steel industry of Pittsburgh, my hometown.  Female activism is viewed as a suprabiological family, a maternal heritage that paves the road for each new wave of collective praxis:

They whispered to use their secrets, handed them down,
mother to daughter.  We have their courage as their inheritance.
Just as our mothers walked across the coal fields
we have begun to walk across the land.

Interestingly, in spite of Butler’s celebrated feminism, she has been criticized (perhaps most notably by feminist Dorothy Allison) for not adequately transcending patriarchy and domesticity, and for having her female protagonists identify with or assimilate to the agents of the power structure or dominant culture.

Reviewer Cherry Wilder included Survivor in what she saw as a negative fantastic trend in science fiction:  “The female fantasy that is currently gathering momentum seems to run as follows: ‘I was the chosen mate of a large, alien-looking male.’”  And, in another contemporary review of the novel, Geraldine Morse bashed what she saw as the basic implication in the unlikely coupling of Alanna and Diut:

If you enjoyed Mandingo, that titillating tear-jerker about the lust of a white plantation mistress for her black slave, you’ll probably enjoy Survivor, which raises the tension at least theoretically by introducing a pleasant bestiality in the male partner, who would closely resemble a six foot tall blue gorilla if such a thing existed.  Survivor isn’t a bad book, and the ploy of miscegenation perks up an otherwise uneventful story, but with apologies to the gorilla, there’s no real meat in it.

What all the authors and artists in Near Kin share is a fundamental appreciation and reverence for Octavia Butler, and some of the poetry addresses this directly.  Wanda Smith’s “Octavia’s Brood and Vision” evokes Ray Bradbury, who seems to be an obvious influence in Butler.  Smith parallels their careers, praising Butler for her more complex characters, and ending the poem with this magnificent imagined scene:

Up among stars on the Milky Way Ray Bradbury
looks around and blinks.
Octavia E. Butler throws him a kiss and winks.

Smith also wrote “Octavia and Playboy,” which addresses the inclusion of such sci-fi giants as Heinlein and Bradbury in the pages of Playboy in the 1960s, and how Butler and other female writers never made it “on pages/between the bunnies,” let alone the Playboy Book of Science Fiction.  Smith produces yet another great imaginary afterlife encounter to close the poem:

If Octavia and Hef do meet among stars in the heavens
she will probably ask, “Hugh who?”

Tara Betts’ “A Sonnet for Octavia Butler” (which I like far more than her other poem, “God is Change”) is biographical:

[S]he burrowed into books – other worlds.
This was one way to speak, a slight curve
toward a future only she could write…

Ink continued to bite
teeth marks into her pages, where change
became God and women felt the past’s lash
and collared futures that echoed the bleak
lives of so many, like her mother, smashed
beneath nightmares that poverty often wreaks…

Perhaps the most powerful tribute to the honored author is in Cat Angelique McIntire’s “Haiku for Octavia Butler,” which has an imaginary Butler as narrator:

don’t look so damn smug –
you’ll all be compared to me.
few will measure up.

– David Herrle, 10/2014

published 2007 by The Backwaters Press
more information here

First impressions aren’t always the most important impressions.  I’ve walked away from a book or a song with moderate appreciation for it, only to end up adoring it after another visit or two.  “That wasn’t bad” becomes “That was really effing good!”  This is the case with John McKernan’s poetry, at least for me.  After going through a long backlog of review copies and the rapid passage of time in this pinball-game drama of life, I finally arrived at McKernan’s Resurrection of the Dust and stood at its front cover, hesitating to go in.  The author had sent it to me quite a while ago, and, since the book had already been out for a few years before I received it, I wasn’t sure if the author had since moved on from this work (which I, as a master repudiator, can relate to).  Would he even remember sending the book to me?

However, the delay in reading wasn’t intentional or accidental; it was circumstantial.  But I wanted to fulfill my word to consider doing a review of the book.  First of all, the title called to me.  It rang like Faulkner (Intruder in the Dust), Hurston (Dust Tracks on a Road) or Kansas’ haunting “Dust in the Wind” song, and, of course, the phrase that follows the Book of Common Prayer’s famous “ashes to ashes.”

I opened the front cover and crept in.  The table of contents revealed a list of 223 poem titles, in alphabetical order.  (This made my latest poetry collection of 191 pages seem less obese.)  Thankfully, the poem titles welcomed me right away, for I’m a sucker and stickler for cool titles.  Hell, titles are half the poem.  McKernan’s range from a single word to Dali-painting-title-long-and-weird.  And many of them allude to or point very loudly at death: “Be Soul & Die Sex,” “The Corpse Gives Itself Away,” “Your Corpse Wants Your Body,” “Death’s Rummage Sale…,” “My Last Breath,” “My Father Returns From His Grave,” “My Ode to Death,” “The Shadow Beneath my Corpse is Always” and “Your Skull,” to name several.  How could I, one who obsesses about mortality ad nauseam, resist?

Resurrection of the Dust doesn’t break any new ground as far as subject matter goes: the past as present, death, Daddy issues, place of origin (Omaha, Nebraska, in this case), momentary impressions.  But what matters most is how these familiar things are perceived and poetized.  These poems are chock-full of enviably great lines that are right on though they’re not up against a standard.  McKernan has perfect pitch: a lot of his phraseology seems as if it couldn’t be otherwise; the way he writes a particular image or observation or feeling is the exact way it should have been written. And these golden lines know they’re good.

Despite more than a few jumbled “Surrealist” pieces and passages that amount to not much more than strung-together words and images (I’m snobbish when it comes to such experimentation), McKernan’s deft wit and svelte cleverness usually pump out worthy gold, such as “the endless violence of the prism,” “[t]he word autopsy/sounds like a switchblade clicking/open in the dark,” and “[s]creaming my name in Braille.”  Cancer is “pink cancer,” a spade opens the earth “into a soft coffin of air,” “a sun-rinsed cloud” is “speechless,” Death observes a distant galaxy “[t]hrough his microscope,” “a red light can paint the sidewalk pink/Or give a face the look of fresh sunburn.”  Then there’s one of the ultimate questions we never think to ask: “How much does a comma weigh?”

So, yet more poems about the past within the Now, mortality, childhood memories and Daddy can be experienced anew, with a curiosity and wonder akin to discovering a new wall of ancient cave drawings or an unknown species of bird, thanks to such golden lines.

Needless to say, McKernan’s metaphorizing is quite impressive, as shown in “After Light” (one of several pieces in which the title doubles as the opening line):

AFTER LIGHT

 Invaded
The sleepy village

It rounded up all the shadows
From every graveyard
& lynched them

And in “Omaha Nebraska”:

You are the toy store
I can’t enter…

You are the candy shop
I am forever banished from…

In the midst of seriousness, there are a lot of humorous and inventive phrases.  (Someone call James Lipton and tell him to add “gymnasium of wolves” to the next edition of An Exaltation of Larks, please.)  In “Much of the Packing Material”:

This darkness must have gone to Yale
To learn how to act    It knows how
To impersonate the silence of my coffin

Also, McKernan’s stuff tends to be Imagistic, a style that I once disliked but has wooed me over the years, thanks to finding it in very capable hands.  Some favorite examples: “The silence was bumpy like a teaspoonful of white rice,” “[f]ive ice cubes clinked/In a dark room,” “[y]esterday runs screaming down the hillside/waving a butcher knife” and

Hard hands     Firm jaw     The neat hair     Crisp shirt

White suit     Sharp tie     Talking to a small boy
Lying on a blanket     On the sloped green lawn…

From “Catalog of New Lanterns”:

The grave digger’s bright spade   Greased  Tilted
Your eyes     Your green eyes

Pewter cup of the subway veteran
Plinking with silver    Bright dimes…

And in “Red Wagon” (which appears after “Red Cloud” and “Red Snow”):

The voices of the people when you listened
        to them all together sounded like wet cement…

The rain which had stopped an hour ago began
        again & plinked against the metal of the red wagon

McKernan had to have been winking at William Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow” while writing this poem.  If the passage above doesn’t bring the Williams piece to mind, I suggest enrolling yourself in Being Aware On Earth 101.  Mercifully the pertinent passage from that too-famous poem follows:

a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
beside the white
chickens.

I tend to prefer the how to the what in art, particularly in poetry, but Resurrection of the Dust has the unsavory subject of death at its nucleus, so I’m morbidly delighted by the book’s what as much as I am by its how.  First of all, all art is partly about death, vibrates with death, spotlights death.  When I experience the art of a dead person, “He [or she] is dead” is always at the back of my mind.  When I experience the art of a living person, “She [or he] will die” is always at the back of my mind.  There are both ephemerality and eternity in art, just as there is a skull behind Garbo’s timeless face.  I’m offended and bored by art that never faces death, never dares to hold and contemplate the pitiful skull as did Hamlet.  This is why I’ve an especial appreciation for McKernan’s work.  He keeps death around – because death is always around.  It’s as with us as life is.

Every day I’m anxious daily over the anticipation that someday I’ll be a corpse.  You, reader, will be a corpse.  Those eyes you’re reading with will surely decay.  (“Quintessence of dust” indeed, dear Hamlet.)  In one poem “Sister Death” is mentioned: an almost certain clue that McKernan knows Faulkner (that greatest American Tragedian with death in his ink), particularly The Sound and the Fury and Quentin Compson’s narrative.

The primary symbol of mortality in the book is the narrator’s father, who died when his son was only sixteen years old.  In one poem the father visits from beyond the black velvet, “[c]omplaining/About the leaky coffin.”  “It’s so silent down here,” the dead man says.  He can’t sleep without the sounds of a broken clock and a creaky stair. 

The father is a spiritually massive presence even in death, for there’s mountain-like substance in the left-behind vacuity of the (dear or dreaded) deceased.  He used to always sit in a leather chair, and after his death the chair and its emptiness frighten the son.  In “The Son” a dream of his father in a coffin recurs nightly, and he can only look at the coffin’s shadow, not the coffin itself.  Though sources of foreboding, the conflated chair and coffin call to the son, inviting him to plunge into death’s darkness, to take the place of the lost patriarch.  After all, in “I Look Hard At the Photo on the Wall,” the narrator admits that he’s “always wanted to become my father.”  What better way to explore this notion than in a poem called “The Son?”

…I touch the shadow
It is substance     I can lift it

It feels like cotton     I fold it as a napkin
& put it in my pocket…

Then the son borrows an air pump and inflates the shadow until it fills the room.  In his waking hours the boy associates the shadow of the empty leather chair with the coffin’s shadow in the dream and wills a new dream into occurring.  He deflates the coffin shadow, cuts it into the shape of a boy with his mother’s scissors and somehow uses the shadows cast by the coffin and chair to exorcize the foreboding and identify symbolically with the father in a bizarre form of resurrection or reincarnation.

…I have entered the darkness
Of Death    I make a new boy

My fear floats away like dreams…

I sit in my father’s chair    I rock
I am the son of my father at last…

The fearful shadow also stars in “The Shadow Beneath My Corpse Is Always” (a title that’s completed by the poem’s opening line: “In training”).  As someone who is ambivalent about mortality, swinging from hopeless belief in the finality of the grave and the hope of a benign Hereafter, I appreciate fantasies about the death of Death.  (I’ve written my share.)  There’s a noble but pitiful superhero quality about our desires to rescue or redeem our loved ones from Death’s bowels.

…[The shadow] loves pretending he is
A layer of skin     Peeled from Death’s moon-burnt

Shoulders     Tonight he is resting under
Me     As I write these words…

He does not know
That I am sharpening the tip of each syllable
To impale him     Him & his little brother Fear

On the other hand, the narrator, ever aware of his guaranteed future state as a corpse, imagines his last breath “floating somewhere”:

Perhaps it is moving
Over an orange grove
In Venezuela…

…Wherever
You are Last Breath     I know
Nothing about you
Except your taste     You
Taste like forty acres

The reader has reason to fear as well, for there’s not a soul alive that won’t be dead someday.  So much of what we do doubles as a denial of impending demise and our flesh becoming a future feast for microorganisms: whether it’s artistic creation, destructive war, building massive edifices or losing ourselves in the tiny eternity of sexual abandon.  Sex, however, isn’t a sure-fire way to deny or diminish death.  That’s why it’s a cliché to say that sex and death go hand in hand.  As far as I’m concerned, sexual ecstasy is both a revolt against and reckless resignation to the idea of death and putrescence.  (As I’ve written before, “the lifeful squish and smells effigize death’s pus and gas.”)  After all, doesn’t all sex culminate in a “little death,” at least for males?  In “Intricate Interior Laughter When We Worked” sex and death swirl together indeed:

At that mortuary on Dodge Street in Omaha
Of course we had sex inside caskets

With our girlfriends     It was best
When we could close the lids
But that was risky     What were we doing?

Were we proving our bodies weren’t dead[?]

Screwing in coffins pretty much sums up the weird games we play daily in the face of oblivion.  The game compromises even our compassion for the unfortunates who go into that oblivion before us.  Though news of others’ deaths always accents our own eventual ones (we’re privately relieved that we live to see another morning), McKernan goes further and reminds readers point-blank in “Your Corpse Wants Your Body”:

It wants your legs for crutches
Your hands for garden gates

Every furrow of your smile
Each dab of starlight hiding
Between the lattice of your eyelashes…

…It wants all of you that’s
Ever been & it wants too forever     My Dear

And in “Your Skull”:

All the words
You will never hear
Float elsewhere now
Anchored in dirt…

Even Heaven is no real solace because the narrator predicts that there “[y]ou’ll be emptied of language.”  All this clever verbosity, magnificent metaphors, slick similes and inventive phrasings to record and analyze a brief life – then eternal inarticulation for an eternal eternity?

Another recurring motif in the book is the sundial.  I’m reminded of the age-old tradition of the so-called sundial mottoes, which are aphoristic sayings, usually negative and about fleeting time, etched into the stone, steel, brass or bronze of the ancient timekeepers.  You may recognize “Time and tide wait for no man” or “Snatch the present hour, fear the last.”  More interesting is the frequent appearance of the word “shadow” in the mottoes: “Time passes as a shadow,” “By the shadow shall I mark time” and “I am a shadow, so art thou; I mark the time, dost thou?”  I don’t know if McKernan had these in mind, but this is the glorious natural context of poetry and art in general.

Shadows mark time, but we must remember that light surrounds them.  In “Where Are You?” the narrator nightswims in vast Lake Erie and skims the lake’s bottom, among the algae and underwater creatures, looking up to spot distant airplane and even more distant satellite lights: “People drown themselves now & then/But I follow the lights.”  As Lady Gaga said in a 2011 Google interview, “if you don’t have any shadows, you’re not standing in the light.”  Though McKernan walks among the tombs and peeks into mortuaries, the beauty of his poetry and the persistence of his memory are celebratory rather than all dirge.  This is the secret of the death-dwelling artist, who sees the skull behind everything with the acuity of the live-as-if-already-dead samurai.  (I know, because I am one.)  We may say “So far gone am I in the dark side of the earth, that its other side, the theoretic bright one, seems but uncertain twilight to me” along with Melville’s Captain Ahab in moments of confusion and despair, when graveyard worms seem to be the only survivors, but our poetry, while being partly about death also is about life, is life.

Remember, the book is called Resurrection of the Dust, a decidedly death-defying title.  I can’t say that I found any stated defiance of death by McKernan, and, similar to Faulkner, the work has a somewhat grim vibe, or the feeling Sophocles leaves behind.  John McKernan will die someday; he might even be dead by the time you read this.  Who knows?  He certainly hasn’t voiced any dramatic hopes against that materialist fact, but, regardless his – and Faulkner’s and Sophocles’s! – private eschatology, I insist that the art itself does the exaltation.  This is part of the reason I adore Ingmar Bergman films: his lowest and most traumatic moments can’t dampen the thrill and wonder with which his art fills me.  There is glorious music in The Silence. In spite of my natural pessimism and my attunement to John Donne more than, say, Norman Vincent Peale, I’m compelled to balance out Franz Kafka with Frank Capra, because of either genuine faith or desperate denial: it depends on the day.

Earlier I mentioned that it brought my mind to similarly ringing titles such as Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust. Well, there is an intruder in the dust: it’s life.  And it’s here, for the time being.  It’s here for the being.

Another fine writer, G.K. Chesterton, wrote in “The Praise of Dust”:

“What of vile dust?” the preacher said.
Methought the whole world woke,
The dead stone lived beneath my foot,
And my whole body spoke.