Good times, bad times... how does that song go?

So the good news is that we found a spot in the mini hotel/hostel that I'm staying in, that has an internet hotspot. To be honest, its kinda rocking and totally free. You can't really complaint that much. The bad news is that it drops out every 10 minutes or so and since the uploads to FLIKR take so bloody long, it still seems as though I had better find a way to shrink the photos before I try and upload them, or find a land line over which to upload the photos.

Before I left I stood at the counter of looking glass photo with my heard earned money in hand. I had put a down payment on a D200, that had come in that afternoon. Accepting the fact that I was about to buy the most expensive piece of camera gear I had ever invested in was more than difficult to swallow. I wanted reassurance, I asked the girl behind the counter "its a good camera right?" Its like asking your broker, just tell me this is how people make money, or something like that. She said in a tender voice with just enough smile to make me feel calm and a bit more for added pleasantness "its a great camera."

Thus far is been a more than beautiful camera and I'm taking picutres like a madman when I bring it with me. The fact that I can delete things with the touch of a button, selectively choos what I want, and what I don't, take long night exposures without thinking this is a waste of film, using nothing more than beer cans for tripods, yeah man, this is a great camera.

So as for the program, well the readings last night were ok, the reading of the play was by far the best thing, Laura Maria Censebella read from a work in progress. It was about three generations of Italian women, discussing events during WWII as the grandmother claimed to have hidden jews and resistence fighters. The "mother" found it all quite unbelievable and continued to pretend drink from a wineglass while rolling her eyes. The "daughter" was desperate to find out the truth about her aged grand progenitor and her mother, the great grandmother, who had sent this girl away at one time. Censabella's reading voice was strong and the accent quite good as she tried to portray this 80 year old woman. Swafford's excerpt from his up and coming book didn't grab me. I spoke to several other people, they agreed, it had a nice ending, nothing terribly shocking, but it was storng in the finish and witty, but it didn't make me want to pick up the book and start diving in because the characters were written in an interesting fashion, something about it left me feeling flat. Binyavanga arrived two hours before the reading, if not less, he came in and read form his laptop, a kind of personal account of his experiences in Nairobi, with that wonderful African/British English where the R's roll off his tongue with the greatest of ease in the most rrrrrrobust tones. Still, it seemed a little too personal to really be comrehensible, it didn't grab either.

The parents called me this afternoon. They're at the hermitage, we have to walk a group of people over to the Ahkmatova museum for a reading in Russian. The address is 53 Litenny Prospect from which we're heading over to Nekrasova and Litenny to meet the folks for a little Uzbekistanian feast and allow my mother the pleasure of ordering for the entire group... WOO HOOO!!! I've been dreaming about this stuff for a year.

The group this year is mostly mellow, older, more mature, and sometimes even seperating out by age groups. I overheard certain conversations that lead me to believe that the generation gap here is strong and without a doubt divides our participants, but its always like that. Even art can't seem to bridge the gap between what once was revolutionary and now is simply archaic.

I'll see if I can post some pictures at the Players cafe tomorrow morning... for now... adieu... and shislivo...

I took him down...

Anthony Swafford is here, the author of Jarhead turned into a film starring Jake Gyllenhall and Jamie Foxx. Last night was a rather late one with a few of us at the British pub. You know, you get enough testosterone flowing and you're bound to either get heads butting or some other deomonstration of manhood. Well for us it started as a question of weight and age and next thing you know, Semper Fi Do or Die, went down town... 3 in a row, both arms...

You can wait or you can go back

I'm not dead, no, I felt that way by the time I arrived in this city, but I'm alive and finally starting to hit my stride. Where do I begin?

The flight was fairly uneventful: Oakland to JFK, two hours on the ground after five hours of flying, then caught the Finn Air connection to Helsinki, seven hours of flying with screaming chilredn that I wanted to jetison like ming the merciless. On my left sat a giant bull the size of a house with a shaved head that was heading for a singles tour of Kazan. Read between the lines: sex tour! On my right was a suburbanite heading to show her dog in some European dog show in Helsinki. She kept making faces and rolling her eyes at the poor parenting of the screaming children. She must've thought that they should've been treated just like her mut and quiet and attentive with a choke collar. Needless to say the flight was less than stellar and I couldn't wait till it was over. I spent half the flight standing and pacing up and down the plane. The only redeeming thing about it was the free beer and wine. Finn Air, very humane for just that. I spent an hour in the airport and then caught my connection to St. Petersburg where the real fun began. I arrive and make my way down to immigration. The lines move quickly, quicker than Moscow, and I'm at the terminal. I can see the customs area beyond, hope, my double entry visa will work, I can get through and get into the country.

"When were you born?"

"August 4, 1975"

"Your visa says April 8th"

"That's a mistaken"

"I know it doesn't match your passport page."

"Well what can we do?"

"You can wait for the diplomat or go back to Helsinki."

And so I began my 2 hour wait in the lobby of the airport for this diplomant who would correct my visa and give me a new one, cancelling a second visa in my now overburdened passport. A new visa later, third one for this trip alone, I'm in the country, my ride has left thinking I'm MIA in some scandanavian paradise. I catch a cab, mercedes, 1800 rubles, way too much, I don't care, I'm tired, hungry, head is pounding, I have 5000 US in my pocket for the program's use, and a big suitcase, not risking a gypsy cab.

And that was how I got here. and now, I'm going to shut this down, laptop is almmost out of juice and I don't see a nearby plug. The 24 hour internet cafe, Quo Vadis, is gone... sadly... so its all slow wi-fi at zoom and the british pub, the office.

More soon... once I juice this thing up.

liebe,
-L

Buh-bye!

St. Petersburg or bust!

13 hours...

or in the words of J. Cash:

I can see the buzzards I can hear the crows 1 more minute to go
And now I'm swingin' and here I go-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o!

Nazerman - The imbossibility of sympathy or disdan...

Jean Amery, in his essay, On the Necessity and Impossibility of Being a Jew, writes “On my left forearm I wear the Auschwitz number; it reads more briefly than the Pentateuch or the Talmud, and yet provides more thorough information.”[1] The numbers identify the condition of his being a Jew at the same time it makes him a part of something referred to as “the jewish problem” which as he puts it, is a neurosis of historical context external to the state of being a Jew. In both cases, the identifiers: a series of numbers, abstracted, like counting the change in your pocket or looking at the face of a clock, have completely become reversed and extrapolated out of the quotidian uses therein and enslaved by an exclusive Meister aus Deutschland[2] for the purpose of distancing one group from another. Does one then blame the numbers for the condition the person “wearing” them? Are numbers culpable?

Through the perversion of everyday symbols, acts and traditions, the Jewish population of Europe, began in 1935, to be identified as abstractions, numbers, bills of lading, cargo and chattel transported at their own expense across borders and into what became known simply as “the final solution.” But, before this final solution was possible the Jew had to be debased and removed from popular culture, from society by being denied his dignity and right to live. In this final bedraggled state a solution could be had that seemed fitting to the state of being that Jews had been reduced too. Now, sixty years later, we are left with varying degrees of images to remind us of the facts. Stories in their multitudes, more forgotten than remembered are recorded and transformed into film and narrative as a means of commemorating and meditating on a brutal chapter in human history.

Amery describes striking a Kapo in the face as an act of dignity even though he was beaten severely for this brief and ultimately fruitless act of resistance. Dignity is at the heart of Sydney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker. Nazerman claims he has come to terms with the holocaust because he doesn’t care about nostalgia, he doesn’t believe in pity and ultimately is incapable of extending dignity to other people. Those that come into his pawnshop are greeted with nothing more than base courtesy. People respect the pawnbroker but hate him for his mercantile prowess as he lords over them a single dollar for their possessions. It’s impossible to speak to Nazerman because he has become an exclusive being, a problem, exteriorized by the numbers on his forearm, and thus ultimately incapable of meaningful human connections.

Nazerman’s inability to recognize “other” than himself, to extend a human courtesy could be viewed as a direct result of his experience in the camps where images are wounds that don’t heal according to Insdorf[3]. When forced to bear witness to horror, Nazerman chooses to ignore humanity as it is both the source and victim of that horror; as dehumanized as Nazerman is in the camps, it’s the human master that reduces him to a state of inhumanity and forces him to bear witness to his own wife’s brutal rape and eventual murder. To “see”, to have those visions that are like wounds, is also a state of absolute powerlessness; it’s the inability to act in a fashion that would salvage one’s dignity as in Amery’s case, but more accurately it is a state of being an object[4], inanimate in the sense that death is the only form of salvation and inevitable conclusion.

In 1844 Karl Marx wrote his essay, Estranged Labor, to identify, philosophically, the problem faced by the worker. Marx spoke of an objectification that happens when the product of labor becomes more valuable than the act of labor; a worker’s labor becomes a commodity when the product of that labor is no longer owned by the worker. Labor’s only means is a means to a ‘subsistence end’ and has no value in the act of ‘working’. Thus the individual that performs that labor is ultimately unable to claim the act and begins a long line of dissociations that make it impossible for the worker to recognize “other” than himself, through a loss of language, identity and finally a kind of psychological recognition of ‘other’ people. Nazerman’s objectification, a catalogue number on his arm, which has closed him off from other people, from humanity, a dissociation and inability to understand that his (in)actions are capable of causing the same harm that befell him from a lack of recognizing “other”. His flashbacks begin to haunt him as witness mutates into a kind of constant reliving of historical reality.

The further reality of this dissociation is based on Marx’s concept of the ‘laws of political economy’[5] which posits an inverse relationship between the worker and the object of his labor, or the labor object. As Nazerman accumulates ever greater value, he is devalued himself as he is beholden to Rodriguez thereby denying any real ownership of that wealth. Nazerman is ever the courier of blood money and eventually, his conscience gets the better of him. Every object in his pawnshop is labor objectified, dissociated from the memory of that object and the person who retains that memory. Every offer made to Nazerman, of something to be pawned, is accompanied by a personal experience that is checked at the bars inside the pawnshop.

The world of the pawnshop is as much a cage and prison as was the camp with its bars that hold back the teaming masses of people that remind Nazerman that other people did him an injustice and denied him both his dignity and forced upon him images that robbed him of his humanity. The pawnshop’s bars are the middle-man of the transactions where Nazerman gives out as little as he can for customer’s memories, for their effects and human tropes, it’s a speech grill through which all human dialogue becomes impossible:

SPRACHGITTER

Augenrund zwischen den Stäben.

Flimmertier Lid rudert nach oben, gibt einen Blick frei.

Iris, Schwimmerin, traumlos und trüb: der Himmel, herzgrau, muß nah sein.

Schräg, in der eisernen Tülle, der blakende Span. Am Lichtsinn errätst du die Seele.

(Wär ich wie du. Wärst du wie ich. Standen wir nicht unter einem Passat? Wir sind Fremde.)

Die Fliesen. Darauf, dicht beieinander, die beiden herzgrauen Lachen: zwei Mundvoll Schweigen.

-Paul Celan (1959)

Eye's roundness between the bars.

Vibrarile monad eyelid propels itself upward, releases a glance.

Iris, swimmer, dreamless and dreary: the sky, heart-grey, must be near.

Athwart, in the iron holder, the smoking splinter. By its sense of light you divine the soul.

(If I were like you. If you were like me. Did we not stand under one trade wind? We are strangers.)

The flagstones. On them, close to each other, the two heart-grey puddles: two mouths full of silence.

-Paul Celan (1959)

Celan’s poem echoes what Nazerman himself would claim he has become, a mouthful of silence, content within himself, and yet reflective. A puddle has the potential for reflection, so the question has to be asked, what is being reflected if not that which has made him silent: the shear inability to convey the horror. He claims that “bitterness has passed him by” and that he is content with simply being. This passive vessel of suppressed memories acts as a reflection for the ghosts and the collection of random objects in his shop that remind him at every step and turn, consciously or not, that he too is a bill of lading, tagged and shelved, inside and out.

However, Nazerman’s lack of humanity doesn’t begin with the number on his forearm, rather you get a sense that it’s much older than the experiences he had in the camps. The first dissociation occurs thousands of years ago and is a byproduct of what Nazerman refers to as the bearded legend in his speech to Ortiz:

“First of all you start off with a period of several thousand years, during which you have nothing to sustain you but a great bearded legend. Oh my friend you have no land to call your own, to grow food on or to hunt. You have nothing. You're never in one place long enough to have a geography or an army or a land myth. All you have is a little brain. A little brain and a great bearded legend to sustain you and convince you that you are special, even in poverty.”

The concept of God as a bearded legend, distant and abstract, is the beginning of a process of dissociation that makes it impossible for the Jew, and ultimately Nazerman, to feel beyond himself. His emotion stops at the gate of the numbers on his forearm. To further confound the problem, without an afterlife built into the covenant with God, the Jew has nothing but the fact that death is the end; the promise of a land of milk and honey and a good life here on Earth is the only established pay off to follow the 613 rules of a good Jew’s life. Paz notes that Death defines life and that we don’t transform or transfigure as in western doctrines of Christianity, but rather we disappear; thus, if our deaths lack meaning so do our lives[6]. Confronted with so much senseless death, and a legend filled with empty promises, the shell of the self becomes the only place where meaning can be created.

In reducing God to a bearded legend, an abstract with a goatee, Nazerman has effectively transferred any belief he had into idolatry: “Then, Mr. Teacher, aint there nothing you do believe in?” asks Ortiz to which Nazerman replies: “Money.” Salvation is found in the proclamation of “In God We Trust” emblazoned on every dollar bill. For Nazerman, this salvation, this reality, holds true that he can enjoy a sterile and servile life beholden to Rodriguez through an agreement that so long as money flows, then there is peace on Earth. Yet consider the rich that went to the furnaces of Auschwitz, money did not alter their fates; a rich Jew was fated to die and burn the same way a poor man died. In the camps, the lowest rung of that exclusive society was the Jewish inmate. Rudolph Vrba, in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, echoes this as he talks about how political prisoners were treated above the Jew, who ultimately was as disposable as a paper napkin knowing there were more in the cupboard. Filip Muller makes the connection that as long as there were bodies to burn, then, there was a reason for one’s existence. For a people already disenfranchised of their dignity, reduced to a number, the knowledge that reducing their fellow countrymen to ashes is the only hope for survival, left them as subhuman as the anti-Semitic machine that drives the apparatus of murder. We must keep in mind that none of this could or would’ve been accomplished as Raul Hilberg points out, without money. The Jews sent for extermination paid their own passage in the sense that the goods stolen from them by the Nazis funded the transport. The connection here is that a reliance on capital for murder doesn’t create a more just or secure society, and so Nazerman adopts the machinations of his oppressors in order to maintain that false sense of security that a bearded legend simply can’t provide when faced with Job’s declaration of “God why has though forsaken me?!”

Lumet’s near charicature of Nazerman, a usurer, a heartless pawnbroker, victim turned victimizer doesn’t evoke sympathy easily. It’s difficult to truly feel sympathetic toward someone who hasn’t learned from the experience and hasn’t walked away with an appreciation for humanity above and beyond the fact that people are other living creatures. Simultaneously, it’s nearly impossible to hate Nazerman or scorn him for his inhumanity because he is ultimately brought back from believing that suffering didn’t exist outside of Auschwitz[7]. But if that old maxim holds true, then all things were possible after Auschwitz and so the illusion of security invested in the abstraction of money is a falsehood that perpetuates the disbelief of those that Jan Karski and others vainly tired to warn.

It’s exactly a warning, from Rodriguez, that sends Nazerman into a tail spin that ends with a betrayal by Ortiz that backfires and ends up killing him. The only option at this point is to feel something, and so Nazerman impales himself in the final scenes of the film, turning his body into both a human check and assuming the role of an impotent man, unable to create life, nor save it, and according to Insdorff, a broken pawn[8]. To Insdorff’s point of the inheritance of the Nazis concept, self mutilation, a wound that never closes, Amery would say that this wound is the result of “the Jewish question”, historically and socially determined conceptual phenomena as a matter for the disgrace of the antisemites as their disgrace[9].

Ortiz’s death reminds Nazerman how fleeting life can be, and even a silent wail is important, a shriek to better understand why the Jews were sacrificed by fire. The term holocaust is the first stage of dissociation, on the tongue, in the mouth, when discussing genocide. If it is through images that we have come to terms with the unsettling facts that comprise the catastrophe of those war torn years, then it is in language that we falter by using a term that intones something of a religious quality to what is the destruction of a people. To whom, is the Jew sacrificed? What cause is furthered by the sacrifice? Is the Jewish Question answered by fire? It would seem, through Lanzmann’s documentary, that no answer suffices, but rather one must understand the roles and personalities that kept the wheels turning, the trains running, the ovens cooking.

Shoah illuminates three categories of witness: those that suffered, those that stood by and those that committed the crimes of genocide. The bystanders are inculpated into the crime by doing nothing, and more importantly, feeling nothing. This method of tackling the fact of the event, examines the function or role of each separate part of what was a very large bureaucracy surrounding the Nazis machine. This is not murder, nor is this genocide in the frenzied sense of the Hutus slaughtering the Tutsis. Participation isn’t simply defined by those that wielded machetes but everyone surrounding the system that worked like business. The veneer of engineering and punctuality, as is the myth surrounding German trains being on time, is broken open to show the foulness of the task at hand. You walk away with a sense that nothing of this order could be clean, and no one comes out clean for dipping his hands into that well.

If the misunderstandings surrounding the holocaust begin, like the new testament, in the beginning was a word, then they end in the final scenes of Alain Renais and Jean Cayrol’s, Night & Fog: who is responsible? That question was asked before the film was made of the perpetrators in Nuremburg. It was asked once more but in the context of how do you talk about something that begins as a misnomer? Every generation has had to face catastrophe and give it new meaning through various art forms. In the cinematic age, the options are almost never ending in terms of how to create a narrative, which story to choose, it’s a limitless pool now.

Ten years passed before Night & Fog was made, before cinema was given the right to deal with a wound still open, and gaping considering what happened in 1948 with the creation of the Israeli state and the conflict surrounding its genesis. Since then, technology and the speed of information has overwhelmed us. There is a film ready a week after the disaster. We are approaching an age where we won’t need actors anymore, only their voices. The fresh wounds of September 11^th, 2001 are still open and festering while Iraq is still a part of every nightly news cast. The question of how to represent this tragedy has now come before film makers. The door was open, but like so many moments of silence, the dead weren’t ready to be unearthed and filmed.

There will always be questions and concerns surrounding how we remember this event, or the next catastrophe for that matter, and how it shapes our memory of prior events. Thankfully we have film to remind us as a kind of malleable and artistic conscience. The same concerns of how do we go about ‘remembering’ what happened and what representations of that memory might mean to society, are as important today as they were in 1955. We’ve had numerous documentaries and theories that recount the blunders, the missteps, a made for TV movie, and now, a Hollywood production, but the narratives with their symbolism and literality are make the fact and memory of the event problematic. The pace of human history is moving ever faster and faster and its quite easy to let small details, nuances like the definition of a single word, slip through the cracks in lieu of the disasters, both real and imagined, on the celluloid screen. These idea that the devil is in the details reminds us that understanding a concept, a piece of history, thoroughly, requires that we understand not only the fact of its historical significance but the repercussions stemming from how we choose to remember and memorialize the event; its not enough to simply build a monument, there must be a thorough understand of the event in order to reconcile the victims and the perpetrators involved. In an interview with Omar Berdouni, an actor, who portrayed a terrorist in the film United 93, he cautioned his interviewer to remember that more than just those four planes were kidnapped that morning; he said that the entire Muslim faith was hijacked and subjected to misinterpretations. It is in the misinterpretation of ideas that we find misrepresentations of groups like Jews in Der Ewige Jude and in prein as seen in Der Strummer, it is these seemingly impossible, yet completely potent lies, that help shape opinion, divesting humanity from recognizing ‘other’ thereby allowing for things that we can only term catastrophes.

---

[1] Amery, Jean, At The Mind’s Limits, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN, 1980, Pg 94

[2] From Paul Celan’s Der Totes Fuge (Death Dance) …Er ruft spielt süßer den Tod der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland…

[3] Insdorf, Annette, Indelible Shadows: Film & The Holocaust, Pgs. 28-30. “When Nazerman refuses to look a soldier pushes his bald head through the glass forcing him to see. In this film, one pays a price for vision: images are wounds that will not heal.”

[4] Paz, Octavio, The Labrynth of Solitude, Grove Press, New York, NY, 1985 – “Modern criminals and statesmen do not kill: they abolish. They experiment with beings who have lost their human qualities. Prisoners in the concentration camps are first degraded, changed into mere objects; then they are exterminated en masse.”

[5] online source: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/labour.htm:
(The estrangement of the worker in his object is expressed according to the laws of political economy in the following way:

1. the more the worker produces, the less he has to consume;
2. the more value he creates, the more worthless he becomes;
3. the more his product is shaped, the more misshapen the worker;
4. the more civilized his object, the more barbarous the worker;
5. the more powerful the work, the more powerless the worker;
6. the more intelligent the work, the duller the worker and the more he becomes a slave of nature.)

[6] Paz, Octavio, The Labrynth of Solitude, Grove Press, New York, NY, 1985 – “Death is a mirror which reflects the vain gesticulations of the living. The whole motley confusion of acts, commissions, regress and hopes which is the life of each one of us finds in death, not meaning or explanation but an end. Death defines life; a death depicts a life in immutable forms; we do not change except to disappear. Our deaths illuminate our lives. If our deaths lack meaning, our lives also lacked it.”

[7] Mehmedinovic, Semezdin, Sarajevo Blues, City Lights Press San Francisc, CA, 1998 – From the poem Corpse: “…I heard the crunch of snow under tires / like teeth biting into an apple / and felt the wild desire to laugh / at you / because you call this place hell / and you fele from here convinced / that death outside Sarajevo does not exist …”

[8] Insdorf, Annette, Indelible Shadows: Film & The Holocaust, Pgs. 31.

[9] Amery, Jean, At The Mind’s Limits, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN, 1980, Pg 92 – “I understood reality. But should this perhaps have occasioned me to come to grips with the problem of anti-Semitism? Not at all. Antisemitism and the Jewish question, as historical, socially determined conceptual phenomena, were not and are not any concern of mine. They are entirely a matter for the antisemites, their disgrace or their sickness. The antisemites have something to overcome, not I.

I do believe

I'm going!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The suspense

Is driving me a little insane...

For Not Us - Rewrite

VIII

for P.C.


There's a lattice
of steel bars
as your voice
in me:
all meaning
fails itself
you can say
trade the wind
like a point
bloated with principle
I'm here
you're there
just beyond
green lines
show how holy
blood each day
is wasted on
prophet tongues
not here—not for
rubble hordes
a grip of stone
pebble pastiche
stoned fiction
for a time
the story seemed
to hold by name
a siege enthroned
ad hominem
ecce homo
ex nihilo.

Fences

"you’ve seen so many fences that it makes you want to weep."
--John Cleary

Euphemisms

Why can't we say "died"? Why do people pass? Pass sounds like a voluntary choice to me. You pass on seconds at a dinner table, you pass a road sign to where you're going while your distracted by the beautiful blonde in the BMW passing you, you pass the greay poupon, pass the carrots, you pass your glass for a refill, you pass on condoms because you're too drunk to keep it up with that much latex. In all these things pass is voluntary except when most people die. Now we can make an argument that suicides should be the model for voluntary death, but you know there's a sticky gray area there too.

I'm still uncomfortable with relying on the 12th definition of the verb form of pass in reference to a person's death. I might prefer the 1st definition of the word's noun form as being closer related to coins for Charon than the act of transition. However, why can't we say died or death? Is there something to permanent in those two words that there isn't in pass? Is passing away imply a passage to someplace? Is there a destination in pass that you don't get in death or died?

I've always been curious about this. I find it hard to use the term passed away, I just say died. I feel more comfortabl with the absolute nature of that phrase than with the nebulous and implied potentials with passing away. I don't like to think that my loved ones passed away, willingly or otherwise, and that they may be in some thick reality definied by the faithful and instituted by zealots in an afterlife church of eternal exclusivity. No, I want to think of them as having expired, used this flesh up and finally it or whatever passes for soul or spirit, relinquished it's grip and expired. That seems like an equally euphemised way of looking at something for which we have a perfectly good term, yet it still doesn't quite satisfy.

Why do we want to pass away? Why can't we just come to grips with dying? "The dead look so very dead when they're dead." wrote Sommerset Maugham in The Razor's Edge. The statement seems to plant the dead where they should be, not among the living, but dead, in a state other than living. If the path to that state weren't important, then they can't have passed into a state where they look very dead as the dead tend to be when they're dead. It seems that death, in this case, is evoked for three senses or means by which we understand the world: the dead (noun) look so very dead (appearance) when they're dead (being). Language vs. the appearance of reality vs. that thing in itself concept that Schoppenhauer talked so much about.

Perhaps we can find a reason for our need to put choice into the equation whose result is death: "The dead only know one thing: it's better to be alive." These words came from the internal monologue like narration of Mathew Modine's character in Full Metal Jacket as he stood over a pit full of corpses covered in lime. Private Joker muses that the state of death has a knwoledge in it, something that we can say is similar to willing passage, that the dead know something we the living don't. Is it that are privy to the great mystery of the beyond before we are? Is there a certainty in the state of being dead that the living only guess at, or in a complete abandonment of empirical rationality, embrace whole heartedly regardless of the possible dissapointment? The dead, if they knew that living was better, might make the choice of passage even more difficult to stomach.

The sad fact is that we need to pass, we need transition to represent something. As myth is as much to explain natural phenomenon as to place an individual into the constructed cosmology and realize the self in terms of "other" according to Jung, then death has to have a meaning and a continuity through human history. Our greatest fear is falling out of the thread, so we pass, from one thread to another, from memory to memory like a photograph carried through a sea of people. We have to have our loved ones pass from this place to the kingdom du jour so that we can still feel like potentn creatures capable of affecting positive changes in the world around, because there is a choice.

reflections in perspective

Delillo wrote about in white noise, the most important unifying trait between humans is their ability to communicate their fear and wonder at death through language. We're brothers and sisters because we can talk about death.

But is it possible that death can make us want to feel more than we should? Is it possible that between head and heart there exists an exterior syntax of emotion that we can only understand through an empathic vernacular that gives us pause? I didn't know him that well, but I can't stop thinking about him. I see the tattoos on his arms taking flight, lifting off his skin, pealing away, and I miss the potential of running into him again and sharing a pint of whiskey. There's nothing touching about my emotions here, only their genuine quality is what's striking and I sit here and curse the almighty for being a poor steward and all those other things as pointless as tears but just as necessary.

I wonder if we need to feel other than ourselves sometimes.

From the time (in anticipation -edited)

from the time

you landed maybe until you might wake up knowing night was figment the buildings tall sleekness etched chunk architectures borrowed and built to remain civil in the way that organisms take space and grow from center out stalin marked his mass with bigger blocks in an older strain not of this century but the river’s ice can support the city in times of need large trucks rolled across frozen water the worst floods are marked with iron quarters were germans got their own high water line russian corners in this room and that still painting over twelve languages of graphiti to rosko’s murder happened in a book but the stairs will echo his steps exhaustive walking wears away what can be written into stones zdes ohn napisal prestuplenya e nakazanya or its not his city in the seems bursting countryside clerks there’s twenty thousand memoires floating in the pages of zapiski iz podpolya the thing is its not about hiding if it weren’t for ownership the flats we used as temporary housing for the jet set elite in soviet times mark this hall with exposed piping set out with brass knobs to look less shoddy shoe repair is tops in small wooden shacks on the street is something missed in every museum you just can’t take in whole stories here rolling on the grass with a chain collar his claws haven’t quite learned how deadly we have become speaking candidly my favorite club was underground they called boonkar on its roof was patio far at street level jenya came back from chicago at twelve she came back here knowing the lingo can make money lips drunken the closer we spoke and scream she leaning forward just far enough and tight top low vee-cut I couldn’t not bare but stare back to the subject of literary stigmatas shelves in every pub crawl with books and zoom cafes the check on page thirty-six now mates with lenin and maybe the waitress borrowed her mother’s dress to pioneer the new western freedoms here’s a tv with cherenko walking by and zip to fucking forms in soft core shells landed in spilled blood’s fifth dome knocking down a big chunk o jesus was originally of three domes for father son and holy coat of arms triangulated on their gold crowns until mountain men painted heaven’s glorylaid out on every corner unlike other churches sasha said you have to be dressed prelechnya what you choose to wear is your business but take off the star five points to it and its everywhere like mars field flames to fan it still burns in everything never is forgotten time memorials 1881 at 20:36 someone had to stop the rain which keeps it all green and the water was high enough to submerge the first floor cellars where the best eats still sink down under the building just far enough for the stray dog to seem filled with smoke and the green fumes of absinth fueling liberation’s freedom from lucid resignations for the dead like vrubel’s lavender gestalt generally understood you have to come to terms with food and the power wielded by grocery stores have now succumb to supermarkets and dixie lies around every corner shops stay open all the time and each one has a state sponsored drunk across from my hotel his name was kolya and looked like he was close to sainthood at twenty three for the solstice and the last bell where they give them the city that he hasn’t yet returned for their own uses can you tell that things revolve and you can live for celebration and acceleration while moods are not advised for foreigners there are still niggers and a nigger is a nigger he tried to tell the cop that they were cousins and he was a racist because he was the only black man on the streets while making quick work of something that should be kept indoors the goom displays cases against the jews because sasha couldn’t understand why they died the same but death isn’t unknowable and he knew that they were dead but still reviled even in death there’s no such thing as a jewish hero of the soviet and something like perestroika enduring the longest hatred has got to be a civil duty to serve at eighteen while vera asked her to go na belayi notche and we were followed by body guards for ten days of canon’s hand and the huge motif of what’s really quite a small head in exaggerated relief aid was something that a people must do for themselves while shostokovich wrote a symphony under siege this city is always playing even when you can’t stop looking look again at your watch telling you one thing and if it were the 19^th centuries’ clock faced grin you’d wonder if he’s the worst sort of man that can’t even hold his liquor while you’re sitting on the shitter when the revolution came the aurora glowed on nevya where she rusts to the racket of a nearby caravan of busses in five indo-european peoples we were fucked by the mongols and then took turns being done and doing sweeden declared in olden times the worst enemy but it was not a crime open to imagination you think if they see it somehow reversed like a dove flying through a mirror and every square has been mistranslated into its current form zamak and zamok mean they have a natural and integral link if you could unlock one to get to the other side of the river isn’t quit the same here in the center of the city you’ll be kept well and hospitable and for fifty bucks she’ll make you orgasm all night long listen you call me next time you come here as the rain fell I thought back to his job and couldn’t help but chuckle that everyone thinks they’ve been deceived s’mokrayi dela the cops will leave you be for fifteen hundred it’s the most expensive piss you’ve ever given that the west doesn’t understand the beauty of birch in the thickest of ancient slavic bath houses its purely a russian phenomenon to want something more you ask in metrics drink in english pubs around the world are just as bad outside of england similarly overpriced markets for colorful knick knacks patty whack this old night went rolling into that bronze horseman on the whicker rock he rode down but as you enter the place where five million people dwell and you can’t help but feel that devastation was built into the design of the city

27th & Fulton

What were you thinking?

I was making up for something I should’ve done.

That was your thinking?

No, that’s just what I did.

So you just picked her up?

She stopped me as I was getting out of the car. I had just pulled up to my building with a belly full of Filipino delicacies and a head full of nostalgia. She asked me where the 2000 block of 44th was. I pointed toward the ocean and said across the park she said that she was scared to cross the park. It was 11 already.

So it was dark and she didn’t want to walk a few blocks?

Could you blame her?

Was she pretty?

You don’t have to be attractive to fear for your skin. She asked me if I’d give her a ride. I’d just popped the trunk to fetch my bag and some goodies I bought earlier. I paused and choked down a mouth full of um’s and uh’s. Without really thinking the whole thing through a yeah came rolling off my lips. So I walked to the otherside of the car, cleared my stuff from the passenger seat, she saddled up with her three bags, all small handbag things that looked like canvas even though they were some hybrid leather thing. I didn’t bother closing the door for her.

She wasn’t pretty.

That’s not the point. I just climbed into the driver seat half expecting her to be holding a derringer to my head. She held her bags close and I fired up the car and started down Fulton. She asked me if I was from New York, I told her people get that impression, it must be the jewish father in me. She didn’t get it.

Get what?

I barreled down Fulton cause I had a date, see, I had to get back cause she was coming over. I wasn’t even really sure what I was doing at that point. I hung a left on 43rd and when we reached that first intersection I said, did you know there’s buffalo in the park? What do you mean she said. I said, there’s a buffalo paddock in the park, its just one of those things that people don’t know or realize. That’s crazy she said. So I shifted down into third and hurried it along.

What else did she say?

Not much really, she was quiet in that way that you’re quiet when you really don’t know what you’re doing. She thought San Francisco was full of do-gooders.

Why’d she think that?

Cause I gave her a ride I suppose.

You’re a regular mighty mouse.

I know, I told her she caught me on a good day, that’s all. She said she was from San Diego and that people weren’t quite so nice. I told her that she’s probably walking on a borrowed carpet of luck. About this time I made the left on 44th at Lincoln. It was the 1000 block.

Did you drop her off?

No, felt bad, it was cold, damp, you know the way that summers get, early on, the nights and that neo-gothic-fog thing that happens as a way of pretending that the rest of the world isn’t enjoying a bit of warmth.

Yeah.

I decided to keep driving. We went by one hundreds, each block a bit closer, each distance marked by an ever thicker silence until finally she opened her mouth and said that she didn’t know the people she was going to stay with very well. We crossed Taraval at that point and I was just a couple blocks off. I ran a stop sign and pulled up at the end of the next block, 2100. I said to her that we had arrived. She opened the door, and I was about to take that sigh…

Relief?

Something less pure… Fuck, it’s over.

So did she get out?

She looked down at her feet. Maybe the revolver was in her leg warmer, or maybe she had a shiv poked up in that furry knit cap she wore. I started to get into my mental bruce lee posture for whatever was coming. No one’s really happy she asked me.

So what did you say?

I agreed with her…

but…

I didn’t say it, I just said, I am.

That’s not like you.

No, it really isn’t. But the free ride didn’t include a chat about the world’s inclination toward unhappiness and false senses of security. So she got out of the car and said thanks as the door was closing. I pulled away as soon as she had cleared the rear tire.

Was it worth it?

I think I’m still in debt.

You know anything could’ve happened, she could’ve called the cops, and…

Yeah I know, but she didn’t seem the type.

So why’d you do it?

I think I want to live in a place where that’s possible.

What’s possible.

Depending on strangers.

But you didn’t talk to her.

I know, that’s too personal.

Chicago, the art institute...

To _________,

long ago

I went to the museum
to see Van Gogh's self
portrait,
the one without
bandages

and remembered--

how small a drop
of paint lasts

to be itself
remembered
and removed

from withholding
too much

--unwinding

Paradise Now

There's a feeling of helplessness as the camera pans and tightens on Said's (Kais Nashef) eyes in the last frames of the film. You want so very much to prevent the inevitable but his eyes, his very fierce eyes might as well lull you into complacency as you're split into the part of you that agrees and accepts and the other part that is balanced with horror and is preparing to mourn.

Is Paradise now a call for peace? Perhaps, there's the voice of Suha who advocates other forms of resistance, she's the rational one. There's Said who has a hidden past that seems to foment his actions and there's Khaled (Ali Suliman), the hot-head, the one you're sure will be dependable right until the end. But Khaled's dependability is ultimately at question in this film as he's the character hat has the greatest change of heart or turn around. Its this turn of heart makes me question the believability of this film. Can it really happen like that? Someone who has pledged to be a human weapon, resolving to carry out an operation of martyrdom, sees that there are other options?

I really want to believe this is possible, but the conversion is too fast and too easy. I don't see where there's a real problem with what he has chosen to do and a kind of realization of what one isn't supposed to do. There's a heated conversation with Suha, the daughter of a respected resistance fighter, who is for the cause, but not the actions of her countrymen. She believes in a war of morals, one where the Palestinians have to stop the violence, so that there's never a justification for Israeli violence and then let the battle be an ideological one where the world will see the Palestinian cause as grounded in a peaceful effort toward coexistance. Her strongest argument, the one that if I suspend my doubt as to her effectiveness in changing Khaled's mind, is the question of "what about us, the ones you leave behind? what are we to do?" This question about the martyr's families, the survivors, the women who have historically born the brunt on the homefront of any armed conflit, resistance or offensive, is poignant. It is asking Khaled to step outside himself, to see a picture that is larger than his narrow view of the world and ultimately, his narcissism about paradise.

"What will happen after?" asks Khaled as he rides in a car toward the launch point of his mission "two angels come down and bring you up to paradise" answeres Jamal. "Really?" asks Khaled with a certain tinge of uncertainty. That uncertainty is ultimately his undoing, but it seems that its minor as Jamal explains it away as 'of course' in his very certain and religiously dogmatic attitude.

Both Khaled & Said's features and acting are excellent, but its the women that steal this show. Said's mother played by Hiam Abass and Suha, Lubna Azabal, are marvelous in their ability to let silence speak volumes. Hiam has a small part, something, fleeting, but in those moments she eats up the screen with the simple and quotidian act of preparing a dinner, and later, talking to her son. There's a part of you that very much wants to sit at this woman's table as she chops fresh vegetables for mezedes and hands it to Said to be carried out for the family to eat.

You can eat this piece alive as you watch the struggle, as you cry out in silence hoping to change what you know has a trajectory and life of its own, or you can sit back and wonder if this kind of moral drama does play out, or if the decision to kill yourself and other people along with you is an easy one to make and that the ritual around the martyr is nothing more than window-dressing for a factory operation called suicide bombing.

"My witness is the empty sky."

-Kerouac

[untitled]

Did you say

solipsistic

i love that

word

gently used

reeds and

willows

face me

speaking

about face

condensed

bread crumb

back toward

this way

walk this way

like the walk

of this road

will lead you

back to me.

XCVIII

3 were charged after messages striking a chord in the prime of youth – their youth wasn't in question – but 18 more than the previous year reported – in an underage way – under reporting absence clearly states – there's more – to be dragged 3 miles till the arms teeter out and depending on the road – this is where it might seem redundant – 63 incidents are collectively enshrined – 34,000 destroyed after they were already destroyed in 2 days no less – on this site there will be a monument – for the numbers were a record – and the 1 was stoned by many on the seventh day in accordance – something written ends relation – 6 million weren't all sacrificed – or by fire – to forget the 20 million trampled by steel – 6,000 lined the Via Appia in 72 – years before 3 on the hill – and later in nome de patre – or it's what you oughtn't to do but you do anyway – some dispute differences between 100,000 gone in prison and another 10,000 at the stake – but revision is modernity's sole resolve toward enlightenment – the figures say now that maybe 31,912 over 400 years – young governments came and went and took with them 1 million or so Anatolians – it was around the 1st great one the record clearly states 9 million fighting men and boys and 7 million others – and every generation is supposed to out do the one before – when everything became possible after Auschwitz – 937,000 laid to waste in 100 days – so many Cain's and even more Able – to understand the origin – 10-20% never made it sailing the ocean blue – another 15-33% couldn't be seasoned out – this season's ripe count measures success totally unaware that eye deep in hell an abacus still clicks and counts.

Away but back...

So its been a bloody long time since I postd anything. I think I need a break from thinking out loud. Now that I've taken a break from thinking to myself, or maybe for myself, or maybe not, I don't know; it


On Broadway at Columbus

you can drink a lesson
like loitering for shadows
when the drummer vanishes
ice melts faster in liquor
first the fingers and then
the fingers

might feel a stab of cold
when you’re crazy
you don’t miss the sun
if you weren’t paying attention

let’s fake letters in lights
park the rhythm in back
inviolate clocks

the violence’s been timed
four-four swings the sound
while sips turn to pound

standards are foreign
friends have come far