Susan M. Schultz
from I WANT TO WRITE AN HONEST SENTENCE
I want to write an honest sentence about exposition or, more accurately, about its lack. Interpretation is a kind of exposure, like the time I peered down from a cliff at a rocky pool and saw naked men and women sunning on the rocks. There was also the sad parrot that destroyed his perch by pecking at it. The sound interrupted our lunch, because nakedness requires an obstacle to interpret its lack of cover. Fashion statements are cover stories that we read over lunch, though I can't imagine hovering like a drone over any of my recent meals. A drone flew over us at the walk out of darkness, but drones don't kill themselves so the point was lost on me. Drone operators do, for reasons of alienation even from the killing that they do. Death in the age of Dilbert, cubicle after cubicle inhabited by office chair soldiers; I read that sitting kills us, so why not kill others while seated? Where do you find a cover story, when you never left your chair? John says I should add question marks to my exposition on exposition, but that would render too obvious the nakedness of my punctuation. After a bag blew up in the Tube, dear leader wrote about “terrorist losers.” I'm surprised he didn't spell it “loosers,” as losers seems to be loosening over time, adding another vowel to its slack elastic. John Lennon was a looser, but at least we could sing along as if not to think about ourselves but about him. My student who suffers from selective mutism says she likes to sing, but not in public. That would be too much exposition, self- or otherwise. I told my students that despite my hardened shell, seeing them write over and over that haoles “lack breath” and are “foreigners” started to hurt. The dull ache of being set apart. It's been a hard year, Radhika writes on Instagram, but there aren't enough words to explain. Her photograph seems divorced from any of that, exposure of a different kind, an orange sun rising over surfers, because—as she'd say—it's in the east. They seem to sit in the ocean, as if divorced from gravity or balance, watching everything that's coming up in its hunky glory.
--16 September 2017
I want to write an honest sentence. Amar is 16 and lives in Mosul; he has just come out of the river, soaking wet. His parents killed by ISIS, his younger sister paralyzed. Their uncle, with whom they live, does not feed or care for them. Amar sings about his mother to the journalist who asks him questions; the sweetness of his grief floods my car at rush hour. We're numb to what's happening, a student says; all that's left of the Vegas massacre is a large banner on the side of the Mandalay. Mandalas are for disappearing, but not the trauma we've outsourced to others. Fifty thousand Americans died of overdoses last year alone. Alone denotes a single year, not a person. Their parents talk to us about addiction, about costs, about funding, because no matter where you start, you end with money. The young Hawaiian beside me told the story of “middle of nowhere” Oregon, where he'd been harassed by police. Asked what kind of Monster he drank, he laughed. They called in back-up. An hour and a half hassle for hitting a few inches of curb on the way into 7-11. “That wasn't a story, though you probably wanted it to be,” said the Mexican kid in workshop. “That was an experience you were writing.” His aunty told him he'd get dates because he's light-skinned. “No one wants to date a peasant,” she said, and he wondered how to respond, so he didn't. What they left out of reader-response theory was what happens when there is none, when what we're told makes no sense, though it hurts. If you give me words to describe your rape, your mobbing, your curling in a ball on the bathroom floor, what am I to do with your gift? The girls of Boko Haram hide their faces behind hands and flowers. Men strapped bombs beneath their robes. The first abuses were precursors, foreplay to the rain of flesh and fabric that was to be their only inheritance. I love you, we say, I love you. The thick mesh of our monosyllables holds some of it back.
--27 October 2017
I want to write an honest sentence. Each clause begins, “In furtherance of their scheme,” then concludes with what money was laundered where. Room after room disgorges its towels and sheets for Filipino maids to spirit away. But the scheme involves money, a lot of it, and off-shore accounts have nothing to do with reefs or wave patterns, rather with Company A and Company B, with carpets and Range Rovers, with condos and lawn services. Where every transaction is a cover story, there can be no depth. This ocean is flat as the stage set for an opera: two women on a boat lose their cell phone and get lost in the Pacific. Four months later they're found, funnily enough, alive. Not every sentence matters but they're all material, like the scarlet yarn that emerges from a chicken's entrails, turning butchery into narrative, as per always. To tell a story is to lose it like a lock or to hide beneath it. To pick the story is to indict its tellers, draw them out of their Virginia mansions. One taxi driver said houses had nothing in them, were shells set in the grass to impress the neighbors. The flag of our disposition is a deposition. Fake news is true insofar as someone calls it false, and false is true when it leads us down long corridors past room service and into the gunman's suite, now set off with police tape. He killed so many people because he didn't get into a good school. He killed them because his father was a psychopath. He killed them because his girlfriend was in the Philippines. He killed them because he killed them. What are these tender buttons but triggers we curl our fingers around, like a baby's hand our own. Tender is not the word, unless we consider the offer a good one. I pay my kids' tuition with the money I have taken from you. We will pull the lid off a bleached reef and watch it stare through the water's crust. No one to see the Range Rover, or the condo. He's driven off, face hidden by a sun visor, though one angle shows him smiling.
--31 October 2017
I want to write an honest sentence about the end of the world. It's coming, you know; how you feel about it matters less than what you do with your remaining sentences. You ransom them for more, or trade them at the deadline for a rental starter who can get you into the post-season, maybe earn you a title before the empty months stretch out with their rainy days and hot stove rumors. Working without a title can be liberating, like writing when you know that no one cares. The choreography of an academic department charts avoidance, curves away from and toward heavy brown doors that open onto drab clean pathways. I asked a young man if I could help; he said he was just looking around, then disappeared as in thin air. In this political season, every encounter seems over-determined. The Proud Boys wear heavy black boots. My former student said one of them's a “nice guy.” Niceness in an age of belligerence is no virtue. Is mask unto self or the cars that roar by between us. (He bought his Trump mask used.) The inevitable verkehr that we giggled over in class. It means “sexual intercourse,” you know, along with “traffic.” Why the heathens rage filled the newspapers of my youth. Now democracy dies in darkness. Deep as any dingle. I get my news on a feed, but what I learn is we're being fed a line, or two, grand epic of budget cuts. Whan that April with his slash and burn doth rid us of our literature, then we'll work as marketers of dreck. But back to the end of the world, which rises like the sun on our side of the island; it's on the other side that it falls, orange, over the earth's frail scalp. Nostalgia's the new revolution, an open square where citizens congregate and children kick balls. What we call terror they might have called poverty, but as my friend reminds me, the lotus comes from mud.
--5 November 2017
I want to write an honest sentence about kindness. The pastor used his motorcycle as a vehicle for allegory. He placed it in front of the altar, all buffed chrome and handlebars, then invited kids to sit on it. Their evening Bible study would be Revelations, and likely they'd not get past I know thy works, that thou hast a name that thou livest, and art dead. We're so in touch with our rage, so divorced from other affect. So firm in our faith that to pray can't stop a bullet, but can bless its aftermath of pain. It's as if 1.3 million New Yorkers had been killed. (The famous poet opened my documentary poetry class with, “Poetry is the art form that does not include information.”) Neither his palms nor ours are trees, more like grasses that bend away from trade winds and absorb the shock of baseball bats. Radhika says she broke a defender yesterday, meaning she split a post used to imitate one. Even grass shall lose its tenure in this United States of Fallacy. A hero neighbor stopped the slaughter at only 27; if he'd not had a gun to shoot the man with the gun, then everyone would've lain down on their fields and watered the ground with their blood, no questions asked. Earth is more fertile that way. Its roots and stalks take us at our words, but words grow mold, live their own disintegration. Our classrooms stink of it. Is there kindness to see how damaged we are that we kill but semi-automatically? Is there compassion enough to wrap these sick white men in blankets, pour soup down their ravening maws? I will come on thee as a thief, and thou shalt not know what hour I will come upon thee.
--7 November 2017
I want to write an honest sentence. It was a conference of clouds. Ashbery's instruction manual foretold the cloud. A woman with small dog, no shoes, told me to distinguish healthy from unhealthy clouds. She counts them from the plane, though she uses no money and wears what she makes from what she finds at the transfer station. I hold the Ashbery poem in my hand, but the man with the cloud keeps reading to me about heavy metals used to make iPhones. An unhealthy cloud is dark, but brings no rain. Her father, I find out, was the Hat Man of Maui. Broad smile, very few teeth. He'd played for the New England Patriots. When I leave, I see her again, with her tan and white dog. No one came to her panel. The man with the cloud wore multi-colored slippers under his tight rolled up pants. I watched them under the table as he read to us, lifting each printed page across as he started to read it. My head was in the clouds, though I kept trying to land, aware the final approach might push me back in the air of this room with no access to Apple TV and only a wall on which to project what might have been given. Later, I open the image of a young woman on my computer; I didn't know her but recognize her face. She died in August. We cannot grieve if we lock our cloud against the air. It's dark, but cannot cry with us; instead, our faces swell and we cough as if to transfer affect into substance. That's what I was saying, he told me, that what we think is abstract never is.
--11 November 2017
I want to write an honest sentence. Someone asks what it's called when you keep starting over in the same way. Surely there's a name for this, other than obsession or compulsion or a strange insistence. We tell those stories that make us feel better, and this is mine. Once upon a time, the word “fragility” meant we weren't to drop a box, or push a glass off the counter top. After leaving the station of fact, our word wandered into a courtroom. A lawyer argued that she was easily broken, that he couldn't handle being questioned, that they denied the privilege they wore on their heads like Sunday hats. Our prose grew more and more heavy, until not only would it not break, but it turned immovable, like a bronze statue in a park. Who that man was mattered to us, but how we transposed him into words did not. They rained on us like rubber bullets. Our parkas frayed and fell apart, fabric scattering like feathers the dog tore up. One man grabbed a woman's ass, while another raped her. According to a spokesman, the (first) one who admitted it was guilty, and the (second) one who did not wasn't. Words hang like donuts on a president's finger as he jabs the air. Turned out he was lying, but we couldn't decide how much that mattered to us. The men I love are good men, but they're fragile. How to reach out with all the delicacy I can muster and pull them down from their perches, or out from under their beds. What are the words I need to use that are light as air and cleansed of judgment? How can I make the word true again? After his uncle's stepson killed himself on veteran's day and a girl fell to her death outside the restaurant where he edited a poem, he told us he was broken. A crushed glass is sometimes truer in the light than one that still sits on the shelf.
--19 November 2017
I want to write an honest sentence. My friend says no one dies while she meditates. My dog hunts drops of rain from the trees, digs claws in the dirt where they fall. Drum drops hit outside sliding glass in the room my son returns to. The ginger and white cat is on patrol. Early music upstairs, after Mozart (and before). Is survival a form of healing? he asks; if we keep it small, like the pulsing of a truck in reverse, sound shielding us from harm. It takes resources to find silence, costs extra to sit in the airport lounge away from loud announcements. Destination is at once fact and aspiration. We asked ourselves what attention is, knowing it mostly from its absence. “You learn to attend to the world, both as it is and as you want it to be,” I wrote in what was called a “descriptor.” Only later did he find that he'd “made women feel badly,” using the adverb to compensate for a deep well of boundary crossings. Yellow tape runs between trees so you don't confuse this with “sex panic” or with dating young women because they are so “pure.” How do you describe a lie so visible we can run it into a reef and watch it rust? It's a boundary we can't see but trips us up, gashing a hole in the bow and paralyzing city government, which can't seem to unstick it from the ever-bleaching coral. Since his major depression ended, he finds it nearly impossible to concentrate on anything other than audio equipment. We finished the book that argued against willpower, but still use that language. One side of the sponge was soft, the other Calvinist. The mold we scrape up can save us, if we're not allergic to it. One young man can only drink tea if it's served without leaves, and another turns it down cold. What we take as truth is a see-through wall, designed to beautify a boundary we cannot feel. He heard “the handmaid's tale” as “the hand made tail” and we laughed. It's a dark time, but if we sit on a pillow on a bench beside a tree-choked ravine where chickens cry half the night, no one will die. Promise.
--24 November 2017
I want to write an honest sentence. I don't want to exist, he said. To want not to be: two positives and a negative. Negative wins, masquerading as member of a team clutching its trophy for the cameras. Digital immortality is brief, though it comes around like days of the week. He sat down to draw a Valentine; what flashed before him was a sketch of himself ascending to heaven. At least there were wings. That was before the image of him lying in the tub, covered in blood. We pay attention to the film more than to the screen on which it dances. The film pierces us with need. His son's ideation involved using his friend's gun at a shooting range. If our father could do it, so can I, one woman reported, having lost both father and brother. It'snot something we commit, except to other's memories. Her friend, dead these 20 years, still appears in her dreams, telling jokes. Ithi stands by Starbucks with Rawi, each clutching a large bag. Suicide is a stay to time, its straight jacket. At the end of Poetry: Shi, the audience sat quietly in the dark theater, as if to take in the braid of dementia and suicide. Outside it was sunny and the Pacific Ocean was turquoise and people were drinking coffee and shopping. Everything as it had been. The death toll is a bell that rings for thee, and thee. A verb and its negative are the enjambment that breaks statement into counter-statement, a moment of being into one of ceasing to exist. “The horses are" was Plath's best line, my teacher said. I'm afraid to see what came next. And he is and they are yet. I feel cleaner now, he says, having told us the story of a grandfather who liked little boys. To hear is to take on but some of the weight, and to carry it away. The road's shoulders bear the strain of wanderers, men and women who walk. (To walk is to place one foot before the other, and the other after.) You can see it in their eyes, the unsettled stare. Theo wondered if our colleague had died by suicide but I said no, he was quite happy. His last glance resembled one.
--24 December 2017
I want to write an honest sentence. A saw cuts my thought in half, though both ends show outside the box. Thought's an appendage, but what occurs inside the box is not. Is not is assertion and denial in two short syllables. The saw would cut them in half, leaving a pile of light brown dust. What feeds the trees in the rain forest is the dust from Mongolian deserts; what feeds the dust is another question. I see from one side of the box, and wiggle my toes at the other. If sawdust makes me sneeze, I perhaps will die of being cut. But to read the box as meaningful is to take it as central to the story, succumbing to the saw. Once upon a time there was a box. Once upon a time it sat upon a stage and people watched as it was cut in half. The piercing of the saw was not entertainment but something more precious. It was what happened while not happening, this separation of the box from itself. The box is a turtle shell that shields beings from consequence. Head cannot think its way inside the box to cradle heart and liver, ease the pain of seeming to be cut. Death would be a poor performance, but life is not. The handmaid saw a sheet that wore a tulip stain of blood and knew a man had died. The other sheets were blank, like petticoats lacking ink.
--26 December 2017
I want to write an honest sentence about exposition or, more accurately, about its lack. Interpretation is a kind of exposure, like the time I peered down from a cliff at a rocky pool and saw naked men and women sunning on the rocks. There was also the sad parrot that destroyed his perch by pecking at it. The sound interrupted our lunch, because nakedness requires an obstacle to interpret its lack of cover. Fashion statements are cover stories that we read over lunch, though I can't imagine hovering like a drone over any of my recent meals. A drone flew over us at the walk out of darkness, but drones don't kill themselves so the point was lost on me. Drone operators do, for reasons of alienation even from the killing that they do. Death in the age of Dilbert, cubicle after cubicle inhabited by office chair soldiers; I read that sitting kills us, so why not kill others while seated? Where do you find a cover story, when you never left your chair? John says I should add question marks to my exposition on exposition, but that would render too obvious the nakedness of my punctuation. After a bag blew up in the Tube, dear leader wrote about “terrorist losers.” I'm surprised he didn't spell it “loosers,” as losers seems to be loosening over time, adding another vowel to its slack elastic. John Lennon was a looser, but at least we could sing along as if not to think about ourselves but about him. My student who suffers from selective mutism says she likes to sing, but not in public. That would be too much exposition, self- or otherwise. I told my students that despite my hardened shell, seeing them write over and over that haoles “lack breath” and are “foreigners” started to hurt. The dull ache of being set apart. It's been a hard year, Radhika writes on Instagram, but there aren't enough words to explain. Her photograph seems divorced from any of that, exposure of a different kind, an orange sun rising over surfers, because—as she'd say—it's in the east. They seem to sit in the ocean, as if divorced from gravity or balance, watching everything that's coming up in its hunky glory.
--16 September 2017
I want to write an honest sentence. Amar is 16 and lives in Mosul; he has just come out of the river, soaking wet. His parents killed by ISIS, his younger sister paralyzed. Their uncle, with whom they live, does not feed or care for them. Amar sings about his mother to the journalist who asks him questions; the sweetness of his grief floods my car at rush hour. We're numb to what's happening, a student says; all that's left of the Vegas massacre is a large banner on the side of the Mandalay. Mandalas are for disappearing, but not the trauma we've outsourced to others. Fifty thousand Americans died of overdoses last year alone. Alone denotes a single year, not a person. Their parents talk to us about addiction, about costs, about funding, because no matter where you start, you end with money. The young Hawaiian beside me told the story of “middle of nowhere” Oregon, where he'd been harassed by police. Asked what kind of Monster he drank, he laughed. They called in back-up. An hour and a half hassle for hitting a few inches of curb on the way into 7-11. “That wasn't a story, though you probably wanted it to be,” said the Mexican kid in workshop. “That was an experience you were writing.” His aunty told him he'd get dates because he's light-skinned. “No one wants to date a peasant,” she said, and he wondered how to respond, so he didn't. What they left out of reader-response theory was what happens when there is none, when what we're told makes no sense, though it hurts. If you give me words to describe your rape, your mobbing, your curling in a ball on the bathroom floor, what am I to do with your gift? The girls of Boko Haram hide their faces behind hands and flowers. Men strapped bombs beneath their robes. The first abuses were precursors, foreplay to the rain of flesh and fabric that was to be their only inheritance. I love you, we say, I love you. The thick mesh of our monosyllables holds some of it back.
--27 October 2017
I want to write an honest sentence. Each clause begins, “In furtherance of their scheme,” then concludes with what money was laundered where. Room after room disgorges its towels and sheets for Filipino maids to spirit away. But the scheme involves money, a lot of it, and off-shore accounts have nothing to do with reefs or wave patterns, rather with Company A and Company B, with carpets and Range Rovers, with condos and lawn services. Where every transaction is a cover story, there can be no depth. This ocean is flat as the stage set for an opera: two women on a boat lose their cell phone and get lost in the Pacific. Four months later they're found, funnily enough, alive. Not every sentence matters but they're all material, like the scarlet yarn that emerges from a chicken's entrails, turning butchery into narrative, as per always. To tell a story is to lose it like a lock or to hide beneath it. To pick the story is to indict its tellers, draw them out of their Virginia mansions. One taxi driver said houses had nothing in them, were shells set in the grass to impress the neighbors. The flag of our disposition is a deposition. Fake news is true insofar as someone calls it false, and false is true when it leads us down long corridors past room service and into the gunman's suite, now set off with police tape. He killed so many people because he didn't get into a good school. He killed them because his father was a psychopath. He killed them because his girlfriend was in the Philippines. He killed them because he killed them. What are these tender buttons but triggers we curl our fingers around, like a baby's hand our own. Tender is not the word, unless we consider the offer a good one. I pay my kids' tuition with the money I have taken from you. We will pull the lid off a bleached reef and watch it stare through the water's crust. No one to see the Range Rover, or the condo. He's driven off, face hidden by a sun visor, though one angle shows him smiling.
--31 October 2017
I want to write an honest sentence about the end of the world. It's coming, you know; how you feel about it matters less than what you do with your remaining sentences. You ransom them for more, or trade them at the deadline for a rental starter who can get you into the post-season, maybe earn you a title before the empty months stretch out with their rainy days and hot stove rumors. Working without a title can be liberating, like writing when you know that no one cares. The choreography of an academic department charts avoidance, curves away from and toward heavy brown doors that open onto drab clean pathways. I asked a young man if I could help; he said he was just looking around, then disappeared as in thin air. In this political season, every encounter seems over-determined. The Proud Boys wear heavy black boots. My former student said one of them's a “nice guy.” Niceness in an age of belligerence is no virtue. Is mask unto self or the cars that roar by between us. (He bought his Trump mask used.) The inevitable verkehr that we giggled over in class. It means “sexual intercourse,” you know, along with “traffic.” Why the heathens rage filled the newspapers of my youth. Now democracy dies in darkness. Deep as any dingle. I get my news on a feed, but what I learn is we're being fed a line, or two, grand epic of budget cuts. Whan that April with his slash and burn doth rid us of our literature, then we'll work as marketers of dreck. But back to the end of the world, which rises like the sun on our side of the island; it's on the other side that it falls, orange, over the earth's frail scalp. Nostalgia's the new revolution, an open square where citizens congregate and children kick balls. What we call terror they might have called poverty, but as my friend reminds me, the lotus comes from mud.
--5 November 2017
I want to write an honest sentence about kindness. The pastor used his motorcycle as a vehicle for allegory. He placed it in front of the altar, all buffed chrome and handlebars, then invited kids to sit on it. Their evening Bible study would be Revelations, and likely they'd not get past I know thy works, that thou hast a name that thou livest, and art dead. We're so in touch with our rage, so divorced from other affect. So firm in our faith that to pray can't stop a bullet, but can bless its aftermath of pain. It's as if 1.3 million New Yorkers had been killed. (The famous poet opened my documentary poetry class with, “Poetry is the art form that does not include information.”) Neither his palms nor ours are trees, more like grasses that bend away from trade winds and absorb the shock of baseball bats. Radhika says she broke a defender yesterday, meaning she split a post used to imitate one. Even grass shall lose its tenure in this United States of Fallacy. A hero neighbor stopped the slaughter at only 27; if he'd not had a gun to shoot the man with the gun, then everyone would've lain down on their fields and watered the ground with their blood, no questions asked. Earth is more fertile that way. Its roots and stalks take us at our words, but words grow mold, live their own disintegration. Our classrooms stink of it. Is there kindness to see how damaged we are that we kill but semi-automatically? Is there compassion enough to wrap these sick white men in blankets, pour soup down their ravening maws? I will come on thee as a thief, and thou shalt not know what hour I will come upon thee.
--7 November 2017
I want to write an honest sentence. It was a conference of clouds. Ashbery's instruction manual foretold the cloud. A woman with small dog, no shoes, told me to distinguish healthy from unhealthy clouds. She counts them from the plane, though she uses no money and wears what she makes from what she finds at the transfer station. I hold the Ashbery poem in my hand, but the man with the cloud keeps reading to me about heavy metals used to make iPhones. An unhealthy cloud is dark, but brings no rain. Her father, I find out, was the Hat Man of Maui. Broad smile, very few teeth. He'd played for the New England Patriots. When I leave, I see her again, with her tan and white dog. No one came to her panel. The man with the cloud wore multi-colored slippers under his tight rolled up pants. I watched them under the table as he read to us, lifting each printed page across as he started to read it. My head was in the clouds, though I kept trying to land, aware the final approach might push me back in the air of this room with no access to Apple TV and only a wall on which to project what might have been given. Later, I open the image of a young woman on my computer; I didn't know her but recognize her face. She died in August. We cannot grieve if we lock our cloud against the air. It's dark, but cannot cry with us; instead, our faces swell and we cough as if to transfer affect into substance. That's what I was saying, he told me, that what we think is abstract never is.
--11 November 2017
I want to write an honest sentence. Someone asks what it's called when you keep starting over in the same way. Surely there's a name for this, other than obsession or compulsion or a strange insistence. We tell those stories that make us feel better, and this is mine. Once upon a time, the word “fragility” meant we weren't to drop a box, or push a glass off the counter top. After leaving the station of fact, our word wandered into a courtroom. A lawyer argued that she was easily broken, that he couldn't handle being questioned, that they denied the privilege they wore on their heads like Sunday hats. Our prose grew more and more heavy, until not only would it not break, but it turned immovable, like a bronze statue in a park. Who that man was mattered to us, but how we transposed him into words did not. They rained on us like rubber bullets. Our parkas frayed and fell apart, fabric scattering like feathers the dog tore up. One man grabbed a woman's ass, while another raped her. According to a spokesman, the (first) one who admitted it was guilty, and the (second) one who did not wasn't. Words hang like donuts on a president's finger as he jabs the air. Turned out he was lying, but we couldn't decide how much that mattered to us. The men I love are good men, but they're fragile. How to reach out with all the delicacy I can muster and pull them down from their perches, or out from under their beds. What are the words I need to use that are light as air and cleansed of judgment? How can I make the word true again? After his uncle's stepson killed himself on veteran's day and a girl fell to her death outside the restaurant where he edited a poem, he told us he was broken. A crushed glass is sometimes truer in the light than one that still sits on the shelf.
--19 November 2017
I want to write an honest sentence. My friend says no one dies while she meditates. My dog hunts drops of rain from the trees, digs claws in the dirt where they fall. Drum drops hit outside sliding glass in the room my son returns to. The ginger and white cat is on patrol. Early music upstairs, after Mozart (and before). Is survival a form of healing? he asks; if we keep it small, like the pulsing of a truck in reverse, sound shielding us from harm. It takes resources to find silence, costs extra to sit in the airport lounge away from loud announcements. Destination is at once fact and aspiration. We asked ourselves what attention is, knowing it mostly from its absence. “You learn to attend to the world, both as it is and as you want it to be,” I wrote in what was called a “descriptor.” Only later did he find that he'd “made women feel badly,” using the adverb to compensate for a deep well of boundary crossings. Yellow tape runs between trees so you don't confuse this with “sex panic” or with dating young women because they are so “pure.” How do you describe a lie so visible we can run it into a reef and watch it rust? It's a boundary we can't see but trips us up, gashing a hole in the bow and paralyzing city government, which can't seem to unstick it from the ever-bleaching coral. Since his major depression ended, he finds it nearly impossible to concentrate on anything other than audio equipment. We finished the book that argued against willpower, but still use that language. One side of the sponge was soft, the other Calvinist. The mold we scrape up can save us, if we're not allergic to it. One young man can only drink tea if it's served without leaves, and another turns it down cold. What we take as truth is a see-through wall, designed to beautify a boundary we cannot feel. He heard “the handmaid's tale” as “the hand made tail” and we laughed. It's a dark time, but if we sit on a pillow on a bench beside a tree-choked ravine where chickens cry half the night, no one will die. Promise.
--24 November 2017
I want to write an honest sentence. I don't want to exist, he said. To want not to be: two positives and a negative. Negative wins, masquerading as member of a team clutching its trophy for the cameras. Digital immortality is brief, though it comes around like days of the week. He sat down to draw a Valentine; what flashed before him was a sketch of himself ascending to heaven. At least there were wings. That was before the image of him lying in the tub, covered in blood. We pay attention to the film more than to the screen on which it dances. The film pierces us with need. His son's ideation involved using his friend's gun at a shooting range. If our father could do it, so can I, one woman reported, having lost both father and brother. It'snot something we commit, except to other's memories. Her friend, dead these 20 years, still appears in her dreams, telling jokes. Ithi stands by Starbucks with Rawi, each clutching a large bag. Suicide is a stay to time, its straight jacket. At the end of Poetry: Shi, the audience sat quietly in the dark theater, as if to take in the braid of dementia and suicide. Outside it was sunny and the Pacific Ocean was turquoise and people were drinking coffee and shopping. Everything as it had been. The death toll is a bell that rings for thee, and thee. A verb and its negative are the enjambment that breaks statement into counter-statement, a moment of being into one of ceasing to exist. “The horses are" was Plath's best line, my teacher said. I'm afraid to see what came next. And he is and they are yet. I feel cleaner now, he says, having told us the story of a grandfather who liked little boys. To hear is to take on but some of the weight, and to carry it away. The road's shoulders bear the strain of wanderers, men and women who walk. (To walk is to place one foot before the other, and the other after.) You can see it in their eyes, the unsettled stare. Theo wondered if our colleague had died by suicide but I said no, he was quite happy. His last glance resembled one.
--24 December 2017
I want to write an honest sentence. A saw cuts my thought in half, though both ends show outside the box. Thought's an appendage, but what occurs inside the box is not. Is not is assertion and denial in two short syllables. The saw would cut them in half, leaving a pile of light brown dust. What feeds the trees in the rain forest is the dust from Mongolian deserts; what feeds the dust is another question. I see from one side of the box, and wiggle my toes at the other. If sawdust makes me sneeze, I perhaps will die of being cut. But to read the box as meaningful is to take it as central to the story, succumbing to the saw. Once upon a time there was a box. Once upon a time it sat upon a stage and people watched as it was cut in half. The piercing of the saw was not entertainment but something more precious. It was what happened while not happening, this separation of the box from itself. The box is a turtle shell that shields beings from consequence. Head cannot think its way inside the box to cradle heart and liver, ease the pain of seeming to be cut. Death would be a poor performance, but life is not. The handmaid saw a sheet that wore a tulip stain of blood and knew a man had died. The other sheets were blank, like petticoats lacking ink.
--26 December 2017