3.14.26
Caught in my thoughts, I think, everything is remarkable: the war, the light, the animal mechanism of swallowing. As though news of them were my first discovery of their existence; even, anyone’s first knowledge. So, nothing is remarkable, a man stands in a dead field and wails, a child peers into a mouth. Someone said that living is relearning, or something like that. The orangutans of Borneo cannot swing from trees for the first 8 years of their life — they cross their mothers’ orange bodies high above the ground which they in their lifetime may never touch.
This is the cost of living. In the end of The God Of Small Things, Arundhati Roy returns to the middle, before the drowning, murder, and exile, to the small, broken middle where Ammu and Velutha make love in the silent darkness in the company only of a small spider. “They linked their fates, their futures (their Love, their Madness, their Hope, their Infinnate Joy), to his.” The spider builds its house of debris: dust, rot, wasp wings. It accumulates these things around itself in a corner, builds walls, a door, a cover, a camouflage. “They chose him because they knew that they had to put their faith in fragility. Stick to Smallness.” The Big things are unspeakable: history, caste, law. The forces that brought them here and the consequences that will spin out from this place — they know them, of course, they are real, they will shape everything — but in the dark they exist in the small gyre spun in between, the movable web at the heart, beaten and blown about by the angel of history. Which doesn’t make it agency-less; no, in the whirlpool is a moving, quiet, center in which they do something: they make love. Lovemaking, and all of the Small things of which it is comprised: kisses, caresses, glances, brushes, blushes, nibbles, grins, gasps, fingers, beads of sweat, beads of saliva, stray hairs, yeses, moans, pinches, breaths. Utterly small and singular. Totally devastating.
My dog is caught in the morning sunlight, throwing patches across her face and bed. From the shadow of her eyes a bright nose emerges, golds and oranges flecked among the brown. An ear flops open into the sunlight. It is pink, coral.
I believe that things are real and material. Too, that we make meaning out of them. That our meaning-making enhances, obfuscates, confuses, adorns, pacifies, sympathizes, violates. That a liberal surprise at U.S. warmongering is a meaningful and self-replicating response based on the perceived distance to said war, bombs, blood, and death and an encouraged forgetfulness of the U.S.’s constant waging of war, of war as a condition of U.S. existence, of dates, years, money spent waging conflict, facts, perhaps. Our surprise is not our own. It is a distancing. It is unremarkable.
And the light. Which wakes us everyday. Catches a glint on the dog’s tooth I’ve never seen before, I swear I’ve never seen it before. Though I know of it, now I see it. I see it again. Perhaps it is a kind of truth that makes us love the things that war hates. And when everything, perhaps, is forgetting — the condition of living, the gift of ageing, of accumulation, of our finite internal storage systems, our small exploding stars, our whirring parts confronted with Oh so many faces, names, written words, heard words, melodies, animal shapes, material forms, textures, ordinary rocks, significant rocks, calculations, estimations, our memories and our mothers’ memories — the Truth is what is remembered, what is felt to the body again and again and made known, habitual, ritual, home.
Do the small things insist an ethic? “A language of ideas is, in itself, a phantom language,” writes Mark Doty, “lacking in the substance of worldly things, those containers of feeling and experience, memory and time. We are instructed by the objects that come to speak with us, those material presences. Why should we have been born knowing how to love the world? We require, again and again, those demonstrations.” (Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, p. 10).
Doty loves the objects of Dutch still life. He loves the thick tablecloth, rumpled, falling, yet still; the bruised fruit, at its ripest, green, fragrant, forever; the shellfish, some strange state of matter between solid and liquid, almost crystal, its gelatinous translucence. I describe from my memory his memory of the canvases in the museum onto which some master poured (paint, yes, made of crushed shells, and oxidized fragments, chemical compounds, yes, materials heavy with life) attention. A life spent looking at a lemon. Doty looks around his home too, his life, at the things accumulated at antique shops and yard sales, a set of champagne glasses, a wood dining table, a porcelain platter with deer. “If it is a reminder of loss — my mother, my lover vanished in the slipstream of time — then it is equally a token of what can be kept: a sense home, or permanence, of the ground for ourselves we can make” (p.43). Do I long for a closeness to that I have lost? Is home ever more than a sense? Then, it is our immaterial things, our longing and attachments, our familiarity and ritual, these feelings which are heavy as bricks, structuring.
There were so many painters. There are so many poets. Do they “increase the store of reality?” Do they offer us more, more life? Do they take away grief? No, not this last one. “Can’t they see where they’re headed?” asks Doty of lovers he passes in the street (p.47). Yes, they can. No, they cannot. We come close to death and far from it, again. “Is that what the soul or spirit is, then, the outward-flying attention, the gaze that binds us to the world?” (p.50). No G-d, no dais, no altar. Just touch. Just everything.
O keep me bound to the world. O frighten me, shock me, keep me attentive. “That is what we do with sight, give it out, give it and give it away…” (p.53).
2.7.26
Winter, it turns out, is difficult.
“To say, I know — is there any touch in it?” writes Jean Valentine (from the poem “Actuarial File,” in The Messenger).
Winter is filled with the knowledge of horror and grief viewed through a foot thick block of ice, polluted with exhaust, excrement, bones, the debris of the street it has existed on frozen for five weeks. A dog’s hot piss warms it. At nights, snow again. By day, the deli’s split pea soup hits the open air like a chime.
It turns out, we are not alone. Last night, ten of us gathered at my moms’ house for Shabbat. Lugging three bags of Thai food two blocks from the place on the corner of Washington — across the street, down the slanted block, across the street again — the weight was like anticipation, mouths to be fed. The numerous thanks of my having just ordered. Wet shoes assembling in the entryway I try to nudge onto the mat and off my mother’s new floor. And Bunky leading shabbat: a blessing for the candles I’ve heard before but not my family’s primary tune, and other tunes coming in now from the others, though Bunky’s is the strongest, with some humming and catching up and improvising, and gathering of the light in front of our eyes, which becomes part of the music too. I think the great fear is not ignorance but shame: not knowing is easy, blameless. The first time I sat in a church service — Brooklyn, progressive, — and a man with a guitar strummed songs about Jesus, I said, Jesus? Who knew. I left, didn’t even have to eat anything.
It’s more risky to overlap in incongruous ways. To assemble into an un-uniform group: a plastic bin of wayward Lego pieces, a multispecies school of fish. “Groups are regroupings of the already engrouped,” writes Ethan Philbrick (Group Works). “Groups never just mean one thing. They are an encounter with the continued uncertainty of what it means to be both a subject and a collective.”
I guess the risk is the risk of feeling. But: it feels good. The small, white Shabbat candles from the Palestinian owned FoodTown burn all night long. There is too much food. Aviva is considering children. Grae sat down and wrote a poem for the third time in their life. I find an Elle magazine from 1994 with a feature on lesbian mothers, and a picture of my mothers and my brother and 2. They hold him up between them, and they all beam, looking at each other, somehow, each of them looking at each other, and somewhere else, younger than they have ever been. In the interview, one mother says that he will have no lack of male role models. The other mother says that he will grow up in a home without models of patriarchal violence.
“How can I answer your letter? Words from your life / bring me home to my life.” (Valentine, from “Letter from a Stranger, The Messenger).
The backyard is a dark void. For a moment I am a man. For a moment I am Mona. For a moment I am my mothers, with a sense of responsibility that may come from ownership, history, genetic connection, lack thereof. I feel like a stranger at home. We gather in a tight, wobbly circle in the living room, which means that there are many unoccupied spaces in the house.
In a measured voice, because she must not strain her voice, and has been teaching silently all week, assigning one fourth grader a day to be her microphone, Sadie says that this has been a terrible time. She lets us touch this. To not know. The correct melody to a prayer. The ancient verbiage of a tradition in translation, in migration. She wants to do everything — I want to do everything. We cannot rest. We cannot take it in. “Someday, we will be able to take it in, that violence, hold it in our / hands…and the ones who come after us…” (Valentine, from “Actuarial File,” The Messenger).
“Sharedness is not a space of sameness but a space of the close but not quite.” (Philbrick, Group Works).
In closing: the earliest known example of a Yiddish Purimspil was in Frankfurt in the 17th century, and it was banned for its lewdness. We aim to be a very articulate confusion. Or an inarticulate narrative. We believe in structure but also surprise.
1.30.26
Being again.
I wake sick, I think. Last night’s laughter and hiccups and spicy noodles have turned into a cough, not that these are the origins of this illness — more likely the police van, or the cold, or the clapping, or the chanting in the cold — but that I wake uncertain as to whether my symptoms are symptoms or merely consequences: the dryness of the the heaters blasting against the 4 degree weather, the aches of the workout class I took at the gym yesterday entering me now, normal, just.
I had meant to write “begin again.” Every sickness feels like it is the first. We are so surprised by ourselves. Sofia Samatar writes, “Every time I start to write something, not only is it as if I’ve never written anything before, but it’s like no one has ever written anything in the history of time. I’m writing the first thing ever written. That’s how hard it is.”
I take the dog out. It has snowed a foot. I put one puppy-brand water balloon over her back right paw, which has lost a nail. Her paw flops around in green latex over the snow.
At the park on the hill the snow is packed and hard after days of freezing temperatures. She steps out like a man on a glacier. She is unable to avoid the holes in the land, the places where the hard snow gives way under her sizable Labrador body. She is all graceless, stumbling after a scent, tripping after a squirrel.
When I was a kid my mother shoveled the the snow in front of our house into a large pile that surrounded the streetlight The pile grew into a hill, with the streetlight, or what could be seen of it, at the summit. I would clamber over that hill all day, although the days were short, protected, it felt like, from the usual traffic, unsupervised, except by strangers passing quickly on the sidewalk. And at night the snow would begin again, flakes gently fluttering through the beam of light above my head. I was never cold.
Inheritance doesn’t come from the past, says Sangamitha Iyer in her interview on the Between the Covers Podcast with David Naimon to dsicuss her book, Governing Bodies. Inheritance comes from the present, she says. I think what she means is that were are implicated in inheritance: our mothers and grandfathers and ghosts and gaps exist(ed) in a past, yes, but we know them only from our station, here, trudging past the renovated playground of our childhood, reds and yellows and monkey-bar greens washed by the inclement weather, across from the slantwise condo complex that was once a bodega from which one might purchase ice when the refrigerator broke, a scratch-off ticket. This isn’t to be romantic. The time-traveling goes both ways.
In a diner in Columbus a few weeks after meeting, Aline says “oh that’s why you’re a poet” when I tell her and Annie about my mother’s death. Annie is visibly uncomfortable, holds the fork. Later, Aline apologizes to me, but I don’t think she needs to. I want to be seen in ways that I can’t see myself, in ways that may be correct or not.
In the interview, Naimon suggest that many writers write out of a rupture. Or become writers because of a rupture. Or write out of a rupture, or to fill a rupture. According to one translation, the Latin root “rupt” means “to burst.” A volcano erupts. You’ve gone bankrupt. That corrupt doctor.
When I think of rupture I think of a void. A glitch. A gap in memory. The space between stitches. A wound. A hole in the snow and ice. But “to burst” conjures something else, something like release, the growing cracks in a glass, a wall, a dam, from which comes (not nothing) something, like these sentences, which I want to be long and endless and ignorant of grammar and incomplete, like sickness, like health, like the weeks, which I try to fill like a body with formaldehyde yet which dance up off the table and away from me, through me, over the frozen, uncertain landscape.
Let me try appreciate Samatar’s appreciation of incompleteness, when in her book Opacities she quotes Haytham El Wardany: “In their eyes, completed works conceal the incompleteness at their heart by way of an artificial unity: a unity whose purpose is to rescue their author. Incomplete works, however, are quite unashamed of this incompleteness. Indeed, they take it to its extreme as if to say, ‘You can never write alone.’” And Samatar, who answers, “Was there, then, a necessary link between community and incompleteness?” And Clarice Lispector, who writes, “During the time I’m writing and speaking, I’m going to have to pretend that someone is holding my hand.”
Isaiah Yonah Back-Gaal 