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 