WRITERS WANDER
Writers are the scattered or lost tribe of the world. They originated from one belief — even the tenets have since been lost — shared rituals and music, and the same place, which was an oasis port on the edge of dark badlands. Because of a history of roaming and Diaspora long, long ago, the individual members became stultified in separate languages and they took on as protective coloring the customs and the beliefs of the populations among whom they lived. They may have given their hearts to the people. But when they meet they recognize one another by a look in the eyes as if squinting against the sun, and by the clumsy gestures of hands. Their hands are uncertainly looking for sugar signs of sharedness. This they will see, maybe with mortification, remorse and shame: that they are indelibly marked by the same stubborn illusions, the same shortcomings making their fit into life an awkward one, the same yearning for projecting connectedness and for initiating transformation. As they go about their business of assessing ass (this is a slight sleight of hand, I’m sorry) they have the same timid desire for transgression. Speak not of transcendence, friend. They’re not sure how they relate to the other tribes of the Book, and perhaps they don’t really care. And they intermarried over generations and ages and seasons to the point of becoming mongrels and bastards mistaking themselves for dogs when they see a mirror. All they do know is that despite the distances of exile and fusion, they have the same phantom aches and passions that put them apart from the preoccupations of their environment to start with. Does the dog ever consider losing its dog-ness? This tribal condition can be isolated as a genetic weakness that one is unaware of but which will rise like a cloud of flies in your face the day you open a book — it is the first day it is the last day — to obscure your self as in a mirror or a sunken Atlantis. So this is where I belong? This is where I will become whole? Of course, it doesn’t work out that way. Once inside, you’re lost for good. And for bad. The consolation, friend, comes from recognizing your affinity with the other lost souls flailing around for purpose and for meaning. With those barking at the stars in the night. Ah, the pleasure comes from realizing that the sicker you get the better you will feel; the more isolated and alienated you are the more you are tied to others of your kind.
THE ASHES AND US
it is the tree coolness by day
like a robe of grace
draped around the trunk
it is the fire by night
burning holes in the dark
it is where sun and moon perish
and the answerableness
of identity
is weighed slaked shifted
to all evil things worded away
not-us is the fulcrum of rancor
in squatting together for solace
memory is leisurely fumbled
folded fashioned
measure for measure
and fitted to words
do we know who we are
one by one
for you and one
for me the blood and the clay
the rememberer’s song
but when the tree is chopped down
so that sun burns a stain in the eye
and fire goes to ashes
to a scorched blot of absence
we are strewn to four winds
do I not know who I am
wandering through the flame-fed day
and night’s shivering articulations
looking for you as if for mirror
NIETZSCHE’S HORSE
I have been mulling over in my perambulating or peregrinating (or percolating) thoughts the notion of ‘the function of writing.’ In the light of the September 11 parting of the waters and the ensuing war. Note: not necessarily ‘the role of the writer,’ for that chestnut has for some time already been a horse drowned in many a shallow ford (in a manner of speaking); and no wonder the beast expired screaming and frothing at the bit, because numerous self-aggrandizing scoundrels, standing in the stirrups to look tall, had been flogging it to death. In my mind and memory I try to avoid the trap. Nietzsche, it is told, finally lost the remnants of his clear mind when he saw a horse being whipped in the street, and he went up to it and threw his arms around its neck and wept. But I’m not Nietzsche. And then, if I wish to hold to my tenet that “writing is an awareness-enhancing process,” I have to engage the question of how the above events affect our writing. And what our consciousness implies.
How are we all dealing with the aftershocks of incomprehensible death from the skies torching the skittles of our Western vanity? (Incomprehensible because carried out by humans like us.) Are we more or less alive than before? Has it modified our concerns? Did it change our writing? Is there any other perceptible smell except for the whiffs of decomposing flesh? Do revulsion and sadness and anguished anger smell? Rather — did only the flesh perish (and with it our glittering conceit of invulnerability, the ostensibly endless triumph of human ambition and ingenuity tumbling in a cloud of gray glory), or did some conceptions and values also fall away? How do we come to terms with naked terror? You were too shy or intimidated to talk back at me, other than saying you perhaps sleep less soundly and are more skittish. I respect your timidity, or possibly it is reserve, but at the same time I have to insist that you are a writer, that all our discussions around technique (arc, voice, tense, sense, angle and character) will be hot air unless we also think about how this activity fits in with larger social and ethical concerns. (I might as well say existential — you have been generous and patient enough to listen to me claiming that words are the original breath of awareness, and not just hot air.)
And how do we handle the spectacle of seeing the world’s only super-power using the awesome might of its air superiority to attack forces which, give or take a few caves and anti-aircraft artillery, can be compared to the New York Police Department? How do we come to terms with naked terror?