It depends how you situate yourself to language. You are the ‘initiator’ and the ‘companion,’ not the ‘controller.’ (“As with love,” Reader interjected.) Be neither bully nor expert. There can be no Homeland Security in language or, for that matter, in writing narratives. Cervantes left room for both Quijote and Sancho Panza, and then for everybody and everything else as well — time, history, debunking, a multiplicity of lives, imitation, substitution. .
Ethics/neutrality demands that one leaves room for a certain ‘moral imagination’ — that is, the promotion of fragmented spaces for doubt and for the unexpected, even and perhaps especially for what you as writer did not expect to find. And who will take you to the underworld except the processes of creativity? How are you to cut your veins other than with the shards of the smashed dark glass? he asks rhetorically.
If you write ‘down’ to your readers, Picaro warns his students — because that is ‘what they want’ or may ‘understand’ — you are putting yourself up as authority and judge of intelligence (worse, judge of the heart) inside your own text, and this will influence your attitude to your tools. Because of obtuseness your tools will abandon you. Self-effacement is not a moral stance; it is a survival trick. (“Unless it is genuine.” [Reader])
Authenticity should not be confused with ‘authority,’ Picaro finally concludes. Authenticity (the integrity of the voice, not its coherence or its homogeneity) goes beyond reliance on “verifiable facts or information.” Ms Reader, he hopes, will sense whether he can be trusted or not as ‘search party’ into the thickets of existence. She may well be enticed out of the bush. Will she snort and hoot? Authority, on the other dirty hand, is a construct shaped by perceptions about reality (the way the media do about war); it draws its sustenance from collective prejudices and preferences — patriotism, nationalism, religion, racism. .
For a poet, there is terror in the dust.
Wen Fu
OF PENISES AND PENINSULAS
the cento as dirge
Nonetheless,
it was too late.
By that time,
we had all been royally fucked.
(Clary Stopes)
I spent all night dreaming about god
as though some blank bird called
(There were) scuff marks where I
have been running from the shadows
the barbed wire
the bloody bodies the naked women
crawling in the hope of
staying alive
Alone at dawn, alone watching
the rotting face of the grinning thing
The open window means little
to the disheartened dreamer –
the world is empty as a song
and we lose the place where we belong
Alone at dawn, alone watching
the shadow dunes washing their black
back into a green sea of grass
the vertebrae of gulls aglow
and now as how blood
clots to black its platelets
of newspaper ink
splashing the banks of the river
so some other ass could drink it all up
Alone at dawn alone watching
the rotting face of the grinning thing
the hint of lips
held flush with papier-mâché and masking tape
walking on top of words so soft
(the memory of these passing breasts)
who fiercely guard the empty spaces between us
A gray horse looks into empty windows
The world is empty as a song –
the open window means little
to the disheartened dreamer
but we lose the place where we belong
Time is slow and moves at
a slackening rate as the fog floods
your valley with a frail sea
Don’t be afraid to open your eyes
though the rolling-calf
draws its chain in the wet grass
Why should our bodies
not steal from dreams?
I’ll deliver all the lands for the chosen in a single night
and what will I do with shoes, clothes, underwear?
Those kinds of things fell to men
who had the barbed wire
the bloody bodies, the naked women
clawing in the hope of
staying alive,
girls who were fourteen but looked legal enough
to the Dakotas’ drinking eyes
If death were a field of sugarcane
I am the mongoose’s tail burning a trail
through its snake ridden heart her
tan crust of skin roasting
in our smoke turning black
The open window means little
but we lost the place where we belong
to the disheartened dreamer
and the world is empty as a song –
you feel this most in our eye, the love
the torturous going their own way, sparks
in dying embers:
they all left
except the wineskin whore
People pull out their dead graves singing
these bedazzled beings dressed like foreigners
and in the street
a piano and the winter evening smells
of wine and roasted garlic
carbolic skin
and that silent slow smoke
from a cold coal stove
Not our abused gods but old wifeless
men in a procession that
precedes us immemorially with their dying
walking on tops of words so soft thought
that everything is burning everything
I spend all night dreaming about god
as though some blank bird calls:
Painted sparrows carry
my body to Elysium one
glittering bit at a time:
how slowly I say goodbye
How slowly I say goodbye
Don’t go without ringing
The boy’s ossified heart
And dance even when
You the only music