where is my love my love
on the edge of this continent
of forest and snow
by the end of the world
at the hem I say
of a dark ocean
where whalefish roam
to hollowly sound their despair
in waterlogged waiting rooms
if one were to let darkness flood
who would identify the corpse
who fold the shroud like a wing around absence
what name as solitary password
will be pinned to the waterlogged heart’s hollow
a crow flies by and later a gull
where is my love oh where is she now
Vancouver
WRITING SUMMER
The summer has been dense and crazy. More so than usual, and not easy to come to words with. Or is it just my imagination silting up as I grow older and less flexible? Am I having trouble imagining and therefore shaping the understandable? Maybe there is a point of saturation beyond which the digestion of impressions — through writing — becomes difficult.
Still, the past northern or European summer was for me an illustration of how problematical it is to live in this world with some grace and equilibrium, let alone a sense of enjoyment and satisfaction.
I’m referring, of course, to the outside story of our times. There was the flaring conflict in the Middle East with seemingly no resolution in sight, despair and brutality and thus brutalization on both sides, depression and destruction and death. There were the days of Genoa which ushered in a fore-grounding of the divide between the official powers of a new world order (the G8) and contestants of many different origins and directions — eco-warriors, anti-globalists, anti-capitalists, so-called illegal immigrants (“people without papers”), anarchists and idealists and revolutionaries. . And what does the confrontation and its repression say to us? Where is it leading to? What will come next? How does it affect our local environments? There was the ongoing painting out of wars and horrors and disasters in Africa, probably not by design but because that continent just doesn’t figure on the radar screens of the powerful who interpret and classify information, those people and instances who decide what will be ‘news’ and what relegated to the obscurity of ‘non-events.’ But the unnamable will flow over into other parts of the world: pateras bring their cargoes of espaldas mujadas over the Gibraltar Straits to the coast of Andalusia (already 10,000 clandestine migrants have been intercepted so far this year, hundreds coming from deeper down Africa die in the desert on their way to the Moroccan ports of embarkation and many more drown when their makeshift crafts capsize); desperate Afghans and Kurds and Pakistanis try to walk through the tunnel under the sea between France and Britain; boatloads of refugees are adrift off Australia and Europe and probably America too; and there’s a continuing tide of people trying to get into the United States through Mexico. Mount Etna erupted, spewing its antediluvian anger in brimstone and smoke. There were floods and wildfires and catastrophes elsewhere. And earthquakes. Nearly all of the European continent is still afflicted by the plagues of ‘mad cow’ and ‘foot-and-mouth’ diseases. Soon there will be ‘bird flu.’ And then we witnessed a kind of low spluttering of international concerns and justice — Milosevic brought to The Hague to stand trial, the beginning of a resolution to the civil war in Macedonia. There was the bizarre wipe-out of the royal household in Nepal. The destruction of the Buddhas in Afghanistan and, worse, the darkening plight of all women in that sad country. Chinese authorities carried out the executions of ‘criminals’ by the thousand, shooting them behind the ear and often removing right there in the fields of death the vital organs for transplantation. In the West too, we entered the slippery domain of stem cell research and fetus manipulation and eventual cloning — how Mengele must be laughing in his grave! We could observe the gradual shifting into hostile positions of America and China, and more specifically the perturbing unilateralist stance America was taking internationally — renouncing the Kyoto agreement on attempting to turn back the pollution of our shared planet, protecting its ‘right’ to make land-mines and chemical and bacterial poisons, wanting to scrap anti-nuclear proliferation treaties in order to put up missile shields, its near total inertia in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, continuing to bomb Saddam Hussein ineffectually, walking away from the Durban Conference against racism. .
How do we write such a summer? What is writing? Maybe life is the answer. Life happens (“while you’re crossing the street,” as the songwriter said).
I must not proceed too quickly. So much gets left behind, perhaps forever. Allow me to return. I remember a scene from Tarifa. 15,000 ‘illegals’ from Africa had been intercepted last year. Now on this bright summer morning 33 more had been caught in one roundup, the majority of them young women. When asked where they’re from, in several languages (each person crossing the Straits like the soul crossing River Styx to the other shore where nightingales sing, destroys her or his identity papers so as not to be returned to the country of origin), they smile very sweetly but do not answer. Then, as if hearkening some invisible signal, they all start singing a very sad song to the bewildered Guardia Civil. Was this a spontaneous recognition of identity? Are they appealing to a shared humanity? Or do they believe they can in this way ‘put a spell’ on the miscreant but powerful whites? Later, I visited the piece of land where the many who wash up drowned are buried. Ah, to die nameless and be hidden away in some no man’s land where the bones as are shadows! The gravestones are anonymous, bearing just a date and a serial number.
Still later, in a few years’ time, it will become nearly impossible to cross the Straits. Then thousands of desperate would-be emigrants from Sub-Saharan Africa will throw themselves on the barbed enclosures around the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla in Morocco, try to scale these barriers using rudimentary ladders made in the forest, believing that if they could only make it onto Spanish soil they’d be allowed into Europe, and cut themselves to ribbons, and get shot. And later still tens of thousands will flock to Nouadhibou in Mauritania, having walked and hitched from Senegal and Mali and Guinea and Guinea-Bissau and Gambia and Sierra Leone and Nigeria, and pay a minimum of 150,000 ouguiyas each to a passeur (about 500 euros), they’ll live like animals under rudimentary shelters while waiting to embark on a crude cayuco for the Canary Islands. The embarkations will be smashed on reefs and treacherous shores or turn turtle on the high seas; the clandestine passengers will drown; when they wash up somewhere they will be put in the earth anonymously.
Writing remains the surfacing of a sense of being alive, of living and experiencing the only ‘world’ we know — which is life. Wanting to change it too. Being petrified, sometimes, by the cracks in the sidewalk and the slips and slopes of the mind. Frustrated by the restrictions and exhilarated by the challenges and the unforeseen discoveries of ‘surfacing.’ In that sense then, writing is always against death, obliteration, extinction and non-writing. But writing is also a way of situating yourself in the one world we inhabit.
In The Witness of Poetry, Milosz remarks: “Through the mass media poets of all languages receive information on what is occurring across the surface of the whole earth, on the tortures inflicted by man on man, on starvation, misery, humiliation. At one time when their knowledge of reality was limited to one village or district, poets had no such burden to bear. Is it surprising that they are always morally indignant, that they feel responsible, that no promise of the further triumphs of science and technology can veil these images of chaos and human folly? And when they try to visualize the near future, they find nothing there except the probability of economic crisis and war?”