Vol. VI, No. 8, August 2015 Archives

Numéro Cinq at the Movies: Roy Andersson’s “World of Glory” — R. W. Gray

Aug 142015

Roy Andersson’s “World of Glory” opens with unspeakable horror: a truck load of naked people, a child last, are herded into the back of a cube van, the doors locked, and a hose is connected between the truck’s exhaust and the back of the van that holds the people. This allusion to the holocaust is made more horrific by the crowd of people watching on as the scene plays out. Halfway through the scene, and then again at the end, the film’s protagonist looks back at the camera, at those of us watching, drawing attention to our watching: it is an incriminating glance that identifies us with the others who stand idly by. We are complicit.

This horrific spectacle is at odds with the rest of the film’s numb and disassociated narrative. The protagonist who identified our complicit gaze at the beginning of the film directly addresses the audience and introduces us to his mother, the bed he sleeps in, his son, his brother, and various other mundane details as he takes account of his life for and through us. What’s left unresolved by the end of the film is what this mundane life, bracketed by the first scene’s atrocity and the return of the screams at the end, amounts to. What can this one man’s fear of his mortality mean in the face of his complicity in the deaths of so many others?

Andersson fixes the camera on this man’s life, holds the shots painfully long, and chooses a mise-en-scene that agonizingly attends to this man’s life. In her article, “Roy Andersson: From Mordant Ad Director To Philosophical Filmmaker,” Neda Ulaby discusses this style of Andersson’s:

“He eliminates the editing entirely,” Linqvist says. “There is no editing within a single shot. The camera does not move. And so it’s our eye that has to move, has to roam around the picture.” Andersson demands we pay attention; he refuses to manipulate us with close-ups. And his filmic philosophy is also expressed through lighting. “I want to have light without mercy,” he says. “There are no shadows to hide in. You are illuminated all the time. It makes you naked, the human beings — naked.”

“Light without mercy. ” At the screening of his new film at the Toronto International Film Festival last year he added,“So the truth can’t hide.”

Ideologically, Andersson’s style has a lot in common with the Italian neorealists and those who have followed in their footsteps. He uses real people instead of actors, and avoids “artifice in editing, camerawork, and lighting in favor of a simple ‘styless’ style.” The intent here is to lay reality bare.

Andersson departs from the neorealists in how he chooses to stylistically emphasize the bareness. “World of Glory” is clearly an Andersson vision with the washed out florescent lighting, the pale visages of the actors who appear drowned or corpse like, and the staged and theatrical mise-en-scene. In his explanation of his most recent film A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, Andersson describes a connection between reality and fantasy in his work that equally applies to “World of Glory”:

“some of my favourite Neue Sachlichkeit painters include Karl Hofer, Felix Nussbaum and Georg Scholz. Their combination of reality and fantasy resulted in abstracted condensed realism, a kind of “super-realism”, an ambition that I also have for A Pigeon Sat on a Branch, in which abstraction is to be condensed, purified, and simplified; scenes should emerge as cleansed as memories and dreams. Yes this is no easy task: “c’est difficile d’être facile” – it is difficult to be very simple, but I will try.”

In the push to get to the truth in reality, to make it simple, Andersson paradoxically stylizes it, exaggerates it. He condenses the complexities of real life into a simple juxtaposition between atrocity and the mundane.

Andersson connects one man’s mortal fears, the lurid, almost pathetic, small things he holds on to as normalcy against life’s passing, and the awful crime that haunts the film. “World of Glory” suggests that the most remarkable thing in this world is our insensitivity, our passivity, our disconnection. Glory exists is an absence. In his other works, this leads to moments of great awkward laughter, yet here in this small film he holds us to the pain. Maybe in that pain lies the hope of glory.

— R. W. Gray

Small-City Chatter: Review of Jeff Bursey’s Mirrors on which dust has fallen — Mark Sampson

Aug 142015

Mirrors on which dust has fallen
Jeff Bursey
Verbivoracious Press
344 pages, Paperback $22.99 CAD
ISBN: 978-981-09-5437-6

NOBODY WOULD ACCUSE JEFF BURSEY of being lax in his demands on literature. In much of his book reviewing and other literary criticism – including pieces published here on Numéro Cinq – Bursey argues vehemently against a prescriptive approach to fiction. He trumpets the elasticity of form; he challenges his fellow novelists to eschew tried-and-true strictures on structure; he shames those who take a paint-by-colours approach to characterization; he begs us to embrace experimentation in the truest sense of the term. Mostly, he hates it when writers make rigid statements about what can/can’t be done, should/shouldn’t be done, or must/mustn’t be done when it comes to a creative work.

This mindset is very much on display in Bursey’s own fiction. His debut novel, Verbatim, published in 2010 by Enfield & Wizenty, is written almost entirely in Hansard, the official transcriptive record of a Westminster-style parliament. The book is a kind of literary curios: in it, Bursey shows how much of the muck and mess and pulse of a place –in this case, the city of Bowmount in an unnamed, fictitious Canadian province – he can capture via the verbatim excretions of elected officials. Here Bursey hews closely to perhaps an overtired tenet of fiction (write what you know), as he himself works for Hansard in the provincial legislature of my home city of Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island.

Full disclosure: During biannual visits home from Toronto, I will summon Bursey to attend a social gathering I affectionately refer to as the Prince Edward Island Writers Mafia (members include J.J. Steinfeld, David Helwig, Judy Gaudet, Steven Mayoff, and Beth Janzen) in which Bursey’s position resides somewhere between secretariat and chief thumb breaker. Bursey and I see eye to eye on many – though not all – literary conventions and trends, and I’ve generally judged his reviews, even the harsher ones, as well above the belt. One thing is clear from both reading and socializing with him: he is adamant in his insistence that novels be, well, novel.

Which brings us to his latest offering, Mirrors on which dust has fallen, an explosively unconventional, deeply disturbing, and relentlessly original work. This is not, in effect, your daddy’s Canadian Literature. The novel is set in Bowmount in the late 1990s, same as Verbatim; and rather than dropping the reader in medias res, the opening pages provide us with both general details of the town and some specific issues of the day. One of the larger challenges the city is facing, it seems, is to engender a sense of community among a certain contingent of its populace: “Clearly, for those alleged troublemakers Bowmount was not a community but a point on a map, not a City rich in varied history but a town with a grandiose self-conception.” While these prefatory remarks appear a bit rough around the edges – why is city capitalized here? what is “self-conception”? do we mean “self-perception?” – Bursey does a good job of situating us in a fully imagined and concrete place. (With the novel opening in such a prefatory way, it is unfortunate, and somewhat redundant, that publisher Verbivoracious Press decided to include an incoherent, academically pretentious, and wholly unnecessary introductory essay by Christopher Wunderlee.)

The narrative picks up heft as we begin to meet, through alternating chapters, the book’s motley ensemble of characters. There is Loyola, a university-drop out who works a soul-sucking job at a clothing wholesaler. There is his sleazy, supremely confident friend Jules Deeka, offering all manner of temptation from the wings. We meet a deeply compelling woman named Ivy, who struggles with the onset of middle age and its concomitant frustrations. We get a view into a radio station looking to update itself with the times (at the expense of several of its employees) and we also encounter the local Catholic church grappling with a sex abuse scandal. We lounge around in perhaps Bowmount’s most down-market watering hole, Johnny Bar’s, and we learn about three cops killed in a hostage taking at the local pet shop.

Bursey presents each of these threads in fragmented form, the chapters twitching and looping and hopping from one narrative to the next. Unsurprisingly, these strands intersect in surprising ways, and we soon learn about Bowmount’s darker auras glowing just below its skein of lower-middle class normalcy. What impresses most is the level of occupational detail that Bursey weaves into these stories. He is equally comfortable writing about the logistics of clothing wholesalers and the challenges of running a small radio station as he is about the quotidian detail of Catholic ceremonies and the grit needed to keep a seedy pub afloat. Here is an example of this kind of mastery, taken from a chapter called “The priests”:

The archbishop had descended from the refined heights of Toronto and Montreal, and regarded the priests and laymen of the Catholic Church in this province as boobs. Oh yes, intelligent decisions were made now and then, but less than the law of averages allowed; and of course, good works of a highly Christian nature were performed almost every other week. But to his mind the capillaries of the local Church were clogged by the lacklustre efforts of poor priests recruited from the local population, and by the vapouring laymen and church committees.

This level of specificity helps to offset the larger challenge that Mirrors presents to readers – that of a carefully constructed and confounding set of elisions.

What form do these elisions take? Funnily enough, they are very similar to those found in his previous novel, Verbatim. When you write a book almost entirely in the language of Hansard, (not that you have, or I have, or anyone else has, as far as I know; this seems to be strictly Bursey’s domain), you create the unusual constraint of limiting nearly all of your prose to dialogue – specifically the official dialogue of a provincial legislature. In Verbatim, the novelty of this was sharp and rendered into a very believable verisimilitude. A number of our expectations get thwarted or left out as a result: these elisions include descriptive writing, internal thoughts, and other nuanced interactions between characters.

But interestingly, much of Mirrors is also written in dialogue. There are long stretches that consist almost entirely of two or more characters riffing on each other over some element of their individual narratives, with their exchanges demarcated by dashes. Indeed, like Verbatim before it, much of Mirrors reads like a transcription – and as such, it too comes with various exclusions and limitations. Through most of the book, we get very little exposition, almost no physical descriptions of the characters, and a paucity of internal thoughts or monologues. In this sense, Mirrors is like a mirror of Verbatim. But whereas the previous novel was concerned with the “official-speak” of politicians looking to put their best foot forward and get the upper hand on opponents, Mirrors concerns itself with the rough and rowdy transcript of the street. Its characters talk at length about the filth and failure and frustrations of their personal lives. They discuss thwarted ambitions, secret desires, and their often strange or uninspired sex lives. This is the opposite of politicians’ orating formality in a legislature. This is workaday people being baldly honest in the agora of the public square.

Throughout these narratives, there is one issue, one preoccupation, one motif that occurs and re-occurs. It is an obsession of Bursey’s that I failed to spot in reading his first book and his literary criticism, or in socializing with him personally – that of the human anus. The human anus is, it should be said, the closest thing that Mirrors has to a main character. It makes numerous appearances in the different intersecting narratives of the book. At one point Ivy, suffering from some kind of gastric malady, reflects back on a sigmoidoscopy she received, “its camera transmitting pictures of pink flesh, white flesh, red veins in chain lightning patterns, the camera bungling around the nooks and crannies of her intestines during its serpentine intrusion.” At another point, two men discuss how to prepare for the inevitable unpleasantness of prison life with the aid of a carrot. In a particularly provocative section, Jules and Loyola get into a debate about sex’s more cloacal joys:

– But enjoying it? With a man?

– Before AIDS, when things were safer, you went in the back door with a woman, had a bit of anilingus.

– What? Jules explained, finishing with –a pungent meat, like game, make sure you wash before and after. The fundament is one of those places you get a lot of pleasure out of. Slapping, tickling, biting, kissing, enemas if you’re into that, so why not anal intercourse? Greatest warriors in the world did that, the army, the navy, you name it. Natural. Not healthy, not now, but natural. You’re looking pink. It isn’t the chili, is it?

Of course, not all interactions with the anus in Mirrors is consensual. The book also includes a harrowing anal rape scene, recounted by its perpetrator to the fellow lowlifes who inhabit Johnny’s Bar. This man tells how he stalked a young girl whose clothes (or lack thereof) reveal a bit too much of her backside for his liking. His subsequent assault on her on an isolated bike trail is told in chilling casualness, couched as an act of prostitution because he throws the girl forty dollars before raping her. This is as dark as Mirrors gets, and many readers who find their way to this chapter will no doubt be disturbed by it. As someone who has himself included difficult scenes of sexual assault in a novel, I have no advice or solace to provide other than this: as horrific as the scene is in Mirrors, it’s important to see how it fits into the larger thematic structure that Bursey has built for us. There are many ways this novel shows how the city of Bowmount – rendered into such stuffy officialdom in Verbatim – is still very much in touch with its lizard brain. For all the macro social engineering that occurs at the municipal level, individual citizens still feel – and resign themselves to – their basest human instincts.

The rape scene in Mirrors simply takes this to an unconscionable extreme.

Yet change is coming to Bowmount. Indeed, one could argue that change is the ultimate theme in both of Bursey’s novels. In Verbatim, it takes the form of new (and somewhat corrupted) management at Hansard that actually influences the transcripts of the legislature. In Mirrors, the change comes as an unpleasant intruder into the lives of its core characters. Many of them, it seems, wrestle with the brutality that time can exact on us all and the very instability of modern life. Yet this novel ends on a surprisingly tender note in a chapter called “A new cycle.”

What awaits our intrepid Ivy as she is about to take one step toward a man that she should have been with all along? She doesn’t know, and neither do we, but what we’re left with is the knowledge that it’s probably very important to take that step forward anyway. It’s important that dust not settle on the mirrors we hold up to ourselves.

—Mark Sampson

Photo by Mark Raynes Roberts

Mark Sampson has published two novels – Off Book (Norwood Publishing, 2007) and Sad Peninsula (Dundurn Press, 2014) – and a short story collection, called The Secrets Men Keep (Now or Never Publishing, 2015). He also has a book of poetry, Weathervane, forthcoming from Palimpsest Press in 2016. His stories, poems, essays and book reviews have appeared widely in journals in Canada and the United States. Mark holds a journalism degree from the University of King’s College in Halifax and a master’s degree in English from the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg. Originally from Prince Edward Island, he now lives and writes in Toronto.

Public Opinions—Private Laziness: The Epistemological Break in Nietzsche — Jeremy Brunger

Aug 132015

For a man with such little ears, Friedrich Nietzsche heard a multitude of deep pulses within the heart of European culture. The great despiser of liberalism and humanitarianism was also no less than the great despiser of conservatism and capitalism. As is the case with many important thinkers in the Western canon, Nietzsche’s dislikes greatly outnumbered his likes, just as the contradictions in his thought served to develop them all the better. Adoring power, he hated the powerful of his time for their unearned privileges. Adoring culture, he hated the cultured milieu of his time for its abiding philistinism. Adoring the sanguine bigotry of nineteenth-century society, he hated anti-Semites and the Darwinian biology that Herbert Spencer would later develop into a lethal social philosophy. His reputation in the popular consciousness is inaccurate as often as it is unflattering.

Nietzsche has been called the philosopher of a Hell that would put any of Dante’s to shame; he has also been called the original entrepreneur of the self-help genre. Who can say that most of this popular genre doesn’t boil down to “how to be what you already are?” The majority of humankind sickened him—“suffering from solitude…I have only ever suffered from ‘multitude…’”—even as his own sanity famously deteriorated during his final productive years. The overman himself was a botched invalid, internally contradictory, eloquent even in his madness. It is this aspect of Nietzsche’s thought that proves the most interesting of all his many interesting thoughts. For the epistemological break^[1] in Nietzsche, from his relatively sane years to the period in which his syphilis destroyed him, is the hinge of his oeuvre, the unhinging of which provided the world with its own worst reflection.

There is, first, a need for some biographical context. In life, Nietzsche was a soft-spoken, gentle man. Like Schopenhauer before him, he detested the animal vivisection of his time and the Christian dogma which supported it. Descartes had taught that animals were only machines: only humans could say cogito ergo ego^[2]. The beaten horse of Thus Spake Zarathrustra, saved by the anti-Christ himself, is probably the most famous beast in Western philosophy. Nihilism mingled with antihumanism when it came to Nietzsche’s view of war, however; he saw in war a great synthetic process that improved humanity for all its loss of life. This is a paradox, considering he considered himself totally opposed to nihilism in all its forms^[3]. All of life was a battleground, power was the world’s skeleton, and whoever could not gain power was rightfully doomed to serve those who could. Nietzsche went far beyond a basic philosophy of “sink or swim” in his preachments—he taught that swimming in the ocean was a belittling affair compared to declaring oneself its personal god. He was a thoroughgoing sexist^[4], too, although most men, even Christian men, were sexists in the deeply religious nineteenth century. Had he been more progressive on the sexual question, Nietzsche might have retained more relevance after the sexual turn of contemporary philosophy. Some of his flaws, it must be said, caricature him even at his most solemn.

The timid bachelor held that morality was a mechanism spun into culture in order to enslave mankind to its lower orders and that, once the Victorian liberalism became ascendant over the old feudal regime, the slaves had won the game. Of course, Nietzsche’s view of slave morality was rather idiosyncratic: he thought the rich were slaves, the skilled workers were slaves, and homeowners were slaves par excellence. For Nietzsche, the overman, the man who was himself, the man who had transcended both culture and contingency, had not yet been born. In this respect he thought himself the foe of determinism and the very midwife of a new aristocracy freed from every circumstance save those that were worthy of the next evolution in human ethics. Whether he invented modernism or postmodernism, he invented.

It would be no travail to produce a fruitful thought experiment concerning the man in the flesh. Imagine the phenomenology of being one of Nietzsche’s friends, of knowing him, of having been at first repulsed by his eccentricity and then inevitably drawn into its orbit. He would either entice you or estrange you. Who can say that Ignatius J. Reilly, of Toole’s novel A Confederacy of Dunces, was not modeled on Nietzsche’s physical appearance: a lumberman’s mustache, slicked-back hair, and lunatic eyes? Given that the nineteenth century was a bit less normative than our own—most periods in history respected eccentricity more than our own, in fact—he might have struck a social note less strange than any of the illiterate handiworkers of his day. But if one had the benefit of hindsight, it must have been an event bordering on the uncanny not only to have met Nietzsche, but to have known him for what he was: a world-historical creep, an unsound man, a profound critic of the everyday, a scholar steeped in far-flung days, an iconoclast who couldn’t keep a friend anymore than he could keep a lover. Had he been alive today he would be brushed off as a mouth-breather, or a gloomy diarist, or cast aside as an unsocialized loner incapable of integrating into the status quo^[5]. Of course, Nietzsche expected this expelling of singular persons from respectability, writing in Daybreak^[6] that

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.

The only cure for the unqualified sameness of human civilization was eccentricity, then. Behaving like the mass was to be equivalent to the mass, and this, for Nietzsche, was a sin greater than any concoction of the Christian gospel.

Given his valuation of difference, what would Nietzsche say about the sane-insane dichotomy which was only coming into scientific discourse during his lifetime? Unenlightened society often calls its outliers insane, and even enlightened society has no limitation of names for psychological deviations. Much of Nietzsche’s writing sounds bipolar, or schizophrenic, or amoral (to this last accusation he would yelp an astounding yes). A more anti-social philosophy the nineteenth century never produced. But it is a mistake of psychological prejudice to denounce him as merely insane, and therefore fit only to be ignored^[7].

When he wasn’t a crank, he spoke truths so frightening they hardly bear countenance; when he was a crank, he still provided insights of more worth today than that of most of our credentialed moralists. To be an atheist in the nineteenth century was to count oneself a member of the Ship of Fools. Today, we would sooner declare insane the man who declares his personal affinity with God than the village atheist, who would look incomparably more normal, a veritably endowed member of consensus reality. Nietzsche himself taught that conventions and customs change over time, borrowing this from the German higher biblical criticism of his era. Were it not for the empirical understanding of his venereal disease and its effects on the brain, we would have little evidence of his insanity, except that Der Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, and Zur Genealogie offend us.

If, as Peter Sloterdijk has it^[8], Walter Benjamin universalized the category of prostitution in his critique of capitalism, then Friedrich Nietzsche universalized the category of the godforsaken in his critique of Christianity. The modernist Christianity of today bears almost no resemblance to the Christianity of Nietzsche’s era—it was very much the nihilist construction he painted it to be. If it affirms earthly life today, it is only because it denied it in the past; it preached asceticism to the “factory slaves” (Nietzsche’s term, as well as Karl Marx’s) and reserved praise and pleasure for the powerful alone. He thought Christianity had smuggled weakness into the former majesty of Western culture and, in preaching the essential equality of practically unequal people, vulgarized all that existed. To defend the botched was to condemn the perfected. Of course, Nietzsche’s failure to recognize himself among the botched was a lasting error of his philosophy, which even H.L. Mencken, the journalist who introduced him to the English-speaking world, pointed out in a humorous essay condemning the pseudoscience of Jazz Age eugenics^[9].

Prescience eludes even the most astute of prophets, at times. Nietzsche was weak and preached the demise of the weak, or their enslavement; perhaps the one remnant worth preserving from this particular labyrinth of power relations is his insistence that race did not determine the worth of a man. Nietzsche was many unsavory things, but he was not a racist. Such a construct as race could only be inherited, and was therefore below the status of the self-made man no longer all too human. While he did not view race as modern biologists do—that is, he did not think it was purely a myth, as post-racial biology insists it is^[10]—he did think it was an anxiety of influence the overman deserved to shed. It is a historical quirk that European fascism found a hero in Nietzsche, since he would not have supported totalitarianism^[11] or the embrace of capitalism. Such atmospheres, in abolishing solitude, would stifle the Nietzschean overman. He probably would not have deplored the war casualties of the second World War—he was overjoyed at the prospect of Europe depopulating by a fourth-measure after the turmoil of his own mid-century—but he would have deplored the idea of philistines winning the game of international politics. National Socialism was as far removed from the core of Nietzsche’s existential thought as American liberal democracy or Europe’s vying theocracies of the Middle Ages.

What to make, then, of the elder Nietzsche’s lunacy? Did it inform his philosophy and thereby disqualify it, or did it oust him from the confines of mere convention and therefore render his worldview absolute? Hating the world as it was, he denounced Christianity for preaching the same, that the mundane was only a pathetic reflection of the platonic Heaven. Proving unfit for war, he preached war and the death of able-bodied inferiors. Flitting from one antimony to the next, Nietzsche’s existence contradicted his philosophy in almost every respect possible. Like the individualist Emerson with his wife’s financial support, Nietzsche lived off a university pension for most of his authorial life—on the nineteenth-century equivalent of welfare. He himself could not have survived in a Nietzschean universe. Every site of his contradiction devalues his philosophy in the abysmal concrete.

But philosophy, as Kant said, is the science of concepts. The Nietzschean concept is beautiful, if terrifying; even if it is not practicable for the uppermost portion of human beings, it inhabits a special place in the imagination that yearns for betterment of self and world. His books were not his body. That his own mind was split in twain by a biological infestation is immaterial in relation to his philosophy, which exists beyond the carnal body. His demon of the “loneliest loneliness” that preaches the doctrine of the Eternal Recurrence is a valuable thought experiment anyone and everyone should perform in their private introspection. That this life, being the only one we have, ought to be as perfected as possible is surely not the stuff of sin. It exemplifies the American ideology better than any belief system concocted in America. In his On the Genealogy of Morals, he writes

It is not impossible to conceive of a society whose consciousness of power would allow it the most refined luxury there is—that of allowing those who did it harm to go unpunished.

What statement better exemplifies the American maxim that it is better to travel the high road than the low when confronted with adversity? What better display of power than the power that goes unused? If only the American government’s foreign policy followed such advice as Nietzsche’s—not the Nietzsche of the fascist parody, but the aristocratic Nietzsche who sees warfare as a means to a peaceful end rather than the indefinite extension of the military-industrial complex, or the global hegemony of a single statehood. Against modern capitalist dynamism, which can enslave as much as it can emancipate, and against the medieval Great Chain of Being that inhibited social mobility completely—like it or not—Nietzsche posed his formula of amor fati. Even if one is unable to navigate the world, to bend it to his will, he nevertheless must love that he is in it, be he the hangman or the hanged.

With his decade-long period of invalidity in his sister’s care, he even portrays mankind at its most vulnerable: in him, the brutality of competition melds utterly with the essential impotence of the human experience in this vale of tears. If Nietzsche was insane, his insanity was more valuable to the human race, which he despised, than the sharpest clarity of an Emerson, a Spinoza, a James, a Niebuhr, or a Wittgenstein. We have his books precisely because he could not live up to their ideals^[12], because his esoteric and idiosyncratic epistemology was so problematic that it could only be birthed through the medium of text. Few today would recognize that he originated the adage “whatever does not kill me, makes me stronger.” Modernity—right or left^[13]—owes to him its viable atheism, its insistence on individual progressive striving rather than collective cow-towing, and the relativist morality that bolsters its liberal achievements. The disease that devoured his unfortunate brain, in turn, enlightened and enriched our own thinking, however much the man himself was damned in the process. Where would we be without Friedrich Nietzsche but lost and raving in the intellectual gutters?

— Jeremy Brunger

Jeremy Brunger is a Tennessee-based writer and graduate in English of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. His interests trend toward Marxist-humanist political philosophy, the psychological tolls of poverty, race theory, and the end results of religious practice in modern societies. He publishes poetry with Sibling Rivalry Press and the Chiron Review and nonfiction prose with various and sundry venues and can be contacted at jbrunger@vols.utk.edu.

Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

In treating Nietzsche’s 1889 “epistemological break,” I borrow the concept from Louis Althusser’s symptomatic reading of Karl Marx in Reading Capital (Verso, 2009), since Nietzsche is, no doubt, better treated by philosophy than psychiatry.↵
Descartes, the founder of modern Western philosophy, dissected cats in his spare time. Although Nietzsche was morbid, he never was so morbid as that, and hesitated to harm a fly. It is odd that Descartes is remembered as a positive influence and Nietzsche as a psychopath.↵
See Heidegger, Martin. “The Word of Nietzsche: God is Dead.” The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Harper Perennial, 1977.↵
See Nietzsche. “First Part, 14: On the Friend.” Thus Spake Zarathrustra. Oxford, 2005. Pg. 50. This section, among others, explains the subtleties of Nietzsche’s sexism. In it, he condemns women as essentially still being slaves, and therefore incapable of friendship—even calling them birds and cows—but at the same time he condemns most men for being in the same debased state. It must also be remembered that the narrator is an ambiguous conceit exemplifying madness.↵
Once a full professor, Nietzsche benefited from his later estrangement from the German academic establishment. His alienation from scholarship solidified his audience, who were still reeling from the revolutionary movements and institutional storms and stresses of 1848. In fact, had he been a more normal man with the same ideas, it is unlikely he would have been remembered by posterity. See also Ratner-Rosenhagen, Jennifer. “Nietzsche as Educator.” American Nietzsche. The University of Chicago Press, 2012. Pg 169.↵
See Kaufman, Walter. The Portable Nietzsche. Penguin, 1982. In this definitive anthology, Kaufman translates Daybreak as Dawn.↵
In contrast to his earlier demand for sober aesthetics, Nietzsche exhorts in Twilight of the Idols that “for there to be art, for there to be any kind of aesthetic doing and seeing, one physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.” The Dionysian worldview is the quintessence of what lay psychology would call insanity. See also Ronell, Avital. Crack Capitalism. 1992.↵
See Sloterdijk in the 2010 film Marx Reloaded , a short philosophical documentary concerning the re-emergence of Marxist philosophy in the light of the 2007-08 global financial crisis. It is also worth noting that, contrary to some popular opinions concerning Nietzsche and laissez-faire capitalism, he would in all likelihood detest elite capital as much as he detested the common man. He would sooner have been impressed by a breath-controlling yogi than by a financial magnate.↵
See Mencken, H.L.. “Dives into Quackery.” Prejudices: Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Series. Library of America, 2010. Mencken introduced the Nietzschean philosophy to America with his 1908 book The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, but given that he did not have access to the mountain of scholarship on him now extant, Mencken’s book now reads rather superficially.↵
See Sussman, Robert. The Myth of Race. Harvard UP, 2014.↵
See Foucault, Michel. “Society Must Be Defended”. Picador, 2003. “Here we have the beginnings of the famous great portrait of the ‘barbarian’ which we will go on finding until the late nineteenth century and, of course, in Nietzsche, [for whom] freedom will be equivalent to a ferocity defined as a taste for power and determined greed, an inability to serve others, and constant desire to subjugate others…” (149). Foucault’s portrait of Nietzsche was apolitical, whereas totalitarianism demands over-arching political structures that, in the philosopher’s view, could only limit the individual in his quest for overman status. If, as he aged, he revered a strong state, it was only to keep the masses from limiting the liberated overmen, not as an end in itself. He is also notorious for despising hero-worship as embodied by the proto-fascist Carlyle’s historicist great man theory.↵
See Nietzsche. “Why I Write Such Good Books.” Ecce Homo. Oxford, 2007. “I am one thing, my writings are another…I myself am not yet timely; some are born posthumously.” Pg.36.↵
See Berman, Marshall. “Marx, Modernism, and Modernization.” All That Is Solid Melts Into Air. Penguin, 1988. Pg 100-01. While Berman’s book is ostensibly more about Marx’s relation to modernity than Nietzsche’s, in this chapter he thoughtfully links Marx to Nietzsche’s attack on nihilism to the whole administration of contemporary capitalist-bureaucratic society.↵

One Drunken Preschool Summer: Childhood — Meg Harris

Aug 122015

Author photo by Abigail Kibler

ou remember it as a holiday weekend at camp, an outdoors club your grandfather and a few of his friends and brothers started in the early 1900s. It’s the summer of 1962 and friends and families, who’ve descended from those nine original members of Royal Outing Club, mill around the grounds in rural south western Pennsylvania. Someone starts a bocce game on the lawn, others play cards, drink beer and smoke cigarettes. They lounge around on lawn chairs or the wooden porch swing which hangs from the branch of giant tree near the mess hall. The smell of roast meat emanates from the old wooden building and laughter and conversation rise and fall ubiquitously. Horseshoes clank and thud in the dusty pits behind the beer-garden where old men play poker and drink an amber liquid from tiny glasses. Their cigars make a canopy of oaken smoke over a low hanging black walnut branch which shades the lichened table where they sit. Bright glints of afternoon light chink through the foliage here and again. Inside the crowded beer garden, nutshells crunch under your sandals, bigger kids push past you. Teenage girls, hips swathed in plaid peddle-pushers, sway rhythmically to the beat that rolls from the grill of the Seeburg juke box.

You and some girls your age run up to the ladies’ bunk to play. It’s the kind of afternoon where you can wander as a pack for hours and someone or other’s mom or dad peeks in on your game when they visit the powder room or stroll down to the creek-side. The cool cement floor and spare block walls of “the house” are the perfect setting for a game of hospital—this and the rows of metal WWII cots with their sagging mattresses. It’s quiet here too, with all of the grownups down at the bar or out on the lawn, even the napping babies become a part of your game of hospital. The children’s ward is in the back room where cribs stand end to end those patients sleep soundly. Ailing 3, 4 and 5 year old patients with measles, river fever, or snake bites convalesce and suffer in the camp hospital. You recall that you and Regina Gemperle or maybe Susie Larkin doctored and nursed with some authority and aplomb. You minister to the sick moving somberly from bed to bed. You are tall enough to reach their pale slight faces and feel for fever, offer a sip of water or medication, bandage an injured wrist. Your mother’s magnifying mirror and other instruments, curling irons and shower caps become the tools of your trade.

Years later you are told by the ladies that so many children were born in 1957 because the summer before your mother taught everyone the rhythm method of birth control. The result of these instructions were you and at least six other children.

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The playing hospital in the women’s bunkhouse part of the day is the clearest in your memory. Maybe you needed a nap or maybe the afternoon grew especially hot and therefore you recall only the blurred moments. You’re not certain as to how or when the day changed profoundly. What you do remember is this day included your first awareness of your mother’s being drunk.

On the back stoop of the bunkhouse your dad holds you in his arms as you sit together on the cool cement slab. You lean your head away from your mother’s distorted face, her mouth coming toward you for a kiss. She comes in close making you swoon and whimper.

“Aaawwwhatsamatterdoll? Don’t cry,” her speech slurs and you catch the scent of sour breath with her words. You are aware of grownups laughing on the lawn and the afternoon suddenly green and bombed with intoxicating heat and sounds which bore into your small head. Your mother’s never been like this; all of the world tips on its edge, if not for the sure arms of your dad you’d collapse on the lawn. Years later, you will blame your nightmares in which your mother is replaced by a shaved-head-Nazi, on this day and that is probably exactly where those nightmares began.
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The gravel road from camp leads out to the Buhl Bridge on old Route 8 and just a few steps from there you can double back on Cottage Lane as it runs with the tracks for a time until it turns toward the tall stalks of corn and leads to the little cottages. Each place is brightly painted and one of these belongs to your Aunt Cle and Uncle Dick. Your favorite is the white cottage with red decorations and the giant letter on its front. Today, you and your father do not stop to visit any of the cottagers. You have trouble keeping the rough chunks of gravel out of your white sandals and your stride is clumsy. No matter your appeal your father does not carry you. Only, he pulls you down the lane, the strap of your summer romper slipping from one shoulder, the buckle on your sandal rubbing a blister onto the side your foot. Your father does walk you through the labyrinth mowed into the tall weeds across from your uncle’s cottage and there you grow dizzier with each twist and turn of the maze, the tall grass moving in a haze of green with the soft shushing of an afternoon breeze which lulls you to doze. One day you will puzzle at the uncomfortable feelings games of hide-and-go-seek that grass maze calls up in you, how you are unable to play along with the other children.
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This is your father rescuing you from the upset of your drunken mother. He takes you for a walk ‘out the road’ and then back toward the cottages and finally, full circle, he walks you across the ball field back toward the camp grounds. The field needs a mow, overgrown barnyard and crab grasses scratch your drowsy feet and scrape your ankles. Ground bees lumber about your moist person. Your wee-self fills with weariness as you approach the back of the mess-hall knowing that opposite is the bunk-house where, in the darkened back room where the cribs are and the soft wooden floor and giant overhead fan. You will rest in your own little bunk with its pink pillow-case on top of the soft-worn Indian blanket. You are by now tired and troubled enough about your mom that you haven’t the energy for finding Tobie cigars with the kids, or beheading dandelions, or the touching of Monarchs, or finding blue fairies, or gathering Queen Anne’s lace. No time for spotting black snakes, hooking worms, or building sand castles creek-side. Your father has insisted that you walk with him and because you adore him you do your best to please him. Your soft light brown curls stick to the perspiration on your forehead and the slow buzz of a no-see-um sounds eternal in your ear.

At last the crepe soles of your sandals meet the scruff of the paved sidewalk leading to the bunk and your father scoops you into his arms. You rub your face into his neck. The damp cotton of his shirt smells of nicotine, sweat and dial soap, a somehow tender and comforting scent. Years after he dies the smell of cigarettes still gives you a sense of security and, you believe, adds to your long struggle to stop smoking.

Your eyelids grow heavy and you are letting yourself slack into afternoon dreams when you hear the distant sound of your mother, “Oh, Stuart,” she is saying and something more you cannot make out as she staggers near.

“It’s alright, Rita,” your father tells her, setting you down on your feet and taking your hand once again. To you he says, “Come on, Babydoll. Let’s walk around the block again.”

You cry. You tantrum. All protests are ignored by your gentle father and after a visit to the ladies’ bathroom, once again you walk with him around the tracks and along the lane where the earth is a gravelly gray clay which traps puddles that will last as long as summer. Your toes are black with dust and your sandals are now a dirty white. This time around a train passes sounding its horn into your sunburnt temples. One of the cottagers drives slowly down the lane heeding the yellow “5 miles per hour” sign and rolls to a slow stop next to you and dad. It is your aunt and uncle and your father picks you up this time allowing you to sleep deeply on his warm shoulder. The sound of his voice chatting with these passersby tumbles up to your ears from his warm chest and soon you are in a deep sleep. He carries you the rest of the way back to camp. The only sound his melodic random whistle and the stirring of the cicada’s call as the warm afternoon gives way to evening.
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Years later you will recall this experience while talking with your sister and you will ask if she remembers the time mom was so drunk and how it upset you to the point where dad had to take you for a walk around the block at camp.

She will laugh at your recollection and explain, “Mom wasn’t drunk. Dad was walking you around because you kids got into Sis’ sleeping pills. You were playing hospital in the bunkhouse,” Later other old friends will fill in the blanks for you.

“We called doctor Klatman and he wanted all the kids to take syrup of ipecac.”

“Your dad refused to make you throw up because you hated it so.”

“He decided to walk you around until the effects of the drug wore off.”

“You were five, I think. Our Carol was just a baby at the time. Just two, I think.”

“No. Your mom was not drunk. She wasn’t even drinking whiskey. Just a few beers.”

Your mom is gone over a decade when you learn the truth of what happened that day and you have a vague recollection of perhaps even being the person who distributed the medications. You do remember that as a child you loved to explore, especially into the business and belongings of others. Your sister’s make-up, the old photos your mother stowed in the cedar chest, your brother’s girlie magazines.

You remember some things now and it makes sense that the medication was the culprit making you light headed and sleepy. You see now the deep affection that your father showed for you that day. The cloak of unfaltering devotion from your father bolsters you even today some 40 years after his death.
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That summer marks the first but not the last time you were inebriated. You know that your condition then made you somehow able to see something you’d never seen in your mother. Drunkenness. It was something you’d never fail to distinguish again. You would also never fail to forgive it, not in yourself, not in your mother.

—Meg Harris

Meg Harris grew up in southwestern Pennsylvania but has lived in New England since the 1980s. Recently Meg and her husband took occupancy of a home in Connecticut that was purportedly a tearoom in the 1700s and originally a “great barn” in the 1680s. Today, “Sol’s Path” is Meg’s writing retreat. A chap of Meg’s poems, Inquiry into Loneliness is forthcoming this month from Crisis Chronicles; her stories and poems have appeared in both print and online journals. This is the first time Meg’s creative nonfiction has been published.

Interviewing God: Poems & Paintings — Kate Fetherston

Aug 112015

Spring: watercolor/oil pastel/graphite on paper 11”x15”.

.
OVERTURE

I dream we argue about money, which is to say, about toast
and how it should be made, if you really loved me. You

lobby for your birthright to pile striations of mail across
horizontally opportune surfaces. That is: everywhere. If I

loved you, I would see this. I would celebrate your scattershot
genius. The next night, I dream prime numbers in bad

moods bump shopping carts in the produce aisle and slam
bananas to the floor with a fury that says, I am

special. And you don’t love me enough for it. After
weeks of this, one evening around midnight, I slip

out of myself, a stranger to the usual
conflagrations, and dream we muscle

through buoyant water as seals slapping
backsides. Our flippers splash each

other’s whiskery snouts as we loll
in sunlight we didn’t earn. When I open

my eyes, there’s music again. I stroke your stubbly
beard and dream of the Sargasso sea.

Hidden Gold: oil on paper 22” x 30”.

BAR SCENE

Your pick up line, “What kind of farm animal are you?” could use some work, and you never said where you’re from. But I to you of a white goat am mothered, my manners dainty and feral. Don’t invite me to the company picnic. I’ll bat my eyes at your boss while nibbling his flip-flops. Senseless, these conventions. My beast-like heart has no strings. You could play me like an accordion. My lungs swell with the sharp air of not-yet spring. I have the kind of hope acquainted of a tin can, desiring nothing more than to remain shiny. I to you am fatherless, gotten of a wild boar, an 80’s punk rocker. See, my mouth filled with thyme and laurel. I can’t sing a lick but my braying is the talk of the county and there have been several offers for my hand. I would like a comfortable barn and an acre of mint for my wedding day. I would like to lie down in clover. You could know me real well, buddy, or keep pretending you don’t want it. Either way, baa–aaad boy—the tab’s on you.

Pieces of Self: collage on cardboard. 20”x 15”.

GOD’S INTERVIEW

Tell us how you successfully met past challenges
and why you’re applying for this job.

Weary of mere hallelujah, I held the moon’s dark
backside and lounged on my netherworld throne. People
yammered and I tried to listen. For awhile, to get my
attention, small burnt animals smoldered on every
hillock, then my inbox burgeoned with cracks
about my outdated skill set. They gave feedback
on my goals. They wanted me to improve. They wanted
rules to break. They wanted selves. Expectations,
evaluations: a poverty of imagination for which I take
full responsibility. I dressed for the job I had instead

of the gig Lucifer snatched, so I rocked it
invisible. I did vocalize my needs through burning
bushes, giant snakes, dragons, unicorns, poets,
an Al Gore or two, but nothing slowed the bloodbaths,
pyramid schemes, political stupidity. People bludgeoned
each other no matter what. Praise and lambast
piled up like junk mail and the universe
became unmanageable Maybe I didn’t
have good boundaries. I tried tough
love. Leaked news of my death and hung

with Saturn for a while. His party
presence relies on a few glum
syllables and splitting a can of Spotted
Dick, but at least he’s not
demanding. But, folks seemed
lonely so I packed a lunch and parked
outside Lincoln Center in a plastic
chair for a couple of weeks. Of course, that’s
the most quiet I’ve enjoyed in millennia. Only
psychotics stopped to schmooze. Maybe higher

intellectual pursuits were the ticket, so
I eavesdropped on philosophy: If p = q, why
is there no water in the gorge? What
were they even talking about? I had to skidaddle
the hell out of there to make that refresher
course on how to be a supreme deity and still
have time for myself. It’s all about balancing self-
care with busting ass. But I knew this gig was toast
when I no longer loved tender acrospires busting
snow laden earth. Yes, when the moon’s white

thigh rose over spring fields I waited
for the sun to gutter out. So I’m available
to start immediately. Or, since time
is my plaything, before.

The panel appreciates your detailed response. However, in light of your already overtaxed schedule, we feel you are not the ideal fit for us. And—off the record, that was quite the bar rant, Mr. G. To promote your success in future interviews, might we suggest job coaching—or medication—or, for God’s sake—both?

Field with Light: watercolor/oil pastel/sgraffito on paper 9” x 10”.

CHEATING AT SOLITAIRE

Grandma Dubie, day after day, hunched
splay legged over a bourbon glass balanced

on her chair’s cigarette-burned
arm and flicked cards with a loud

snap, each laid down with a private
purpose. Pastel squares on her

ancient rug functioned as a
game board for us kids. Made-

up crosswords: blue six down
by dusty pink three

across for a prize of burnt
toast. Once, unminded, my little

brother Sam gleefully pried
open the china cabinet, wrapped baby

fists around thin-skinned
teacups, and, determined as

a journeyman, dropped them
one by one on the dirty

floor. Without a word, she hammered
it shut. Shooed outside, we shadow-

boxed dust motes adrift in sour
apple trees, their rotten fruit

slippering bunchgrass that struggled
through what she didn’t

think of as neglect. We played with dead
Uncle Somebody’s toy soldiers. We hid

in the smelly basement, wiggling murky
Mason jars to see when, not if, they’d

explode. We tried climbing into the extra
fridge that, thank god, wouldn’t

shut. Eventually, nothing
else to do, we’d belly flop

back on the rug, singing tonelessly
while clicking Grandma’s jewel

clasped cigarette case. Finally, Grandma yelled
at Mom, I can’t take it—Bring

them back when they’re
housebroken or old enough

to drink. As if we could change
ourselves. As if that

would change us. Today, phone
held sideways, I swish virtual

cards with a finger—tick, tick—and my
fingers become my grandmother’s—now that I

too, lost in the cross hatching of love and irreparable
damage, need for something, anything to come out

all right. And the ache of blue shadow glides with winter
sun along walls of that other room I never left.

Navigating the Underworld: watercolor/oil pastel on paper. Four 9”x10” panels.

THE OLD YEAR IN JOHNSON, VERMONT

October hunkers on drab hindquarters
spattered with a few resonant

golds and rusty
oranges. She no longer cares to dress
for dinner or other occasions of vulgar

admiration; company is such
a bore. Spiny deciduous trees bristle

against a dirty palate
sky, and the old year lies down beside a mouse-
brown river. To sleep she might say, if

she were speaking, but the truth
is colder and grief hardly

original. At the local coffee shop, I sift
some poetry through my early
morning confusion while at the next

table two mental health consumers-
slash-respite workers conduct a convo

with their payee. “That money
is coming to me,” says one. “I played
World of Warcraft all weekend. So don’t try

to play-sate me.” The caseworker
unrolls an I’m-Being

Very-Patient tone. In a small voice, guy number
two makes acquiescent I’m no
trouble noises, then says, “I’ve done

everything to lose
weight and it’s not my fault I hurt

my back. Can I get
some Oxy from anyone at your office? Is anyone
hooked up?” The caseworker’s inaudible

response is sure to be
appropriate. We’re all in need

of respite, right? My seventeen year old
cat purrs and wants to sit close
but, thin to thinner, she’s disappearing. Her once

shiny black hair is drying to chick fluff. Where
is she going? The dwindling year

can’t be bothered for information. You’ll have
to go through channels, she’d say. If I asked
her to whisper god’s secret

name. Buttoning my coat against
a sharp wind coming off the railroad

tracks, I lean over the riverbank where
water is language enough. Red leaves circle
in widening ripples, then move on.

Summer Storm: watercolor/oil pastel on paper 9” x 10”.

—Paintings & Poems by Kate Fetherston

Kate Fetherston’s first book of poems, Until Nothing More Can Break, was released in 2012. Her poems and essays in numerous journals including North American Review, Hunger Mountain, and Third Coast. She’s received grants from the Vermont Council on the Arts and Vermont Studio Center. Kate was twice a finalist for the Pablo Neruda Prize in Poetry and has several Pushcart Prize nominations.

Kate’s visual art is inspired by the line between feeling and seeing. In this series, she’s is interested in playing with process and form to reinterpret landscape as it connects with internal space. Kate’s art has been shown in California and Vermont.

Every Book is Like Writing a Book for the First Time: Interview with Greg Mulcahy — Jason Lucarelli

Aug 102015

AS WITH MOST AUTHORS whose books I buy second hand in first edition, Greg Mulcahy came to me through Gordon Lish.

Mulcahy’s fiction is, as Noy Holland says, “funny, in the way that wisdom, plainly spoken, is funny.” Through his characters’ agonies he reveals the ruse of our surrounding world, and their rock bottom falls propel each consecutive sentence—the content carried through frictive syntax. His sentences slide, stop on a dime, fragment, run on without punctuation, run over you, leave you breathless, bewildered. Sam Lipsyte says, “Reading Greg Mulcahy’s sentences is like watching the best slalom skiers in the world dare the universe a crazy millimeter at a time,” and it’s a ride that leaves you on the other side, as brave and as dangerous, but with new truth.

Mulcahy is the author of the short fiction collections Out of Work, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1993, and Carbine, Winner of the Juniper Prize for Fiction and published by The University of Massachusetts Press in 2010. He’s written two novels, Constellation, published by Avisson Press in 1996, and O’Hearn, Winner of the FC2 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize and published by The University of Alabama Press in 2015.

After reading Greg’s latest novel O’Hearn, in which I laughed the hardest, I sought him out—where else but Twitter, and who would have figured, the platform come in handy after all?

What started in May and ran through the middle of July is disclosed here now, a glimpse into who Lish once called a “menace to your community.”

How harmful is Greg Mulcahy?

You be the judge.

—Jason Lucarelli

My favorite stories stand in denial of progression and the onward flow of time. Your recent fiction seems to lean in this direction. Using a phrase lifted from your newest novel O’Hearn, I ask: does your fiction aspire “to be outside time or better than time”?

I think all literature aspires to be outside of time in Yeats’ sense, but of course, that is impossible. Chronology in any work is a fiction, but the real fiction is the contradictory human experience of chronology. People, or at least I, know death is inevitable and certain, yet I feel as though I’m better than time, that somehow I’ll escape its consequence, when, in fact, it’s wrecking me by the second.

In O’Hearn, the narrator struggles “how to know” as he attempts to sort out events occurring before and after “the incident,” a workplace “mishap” occurring outside the confines of the novel. As the narrator struggles to determine “what was now and what was before,” so, too, does the reader. Was this mirroring intentional or simply inevitable?

It is both. Anybody who writes seriously is intentional about every word. That sets up causation. When the reader reads, if the reader reads seriously, the reader produces the effect. The problem, of course, is that the causation can not ensure what the effect will be. But, you can try your best.

Throughout O’Hearn appear the phrases “The Use Of Narrative,” “the perfection of the narrative,” “the nature of narrative,” and “confines of…narrative.” There are references to the “roles” of certain characters—The Queen of Productivity, The Volunteer, Doll, Madame Pompous, and Twerp—and to the “story” the narrator tells himself as he tries to slide events and people into place. At one point the narrator says, “Story about a place and some people and what happened. Was that what a story was.” Were these and other metafictional elements a function of the narrative, or part of a larger authorial concern you had while writing O’Hearn?

Again, both. Film and literature fought a battle over narrative in the 20th Century, and film won, at least where conventional, or the misnamed realistic, narrative is concerned. In light of that, fiction has to do what it can do and film can not do. Part of that is to ask itself how to tell a story, and more fundamentally, what a story is. And of course, no story can be trusted. Ever.

Storytellers are arrangers, organizers. When you were a boy and you told stories to adults, did they ever say, “You’re such a storyteller,” and not because they were satisfied by your animated relaying of an occurrence, but because they could see through the seams of your arrangement?

No one ever said such a thing to me when I was a kid. I grew up in a big Irish-American family, and story telling was part of the air, and, as such, unremarked. If someone was displeased with what I told, I was more likely called a liar or told to be quiet. Of course, I wasn’t quiet.

Your first collection of stories Out of Work was published in 1993 at Alfred A. Knopf. Could you talk about how that first book came to be? Could you reach back in time still to talk about how you rigged your own “system of organization” to tell the stories you wanted to tell?

I started sending work to Gordon Lish at The Quarterly. Eventually, he ran my novella “Glass” in an issue, and he bought Out of Work for Knopf. For me, the main thing was to forget any preconceptions I had, and I had plenty, and do anything the story demanded. In a sense, I had to let the stories tell themselves in ways that made sense to themselves. I think when my work is successful it comes from a mixture of discipline and indifference.

Your wife, Abigail Allen, appears to have also been sending Lish stories around 1995 and 1996. Was sending your work to Lish a shared pursuit? Did she take classes with Lish?

Abigail sent The Quarterly some of her work. She was never Gordon’s student, and she was looking for a great place to publish. She had eight pieces accepted, but the didn’t get printed there because The Q was out of business before it could run them. She eventually published a great novel, Birds of Paradise, under the name Hiram Goza.

Do you and your wife share work with each other? Who is your best critical reader? Where do you turn for advice on drafts?

Sometimes one of us shows the other something, but usually not. We work very independently of each other. I don’t really get advice on drafts unless an editor offers some. My best critical readers are Lish, Abigail, and recently, Sam Lipsyte.

Who influenced you most in your education as a writer? What impact did Gordon’s support have? Was your correspondence with him mostly through mail? Did you attend his classes?

Gordon’s support helped me a great deal. It displayed my work to other writers and made my work viable. We corresponded mostly by mail and spoke on the phone before we met. For all the controversy around him, I’ve always found him to be a warm, generous man and great friend. I never took his class though I did sit in on a session once. I learned a lot from the way he edited. As to who influenced me, the answers are multiple. Certainly my teachers Al Greenberg and Rick Barthelme, my wife, Abigail, a million other writers starting with Joyce and Camus, and maybe most importantly, my high school English teacher, Lorraine Potuzak.

What is your fascination with work and the workplace? What do you do for a living? What have you done? What would you do—or not do—if you had to do it all over again?

I started working at a car wash when I was 14. Now I teach at a community college. I’ve been a janitor, dishwasher, factory worker, lawn care worker, telemarketer, shipping clerk, and more I’ve forgotten. Our faculty is unionized and I was a state union officer for 17 years, including Treasurer and President. This culture is embedded in work. Its primary value is money. Yet it pretends, and our literature often pretends, this is not the case. It’s hard to say what I would or would not do again faced with the economic realities I faced, but I will say this: I would not, if I had my life to live over, go into teaching. It is bad enough you don’t make any money, but over the course of my career, I never expected to be attacked for teaching people things. Now these attacks are a common feature of political discourse. What, exactly, is this country pretending to?

I appreciate how you take aim at the popular notion of “profession” throughout your work and O’Hearn, specifically through the character of Poppa Douk-Douk:

There is, Poppa Douk-Douk said, no place for what is not. There is no place for anything which is not in place.

…

Your mistake, Poppa Douk-Douk said, is to imagine an alternative life. Imagine if we imagined no alternative, imagine how focused, how aware we would be.

This is “the language of business.” What languages are you attempting to teach your students?

I teach expository and developmental writing at a community college, so my focus is on clarity, precision, and simplicity in its most positive sense. The language I try to teach is clear, simple, direct, and exact. In lit, the biggest problem now is an absence of any deep literacy. I teach close reading in lit more than anything else. In all my classes, I try to communicate the ways the culture lies to us and our often willing complicity in those lies.

Have you ever taught fiction writing? What do you think is missing from the curriculum? Or maybe I should be asking instead about what might be missing from your own curriculum?

I’ve taught fiction writing, but I quit doing it some years ago. If I were to teach it again, I’d like to do it at the graduate or professional level, but it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen. What’s lacking in curriculum is what’s lacking in the culture—a large, sophisticated, well-read audience.

Who or what is responsible for this absence of deep literacy, and how, as a teacher, do you fill this absence?

I think the overwhelming presence of screens—TV, computer, cell phone—has a lot to do with it. And the crazy quilt patterns of American education which is so unsystematic you get creationism in some states, and the general anti-intellectualism in the country, and profound indifference are all contributors. I teach close reading by essentially walking students through texts they have already read. Modern work is particularly good for this, but then close reading was codified as response to Modernism.

Some pieces of yours I’ve read in print or online are fragmentary pieces, little narrative slices. “West,” from the 2013 edition of NOON, is one of my favorites:

Now he had to do something. She wrote that. It was not true. She knew that. She did not want him to do anything. Not really. With the desert and the hills, stone and brush, the sun, the dust, the dry everything.

She wrote that letter. Imagine, a letter. Writing in faded graphite on filler paper—smeared pencil—that—enough for her or all she could do or what she could say and what was the difference.

Was Diane’s editing a result of the brevity of this piece? Are fragments like this part of larger works that you’re writing? Or are these fragments composed as stand-alone pieces?

Diane is a brilliant editor and cuts to the heart of a piece. But they begin quite short, and they stand alone. I’m working on something complicated now, and some of these shorter things might form something longer, but I won’t know until I’ve got a big enough manuscript to start to arrange it. I’m envisioning a number of pieces of radically different duration.

When attempting a new form, do you look for hints of what you’re trying to achieve in other writers? Or does your reading in general influence you to try new things?

Both, I think. Reading makes me want to try more things and shows me possibilities, and I don’t think there could be a book in isolation. It’s like you wouldn’t have a language that consisted of only one word. At the same time, I feel like every time I or anybody writes a book, the writer is reinventing the book, and for me, there’s no avoiding that feeling.

Do you mean reinventing in the sense of how you put a book together against past efforts, but also against the books of other writers you have in mind at the time?

Both those and more. Every book comes with the same problems of language and narrative, and these are multiple problems, but they need to be uniquely resolved each time. So, at least for me, every book is like writing a book for the first time. You get better technically, but the problems are always there demanding solutions, or, at least, amplification.

You are a master of omission. As you developed this technique, whom did you study?

Beckett, Handke, early Mary Robison, Diane Williams, Dawn Raffel, Leonard Michaels, and, now that I think of it, in a strange way Robbe-Grillet. Also Borges. Every serious writer my age read Borges.

Writers are sometimes hesitant to go back and analyze old work. But I wonder if you see the evolution of your short stories from Out of Work to Carbine, from scene-based narrative movement to a kind of momentum driven by interior reflection and pure intent?

I’m hesitant to analyze any of my work, but I would say that my stories are less concerned with conventional plot and more concerned with language than they used to be. I don’t know if this is evolution—I’m suspicious of any notion of progress in art—or simply moving more deeply into obsession. You know, you get older and become an ever-increasing crank.

Culture critiques are everywhere in your fiction. In “Aperture,” a man reflects on a memory of a photograph of he and his wife in Graceland, a photograph he felt guilted into buying but now sits in a box he cannot find, though he surmises it will turn up sometime in the future. Then, he considers his wife’s image of the future: a place where certain humans are picked to colonize another planet. He thinks:

It was all fantasy. Mythology. The mythology of insecurity, the mythology of science fiction, the mythology of redemption melded into a cheesy pop culture concept unworthy of itself.

A reflection of the general insecurity in the culture. That insecurity broadcast daily.

This is a culture influenced by the media and the cinema of the times:

He hated those movies yet once they entered the culture they kept coming back, eternally recycled to squeeze every bit of possible profit from them. If nothing else, images to carry advertising as a host culture carries bacteria in a lab.

Is popular culture a form of distraction? When you teach your students to see through the culture, what role does fiction play in the classroom?

I tell my students pop culture is a device to remove money from the idiots, and we, collectively, are the idiots. I also show them how serious fiction tells the truth and does not neatly resolve itself as pop culture does. But I point out that literature tends towards stasis and the best pop culture can be dynamic, so the two steal from each other and alter their relationship to each other. I realize some writers don’t see a distinction, and some writers like Charles Willeford or Donald Westlake, in the Parker novels, blur the two categories to the extent they’re both. I’m not trying to be some high priest of Culture like Adorno; I’m trying to give my students a method to evaluate the media they receive. Part of what destroyed English as a discipline is when elite universities decided post structural criticism was the truth, the dogma, when it was a method. It’s good not to confuse the two.

What kinds of discussions are going on in your classroom regarding the use of social media? You tweet, as do I. Why is Twitter your social media platform of choice? What is it about the tweet that you enjoy?

The only real classroom discussion is a ban on having devices on in class although yesterday, during a break, I noticed half the students were texting, and, since we had been reviewing semicolon usage, I told them to include a semicolon in their texts. I was on Facebook, but I got so disgusted with their confiscatory policies, I committed Facebook suicide. I like Twitter because it’s a ridiculous platform for inane observations. I make a lot of inane observations.

Isn’t there something to be said about working within a character limit? Online writing is efficient. There’s a limit to how many characters fit into the subject line of your email before the line cuts off on the viewing end—55 characters, typically—and online marketers, for example, write to make their message fit.

I think that’s right. And all the web journals have encouraged short pieces. If I have something longer than 1,000 words, I try to get it in print because I think anything longer is too long to read online. This leads me to write things in different lengths differently although my stuff has always been shorter than what would have been considered standard 30 years ago.

Do you feel, writing and publishing short short prose, and as the form continues to evolve, that your fiction is better suited for today’s readers than those of the past?

That’s a difficult question because I hate the implications of my answer. We are all prisoners of our time and experience, but I don’t want to be. Not wanting does nothing but make me unhappy. I have readers who value and understand my work, and I’m grateful for that, but I have deep concerns about literacy in this country. I do think readers now accept short work. I’m not sure that’s a great development. Style, it seems, emerges from some complicated, obscure history. Then again, I think of Sappho, and I like her work. I even like that it’s fragments.

Stanley Crawford once said in an interview, we live “within a society that is inclined to measure success in monetary terms,” and if his work were to “attain bestseller status,” he “might see that as another kind of failure.” Do you think this is true of your own writing? What do you use to measure your success?

I’d like to be a bestseller, and I’d like to have the money associated with it, but it’s impossible now. Literary writing has moved to the fringes; bestsellers are only commercial entertainment. The culture has fragmented, and the people who control culture have decided serious conversations are over. This, of course, relates to and interacts with the stupidity of our politics. It also serves that stupidity. I don’t know how I measure success. It seems by most definitions I’m a failure, but I’m okay with that.

Does your frustration over the lack of serious conversations cause you to have them through your fictions?

Some of that, and some what life is like now, and some can you believe how ridiculous things are, and some wonder at linguistic constructs.

Sheer force of language is what lures me to your stories. When I think about the source of your stories, what gets them started, I think of this recovered Jiddu Krishnamurti passage: “So there is the content of consciousness, dull, stupid, traditional thought, recognizing all its emotions—otherwise they are not emotions—always it is thought, which is the response of memory, knowledge, and experience, that is operating. Now can the mind look at this? Can you look at the operation of thought?”

Take, for example, this passage from O’Hearn:

Who do you think you are he had been asked.

He had said about his ambition but he had forgotten to say about his fire of ambition. It was fire, right? He said he would avoid the trap of failure though he thought everyone thought he was trapped in the trap of failure and although his ambitions, regardless of his statements, were not much. Not ambitious.

And one more, for good measure:

The past—couldn’t he stop thinking of it?

Couldn’t it be over?

He had the present. And future. Future always out there. He had no power over it.

Days without power. Years.

A man without power. He might make barely enough if he was extremely careful. That he had to be careful proved he had no power.

If he wanted proof.

These sentences convey the action of thought, all the internal pressures and stunted rhythms of the mind, yet these sentences move as if made with the mouth, by the ear. When did you start writing sentences this way?

I don’t know when I started writing that way. I think it evolved over time. The idea, of course, is to suggest the quality of thinking without having to build in the messiness of actual thought.

On literature in our “contemporary setting,” Lars Iyer says, “All efforts are belated now, all attempts are impostures.” Do you feel as though literature is not only on the fringe, but has reached its end, and if so, what should authors aspire to, if not take part in its revival?

Literature is always reaching its end because we are always reaching our ends. I don’t believe literature will go away. It constitutes and reconstitutes in different forms, but it’s as permanent as humans are. When we go, it goes. Until then, it goes on.

—Greg Mulcahy and Jason Lucarelli

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Greg Mulcahy is the author of Out of Work, Constellation, Carbine, and O’Hearn. He has published over 100 stories in journals including NOON, The Quarterly, New Letters, Caliban, Gettysburg Review, Alice Blue, Spork, New York Tyrant, and Phantasmagoria. He teaches at Century College in Minnesota.

Jason Lucarelli is a graduate of the MFA in Creative Writing program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. His work has appeared in Numéro Cinq, The Literarian, 3:AM Magazine, Litro, Squawk Back, and NANO Fiction.

Infiltrate: Fiction — Timothy Dugdale

Aug 092015

BENZEMA TURNED THE KEY and the big black frigate with wounded bumpers roared to life. Every car in town took its lumps. People drove wild, aggrieved at things beyond their understanding. Here comes The Duke was the prevailing attitude at the wheel.

It was a day of errands. Benzema was not enchanted by the agenda even though he knew he’d be splashing in the surf of Cuba’s best beach in two weeks if he succeeded with the item at the top of the bill. He had lost his citizenship card and it was impossible for him to renew his passport without the card. The immigration office had called the day before, announcing the arrival of a replacement card from some godforsaken piece of rock on the edge of Nova Scotia where they paid hillbillies to push paper for the government because there were no fish to catch nor coal in the mines. All he had to do was show up at the office and sign for the card.

After downing an espresso and a brandy at a local cafe on the way, Benzema trawled to the immigration office, a low-slung gray bunker in an industrial park. The lot was almost full. Just inside the door was a ticket machine and he took a number. He cast a wary eye over the room and its steerage rabble, all come to the True White North. Benzema was no blue blood and he knew it. His people were Dutch drunks who farmed for a a few generations and then moved into the factories. His wife came from a line of scoundrels in Suriname including a dodgy mortician who was not beyond grave-robbing for profit. A coffin in the ground by noon would be back on the showroom floor the next day by noon. Benzema folded himself into a seat at the end of a row of orange plastic chairs, closest to the wickets. There were three wickets open, one large one and two smaller ones. The churn seemed pretty good. People were smiling, even the Chinese clan fussing with a folder of paperwork.

But after twenty minutes, one of the wickets shut. Ten minutes later, another one shut. No more churn. No more smiles in the room. All eyes drifted to the wicket that was open. Three women in full length burkas were seated in front of the counter. Off to the side was a young man intensely watching the women. A swarthy middle-aged man in a ratty sport coat was saying something to the big lady behind the counter. At one time, she might have been a biker’s mama, she had that hard-bitten look. She probably had some tats, thought Benzema, perhaps a rose over her tit that was now a full vine. Whatever abuse she had to take was long gone because now she had this iron-clad sinecure. She was behind a choice piece of glass, not unlike one at a zoo, looking into a pen.

“Sir, I’m going to say it one more time. He’s not coming into Canada. Your daughter’s fiance has three convictions. And he is on not one but two lists,” she said, her voice made tinny by the microphone.

The man leaned his shiny dome into the wicket and shouted, “But the wedding is planned.”

The woman let out a little chuckle. “Go ahead with the wedding, have a big one, but it’s not going to happen in Canada.”

“My daughter… I have guaranteed…everything is set with his family.”

Aha, thought Benzema, a deal. But what could be the deal? Money. Perhaps. Not this man’s money. No, it had to be a passport and his daughter, his daughter’s virgin fresh self, ensured by his son, the appointed protector of the collateral. That’s the deal, thought Benzema, he was sure of it, a deal probably made while the groom and the bride were still growing in other wombs. Some people run swindles with coffins, other people run swindles with wombs. It’s a jungle, a zoo.

The woman in the middle chair said something to her father. The man frowned and muttered a retort. The young man turned up his scowl a notch.

“What I’m telling you, sir, is that your daughter can marry this guy anywhere she likes and they can live anywhere they like. Just not in Canada.”

“Where are these lists? Show me these lists.”

“Sir, you’re going to have to contact the minister in Ottawa. We only have the information that they send us.” The microphone clicked off with a squelch of finality.

All three of the women had started weeping openly. The young man, leaning against the edge of the wicket, never took his eyes off them. As Benzema was watching this stalemate, he noticed that the reedy black man in an immaculate suit seated across from him had also taken an interest in the show. At first the man only glanced over but then his expression changed, as if he recognized a foul odour, like a Frenchman sniffing a bad cheese. Now the black man was not just watching. He was glowering. On one of his cheeks was a raised scar and his eyes were bloodshot daggers. He glanced at Benzema. Benzema cocked a brow that the man must have read as both solidarity and license. He stood up and moved to the counter.

“Excuse me, ma’am” he said loudly to the woman behind the glass. His accent was British.

“Can you tell me when you will have more personnel?” He waved his arm out over the room.

“Many of us have things to do.”

“Sir,” the woman said brightly, “everyone is on break but will be back. Please be patient.”

The black man nodded towards the crew at the wicket. “Ma’am, I have been patient. You have been patient. Now please send these people on their way.”

Benzema glanced around. What was happening was lost on the room. “Sir, someone will be with you soon. You have your number.”

The black man exploded. “I will not sit down. I have been sitting down. I’m finished sitting down. This country must not sit down!” He pointed at the father. “You will not infiltrate.” And then he pointed at the women on the chairs. “And you, you will not breed.” He turned and sauntered away in dignified pique.

The woman behind the glass lumbered to her feet and followed him with her eyes. Benzema could see her head nodding ever so slightly. She descended into her chair, shimmying the carapace of her bosum. Her microphone crackled. “Number 78, please, number 78, you’re next.” Benzema glanced at his ticket and stood up. He stepped towards the counter, the trio of women in black and their keepers still implacable.

—Timothy Dugdale

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Timothy Dugdale is a veteran copywriter and brand manager. He writes existential novellas and poetry as well (http://dugdale.atomicquill.com). He records electronic music as Stirling Noh (http://noh.atomicquill.com)

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Restlessness: Poems — Louise Bak

Aug 082015

Restlessness

air smell washed, sidewalk’s shipping crate’s uncollected newspaper’s
high-ranking officials. a forecourt photo’s tousled abbey blouse in the
cart’s overstretched stocking of uncollected tea. a news portal’s picked
out simpler juk syun for “disgusting,” zip maai, broke up with slowed
forward, fingers indenting flat yoke of a dress, at palm molding’s atta,
at x eyes, worsted on lops around its hem. 5:15 a.m. cheep from leaf-
crumbled clump, green “pass” certificate more rigidly vertical than a
sandwich board’s “destiny reform” skill. stripped up sleeve as part of
sock runs down from knee, wind’s whup of glass panel set in wall, at
a cricket in a see-through tube, crosses into wet dab of cotton, where
it drinks. glancing across small hexagonal mirrors, i-ching coins, the
dry-pivot needle at centre of a diviner’s board, its line for north-south
dire, hooded by a lock charm. inscription of tian chang’s perpetuality

is worn, as waxing moon, flat-bottomed clouds rolled, when lurched
off, a watch’s claymore sword style hands, to inside of hand by egely
wheel, glass-boxed. surrounded with more of palm, sighed sensation
to clockwise flit, tensed legs respread at quavered turn, to more brisk
mincing on a redox ring. slid at fifth finger’s dip joint, cocked doubt-
fully, at contrition and defiance of a mayor, caught by cp24 reporter’s
“but … i … i …” appallingly told to newsroom, while uhn shrugged,
that atleast not toronto sensible, to pieds-à-terre towers underway, to
go up to 915 ft, perks of built-in speakers, forced-air heating, but the
scratches on some velux windows to overlook side elevation deemed
“those grandmas, thinned by the first week.” bumptious, timbre on ga
yull, to hurt the sale of units, remarking the walked direction at a few
khata scarves, that the ring musn’t stay on a finger without movement.

advancing warm front curdled the surface pitting of pomes, in swelter
formed within packages. separated husks of roasted watermelon seeds
from seizes of gold premolars, that handed over from long bus back, a
bottle’s semi-cola-colored water swished, bent stiffly, in heard versing
a younger generation’s “can give just 10 (or whatever) hours for free.”
by a stairwell’s tarpaulin, slither of alu foil paper, where the extension
ladder weighted it, leaking “hiraeth,” at blown sauveteur sticker, stuck
on cigarette butts on steps, to more metallic candy wrappers, cornering
the entrance. tpl tee still draped on boxes stacked against the wall, from
hardly picked detritus of a branch’s vhs titles. lust for life’s outstretched
razor on cobbled path, in static-lined chase. sticking drawer opened for
twist-tied villous amomum fruit, pericarps’ longitudinal cracks marked,
in which negatives were under such compression, that some coursed to

floor and off a bowl of liang pi’s starch paste formed at the bottom of it,
water risen to the top, cupped with a polymer note of 100 yuan, china’s
century temple on its backside dampened more, from lain on boxed rice
and in way of slammed gemel bottle, blots ambroxan, like pervading of
men’s aisles. tongue’s stagger to inside of cheek, to noodles-thickness as
a pen’s coating, braided and lashed on a table, without arresting forward
motion, ungained run skips. cordoned outside, steps’ cascading of blood,
after stabbed female, without vital signs taken to hospital, relayed by the
entering of road restrictions and area resurfacing on a keyboard. the okay
asked in writing, so it could be known what to be meted, while a queased
quiet, ambled crossing a tank’s sanddab. its maxillary reaching below the
anterior part of a lower eye, reported borne franticly, splashes from cloth.
bony ridge mid eyes, twained on one side, cam border’s hanged seriatum

zip maai, conceal, bury (Cantonese)
tian chang in phrase tian chang di jiu, everlasting
ga yull, (to add oil) – to cheer someone on by saying “go, go go”!
hiraeth, homesickness (Welsh)
liang pi, literally “cold skin,” a noodle like Chinese dish

Immuring

the red one-button gleaming in the semi-darkness, dropped with
the bracket. in her securing it on the chair, it thwacks blinking at
the half rail. taps at the concentrated liner, melted down a corner
of an eye, on a faint swelling at the lateral canthus. she stretches
from scoop neck to roomy sleeve, for the pressured itch, finding
bands of smooth skin in the sanitized blandness. reaching for the
blouson sweatshirt, she pulls it towards her, making it taut at the
neck hole, only to have it weighted like grain jar with ruyi heads,
while its endless knots circling its shoulder nears temporal ridge,
she feels an overall push outwards, to waist ties undone with the
raglan flopped. uncrumpling the sweatshirt to its inset, the mesh
with garlands surrounded by gimps, that’d go across the sides of
arms is more torn to the “sashou” with the scrape on outer thigh,
red-anemone shaped, punctate with black-blue dots, lappet at its
margin. fingers oilier from being rubbed together to pressing for

the bandeau. the upended nip of elastane, rather the snapping up
just under her sturnum, she sees a girl with a long lilac fringe on
the side of her short hair, who retrieves the arcuate bottom glued
scoop, on the bed lined on the other side of the hallway. tugging
on its pre-assembled paper to a convexity with fried oil luctance,
“pmt 5 worstever” said so dryly, with the anodyne account of the
1 baked potato = fist, heard to her more earnest. a turn diagonally
with pulling at integrated thumb hole, few inches along the index
comes away like a puberlous stipe. smarting in the dark garment,
clasped at its upper medium area, the rest of it bunched at her left
underarm. drawing her cheeks back, so that her lips aren’t smiling
to gingival tissue, correspondingly shaped to upper lip’s overlying
skin, slightly tender, seeing the setting off toward the stray ribbon
and the barge on its positioned “gewt,” close together in iridescent
spring pea. the moving the wrist downward while facing the palm,

while an aide steps from a room ahead of her, fidgeting with a slot
behind the finger tab of a magazine holder. the wrist leaned across
the lovatt’s crossword section at the extra page holder. chain marks
blanchable are indicated and got from the sculpey of kagura, while
there’s the turning to a subsequent page, murmuring at just 9 down,
hued “thicko,” old au pair from latvia. a reproving riffle, in tucking
fingers down, but the index raised, to the flexing of airy fabric with
its full 66” sweep, the right arm craned over head, at the reinforced
twill tape, sliding from the slumped bustle, byakuei’s aching crenate
without let-down, voicing “schutt.” a sidelong glance at her leaning
her torso back on a forearm, her knees drawn toward her chest, as if
a pealing heart. edges of the cabinetwork’s minimal nursing supplies
appears with iritis shadows, brief jerks like the contractile tails of t4
bacteriophage, mnemic length-wise pieces of polygonatum rhizome
in the clip note organizer, separated from the receipts and the mom-

and pop cards, with sections like actions, indications and symptoms
adhoc staffed minutes, sturdied fingered extended ketai strap with a
orbicular rehmannia. lined with irregular transverse curves, pressed
to dust grains fluorescing in a pallor, in a tachyonic stretch, neurons
misfiring, radiations on cell membranes, vacuity breakpoints, while
suddenly, a mid-sentence sprung, smoky of “no uniforms -no flags –
and no medals when we are brave.” sheets stripped back, feeling the
blue scalloped thread design of the blanket, from the inside surfaces
of her knees to shoulders drawn together, head and chest lifted, half-
seating to the set back tightened sound that you’ll get out in about an
hour. inclining to discern, there’s a shot where a barer dietrich arrives
at a small sand rise, taking the rope around a donkey’s neck from one
of the other women. they slowly disappear down the other side, while
her eyes closes in on rouched detailing of her faint teal bra, crammed
between a lady palm and greeting cards also on the footwall. glancing

on the evenness of the vct flooring, the aide carrying a folder moves it
in pulling some dented drop solution from a side pocket, grappling the
other, with brows relaxed but slightly raised, that something’s missing.
striding a step back from the door’s frame, she states “get ready to go,”
sweeping her hand about, to straightening the notice, with its phase of
reorganization, often going on for years -mumbles “shmeed’s charger,”
in turning back. leaning the back strap on the legwarmer, its gunmetal
studs, to the desquamation of her lips, pressed back from the kneaded,
slack of under stomach. the flyby of striped nylon brace, the half of its
clasp’s edges, pushed askance, shortly injected upon left scaphoid fold.
crawling on the reticulate wrinkles of psoralea seeds, said to be able to
expand coronary arteries, while scattered in the rattan chair, light, open
vine stitches of the glove’s pom pom, straight-cut, speckled with pieces
of soft root. rushed from from the double-handled herb knife, the straps
fallen of undershirt, in leaning in toward her of mimosa bark, clasped at

her wrist, used for hundreds of years to soothe emotions. tenebrous, the
bands on each nail on the right, slipped over to the left, curled at the top
edge of the package’s knobby contents, balanced on the outside edge of
left inset, shy of exaggerated frill running at sleeve hem, in the apology
for being so juk maa, fil coupé detail of a looped bow, reddened filmily,
wrackful, like a psc cloud. a leaflet is jounced with her grieved sling of
blue slippers. looking up, lumbering with the identification bracelet and
the emitted “erdbeer” on the gauze compress over a cart, pausing by the
wall to watch that she isn’t on her way back. the dull coated paper seems
malleable in her unfurling, as if it was creased and folded numerously to
a hexagonal star, from its starting in a zig zag. hearing the shuffle of one
just assigned and leaving a room, the “bleats” from the oversized pencil,
halting like it’d take an hour to go down the lines just for her coordinates.
“cuttings,” “smears,” scanned in an order that could only be hers, before
mottled burgundy “smaug,” at the afterward’s “statistically insignificant.”

sashou, trifling, little (Japanese)
kagura, the heroine of the story Ga-rei, who controls byakuei, a white dragon, from the seal on her back and a long chain that connects her soul to his. any damage the dragon receives also damages her as well.
schutt, rubbish, debris (German)
juk maa, disgusting, ugly (Cantonese)
erdbeer, strawberry (German)

Whine

arm clutched higher on side of a lecturn, with hand hung from
tickling midst yarn of a balloon, mylar airship drifted, stopped
when bumped at start of greimas square’s actants of turdsinker
squeezed in larynx, where it opponent chalked, whoudi, while
slumping far over opened textbook’s bragg lines on a brillouin
lattice that shoulders rose above, jerked wheeze, flicking over
by cover edges more bumped to a division house, age spots in
outer margin. dripped from choana, greyish gob pliable across
but not obscuring a few words, liquid of eyes knotted, bai zhu
it can’t be helped demurred. pitch in seat, rounded tip end of a

pencil stilled, midscratch forearm. bled hazed “sus,” glancing
up, as if raisiny touch like kokuto, poster’s headphoned pullip
arm’s seaming of differing lace swung. “datu thing is,” began
as inadequate breath, to a louder “moe,” at hiki-room’s hetalia
kite, peeled neath cos-hop conveyed with cresset points, burst
in stamp shaped seal pricks on sternum, dessicated coconut of
candy listed, where scratched inkless, stratus clouds’ openings.
tap of calendar, masses of ink caps, darker in stems’ exudance
as squared cat’s eye glasses stared at space mid desks’ smocks
tiered, vacuumformed armor. briskly pitched 1” pin button of

“i ❤ terror” with lagged tacks by marks of dupe opi polish on
front of shirt. stood at desk frame’s epoxy coated tubing, with
lean where knee and end of pant straight, meager grinned are
you sure you want to do this? fingers halfway in open face of
metallic getup up wagged, peered in eyelid twitches adjusted
as calla lily bead cap repinned in false moustache’s tip pulled
down more, below end of lip on side of turned strides. quake
wirier beneath nose, rubbed and shook of head, in three time
rows, as “tha fat” lapped by “loid,” neared third in umbonate
cut, stood over encamped amoeba table’s inaba rabbit mask’s

painted acrylic scraped, from couldn’t help it slaps of umami
bag, cranium’s gold crown cake topper. gruff uptick of don’t
deserve to be around. seated closed fist with balalala craned
had already coursed past hand’s wound-up ovals, contracted
to hip pocket’s water caltrop hitting casing of cell, rearward
spun, while pustule more pressurized below lips, pressed on
poly bag’s several spine creases of chew comic. cover’s kind
of cyber-luchadore rooster, got free at some clothing $6 bag
bag wednesday. indentation at faceplated crest, palm facing
just short of straight up, el santo y blue demon hood’s luster

midst mid-weight socks, puckeringly sour chaw of suan mei
at back of throat. brass stamping of belt buckles declivity at
upper back, photo of burnout jersey back of vest, press-stud
detail at collar, shoulder hair like straggly cat ear flaps, with
having been wbv patter. haste of next posted image, drag of
drop sleeve of jumper, pregnant-looking temp, as girl across
two way rack of joggers, pointed beneath elbow pit, shirttail
hem wrenched, chewed breccia-hued gelate, flim of kleenex
tossed , its lower cursive on-wee dabbed, as bandage square
unasked of why she had such, muffled breaking wind thuds

in steps, as elasticated side of plimsoll pulled, kicked out in
cotton of polo shirts. sections arranged by apparel type with
halting mid-colors of glassed re-ment minis, several sprouts
on teapot and croquembouche’s thin threads, finding cordial
lined, implying pieced together, gone to several-days-starch
syruped haws, glister from tug of coated skin, teeth motions
on sides of zipper match ups in good condition, as shuffling
over sesame rong bag, stacked heel bumped on loose pieces
of gravel, from snagging of display shelves. quickly dashed
left choppings of peanut coating, snagged mǎzai crag gooed

shudders, arched lower back up, felt droop of harness vest’s
block shaped hood, repeated with waist traced rotating from
right to left, in circular motions. screwed round gaze, string
lit near tang suit hat on banh tiêus, layout of silk’s longevity
signs with panels of vinyl’s printed mesembs, sections hand
sewn, moments of even stitches midst “you closing eyes in
that photo? can never tell with you,” inattention settings on
their over/under offs. shirt’s shawl collar of pliable tissue in
dragon garland wouldn’t pass muster, pulling a voucher out
of handbag’s packets of dispensed kari-out lady, as twisted

red cloth of cord hurtled, dimmed sockets whined, to wave
of arm ended wagged in air, turned at window’s scrabbling
with a paw at fur missing half-way up a cat’s torso. noticed
too at base of tail, disappearing to tetra pak bottle’s caramel
shake shell, slanting neck’s dipping of angostura in a shrub,
limply dribbling, further extruded rings of cheez-it, judged
liquidy-ish sick down front column linen shirt. avoided the
ignoring eyes’ moving of oval hook clear plastic of glasses’
“either that,” to snagging on lego tie tack. golden laminate
bumps sped off ear of crooked sack cloth double crescents.

middle fingers crossed over, pointer fingers hunched overs
of random tut waded at nonpareil rack’s highschool jackets,
a sailor moon dress, by sparse “medic” smocks and apron’s
long neck tie unlaced from a tubular hanger’s holster garter
and tried out foam latex galaxina mask, stretched out, as in
mouth moved apart. grasped cotton drill by underline at its
knee, shook at upper its knee’s solid fibrefill, as the not too
ott lace at sides of male zentai suit left, it lain on bale of no
longer suitable for reuse. waist down to the vent area where
back of the thighs hitched lower body’s quality of miniscule

marquise galloons on card, with longdashed globe. pouter’s
heta uma at weight of breath near to bangle’s ballchain and
adhesive streaked, a cut more inside the edge of a glass tile
over wicking of donut bail’s not fabricated to be repeatedly
opened and closed on below ear hair, in press on square of
agloe, made-up map trap. adjustment of centring hold with
town labels, route lines, to pleated details on shoulder of a
shirt, lain in a used hide-a-bed’s straightening of three way
zip through crotch, in who else was looking and what was
being seen, smooths of agglomerated cork, willable sound

bai zhu, a chinese herb, with a rhizome clenched like a fist
kokuto, black sugar candy
moe, a slang term referring to the sexual attraction to idealized people
hikikomori, a social phenomenon, involving withdrawal, reclusive patterns of adolescents or adults in Japan
inaba, in Japanese mythology, there’s a tale of coming upon a rabbit stripped of its skin and crying. It was told it’d recover, by washing off in seawater, but doing so, things got worse
wbv, refers to weight-based victimization
mazai, chinese pastry made of strands of fried batter, with a sticky syrup, with historical associations, including “[I’d like to] kill that guy on the horse.”
zentai, a term for skin-tight garments that cover the entire body
heta uma, concept of bad technique, good sense (Japanese)

—Louise Bak

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Louise Bak is the author of Syzygy (DC Books), Tulpa (Coach House Books) and Gingko Kitchen (Coach House Books). She’s the co-host of Sex City, Toronto’s only radio show focused on intersections between sexuality and culture. She also curates/hosts a salon series called The Box, which encourages communication across literary and artistic borders.

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Trolling for the Fisher King: Starting in Gloucester — Paul Pines

Aug 072015

15th Cen. St. Brenden & The Stranded Whale, British Museum

There shines in us, though dimly in darkness, the life and the light
of man, a light which does not come from us, which however is in
us, and we must therefore find it within us.
Gerhard Dorn – Philosophia specuativa

“As the dead prey upon us,
they are the dead in ourselves,
awake, my sleeping ones, I cry out to you,
disentangle the nets of being!”
Charles Olson

1 – Pedrolino

WOKE THIS MORNING in the house where the poet Vincent Ferrini lived and wrote for decades, now the Gloucester Writers Center.August 17th, 2014, at 7:30 AM, newly risen light washes purple drawstring shades, which I keep half-shut. Perched on the shoulder of East Maine Street, a two lane coastal road that runs between downtown Gloucester and Rocky Neck, traffic up and down the hill sets up a constant rush of sound. The front door opens on a gas station/ convenience store at the far side of a parking lot. In back workmen level ground to pave a narrow alley. People walk close to the windows. There’s a small kitchen at one end, and a bathroom off the main room. I’ll be the poet-in-residence here for a week, which ends with a reading from my latest collection, Fishing On The Pole Star.

Last night, after a chicken/vegetable stir-fry dinner, I turned on the overhead fan, moved a lamp to the side of the vintage pull-out bed and perused a book case lining the wall stacked with copies of Vincent’s collection, Know Fish. Among them I found a copy of Charles Olsen’s Collected Works and fell asleep reading his signature poem, “The Kingfishers.” This morning I dimly remember a dream in which I’m standing in a rowboat fishing from the stern with a child’s rig. I understand the implication that I am still developing as a fisherman, but have no doubt that knowing fish has brought me here.

Framed poems hang on white walls beside images of Ferrini and his friend, larger than life poet Charles Olson, who mythologized Gloucester as Joyce did Dublin. Standing 6’8”, aka Maximus, and former rector of Black Mountain College, Olson played a major role in the dynamic changes that drove mid-20th Century American poetry. Ferrini appears small beside him, but no less haunting.

Vincent Ferrini, (monoprint) by Jain Tarnower @ The Gloucester Writers Center

I work on a table facing a print of Ferrini outlined in white on a black field—an image dominated by his white face and hands. He wears a domed hat, like a novitiate in an obscure Italian order, but might as easily be Pedrolino, the moon-faced dreamer out of the comedia dell’arte. His smile is enigmatic. It reads like a confidence, an intimate whisper in my ear: Pay no attention to what is going on outside and around you. Do as I did. Listen for what comes through the inner doors and windows.

I follow the instruction, submit to the inner sensorium.

What enters is as much shape as sound, ideas like iron filings on a magnetic field. The field becomes an ocean, the magnet a star. Fish swim below or break the surface. Constellations in space dance without touching. This ghost in the room I think of as Pedrolino has awakened a ghost in me. I see myself standing beside Amfortas, the Fisher King, in the Pole Star watching a king fisher dive. How did Amfortas end up in my boat, both of us in the stern waiting for Parzival or his equivalent? Olson’s poem, “King Fishers,” which influenced me as a young poet, has set up an inexorable call to the obsession of my later years, the wounded Fisher King!

Amfortas drops his line next to mine, and with it the orderly content of my inner world breaks down. I can’t predict what will emerge from this matrix, what looks like a massa confusa, but is possibly the first stage of important work.

Pedrolino nods.

“Yes,” I tell him. “I accept.”

I’ll take the risk, go where the currents lead. I am a navigator with faulty maps and a ragged compass. But there is a mystery on the tip of my tongue waiting to be revealed, a series of linkages I had not suspected before that will pull valuable information out of the shadows into the light of day—if only I will engage the journey.

Pedrolino is pleased. His smile deepens.

I let him know that in addition to my reading I will give a talk, because the title just popped into my head like a mackerel: “Trolling With The Fisher King.”

That is, after all, what this about. Whether alone in the boat, or with Amfortas trailing in Charles Olson’s wake, fishing is what connects us. It is as though now all three of us were working the same line after the catch we were all hoping for—the wisdom that whispers, “What wounded thee will make thee whole.”

I email my host Henry, old Ferrini’s nephew, proposing the talk and its title and suggest it immediately follow my reading.

Almost instantly, I get a reply: “You’re on!”

Pedrolino likes this.

2 – Spreading the Net

The Fisher King figure in its present form appears prominently in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s 13^th Century epic, Parzival, set in a landscape devastated by war. Armies returning from the Crusades, and mercenaries hired by expansionist nation-states, have pillaged the countryside. Against this backdrop, knights governed by the archaic laws of chivalry kill each other in the name of love and honor, leaving a trail of widows and fatherless children in their wake. Parzival’s mother, stricken by the loss of her heroic husband, takes their son into the woods vowing he will not perish in this way. She raises Parzival in a state of nature ignorant of his lineage and his real name, which means piercing through. One day at an age when most young men leave home, he sees a brace of knights in armor riding through the woods and mistakes them in their shining armor for gods. Parzival follows them to King Arthur’s court, where he gains entry by killing the Red Knight who blocks the entrance with a lucky throw of his lance through the eye-slit in the seasoned warrior’s helmet. Still innocent (unconscious) but triumphant, the fledgling sets out to prove himself, and becomes what his mother feared most, a man who kills in the name of love and honor.

Riding past a lake one evening at dusk Parzival spies a man fishing from a dingy who directs him to a castle where he can spend the night. He doesn’t recognize that the fisherman is Amfortas (without strength), keeper of the Grail. Under the banner of AMOR, Amfortas killed a Saracen warrior in single combat, and ever since that time has carried a piece of the Infidel’s lance in his groin. Because his pain is greatest in the presence of the Grail, Amfortas can no longer function as Grail Keeper. He now sits with a line in the water to ease his pain waiting for one pure in heart to ask the question that heals his wound, and restore the Waste Land.

In some versions, the question is, “Whom does the Grail serve?” in others, “What ails thee?”

The innocent (unconscious) Parzival doesn’t recognize himself as the one for whom Amfortas and all attendant on the Grail are waiting.He follows directions to the Castle and is welcomed by attendants who bathe and dress him. In the Great Hall he witnesses the procession of the Grail that once held Christ’s blood, and the lance used by the Roman soldier Longinus to pierce His side. Joseph of Arimathea, who prepared Jesus for burial was said to have brought these sacred objects to England.

Galahad, Bors, and Percival achieve the Grail. Tapestry woven by Morris & Co.. Wool and silk on cotton warp, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery

From his divan in the Great Hall, Parzival watches robed acolytes parade with the spear that pierced Christ’s side. After this another set of acolytes carry the Grail, which fills the tankards, bowls, goblets, trenchers, platters and baskets with all manner of delicacies, from fowl, and mutton to cheeses, fruits, breads and wine until everyone at the banquet is provided for. There appears to be no limit to what nourishment the Grail can bestow. In the right hands, such abundance might feed the world.Seated across from him Amfortas writhes in pain waiting to hear the question that will deliver him. But Parzival has been taught that it’s impolite for a guest to question his host, and so he fails to ask the question. He wakes next morning to find the Castle empty except for spectral voices jeering from the battlements. The drawbridge slams shut behind him. Slowly, it dawns on Parzival that he has failed to recognize this opportunity.

It’s a bitter pill.

All of his assumptions, the received wisdom given by those in authority, dissolve in the first light of consciousness. He will spend the next twenty years wrestling with this failure. In the end, confronting his own wounded pride, he is able to “pierce through” to the recognition of his true identity as heir in that lineage as Grail Keeper.

Two details must be noted: after recognizing his role, Parzival rejoins his wife in true union, a Holy Marriage (heiros gamos); and, finally, he encounters his dark brother, Fierfize, (piebald), the son their father, Gahmuret, sired with the black Moorish Queen Belcane, in the North African Kingdom of Zazamanc, on his way home from the Crusades. Concealed by their armor, they face off without knowing the identity of the other. Just before delivering the death blow Parzival sees his brother’s face free of the helmet, recognizes him, and the once embattled knights embrace.It begins as a reprise of the battle in which Amfortas was wounded, and ends with a resolution. Parzival welcomes his dark Muslim brother as a part of himself. He can heal the wounded Fisher King by asking the question which he now embodies. Amfortas, free from pain, dies in peace. may be a cipher and a prescription for our own time..

3- Mare Nostrum

The reading at the Gloucester Center for Writing from Fishing On The Polestar is scheduled for later this week. The poems record my experience trolling the out islands of the Bahamas, exploring obscure inlets, crossing the section between Eleuthera and Columbus Point known as “the tongue of the ocean.”

What would the tongue of the ocean say if it could speak?

I recall last night’s dream, and reel it up from my store of memories.

As a child I hooked crappies (small sunfish) in Prospect Park. In the 70s , I hauled in snapper on a hand-line from a dugout off the coast of Belize. Later, I trolled for bill fish in a 42’ Bertram from Ft. Lauderdale to Crooked Island. In time it dawned on me that as a poet and psychotherapist drawn to the unconscious, my lures were set to bring up something concealed in my own depths. I have come to understand the Fisher King wound and why a line in the water brings relief.

Olson’s Collected Works lies on my bed open to “The Kingfishers”. I read: What does not change / is the will to change…

He woke, fully clothed, in his bed. He
Remembered only one thing, the birds, how
When he came in, he had gone around the rooms
And got them back into their cage, the green one first,
She with the bad leg, and then the blue,
The one they had hoped was a male.

Since the poem was published in 1949, no one has been able to give “The Kingfishers” a definitive reading. Those who engage it are drawn or repelled; few are indifferent to its movement. Some critics call it a dreamscape, and there is reason to treat it as such. Others cite it primarily as a response to post-Holocaust trauma.But what’s most haunting about it is less historical than psychological. “The Kingfishers” occupies a limbic space, that threshold between sleeping and waking where the conscious and unconscious are open to each other. This is also where we locate the Grail Castle that appears and disappears, a quantum space beyond fixed coordinates. Here, Charles Olson drops his lures.

Dialogue at Five (Provincetown) – Herman Maril

Lines from “The Kingfishers” float through dream-time into morning light trailing brightly colored green and blue feathers from two caged birds. Still in bed, I hear seagulls outside squawk and cry. Sea-birds have trailed in my wake for hundreds of miles, like my golondrina. As a merchant seaman crossing the Pacific I watched a tiny swallow hitch a ride from the Golden Gate to Subic Bay on our United Fruit ship. Even through the roughest storms. When I thought it had been blown away, there it was the next morning perched on a boom. Long after I returned from the South China Sea, the swallow haunts me. Like Olson’s kingfishers, my golondrina, exists as an ache in the present—an unhealed wound.

I follow my ghost bird into the poem.

Neither “The Kingfishers” nor the Fisher King is primarily concerned with the act of fishing, but each links deeply wounded cultures, lacking coherence, to fishermen, fish and fishing birds. A lost but crucial piece of psyche must be restored. I fish for the clue in Olson’s paradox: everything changes but the will to change.

What is the lure attached to this line?

Wayne Atherton – Mounting The Bounty

It isn’t change that carries the charge, but the “changeless will,” and what that implies.We are drawn to what is concealed in changeless will. Calculations will not reveal it. Otherwise discourse—words, ideas and numbers alone would heal the Fisher King wound.Better to follow the kingfisher into limbic space, watch it circle, dive, and emerge with a fish in its beak. Reason will not tell us what lies beyond it, like the sublime—or how to locate “changeless will” in the wound, the fisherman, or the fish.

Better to follow a ghost bird.

4 – Fixing the Colors

Olson’s narrator wakes fully clothed from a dream. Seated at my computer, under Pedrolino’s watchful eye, I recall that seabirds following a school will mirror the behavior of the fish, then feel a tug, rock back and forth as if I were in the fighting chair. What I bring to light surprises me, a dream fragment from last night. I enter a room where people dressed in blue and green are waiting to hear my talk, “Trolling with the Fisher King”. Olson’s birds are blue and green. This is not insignificant. He quotes 16th Century Belgian alchemist/psychologist Gerhard Dorn: “Color/ is the evidence of truth.”

I agree. Color is important.

As an eight-year-old fishing for crappies in Prospect Park, I watch my cork bob on a bed of light that splinters when the float sinks. As I reel in a sunfish, brightness falls from the air (a line James Joyce borrowed from Thomas Nash). The brilliance of its scales fires my imagination. These sparks are evidence of an underwater rainbow I might pull up whole as all those other kids marvel. It will give me super powers, change my life by calling forth the power inside of me.

Years later, at sixteen, reading Freud’s Future of an Illusion, I understand that fishing my dreams is more likely to yield that life-changing catch. The flashes of color I glimpsed as a child were aspects of myself yet to be identified.I’m still waiting for a vision to break the surface like a marlin.

“Color…fixes the statement,” (Olson via Dorn).

What shall I say about “The Kingfishers” to my dream audience in kingfisher colors?

“We trail lines defined by the color of our lures.”

Sun, Arthur Dove, the Smithsonian

The first thing Olson does in “The Kingfishers” is to pluck color from dream-water, the green female bird “with the bad leg,” and the blue male returned to their cage by someone named Fernand who “ had talked lispingly of Albers & Angkor Vat,” and subsequently leaves the party that is taking place…

When I saw him he was at the door, but it did not matter,
he was already sliding along the wall of the night, losing
himself
in some crack of the ruins. That it should have been he
who said, “The Kingfishers!
who cares
for their feathers
now?”

Fernand dissolves like a shadow in “some crack of the ruins.” He points to what we otherwise can’t see, and seeing, turn away. No wonder the poet regrets that it should have been Fernand who poses the question: who cares? The shadow’s voice, peripheral to awareness,delivers a message that draws us down, even as it hangs in the air like an accusation. The poet wishes the question had been his to ask.

Parzival also begs the question; the part of him that would ask it remains buried in his split-off shadow. He must become fully conscious to ask the healing question: What ails thee?

Fernand’s question points to, rather than discloses the disconnection, and so rings both as desperate and ironic: Who cares?

Outraged, Olson raises a more pressing question: Who is Fernand anyway, this shadow that speaks what must be said, then vanishes, leaving behind him a cloud of regret? Fernand’s question, “Who cares?” exists as a statement yet to be understood by those at the party, including the poet.This Post-Parzival situation finds us in stagnant waters.

Bright blue and green sparks in the kingfisher feathers at the opening of the poem disappear into the rapidly deteriorating natural world. Observing from the shadow’s point of view, Fernand comments.

His last words had been, “The pool is slime.” Suddenly everyone,
ceasing their talk, sat in a row around him, watched
they did not so much hear, or pay attention, they
wondered, looked at each other, smirked, but listened,
he repeated and repeated, could not go beyond his thought
“The pool the kingfisher’ feathers were wealth why
Did the export stop?”

Those at the gathering are confronted with the degraded pool at their center, evidence of unconsciousness. They are unmoved, look but don’t see, listen but don’t hear—remain in a peculiar state of indifference, partying in a Waste Land. Part one of “The King Fishers” ends here, with Fernand’s unanswered question.

It was then he left.

5 – Consciousness / The Wound

How did we become deaf to the voice that reminds us to wake up? Mother earth calls from the depths, warns us to pay attention. This was the purpose of the Great Mysteries. The Dying and Reviving Gods like Tammuz, Dionysus, Attis, Adonis, Ba’al and Jesus demand we remain conscious. Their myths and ceremonies of wounding and healing model the birth, death and resurrection of consciousness, a transformative experience open to those who understand it. In her study The Language of the Goddess (1989), Marija Gimbutas points out that wine and bread were revered as sacraments in Neolithic cultures because they represented the inherent potential for transformation produced by fermentation and yeast. Early Egyptians drank beer and tasted Osiris wafers to partake of an eternal blood and body. The Pyramid Text, dating back to the 5th Dynasty (2,400 BCE), instructs the king to rise from his tomb

Take your head, collect your bones,
Gather your limbs, shake the earth from your flesh!
Take your bread that rots not, your beer that sours not…

Unnamed, Matt Daly

The same text, perhaps the world’s earliest known religious document, records the worship of Osiris, Egyptian lord of the Underworld. Depicted with green skin, a pharaonic beard and ostrich feathers on either side of a conical crown in later hieroglyphs, Osiris is the poster boy for death and resurrection. Dismembered by his jealous brother, Seth, and re/membered by his sister/wife, Isis, Osiris knits worlds above and below into a seamless whole, just as the wounded Fisher King embodies the potential to restore the Waste Land. But there is a shift in this mythos between Dynasty V and the 12 Century AD, and again into our Post-Internet culture. The drama is no longer the provenance of the Gods. The transformation requires human participation. Parzival must become conscious of his own wound before he can heal Amfortas and accomplish his mission.

We are dealing in symbolic terms with human development, the ordeal through which split off material in the unconscious is brought to light and integrated. Carl Jung found in Alchemy a compelling description of transformation applicable to the totality of the psyche. For him, the writing of adepts like Gerhard Dorn revealed in symbolic language the relationship of the unconscious to the conscious as the agent of psychological transformation. Jung recognized in Alchemy an intuitive iteration of Psyche’s drive to realize itself. Olson also quotes Dorn suggestively: “Color is important.”

Combat, Marc Shanker

The Alchemical Work broadly speaking unfolds in four stages, the first of which is a condition of decay, the “blackening” known to practitioners as nigredo. It is analogous to the initial wounding, the early call of the unconscious to become conscious. Olson’s poem locates it in Fernand’s recognition of the pool become slime. He points it out to those gathered but no one hears him. Only when there is some acknowledgment of the condition can the Work move on to stages known by their colors, white, yellow and the reddening, rubedo. Here, the transformation is realized in the body of the “Philosopher’s Stone”, or as Parzival beholds it, the lapis exilies, another name for The Holy Grail.

Olson’s poem can be read as the search for materials in anticipation of the Alchemical Work, which is increasingly difficult as we are blinded by distractions. Psyche’s drive toward transformation, the hidden telos in Olson’s “will to change,” calls out to us. His poem, “The King Fishers” is an attempt to hear it, a plea for us to open our ears or suffer the consequences. Riding the stern of his work, feathered lures in the water, I see Charles Olson become the Fisher King. It’s not the nigredo alone he fears, but that he (we) will get stuck in it, and stay that way—trapped in

a state between
the origin and
the end, between
birth and the beginning of
another fetid nest

Phylogeny recapitulates ontogeny: the principle states that each of us in our development recapitulates the evolution of the species, and possibly the entire universe, from chaos to cosmos. If true, there is a moment when that movement becomes conscious of itself, a shift (or fall) from undifferentiated “time before time” into time as we experience it—antiphonal, polarized, and fleeting. In a number of myths, the creation of cosmos from chaos involves horrific violence, a wounding and dismembering that becomes embedded in nature.

For the Aztecs creation begins with a many armed female monster, a hungry mouth at the juncture of each arm. In this myth, the agents of “the will to change”, Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca, become serpents, wrap themselves around the insatiable matrix and twist until she comes apart. From her parts they construct the ordered world which remembers the pain and exacts tribute in blood. Sumerian hero-god Marduk does the same to the complaining sea-serpent Ti’amat. The mother of us all, pre-conscious chaos incarnate, must be torn apart. This process, essential to creating and sustaining order, also produces the consciousness that re/members that pain.

The wound requires appeasing. Host cultures enacted blood rituals of reparation to a matrix that might exact revenge if disregarded. If we forget or cease to feel the pain inherent in becoming conscious, degradation of the psychological and natural worlds follow as surely as slime on the pool. Numbed and disconnected, we dismiss Fernand’s warning, whisperings from the shadow in the wings.

Kingfisher hovering, Royal Society for the Protection of Birds

6 – Re/member Me

In Greek mythology the wind god, Aeolus, intervenes when his daughter Halcyon attempts to follow her mortal husband drowns in a storm. Aeolus prevails on Zeus to turn them into birds. Zeus does this, but requires that she nest on the shore for two weeks in mid-January ever year during which he stays the waves and winds to let her young hatch in safety. These become known as Halcyon Days; we know these birds as kingfishers.

It is true, it does nest with the opening year, but not on the waters.
It nests at the end of a tunnel bored by itself in a bank. There,
six or eight white and translucent eggs are laid, on fishbones
not on bare clay, on bones thrown up in pellets by the birds.

I have observed riverine kingfishers nesting in the muddy banks of the Sibun River in Belize. We steered our canoe through an uncharted stretch that flowed between the Pine Ridge and jungle low-lands. I noted anhinga, heron, hummingbird and toucan—among other exotic avian life—but the kingfishers where most memorable. They darted in and out of tunnels in which they built their nests. I think of them as I read Olson’s description of that process, how they construct those nests of decomposed fish bones—evidence of which was visible and odiferous as I passed them on the river bank.

Mostly it was the sea-birds I followed.

Hieroglyph Swallow, a.frostly.com

E.H. Gombrich tells us in his Little History of the World: “If you want to know where Egypt is, I suggest you ask a swallow.” That’s where they fly every autumn, over the Alps to Italy, across the sea, to the Nile valley. My golondrina: the swallow, for centuries the talisman of seamen—square riggers manned by seamen with barn swallow tattoos on their arms and chests. The swallow delivered a lost sailor’s soul safely to the Underworld. A Pharaoh tells us in the Pyramid Texts he has “gone to the great island in the midst of the Field of Offerings on which the swallow gods alight; the swallows are the imperishable stars.”

Poems in my book, Fishing On The Pole Star, describe birds circling or diving into weeds banked on shoals where small fish are feeding, larger ones under them, and at the bottom tier great creatures with silver fins that break the surface, incarnate beams of light. Aloft on the tuna tower of our boat, a small seat on top of a ten foot ladder rising from our bridge, I admired the weave of worlds from Bimini to the Planas. For years the sun drenched waters appeared to be as they had always been. Then the veil fell from my eyes. I’d been like those Fernand addressed at the pool-party, unaware of the slime.

The Waste Land referred to in Parzival, and revived as a theme by T.S. Eliot, links the mythic to the ecological narrative. The state of the physical world is a reflection of the psychological one in which we live. Our willingness to read and understand it depends on our ability to tolerate the pain in that recognition, and our desire to heal it.

Changes in Bahamian and Caribbean waters have been incremental, but can be measured in bleached reefs, diminishing schools of tuna, the paucity of local catch, and marlin moving further south to Piñas Bay. Sea birds—cormorant, frigate, pelican, heron, and kingfisher—that dive with satellite precision, are the unifying connection of above to below. What becomes of them as the fish populations dwindle? “Who cares for their feathers now?”

Changes in temperature provide a breeding ground for stinging mites that make it impossible to swim in certain locations without a wet suit.

Cays with white sand beaches that held no footprint are now virtual stages where Bahamians set up a fake village for Holland American Line cruise ships, where tourists buy folk art, drink rum punch, and dance to a reggae band before cruising on, unaware they’ve been in Disneyland. It might’ve been a protected beach for halcyon birds to hatch their eggs, but who can protect them from cruise ships?

We’ve come a long way from the Pharaoh’s great island tenanted by imperishable sparrows. All assumptions about endlessly resilient Mother Nature are no longer tenable. NASA photos reveal we live on a frangible sphere wrapped in atmospheric lace. We are now cognizant of five previous extinctions.
Where does the extinction of our species fit in?

In addition to species, we are also aware that words and feelings can become extinct, the once rich chords on the emotional scale reduced to simple notes. Awe, a word once a referring to a transformative experience, has been reduced to a trivial response in every day speech.

What happens to us, and to the natural world when we remain unconscious and therefore unable to address the wound?

Olson puts it another way: What happens when only the feathers are left?

Tomb of Nebamun, Thebes, ca. 1350 BC, British Museum

7 – Focusing on the Feathers

Olson’s emphasis on the bird and its feathers makes me think of ancient Egypt. In the Ur-myth Isis re/members the severed parts of her husband Osiris thrown into the Nile by his jealous brother, Seth. With the help of Ibis-headed Toth, she retrieves all but his phallus, swallowed by a fish. This doesn’t prevent Osiris from fathering an only begotten son, Horus, his representative on earth. We might call Horus, the falcon: Consciousness Fathered by the Wounded One.

Osiris takes his place as Lord of the Underworld (Duat) where he presides over the fate of souls after death, depicted in hieroglyphs as birds that fly into the underworld. Osiris guides the soul, dis/membered by death, in a transformation through which the wound is healed and the soul restored in the body of Osiris—fulfilling what will be articulated in the Great Christian Mystery: “my father and I are one.”

Nerfertari as Ba, Tomb Painting, 3,200 BC

The Pyramid Texts of the Old Kingdom clearly tell us that souls in the Duat are “regularly and continually” challenged to undergo transformation. The union of the ba (embodied soul) and the ka (vital spark), form a third, the akh (the effective one). The akh, as the pure light of consciousness, is represented in hieroglyph by a crested ibis, bird of the wise god Toth. The Pyramid Text stipulates that should the ferryman refuse to transport King Unas’ soul to the other side: He will leap and sit on the wing of Toth.

Papyri and tomb walls exhibit images of birds and feathers everywhere. For the world’s oldest high culture, birds embodied distinct intelligences essential to specific gods and goddesses. Amon, the “hidden source” or uncreated creator is a feathered crow. Amentet, the setting sun, who prepares souls for rebirth, appears with wings and holding a hawk’s feather. Shu, god of the atmosphere, wears ostrich feathers. Isis, wife of Osiris, mother of Horus, sports a vulture head dress and the rainbow wings of a kite. Horus is a falcon. Osiris wears white feathers on either side of his crown. Ra, the Sun and first Pharaoh, has a hawk’s head. Kephri, at sunrise, becomes the Bennu, or risen Phoenix. A single feather belonging to Ma’at on the scale in the Hall of Two Truths determines the fate of all souls. Souls lighter than her feather become Akh and are welcomed to paradise. Those less fortunate are devoured by the crocodile jaws of Ammit.

Goddess of Balance, Ma’at spreads her ostrich wings over gods and humans.

Sea-birds also link the world above to the one below. Their feathers are talismans. Olson’s kingfishers vanish into the shadows. Their feathers are evidence of a forgotten unity that calls to us unheard. Birds, visible by day, accompany Ra’s solar barc on its Night Sea Journey through the underworld, as did the golandrina, which I failed to recognize as my ba-bird. Birds, especially the swallows, become the vehicles for souls in the underworld, and for their transformation. The Bennu, the Egyptian phoenix, rises and sets with the sun.

The Osiris Mystery, as both myth and ritual, marks the early intuition of an objective intelligence in the unconscious. The drama of transformation in the Underworld describes the potential that takes place in our own psychological depths. Olson’s representation of the soul as kingfisher, a force precipitating the unchanging will to change, and its loss, constitutes more than his own gloss on the old myth, but a new one for our time. Perhaps the de-potentiation of mythology itself, the loss of any symbolic narrative that gives culture coherence and the way of enlarging individual consciousness.

Parzival’s healing question can only be asked by one who has been weighed in the balance of Ma’at and become an akh. Olson’s poem, “The Kingfishers,” is an 11th hour cry for help!

“The pool the kingfisher’s feather were wealth why
Did the export stop?”

When the symbolic links disappear, we are left with lassitude. Anything more is difficult to grasp, certainly the world as a coherent whole. Fernand speaks from the shadows about the devalued kingfisher feathers. He addresses those who sit mindlessly around the stagnant pool full of slime. In the end what he asks is rhetorical, not so much a probe as a hook.

Drawn by the potential for transformation, the changeless will to change, Parzival becomes an embodied soul and asks the healing question. But what happens when Parzival, the Fisher King and the Grail itself disappear from consciousness altogether?

8 -Rubedo, The Reddening

Olson loved to dig among stones. Indecipherable Mayan Glyphs spoke to him of buried intelligence in images of serpents and birds, heads dressed in woven feathers, the rise and fall of a high civilization incised on clay tablets. These elusive messages held valuable if undisclosed information: how do advanced systems decline into devalued plumage, slime in the pool.

I pose you your question:
Shall you uncover honey / where maggots are?
I hunt among the stones

In the coastal Mayan ruins of Dzibilchaltun, and rubble of “Dogtown”, the Gloucester settlement abandoned after 1812, Olson was drawn to the haunt of civilizations that carved the clues to their demise in stone. He knocks on the door of the unconscious.

Courage, Dogtown, Gloucester/Cape Anne

Olson asks, Shall we find honey where maggots are? He might be speaking of the alchemical work which begins in the decomposing nigredo. He may be referring to the condition of mythological structures that once supported these high civilizations now sinking into the earth, and our own, on the way to becoming a Waste Land.

Olson begins Section 2 of “The King Fishers” with the self-mythologizing Mao, who forbids the centuries old custom of binding women’s feet, while proclaiming the risen sun, la lumiere,” as the symbol of a mythless society. In 1934 he will lead his followers on a long march toward l’aurore, and later, in 1949, as leader of the Peoples’ Republic of China, mount a cultural revolt outlined in his Little Red Book to entirely erase the past. After considering Mao’s position, the man who hunts among the stones weighs in.

He thought of the E on the stone, and of what Mao said

la lumiere”
mmbut the kingfisher
de l’aurore”
mmbut the kingfisher flew west
est devant nous!
mmhe got the color of his breast
mmfrom the heat of the setting sun!

In search of a myth for a mythless world, Olson’s avian avatar flies west, redness baked into its breast. He invites us to ride Ra’s Sunship into the underworld accompanied by swallows. In the Egyptian narrative the sun is totally eclipsed and for a moment faces the danger of total extinction. This happens every night. It appears to be what Olson wants us to consider.

Ra in the Sun Ship, Egyptian tomb painting, 1,200 BC

There are twelve houses one must pass through on the Egyptian Night Sea Journey corresponding to hours between sunset and sunrise. Each hour presents its own dangers. A Coffin Papyrus shows three ba-birds in the 5th hour there to protect Ra against devouring chaos, the serpent Apophis.

Ra uniting with Osiris, Temple of Optet, 1,200 BC

Ra grows darker and weaker as the hours pass; even his guardians are afraid. There is no guarantee that chaos will not at some point swallow Ra’s light. At the darkest hour, when it appears all may be lost, Osiris, “the Hidden Soul”, meets Ra face to face. In that moment, the high-voltage transformation takes place. In the Mystery of the Two become One, both are renewed. In the Duat souls are continually transformed into enlightened akh.

Light at the core of darkness, The Red Book, C.G. Jung

On a cosmic level this takes place nightly when wounded Ra consciousness is united to the Osiris intelligence in the unconsciousness. The union gives birth to a third in Kephri, the newborn Sun. This is also the end result of the Work, the red which alchemists call the rubedo. The transformation which starts with the blackening nigredo, moves through the bright white albedo, to Kephri’s light. Both the Egyptian Night Sea journey and the Alchemical phases can be viewed as the movement from despair, through understanding, to enlightenment.

A Hymn to Osiris states: “Thou risest in the horizon, thou givest light through the darkness…”

Theatrum Chemicum, Gerhard Dorn, 1661

Gerhard Dorn, the 16th Century alchemist prized by Charles Olson and Carl Jung, speaks of a “hidden third” arising from the two as “the medium enduring until now in all things…” Jung refers to this as a “synthesis of the conscious with the unconscious,” as a unio mystica. Ra’s transformational connection to Osiris can be compared to Parzival’s to the Fisher King; both describe this underlying unity in the alchemical marriage. Ironically, this was also observed by Chinese alchemists in antiquity and recorded in The Secret of the Golden Flower, which survived Mao’s “cultural revolution.” What the Egyptians called Akh, Western alchemists like Dorn the “philosophical stone,” the Chinese text refers to as the “Diamond Body”.

Chairman Mao, Andy Warhol

Mao wasn’t interested in hieroglyphs or alchemy. Symbolic thought of any kind became anathema. His demythologized Revolution reduced civilization to a simple surface. Hence Olson’s open question: What happens when only the feathers are left?

He answers it in “The King Fishers” by attempting to re-mythologize the wounded cultural psyche, to locate the place in which the archetypal transformation enshrined in the sacred traditions of all cultures can occur. Even so, Olson feared that it might be beyond reach at the beginning of a period which he was the first to call “Post-Modern.”

Olson asks: Where do we find what we have lost?

“The Kingfishers” is a fragmented psychological treasure map missing that piece where X marks the spot. We are given clues: the changeless will to change, the king fishers, and in the absence of the seabirds, their lore and feathers—representations to challenge us in the absence of a living mythology. Of course there is always the possibility that what Mao did by coercion in China, we are doing in a Post-Internet world by attrition. We may be losing the ability as a species to bring the latent intelligence to light.

9 – The Alchemical Nest

Chaos stalks our hi-tech lives more powerfully than ever; one inspired hacker-child could send our infrastructure into a tailspin. The same holds true of our personal infrastructure. The Underworld is no longer the place in which souls are weighed or balance restored by Ma’at’s feather. Our psychology is haunted by forces denied, degraded, or disguised as ideologies, religious and political, that set us at odds. Fundamental religious beliefs fused to nationalist politics are fueled by thanatos, an unconscious death-wish. The ecology deteriorates while gods past and present disappear beneath the waves.

Pacal Descending to Xibalba, Tomb at Palenque, Mexico

In his study The Fisher King and The Handless Maiden Robert Johnson paraphrases Jung: “We no longer have Zeus but we have headaches instead. We no longer have Aphrodite and her noble feminine realm but we have gastric upsets. To dethrone anything from consciousness to unconsciousness is to diminish it in stature to a symptom.” Just so, the wounded Fisher King, split off from ourselves, becomes a hive of symptoms. T.S. Eliot’s Wasteland is inhabited by hollow men.

Will you leave it there? Pedrolino’s question is rhetorical. What will you tell them?

From his post on the wall, this black figure in his domed hat outlined by a white line on a black field gazes down from a moon face that glows like polished silver. He is the soul of old Ferrini, author of Know Fish. His words crawl through my mind.

“Tell whom?” I protest.

Pedrolino doesn’t answer, but I know. He is referring to those who will come to hear me read from Fishing On The Pole Star, directly followed by my talk, “Trolling with the Fisher King.”

It occurs to me that when only feathers are left, we must use them as lures.

Olson does just that; he uses feathers and stones the way a shaman employs a single bone to re/constitute the entire body. He builds the poem as king fishers do their nests with the remains of rotting fish bones. By gathering the “rejectamenta,” decaying bone splinters of myth, personal, and historical memory he builds to re/member.

…it does nest with the opening year but not on the waters.
It nests at the end of a tunnel bored by itself in a bank. There
Six or eight white or translucent eggs are laid, on fishbones
Not on bare clay, on bones thrown up in pellets by the birds

I’ll describe to my audience the scene I witnessed on a bank of the Sibun River. I could smell the rotting fish bone chips from my canoe. Warmed by the heat of that decaying mass kingfisher eggs hatch on the bones of their prey. Future generations will rise from this matrix of remains. From its heat, words are born, take flight, hover and dive. It suddenly strikes me that Olson’s poem about the process is itself a nest of decaying bone chips.

Pay attention, whispers Pedrolino. “You’re close.”

I stop and listen. An idea comes in an open inner window—an insight. Not simply a piece of information, but an epiphany. I must instruct my audience not simply to see what is being described here with the mind’s eye, but to bring all the senses to bear—to hear the birds chatter, feel the river flow beneath the craft, touch the oars, the gunnels, smell the decaying bone chips, let the sulphurous odor of the nests sting the nostrils. Instead of solving the mystery he presents in the opening of “The Kingfishers”, Olson gradually shifts the emphasis from product to process. We must be in it totally to realize what is going on here. The question of what happened to the kingfishers is never answered in the poem—but by the poem. What fledges from it dives like a sea-bird into the unconscious.

Contemplating Mind Before Thought, Secret of the Golden Flower, 1668

10 – Parsing (Parsivalizing) the Question

In his Holocaust memoir, Night, Elie Wiesel describes the secret teaching received by his young alter-ego, Elie, before the entire shtetle was transported to Auschwitz. Bare-foot Moshe the Beadle, who cleans the synagogue, instructs his young protégée, “At the end of your life God measures you by the depth of your question.”

In this teaching, authority isn’t captured by the answer. The deepest question answers itself by deepening. The mythos lies too deep for words but can be alluded to in a myth. Such is the wisdom imparted at the beginning of Wiesel’s narrative that portrays the naked depravity under the veneer of civilization capable of destroying ancient cultures and turning cities into rubble.

Olson asks, “The Kingfishers! / Who cares/ For their feathers/Now?”

Holden Caulfield, in Catcher in The Rye, wants to know, “Where do ducks in winter go?”

Chretien de Troyes’ Perceval inquires, “Who does the Grail serve?”

Von Eschenbach’s Parzival wants to know, “What ails thee?”

From Isis to Olson, we are challenged to re/member what has been left to languish in the dark. In every case, the healing power of the question is measured by the depth of the one who asks it. But what if the question itself is forgotten, lost, out of reach—or, more to the point, there is no

one to bring it full voice into the world?

Parzival, from the Feirefiz Project, Liz Neilson

11 – Spreading the Word

Olson’s vanished kingfisher constitutes a loss of myth, and with it our connection to the unconscious, its potential to transform fragmented souls, the ka and ba of us, into an akh, “the effective one” or pure light of consciousness. As a consequence, something has slipped from our grasp that once linked atoms to the stars and bound existence into a unified whole.

“The Kingfishers,” begins with a comment that might easily go unremarked: He woke, fully clothed, in his bed. He / remembered only one thing, the birds…

I might have disregarded it entirely had I not been for my encounter with the spirit of place, the essence of old Ferrini caught by an etching on the wall. No sooner had I named him Pedrolino, than he spoke to me, as he does three days later, after I wake from the same recurring dream. I’m in a room full of folding chairs. They are empty at first, then people file in to fill them. They’ve come to hear my talk. I smile at them. They smile back. Everyone is dressed in blue and green: my ba-birds. I wake in cold sweat.

Osiris, Tomb of Nefertari

There has to be something I can tell them about “Trolling with the Fisher King.”

Listen, counsels Pedrolino.

I just need a little more time to tie things together. These are my two thoughts and perhaps from them a third will follow. 1) Olson fishes the imagination for something born on a nest of decaying bones, that voice from the underworld speaking through him, the poet, telling us to hear in this moment what “was differently heard// as, in another time…” and 2) birds guide dead souls in the underworld, and shield Ra in the 5th hour of his Night Sea Journey from the devouring maw of Apophis, which would extinguish the light. Then it comes to me, out of the tension of the two, a third suggested in von Eschenbach’s Parzival 3) that the lapis exilies, or Holy Grail was delivered to us by “the neutral angels” while a war between opposing camps raged in heaven. This may be an expression of the unchanging potential inherent in our psychic structure, a constant that binds our atoms to the stars; our mission is to apprehend what we already contain, the numinous as the thing in itself.

The message I will convey to my audience of ba-birds, is this: each one of us is a wounded Fisher King trolling uncertain waters. We must keep our lines in, follow the sea-birds. The voice we listen for is equally uncertain. It comes through us, “heard differently//as in another time,” but is not our own. The fate of the world from which it rises depends on it.

“O city of mediocrity…”, Olson is Gone, But We Are Here, Peter Anastas, 12.24.14

12 – Epilogos

Charles Olson sought out Carl Jung when the latter spoke at Harvard in 1938, and engaged him in conversation about Herman Melville. The fever dream of wounded Ahab’s obsession with the whale pales in anticipation of the world driven to the brink of the abyss. Olson published “The Kingfishers” in 1949, long after public knowledge of the Holocaust and the bombing of Hiroshima had redefined civilization, and the year that Mao established the Peoples’ Republic of China. Jung was also putting together the connection between the transformations described by the Sun’s journey through the underworld, the Alchemical Work and his own theory of individuation as a transformative relationship between the conscious and the unconscious.

The Belgian alchemist Gerhard Dorn summed up the situation in his Theatrum Chemicum: “The sun is invisible in men, but visible in the world, yet both are of one and the same sun.” Olson and Jung were drawn to Dorn, a fellow Fisher King.

Plaque on Fort Street, Paul Pines, 8.2014

I feel Olson this afternoon as I walk through town to Fort Street to find the modest multiple dwelling house facing the bay. A plaque affixed to the peeling white wall is a tribute to the insistence of Henry Ferrini, as much as it to Charles Olson. My host at the Gloucester Writers Center, and Vincent’s nephew, Henry petitioned the city fathers for the installation until they relented. It remains the only physical evidence that locates Olson where he lived, looking out at the channel between the Inner and Gloucester Harbor.

Today, Gorton’s huge plant that hugs the shore along Roger’s Street facing the State Fish Pier processes frozen catch from foreign waters. The depleted local fishing grounds, and the plant that packages fish for export echo the missing kingfishers in the poem. I marvel that it was Olson who coined the term that defined such an age: Post Modern. And that he found in Gloucester material to create a mythic monument to what had been lost.

In Parzival the question is asked and answered; at the end, the Fisher King is healed and the land restored. In our time, we have yet to frame the question.

We fish to bring it to light. This is the theme of my book, Fishing On The Pole Star.

There’s a moment in my book, after weeks on the troll, just beyond Concepcion Island, when I hook a three hundred pound marlin, fight him for almost two hours, then bring him to the starboard side of our boat. Our mate holds him in place to “swim him.” The idea here is to quiet the creature and move him slowly until the water circulating through his gills restores color depleted after our struggle.

Color is important.

No shark in the ocean can best a marlin in full bloom. Dimmed, he is doomed.

Our big boy allows us to swim him until bands of green and blue blossom the length of his body. Then he bites down gently on the hand of the man who is holding him to signal he’s ready. The power in his great jaws could take the arm of his handler off at the shoulder with little effort—but the touch is delicate, almost reverential. Upon release, he rides up over the gunnel to meet our eyes with his large circular orb, full of an intelligence so balanced, so complete, I glimpse in it the Divine Child, and also The Grail. I think, Here is the constant which links the atom to the stars, and binds existence into a whole.

And then he is gone.

Sunrise by the Ocean, Vladimir Kush

—Paul Pines

PAUL PINES grew up in Brooklyn around the corner from Ebbet’s Field and passed the early 60s on the Lower East Side of New York. He shipped out as a Merchant Seaman, spending August 65 to February 66 in Vietnam, after which he drove a cab until opening his Bowery jazz club, which became the setting for his novel, The Tin Angel (Morrow, 1983). Redemption (Editions du Rocher, 1997), a second novel, is set against the genocide of Guatemalan Mayans. His memoir, My Brother’s Madness, (Curbstone Press, 2007) explores the unfolding of intertwined lives and the nature of delusion. Pines has published twelve books of poetry: Onion, Hotel Madden Poems, Pines Songs, Breath, Adrift on Blinding Light, Taxidancing, Last Call at the Tin Palace, Reflections in a Smoking Mirror, Divine Madness, New Orleans Variations & Paris Ouroboros, Fishing On The Pole Star, and Message From The Memoirist. His thirteenth collection, Charlotte Songs, will soon be out from Marsh Hawk Press. The Adirondack Center for Writing awarded him for the best book of poetry in 2011, 2013 and 2014. Poems set by composer Daniel Asia have been performed internationally and appear on the Summit label. He had published essays in Notre Dame Review, Golden Handcuffs Review, Big Bridge and Numero Cinq, among others. Pines lives with his wife, Carol, in Glens Falls, NY, where he practices as a psychotherapist and hosts the Lake George Jazz Weekend

Case Notes: Fiction — Brianna Berbenuik

Aug 062015

“To escape from horror, as we have said, bury yourself in it.”
-Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers

straight lines

We are sitting on the floor of the file room because somewhere, an exhibit transfer sheet is in the wrong file in the wrong box of a homicide that is over two decades old. Everything smells like dust and cardboard, old handwritten reports are like parchment and yellowing. The door is closed and I am sitting with my back against it. He pulls out an old photo album from the latest box.

“Wanna see some old autopsy photos?”

It’s a strange level of intimacy, a weird brand of seven minutes in heaven, locked in a murder file room with a photo album, like someone showing you their family portraits, their childhood.

Inside there is a woman with her throat flayed open, deep red congealed blood hugging her esophagus.

“See, that’s how we know the pressure that was used to strangle her was enormous. It’s actually pretty surprising. Like the fucking Hulk did this.”

Aerial photos of the backroad she was found on.

“If you look at a map, and you can kind of see it if you stitch the photos together, you can tell the person was panicked. It happens when you do surveillance a lot, when someone’s trying to get away or shake a tail.”

“What do you mean?”

“Look. Here’s the main road. Here’s where she was found. What do you see?”

“Left turn, left turn, left turn.”

“Exactly. He was scared when he was dumping the body. Panicking. We never go in a straight line when we’re trying to get away.”

dispatches

A: I once killed a deer with a 5lb hammer.

It was a buck, stuck in the fence. It was injured and clearly in a lot of pain, struggling to get free. I called the parks people – they’re the ones who will come out with a rifle to put the deer down – but they said the guy who did that wasn’t even on the island. So I asked him, “do you have a gun?” he says “nope.” what did I have? I didn’t have a gun, I didn’t even have a knife, but I had this hammer. So I went up to the deer, struggling in the fence and I killed it. I hit it in the head.

Q: Did you kill it in one hit?

A: Hell no. it took more than one, i’ll tell you that. Christ, I don’t even want to think about it again.

ii.

A: When i worked up north there was a floater stuck in a log boom on the river. Came from way higher up, floated down for I don’t know how long. he’d been dead a while. So we had to go get the boat to drag him in, and I had the long hook you were supposed to get ‘em with, and bring them to the side of the boat so you could grab them and heave them up. But this guy was so far rotten, I thought I had his arm but it rips right off, starts floating down the river. So I go for his leg and think it’s all good, but that breaks off too. Eventually we end up with the torso.

Q: did you get the legs and arms?

A: Oh yeah, we went chasing after them down the river, eventually got them all. But that guy didn’t smell very nice, I’ll tell you.

iii.

A: Once we got a call to retrieve a floater off of [redacted] road, right on the beach there. But the tide was out, and he was stuck in this really rocky area where the water was about waist high. There were emergency responders on the beach to help us, but they couldn’t get him because he was too far out. So we are trying to grab this guy from the boat and I realize it’s not going to happen. I said to my partner, “well, looks like we’re going in.” I grabbed the bag, the one you use to put the body in, and I cut the corners out of it so the water could drain and we jumped in and managed to coax the body into the bag. My partner’s turning white and trying not to gag, and I’m egging him on like, ‘you’re in the fucking water with this guy!’ Anyway, we get him back up on the boat and we’re both soaked, and fuck he smelled.

Q: So do floaters found in fresh water smell worse or better than the ones in salt water?

A: They’re both pretty rank. I don’t know if there’s a difference. Decomposing human is worse than any other smell. It’s terrible. You can recognize it a mile off, you know it’s not an animal. Maybe we’re just hardwired to know the scent of our own species.
pieces

They will take apart your daughter when she is fifteen years old. They will flay her from head to toe, removing skin, fat, muscle: dismantling her. You handed over her body after she was driven into the woods by a man only a few years older than her where he beat her to death with a hammer. He beat other women to death with the same hammer and now, as they take your daughter’s eyes from her sockets, and they fold her skin off her face, they will press a substance like thick mud into the broken parts of her skull where it will harden to match the wounds with those of the other women.

(You hear that one of the other women, found partially buried and burned somewhere, animals pulling her out of a shallow grave, was so far decomposed they had to ship her rotting corpse, maggots and all, to a forensic osteologist who boiled her down to the bare bones so they could study her wounds, the wounds that will be compared to your daughter’s)

You didn’t want to let her body go.

She will come back to you in pieces. The man who killed her will be sentenced to life in prison but it will never be enough because he is still alive, and he beat your daughter to death with a hammer, and you had to send her body away to be taken apart.

(All the king’s horses and all the king’s men)

You will stop believing in god and live with the emptiness of loss and grief that will be endless and the cold, hard stone in your chest that is the knowledge that he is left and she is gone.

wounded animals

There are two cameras in the interview room and you are a voyeur. Face view. Full view.

Face view shows only the face of a young man, twenty-something, who killed a woman by beating her, and then throwing her in the trunk of an old car and lighting it on fire after dousing her and the car with gasoline. Before he closed the hood to the trunk, he took one last long look at the girl.

Full view. The girl’s mother is brought into a room to face her daughter’s killer.

The mother asks the murderer what her daughter’s last words were.

He replies: what’s that smell?

The smell was her burning flesh.

The mother looks him in the eye and doesn’t flinch, she says, “her greatest fear was fire, and you burned her alive.”

Imagine that.

With only a small table between them, the strength it takes not to try to strangle this man, to launch forward and press a thumb in each eye, gouging the orbs out of their sockets, tearing out his oesophagus with her teeth, to ruin him and adorn herself with his insides, to not throw a single punch, is a feat few can claim.

She is escorted out of the room, and the door clicks shut quietly behind her.

Face view. Now the man is seated, hands folded on the tabletop, staring forward.

Full view. A man sits at an empty table. He is still.

And outside, a wail.

I wrote about it in a letter to a friend, weeks after I had seen it.

i can’t forget the sound. i will never forget it. i dream about it. it follows me. i’ve seen so many crime scenes and dealt with horrible things by laughing at them, but i can’t laugh at this. there is no way to. it is one of the few things you can’t ever find the humour in, you can’t protect yourself from. a parent’s ache of losing a child. the demolishing of their entire world, their reason for being. how do you measure that loss?

i once saw a rabbit get hit by the wheel of a bus, leaving its back end entirely crushed. it tried to pull itself off the road but its entrails were ground into the asphalt and anchoring it there. it was screaming. the scream was so jarring and unnatural, frightening and deeply piercing.

the woman screamed like the rabbit screamed, only deeper and more prolonged. it isn’t a sound i’ve ever heard a human being make. it was rage and loss and everything primal exiting out of her mouth, like an exorcism.

except there are no demons here. it’s been said that all demons are just humans. and all humans are just animals.

shaken baby

Infant autopsy photos.

the tiniest of human hearts
barely 7 centimeters.
insides pink and clean.

When they do forensic autopsies on babies they need to
strip away all the skin and muscle on the back to get to the spinal cord and then
they take the spinal cord out and look inside that and the baby’s body is like this deflated balloon face-down on the table like that stupid fucking puppet they used to teach kindergarten kids about ‘private parts’ because adults need some kind of comforting displacement when they talk about the truth of the horrors of the world and of adults and therefore themselves with children.
there is a drawer in the morgue that is labelled:

“legs & infants.”

I’ve never opened it to verify the contents.

—Brianna Berbenuik
.

Brianna Berbenuik has a Bachelors degree in English from the University of Victoria, where she was also an avid student of Slavic Studies. For the past several years she has worked in various positions in emergency services and currently assists in Major Crime investigations. She has a modest collection of skulls and bones, enjoys horror movies and detective shows, and has an apartment full of thriving plants. She lives in Victoria, BC.

You can request to follow her on Twitter, @ukrainiak47, or follow her on Instagram @ukrainak47.

The Drama of the Mind: A Profile of Janice Galloway — Victoria Best

Aug 052015

Janice Galloway via The Scotsman

I.In the eponymous story from her most recent collection, Jellyfish, Janice Galloway shows her genius for the ‘ouch’ principle: the wince-inducing collision of something exposed and over-sensitive with something brutal and sadistic.

We feel it coming; harbingers and hints surround Monica and her four-year-old son, on an outing to the beach as a last hurrah, the day before school starts. Alert to the impending separation, Monica sees danger and careless indifference all around her: in the mother who chats to a friend, unaware that her toddler in his buggy hangs over the kerb, too close to the wheels of a passing lorry; in the angry father swearing viciously at his little boy. She worries too much, she wants to protect. Somewhere between the wild beauty of the coast and the unsavoury piles of rubbish dumped by locals, they come across a parliament of stranded jellyfish. Transparent and ‘gummy’, out of their natural environment, one of them is little more than viscous pulp, object of blunt force trauma by human hand. How is the mother to explain this act of random violence on something so exquisitely vulnerable? ‘Maybe they hurt it – her voice faltered – they hurt it just because it can’t stop them.’ Ach, the jellyfish, so hopelessly undefended, not even a skin to mask its insides; the stupid jellyfish, out of its element and asking for trouble. The sight is painful because Monica – and through her eyes, the reader – knows how it feels, recognizes how easily one might end up in its place, how a cherished child might end up in its place. Characters in Galloway’s books are often alive to their inner jellyfish, and aware of – even enduring – the myriad situations in which the hammer may fall.

The recent Guardian review of Jellyfish suggested that these stories held new departures for Galloway in their focus on the parent-child relationship and the natural world. But both make fine provocations for the sort of catastrophic thinking typical to her work; thinking that has flowed and been repressed so many times it creates a carboniferous pragmatism. In the story that intrigued me perhaps the most, Eric Blair (otherwise known as George Orwell), is living with his young son on the Scottish West Coast island of Jura after the death of his wife, Eileen. It’s a hardscrabble existence in a place with no amenities and only the most basic of resources, and Blair is in denial over the diagnosis of his own soon-to-be-fatal tuberculosis. ‘You don’t fight an illness by fighting it; it gives not a hoot about your stoicism,’ the doctor tells him. But Blair is nothing if not stubborn: ‘Rest was not an appropriate response to encroaching lack of breath, lack of power. They had no idea what they were asking.’

Inside his mind, two concerns breed fear; his belief that another war is coming, and his determination to ‘toughen up’ his young son. Excessive fear promotes a formidable fight response, but Blair cannot allow himself anything as weak as emotions; they must harden into ideologies. The story follows his trip to the general stores where he asks whether his parcel – a firearm – has arrived (it hasn’t), and then he begins the twenty mile return trip on his motorbike. The sound of a gunshot from the hills unsettles him so much he comes off the bike, but he’s okay ‘after a fashion’. Menace and machismo shadow box across the pages. He continues hoping for another five years in which to finish his novel and form his son: ‘He’d ruddy well achieve it by means of will alone.’ He was to die less than two years later. But his novel, 1984, the crystallisation of sadism and denial of feeling into a society in which only the broken would survive, lived a dark and splendid life after him.

It’s a fascinating portrait of an artist, from an artist who grew up in what seemed to be a sort of Scottish working-class family microcosm of 1984. Love in the form of brutality, the grim reckoning that the worst would be likely to happen and the best would be to face up to it, deprivation of all kinds, were basic elements of Galloway’s upbringing that transmuted into her writing. But her literary imagination tempers its casual cruelty with tenderness and a cautious optimism. Critics use the word ‘visceral’ a lot, but note the glittering seam of black humour. The New York Times Book Review memorably claimed her work ‘Resembles Tristram Shandy rewritten by Sylvia Plath’, which we might reasonably take to mean that she is an original. Her first novel, The Trick Is To Keep Breathing (1989) won the MIND/Allen Lane award, and was followed by two more novels, two short story collections and, before Jellyfish, two extraordinary memoirs that took the reader deep into the phenomenology of childhood whilst advising caution towards a simple overlap of reality and narrative. There were prizes all around. Not bad for a woman who claimed that an artistic vocation was unimaginable for her as she ‘thought writers were wealthy people who just wrote things out of the goodness of their heart and gave them as gifts.’

II.

Janice Galloway was born in 1955 in Saltcoats, Scotland, to a mother who ‘thought I was the menopause’. In the mythic version Galloway tells in her memoir, This Is Not About Me, which might be the true one for all she knows, her mother was unaware of the pregnancy until her waters broke, perhaps in denial of the freedom-busting, life-ending truth. The young Janice is never in doubt about her status as nuisance. ‘If I’d kent, she’d say, her eyes narrowing. If I’d just bloody known.’ Galloway’s father makes scant appearance in the pages, dying when Janice is only six, though when he’s there, he makes his mark felt. By throwing supper out the back door in a fit of temper, locking Janice inside and making her play chequers with him while her mother is locked out, knocking pitifully on the windows. And finally, setting fire (he was drunk and smoking) to the cigarette stand they owned but had not insured. Just over fifty pages in, she and her mother move into a tiny attic flat above the doctors’ surgery where her mother finds work as a cleaner.

This relative idyll does not last, for Janice’s older sister, Cora, joins them. Cora is seventeen years older and has left behind a husband and son of her own, and once her loud-voiced, gleefully selfish, hard-hitting, pan-sticked presence erupts into the pages, she stalks them like the fifty-foot woman of a B-movie. Galloway calls her Cora, though her real name was Nora, some sort of psychological distance being necessary even in a memoir. Cora takes up all the oxygen in their family and is dangerously jealous if her space, status and rule are in anyway infringed upon. ‘Delight to spite took seconds: there was no middle ground,’ Janice recalls. ‘She’ll be found dead up a close with her stockings around her neck one of these days, my mother said. Too bloody cheeky by half.’

Though it’s Janice whose life seems daily endangered. Cora is ‘handy’, which seems to mean useful for violence. She slaps, punches and headbutts her little sister, locks her in a cupboard, sets fire to her hair. Their mother is too tired and too defeated to intervene, and she loves Cora and cannot escape her thrall. The potency of the daemonic, the Greek concept of an unstoppable force of energy that could be turned either to good or evil, is Cora’s superpower. ‘Even wedged into a chair, Cora charged the air with electricity. Something around her crackled fit to kill flies and drop them at her feet in crispy little packets. I couldn’t take my eyes off her.’ She’s mean, but she’s fearless and vividly sexual. Janice is allowed to watch, enthralled, as Cora paints her face on, pours herself into a too-tight bodice and seamed nylons. A trip to the fair with her is high-octane stuff, all thrills and reckless spending. As Janice staggers dizzily off the walzer, Cora ‘walked in a straight line with her hands on her hips to prove it. Nothing beats me, she said. I could stay on that thing all night and not turn a hair.’ But one minute Jekyll, the next Hyde. When their mother has the chance to work full-time, her concern about Janice being all right alone in the two-bed council flat (they moved back in once her father died) becomes Cora’s decision she won’t get in at all. ‘You give her a key and she’ll let people in. Either that or somebody will take it off her. She can wait in the fresh air. It’s good for her.’

In fact, Janice likes the peace in the garden, and there’s the coal-shed if it rains or snows. Although Galloway would later say in interview with Stuart Kelly that ‘The expectation of brutality used to be a commonplace part of most [Scottish] upbringings’, there is a particularly intense quality of disenfranchisement about young Janice, a too-stark awareness of her lack of value, except as emotional punch-bag. The drama in her small household, ruled by Medusa and the Furies, turns her inward, gives her the obsessive good-girl mentality of someone who knows she does not simply deserve the oxygen she breathes. The memoir displays the close-grained hypervigilant powers of observation that come from the traumatised, or as Gareth McLean in The Guardian puts it, ‘her eye for detail comes from having watched life occur while maintaining not so much a dignified silence as a petrified one.’ We’ve been told from the start that this is not about her, and the key to understanding Janice’s story is to recognise the myriad truths in this statement. Her mother’s suicide attempt, her sister’s disappearance, from which she returns bruised and close-lipped, the screaming rows, all the crucible of disturbing events in which Janice is forged, stem from a history that predates her.

‘Watching their faces as they hurled half-understood insults at each other, the feeling of being in the way while most of it raged over my head was letting something else dawn as well. This wasn’t about me…. This was about Cora and mum; mum and Cora doing something they’d done since Cora left Glasgow behind and turned up at the attic… Longer even than that. Weans, my mother said. As though there had been more than one baby Cora had left behind. If I’m man-daft, where did I learn it? I’ve dealt with my troubles. My troubles. It was always the same in our house. Nothing you knew was solid.’

If the young Janice is obliterated by the emotional warfare carrying on around her (in a way that psychologists would suggest is the basis for most severe neuroses), she finds some comfort in knowing she is not its cause. Her place in the world is formed before she ever entered it, by a cross-hatching of fierce emotional currents, the legacy of ancient events, bitter disappointments and sacrifices, in the lives of those who supposedly care for her. Galloway is clear that there is love, that her own childish spirit, even if oppressed, still finds ways to slip free, but the climate and the conditions in which love and freedom find form are not in her control. This is the reality of all childhoods, but most children feel guilty and responsible anyway. The extreme weather of Galloway’s young life may stunt her growth, but it liberates her perspective.

If This Is Not About Me was about the origins of that ‘ouch’ principle, the collision of Janice’s innocence and vulnerability with her sister’s ruthless violence and her mother’s tough love, the next volume of memoir, All Made Up, is about putting Janice together again from the scraps of self left over after the carnage. As a child, she was good at schoolwork and liked singing. As she becomes an adolescent, music will take an ever greater role in her life. Latin will become an unexpected love. And there will be boys, of course, and inevitably. It’s not that conditions change much – within a couple of pages of the start of the book, Cora has broken her nose. And at the end, when Janice is dressed up in borrowed finery for an evening out with her fiancé, Cora takes one look before launching a plate of stew at her. So no change there, then; but Janice grows into her hardiness, her ability to flourish on very little soil and sunshine, and despite her family’s injunction to cultivate shame and self-doubt. ‘I think it’s part of the Scottish temperament: always waiting for something to cut you down to size,’ she later said in an interview.

The memoir races through the key points once Janice has left home for Glasgow university and a degree in music. Her mother died when she was 26, Cora died of a smoking-related illness in 2000 (and the sisters had barely met since Janice left home). This means that when Galloway sat down to write her memoirs, the main characters of her cast were not breathing over her shoulder. She was aware of writing exactly the sort of truthful account of their living conditions they would have hated, but Galloway had come to understand that old, uncomfortable need to pretend was motivated by working-class shame. When she gave her mother a telephone, she would only speak on it in a Yorkshire accent: ‘Even her voice wasn’t good enough to expose,’ she said. But in all the interviews she gave about her memoirs, Galloway is insistent that the mother and sister who appear within their pages are not direct transpositions: ‘I am a writer. You’re not writing people, you’re writing versions of people that fit into a story version of something universal as well as something ideosyncratic.’ But I have to wonder whether this barrier is not there to protect the dead, but to keep Galloway safe from their ghosts. In an article she wrote in the run-up to the Scottish referendum, she admitted that her sister had tracked her down once she realised she was ‘writing stuff’. ‘She phoned me. How she got my number I haven’t an idea. I recognized the voice immediately, however: if I thought I was It I had another think coming, she said. Do you hear? Pack it in. I felt 11 again and almost wept.

III.

Janice Galloway’s first novel, The Trick Is To Keep Breathing, is an unruly narrative of a distressed and disobedient mind. The ironically named Joy Stone is a teacher in her 20s whose chaotic love life has tipped her over the edge of breakdown. The married man she has been living with – enough of a scandal in itself – drowned on a holiday abroad they took together and Joy’s grief is all the more unwieldy for being that of a mistress, socially unrecognized and unpermissable. She lives in Michael’s house (subject to further legal battles) on a sterile estate with poor transport links, while her own jerry-built house is slowly rotting away. Joy has no one to turn to. Her best friend, Marianne, has emigrated to America, her family consists of a sister, Myra, who ‘could just stand and scare me to death.’ Health care professionals are worse than useless. Joy imagines saying to her weary and indifferent GP: ‘Ok, let’s talk straight. You ask me to talk then you look at your watch… Can’t you send me to someone who’s paid to have me waste their time? You don’t know what to do with me but you keep telling me to come back.’ And all the time she is sinking deeper into bulimia and depression. She is the prototype jellyfish; a quivering wreck of exposed nerve endings.

Or you could read her as a 20^th century version of Job, a woman crumbling under an onslaught of calamities specific to being an abandoned Scottish woman in the late 1980s in poor mental health. This is not a story that begs our sympathy, though, despite the rigors of Joy’s plight. Her exquisite vulnerability, which we readers are invited to witness as intimately as possible, from a ringside seat within Joy’s psyche, is played out on the page as an innovative typographical display that’s entirely distracting. There’s a cordon around Joy’s pain that comes from her own lack of lack of sympathy towards herself and the velvety-black humour that springs irascibly from her narration, as well as the experimental features of the text, attention-grabbing features of a verbal energy that ricochets around the pages, out of control, the underside of a too-tightly held persona masking inner collapse.

‘o yes
when I was good I was very very good but
but
there was more going on below the surface.
There always is.’

In the fragmentary text, words jump out from unexpected places and bleed into the margins, sentences trail unfinished, white space marks missing time and emotional dislocation, italics indicate the presence of memories that remain unintegrated. There’s no order to the story, and no neat boundaries either in the form of orthodox chapter divisions or quotations marks around speech. There’s just an uneven torrent of words acting out, or else a parodic inclusion of conventions: play scripts, for instance, marking cliched conversations, lists, excerpts from magazines spouting cultural commonplaces, and marching imposingly across the narrative, the dreaded mantras of mental health:

The More Something Hurts, the More it can Teach Me…
I write:
…..Persistence is the Only Thing That Works.

I forgot to write:
…..Beware of the Maxim.
…..Neat Phrases hide Hard Work.
…..Everything Worth Having is Hard as Nails.’

A beautifully unarticulated paradox rises up from all this verbal play, in which the insufficiency of such mantras is almost insulting in comparison to the depth of Joy’s disorientation and pain. But such inadequate linguistic supports are all that exist as a bridge back to normal life. Galloway is nothing if not respectful to the reality of her protagonist’s state, and little is resolved by the end of the narrative. But there are the earliest hints of healing; tiny shards of optimism that stud the conclusion with welcome precursors of light.

Talking of cautious optimism, her second novel proved that her characters were at least ready to risk travelling abroad again. In Foreign Parts (1994), Rona and Cassie are friends of long-standing, and mildly mismatched travelling companions who have come to spend their precious fortnight off work in France. Short of cash and feeling unworthy of culture, they know ‘that proper holidays are for proper people with proper money and that real travellers, in denim bermudas of uneven leg length, travel to real faraway places in search of real poor people enduring real life in the raw. We are neither real nor proper: just fraudulent moochers in other people’s territory, getting by on the cheap.’ Cassie, source of the narrative voice though it floats, according to Cassie’s mood, between first, third and even second person, is sensitive, observant, moody and questing for something real and meaningful. Rona is stolid, calm, accepting and happy to tick the vacational boxes. Their differences come to a crunch mostly over the guidebook they have brought with them, entitled ‘Potted France’, whose injunctions to notice historical features enrage Cassie with their vapidity.

Threaded in between the stages of their journey are descriptions of photographs from holidays Cassie has taken with boyfriends in the past and the memories they evoke. Not that these holidays have been any better than the one Cassie is currently on. Holidays fall into a similar category to horoscopes, magazine articles and self-help books for Janice Galloway’s main characters: they are places where the commonplace fantasy of achieving something splendid cracks under the weight of recalcitrant reality. Rona, Cassie tells us, at times when they are sleeping in the car, or in some terrible 50 franc-a-night dive, ‘loves games of not admitting hellishness is hellish.’ But Cassie, like Joy Stone, is in no mood to pretend. And more than that, there is an unspoken but deep-rooted belief in both books that anything revelatory, real, valuable or significant, can only come from an unflinching scrutiny of the situation. When Cassie does transcend the ordeal of pointlessness that is tourism – in Chartres cathedral, playing house in a gîte they hire, standing on the beach at Veulettes before taking the ferry home – these moments have a full-bodied poetry about them that can only come from patient attendance on the authentic.

As such, this is a novel wilfully rejecting a number of conventions; it is not the buddy road trip or travel novel that we might be expecting. Cassie’s sharp edges puncture any such glib journeying. More confusing to its readers (if Goodreads reviews are any indication) is Cassie’s conclusion as the end of the trip nears, that she is no longer interested in a heterosexual relationship, but considering the possibility of moving in with Rona. Cassie and Rona may squabble and bicker, but there is a mutual understanding and recognition between them that is missing, as far as Cassie is concerned, from a relationship with a man: ‘They don’t have the same priorities, to be able to organise their priorities in a compatible way with ours,’ she explains. Cultural fantasy rears its head again, to be cut down to size: ‘The knight on a white charger is never going to come, Rona. You know why? Because he’s down the pub with the other white knights, that’s why.’ If there are generalisations going on here, then they belong to a Scottish culture that lags behind the times (‘There are real gender problems in my country,’ Galloway said once in interview). But what Cassie wants is something free from all sexual and domestic norms. The life she envisages with Rona has no recognisable, culturally-approved shape, resists all labels and orthodoxies.

Right at the start of the book, the first sign Cassie and Rona see when they get off the ferry says: BRICOLAGE. This is a common sign in France, indicating a D.I.Y. store, but its original meaning is one of Heath Robinson-type construction, using bits and pieces of other things to create something new. For this reason it was borrowed by the nouveaux romanciers in the 50s and 60s to describe a kind of literary experimentalism that took apart the nuts and bolts of narratives and put the pieces back together in innovative ways. It stands as a fine sign to hang across Foreign Parts, too, in which the patchwork of travel guides, lists, overheard conversations, street signs, flashbacks and letters correspond at a technical level to the unorthodox ways of experiencing travel and building relationships that are its themes. The disparate and the heterogeneous are more playful, less threatening than in Trick, the anxiety and anger about a dissatisfying present are soothed in this novel into something forward-looking and hopeful.

Galloway’s third novel, Clara (2002), was in some respects a departure, a long, lyrical account of the life of Clara Schumann, child prodigy, world-famous concert pianist and composer. Clara passes from the tyrannical hands of an overbearing father, a piano teacher whose love for her resides in her responsiveness to his teaching and who basks in her reflected glory, to those of her husband, Robert Schumann, mad, melancholy, ambitious in his own right and unequal to tolerating a more famous and successful wife. It’s essentially a study of the discipline, the strategems and the sacrifices a woman like Clara must make in order to stay in touch with her musical creativity. Concerns about gender, freedom and madness abound, tethered to historical and biographical realities.

There is still experimentation, but what’s intriguing is that it is so seamlessly incorporated into the narrative it’s oddly harmonious, rather than disruptive. There are phrases from musical scores, poems, lists (of course) and the use of different font sizes. The latter are easy to decode, for they range from the huge beetling-black words of fortissimo, to the smaller fonts of diminuendo. Lists are staccato, poetry is cantabile, all is effortlessly woven into a smoothly flowing, wordy andante narrative. The voice nimbly skips between the heads of Clara, her father and her husband, able to pick up on a wide variety of moods, constantly singing.

In her interview with Stuart Kelly, Galloway denies that her use of experimentation in the early novels was ‘politically motivated’, saying instead that she ‘just didn’t know how to write a story’. Whispering in her ear, perhaps, was the shade of her sister, telling her that if she thought she was It she should just pack it in. The experimentation, in all probability instinctual, reveals a sophisticated understanding of the landscape of the mind when functioning in a state of extreme fear, duress, or misery. Those fragmented, discontinuous texts showed how words could perch unabsorbed upon the mind’s surface, how other voices within might be heckling from the sidelines, how memories repeatedly broke through any stable crust in the present with unwelcome or alien messages. But over the years there is a distinct progression in Galloway’s novels, one that has the appearance, not of anything as facile as healing, but of steady incorporation, acceptance of the ‘hellishness’ for what it is, a breaking down of old parts in order to put them together again, economically, in something new. After Clara came her memoirs, her darkest and her funniest works, the most revealing and the most accessible. Galloway had always been a formidably innovative storyteller; now the novelty was that the story could tell itself straight.

IV.

In the final tale in Jellyfish, ‘distance’, Martha is all alone on a trip to Jura, site of George Orwell’s last days. Many years ago now, when she was an insecure young mother, her small son cut his head open on a glass table and the accident unleashed some reckoning with the arbitrary and inevitable nature of catastrophe that has never been resolved. Her solution back then was to divorce her husband and allow him custody, afraid that her own fears would prove contaminatory to her child. Since then, Martha has cut herself off, taking only supply teaching work so she should never be lulled into the responsibility of relationships. Though the invisibility begins to tell. Attempting to teach Orwell to a class of resistant children, she tells them about the time he saved his four-year-old son from drowning in a sailing incident. ‘Sometimes, she said, there’s more to people than meets the eye. Repressed and paranoid and dying is not a whole picture of anyone.’

And maybe Martha is dying; in her forties now, with an burgeoning disease that is gynacological, possibly serious, possibly not, she decides to take this solo trip to Jura. The freedom feels easeful, at night watching the waves she understands: ‘There was no hidden code, no message, no meaning. What happened out there was random, wholly without blame or favour. In the end, nothing hinged on human decisions, nothing demanded retribution or just deserts: what happened was just what happened.’ Then, driving back to her lodgings in the darkness, listening on the car radio to Mozart’s Queen of the Night, she runs over a deer. Martha staggers over to the beast, longing to comfort it, afraid her touch will terrify it further. ‘Dislocated bars of Mozart were gusting like feathers in the night air,’ as she tends to the animal and her own relentless blundering in the world. ‘I’m here, she said, her words bouncing off the surrounding rocks and rising, furious, into the solid dark. I’m here. I’m here.’

And here Galloway’s voice remains, holding fast to its lament of risk and vulnerability, innocence and brutality that cannot be resolved. Instead, the elements are left suspended in uneasy harmony together, awaiting conclusion, a perfect augmented chord.

—Victoria Best

Victoria Best taught at St John’s College, Cambridge for 13 years. Her books include: Critical Subjectivities; Identity and Narrative in the work of Colette and Marguerite Duras (2000), An Introduction to Twentieth Century French Literature (2002) and, with Martin Crowley, The New Pornographies; Explicit Sex in Recent French Fiction and Film (2007). A freelance writer since 2012, she has published essays in Cerise Press and Open Letters Monthly and is currently writing a book on crisis and creativity. She is also co-editor of the quarterly review magazine Shiny New Books (http://shinynewbooks.co.uk).

Abacus: Novel Excerpt — Louis Armand

Aug 042015

Louis Armand is no stranger to the faithful readers of Numéro Cinq. At the end of 2013, we published an excerpt from Cairo, a swirling novel that found itself shortlisted for the Guardian newspaper’s 2014 Not-the-Booker Prize. And we’re pleased to now present a snippet from Armand’s latest, Abacus. Publisher Vagabond Press calls Abacus, “A decade-by-decade portrait of 20th-century Australia through the prism of one family … a novel about the end times, of generational violence and the instinct for survival by one of Australia’s leading contemporary poets.” Like his earlier novels, Abacus sinks its teeth deep within an environment—this time Armand’s homeland—providing the reader with a visceral understanding of the territory, and thus a greater empathy for the individuals who roam each page.

This excerpt is a condensed version of a later chapter in the novel, titled “Lach,” though it was originally titled “King Shit.” In the following, childhood carelessness butts heads with the lingering aftereffects of wartime trauma. This is, of course, just a taste of what Armand has to offer. For the full picture, seek out the novel itself. It’s well worth the time.

— Benjamin Woodard

The morning the spastic girl walked out in front of morning assembly with her undies down, bawling for her arse to be wiped, was the last time they ever had to sing “God Save the Queen.”

It was March and the Drover’s Dog had just won a landslide victory for the ALP in the federal election. A republican was made Governor General. “We’ve got our own bloody anthem,” Lach imagined him saying to the knobs at Buckingham Palace, Sir Bill, because you couldn’t have a Governor General, even Billie Hayden, who wasn’t a “Sir.” Just like their headmaster, Crazy Crittendon, who went purple when the spastic girl came up in front of the whole school like that, skid-marked knickers round her ankles, you had to call him “Sir” if you didn’t want a caning or detention for a week.

“Bwoo! Mnaaa!” the spastic girl wailed.

The teachers were all standing out the front singing the nation’s praises while all the kids just mumbled along not knowing the words, they’d only ever heard it on the tellie when someone on the swimming team won a medal at the Commonwealth Games. “Australia’s suns let us rejoice,” what was that supposed to mean? But when the spastic girl did her thing everybody suddenly went silent. Three hundred kids sweating under the hot sky in turd-brown uniforms, waiting to see what Old Cricket Bat’d do next.

Which was exactly the moment Buzik, standing in the middle of the back row, chose to crack the loudest fart in history.

“They make a lie so big, no-one can see it,” Wally Ambrose said once. Reg could hear the old bloke’s voice in his head clear as day. Could see him, too, sitting on the verandah, handing him a model spitfire. Who knew how old he was back then? Wally’s voice came to him while he was sitting in the parking lot at the Holsworthy Army Base, across the river in Liverpool, waiting for Eddie. They’d called him in for some medical checks. Ever since Eddie’d come back from Vietnam, he’d been having trouble sleeping at nights, couldn’t breathe properly, kept getting headaches, skin rashes, sometimes couldn’t feel his hands.

The doctors said there was nothing wrong with him, but one doctor thought it might be something to do with the war. Agent Orange. The stuff the Yanks dropped by the metric tonne to kill-off jungle cover along the Ho Chi Minh trail. There’d been talk in America of child birth-defects. Both of Eddie’s kids had the worst kind of asthma. As a matter of course the Fraser government denied everything. The army wanted their own doctors to have a look, so Eddie got the call and Reg’d offered to drive him over to the base, knowing his brother’d be too shook-up afterwards to manage the traffic alone. The vets had been bullshitted all along the line, it was just a question of time before enough of them cracked and took matters into their own hands.

Finally, now Fraser’d got the boot, there was talk of a Royal Commission. “Yeah,” Eddie said, “Royal fuckin’ Whitewash.” Reg switched on the radio and got Rex Mossip in mid-stream, then dialled across to a different station — Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs — and tilted his seat back, closing his eyes with the music on low. Politics didn’t mean anything to him anymore. He had enough drama of his own to worry about, a fucked-up marriage, a smartarse kid and a job that had him pegged for a cardiac before he hit forty. He never did get called to the bar, working his way through the NSW Public Service instead, “faster than a rat up a drain.” It didn’t take long to earn a name for himself as a hatchet-man. They sent him to balance the books in every dysfunctional underperforming redundant backwater of government. From Attorney General’s to Education to Consumer Affairs and finally Premier’s, kicking heads at the personal behest of Neville “Wran-the-Man” on a Grade-11 salary. Another ten years, he could sign-off in style with a harbour view.

But Reg wanted out. Besides, there was nowhere left to go, he’d already bagged the number two job to the biggest hatchet-man in the service, Gerry “Bottom of Darling Harbour” Gleeson. To get his job, he’d have to stiff the fucker. Only alternative was to bide time till the next election and hope Nifty Nev took a nose-dive at the polls, but even then. Besides, in this game, you sat still and you were a dead duck.

Reg dialled-up the volume on the car radio so as not to think about his glorious future any more. A commercial ended and he found himself listening to Acker Bilk. He stabbed at a button blindly and got a different station. “History never repeats,” someone sang over background guitar in a high nasally voice, “I tell myself before I go to sleep…” He made a wry grin, seeing himself exactly like that, stuck in a vicious circle of his own making and trying to bullshit his way out of it. Bullshitting a bullshitter. It was a sure way to fame and glory, peace and happiness, whatever the fuck he’d been pretending all these years he wanted out of life. And what did he want? He didn’t know. To be King Shit maybe.

There was a tapping on the passenger-side window. Reg lent over and flipped the handle. Eddie pulled the door open and slumped into the seat. His face looked sunken and puffed-out at the same time, dark around the eyes, bloodshot. His fingernails were yellow from chain-smoking, to give his hands something to do so he wouldn’t scratch all the time. Had to drink himself to sleep, too, because none of the pills the doctors gave him worked. “Fucking placebo shit.” Whatever they’d been sprayed with over in ’Nam had its claws in deep and wasn’t letting go.

“What’d they say?”

“Usual,” Eddie said, rolling the window down and reaching for the car lighter, a Winfield already wedged in the corner of his mouth.

“Any chance of compo?”

Eddie dragged on his cig, killing half of it in one go while plugging the lighter back in the dash.

“Buckley’s, mate,” he said, exhaling a long plume of smoke out the window. “Only way the government’s forking-out’s if someone proves liability. But to prove liability, they’d hafta prove they used the stuff in the first place. And since they deny the stuff even exists, we may as well just hand ourselves straight to the head-shrinkers, ’cause as far as the experts are concerned, this whole Agent Orange shit’s in our fuckin’ imaginations.”

Buzik had freckles and was the shortest kid in the sixth grade, though he acted like he was some sort of Daniel Boone. He lived on Kingarth Street, near the park ruled by an ancient magpie called Big Eye. A strip of concrete in the middle of the park served as a cricket pitch, but no-one ever wanted to field at long on, because that was right under Big Eye’s tree. Legend had it Big Eye once tore a ball to shreds mid-air on its way for a six. All that was left of it were bits of string and leather and scabby cork raining on the boundary. Or maybe Buzik just made that up.

Short-arse though he was, Buzik was the undisputed king of the tall tale. He could cook-up an adventure out of anything. One day he came to school with a copy of Huckleberry Finn and decided their gang was going to build a raft. Buzik, Lach, Robbo and Robbo’s lisping kid brother, White-as-Wayne. He drew up the plans from a Scout’s handbook. To make a raft, he explained, first you had to find some empty forty gallon drums, then some timber to make a frame, some rope to square-lash the drums to the timber, and finally some planking to build a deck. There was a dam just off South Liverpool Road he knew about, past Wilson’s, all they had to do was find the stuff they needed and get it there, then they could lie about on the water pretending they were floating down the Mississippi.

The rope was the easiest bit, the drums were trickier. Buzik found a dozen lying around among the car wrecks in the wasteland behind the Liverpool Speedway, but most were rusted full of holes. They managed to salvage four that looked like they’d float, but the problem was how to get them across to Wilson’s — you couldn’t haul a forty gallon drum on a BMX. White-as-Wayne said they ought to use shopping trolleys, so they hiked across to the gully where the drain at the end of Orchard Road emptied out, to see what they could find. People dumped all sorts of stuff there, but especially shopping trolleys. There was always at least one upended in the grass whenever they went by on the way to school.

You’d never know the dam off South Liverpool Road was even there. It was trees and dense bush all the way along the roadside with a three-strand wire fence. But if you climbed through the fence at the right spot there was a path into the undergrowth that about fifty metres from the road forked left and right, and to the right it ran smack into the reeds along the shoreline of a wide dam. To the left, the path eventually found its way along the top of the dam wall, a berm of compacted earth with a steep run-off into a ditch where a farmer’s septic tank overflowed. You could follow the path half-way around to the other side of the dam or veer left again where soon you came across old chicken coops stacked high against the side of a barn, a tower of corrugated rust with a wrecked school bus parked in front of it. On the other side of the bus was the farmer’s house.

The four of them must’ve made a queer sight ferrying old diesel drums balanced on a shopping trolley across South Liverpool Road, then wrestling them through the fence and into the bushes, but who would’ve seen them? White-as-Wayne stood sentry on the corner of Wilson’s and shouted the all-clear when no cars were coming. And whenever one did, they dived for cover among the weeds that grew waist-high. The trolley and the drum were just more of the usual wreckage camouflaged into the scenery. It took all morning, but eventually they had the drums stashed in a clearing under the canopy of a low-hanging she-oak. Then they went off scavenging.

Buzik, crawling on his belly, snuck into the creaking barn and found a cool-box full of beer bottles. He came back with six of them slung inside his shirt. Robbo and Lach meanwhile had wandered off onto the other side of the dam and found some corrals and a pile of timber that’d been cut once upon a time for fence posts. The posts looked ideal. White-as-Wayne guarded the drums. Buzik had already cracked one of the bottles and was down by the water sucking beer when Robbo and Lach came back with the news. The rest of the beers were bobbing at the edge of the reeds, keeping cool. White-as-Wayne was busy climbing a tree.

“Where’d you get the Tooheys?” Robbo said.

“That’s for me ta know ’n’ youse ta find out,” Buzik grinned.

They parked themselves beside him and cracked a couple of more bottles and sat there drinking thoughtfully.

“This stuff tastes like piss,” Lach gagged.

“In one end, out the other,” said Buzik and proceeded to whip out his dick right there in front of them and, holding the bottle of Tooheys upended in his mouth, arced a stream of piss into the water.

When the beer was finished the four of them tramped back to the horse yards to collect the timber Robbo and Lach’d spotted.

“Jesus Christ,” Buzik said, trying to haul one of the fence posts off, “this stuff weighs a tonne.”

“Yeah,” Robbo gloated, “solid as. The raft’ll never break, no matter what.”

“Give us a hand, will ya?”

Two-by-two they carried and dragged the wood all the way back around to the other side of the dam. The dam was bigger than it looked. It was getting dark by the time they’d hauled the six posts they needed. Four for the frame to lash the drums to, and two for cross-beams to keep it square. There was an old tarpaulin in the barn, Buzik said, which they could use for a deck, and even a couple of oars that must’ve belonged to a row-boat once. They trudged off home in the twilight and pulled the splinters form their hands and next morning went back for the canvas and oars and set about putting Buzik’s grand design into effect.

Lashing the posts to the drums took some finesse, the rest was easy by comparison, it was just a question of getting the ropes tight enough so the whole thing wouldn’t just come apart. Then they had to cut a path through the reeds down to the water. They cracked a few more of the farmer’s beers and poured some over the raft to christen it. The Graf Spee, Buzik wanted to call it. But in the end they just called it “The Raft.” On the stroke of midday they pushed off. It was heavy work, hauling their contraption out of the clearing and down the bank. Then all of a sudden it slid out into the water and down, down, catching the sunlight faintly through the murk. The raft came to rest about a metre beneath the surface, a faint trail of bubbles rising from the drums, the hardwood posts making immobile shadows beneath the canvas as it flapped in the cold current.

Robbo’s house was a block east of Buzik’s, on Trevanna Street. Lach lived on the other side of Whitlam Park. All three of them played footie for the under-11s. Maroon-and-blue were the locals colours. The school colours were yellow-and-brown, like flying-monkey guano Buzik said. On weekends when they weren’t kicking a ball in the park or roaming about on their bikes, they’d hang out at Robbo’s place. If no-one else was home they’d stuff about on the phone impersonating Robbo’s neighbour, ringing the taxi companies or the pizza delivery man for giggles. Their record was three taxis at the same time, parked one behind another outside the Hogans’s front gate, honking their horns. Mr Hogan knew who the culprits were and bawled at them over the side fence. Said he’d kick their arses so hard his boot’d poke them in the back of the teeth. So then they phoned a towing service, an undertaker, and the Jehovah’s Witnesses as well.

There were three Roberts brothers, the eldest played guitar in an AC/DC cover-band and was the stuff of legend. White-as-Wayne was in fourth grade, short and skinny with blond hair and a lisp. They teased him a lot but let him tag along, though he had to swear on his life not to tell anyone about The Raft.

Buzik was never one to let a minor setback get in his way, so the weekend after their first effort sank they went back with their shopping trolley and hauled four more empty drums up to the dam. This time they found a couple of planks from a scaffold on a building site and tied them crosswise like an outrigger. They pushed off and this time it kept afloat. White-as-Wayne, who was the lightest, sat up front with Robbo at the back. Buzik and Lach, one oar each, sat on the outside drums and rowed, careful to avoid the snags.

They could’ve floated around the dam for days, it seemed to go on forever, one fjord opening onto another, and yet you could’ve walked the long way around it in an hour beating through the bush.

“There’s eels,” Buzik said, peering down into the black water.

White-as-Wayne pulled his feet up and crossed his legs at stern. Robbo stared glumly over the side.

“I’m goin’ in,” Buzik said, “see if I can catch one.”

He propped the oar on the cross-beam and stood up on the barrel. They were all wearing only their shorts. Buzik bounced on his feet, jumped, did a donkey kick mid-air and splashed down into the black. The outrigger swayed and bobbed. Lach paddled it in a half-circle towards one of the fjords. The undergrowth came down thick to the water’s edge, overhung by dangling willow trees. Dragonflies hovered. Skaters raced about on the surface. It was a warmish spring day and the air was full of insects. White-as-Wayne shivered.

“Hundreds of ’em,” Buzik shouted, flinging his head above the water. “Huge. Big as morays!”

“Bullshit,” Robbo moaned.

“What we need’s a fishin’ line,” Buzik said, catching hold of the port-side drum. “A bloke showed me ’ow to do it. You catch eels wiv a pin, tied to the line, like this.” He made gestures with his hands none of them could decipher. “We’ll catch ’em ’n’ roast ’em on a fire.”

Lach was busy with a pencil working on a map of the dam. He had a square of paper in a plastic bread bag which he kept wrapped up and tucked in the waist of his shorts. Right now he was adding the fjord they’d drifted into. There were roots jutting out from the bank and slimy reeds under the water and a tree stump with a skink lying flat atop it with only its head sticking up.

“What d’ya reckon we should call it?” Lach said.

“Call what?” Robbo shouted.

“This place,” he gestured with his pencil at the fjord in general.

“Something different from the last place,” Buzik said, clambering aboard. “Like Fuckwits’ Cove. Or Silly Cunts’ Bay.”

“Yeah, but it ain’t a cove, or a bay neither.”

“Haiwee Quack,” lisped White-as-Wayne.

“The Arsehole’s Arsehole,” crowed Robbo.

“You bastards’re no help. We’re meant to be explorers. Yer s’posed to give things proper names.”

“What like?” Robbo said. “Sydney Harbour?”

“Call it Lizard’s Bight,” Buzik said, grabbing his oar and pushing off from the tree stump, so they wouldn’t get snagged on its roots.

The outrigger drifted around on its axis. Lach stuffed his map in his pants while Buzik manoeuvred himself into position and they worked the paddles out to deeper water.

“Who d’ya reckon’s better looking, Jenny Carter or Helen Heckenberg?” Robbo said from the back.

“Carter’s a stuck-up bitch,” Buzik yawned, “’n’ Heckenberg’s an old stuck-up bitch.”

“Helen Heckenberg’s the biggest piece of class in these burbs,” Lach drawled.

“Helen Heckenberg’s got melons out to here,” said White-as-Wayne, hands groping the air in front of him.

“How d’you know?” said Robbo, splashing water at his younger brother’s back.

“Piss off!”

“Jenny Carter’s got a head like a sucked mango,” Buzik yawned again, “but I’d still root ’er.”

“You’d woot anythin’,” lisped White-as-Wayne. “You’d even woot one a tha spazos at school!”

“I ’ope ya can bloody swim,” Buzik growled, launching himself between the crossbeams and knocking White-as-Wayne right off his perch.

The two of them thrashed around in the water for a while before Buzik swam away towards the shore where their secret base was. White-as-Wayne clung to the drum at the head of the outrigger, sulking. Lach climbed onto the middle of the cross-beams and paddled legs-astride.

“Don’t ya reckon Jenny Carter’d be a real goer, but?” Robbo said.

“Bit skinny,” Lach said pensively, “’n’ she’s got more freckles than Buzo ’as. They might be related, you never know.”

“Yeah, but Buzo’s sister’s fat’n’ugly.”

And as if on cue the three of them started singing, “Who got beaten wiff tha fuggly stick? Buzo’s, Buzo’s. Who got beaten wiff tha fuggly stick? Buzo’s sister did!”

Lach had never seen his father fall down drunk before, but that’s what he did after the taxi driver helped him in the front door the night Lach and his mum stayed up to watch The Battle of Britain on the old twelve-inch black-and-white tellie. Midnight matinee. In the movies, people drank coffee when they had too much booze, to wake them up, so Lach took the matter in hand and brewed up a pot while his mum tut-tutted over the prostrate figure in the hall. He made a couple of guesses at how much of what went where and came back a few minutes later with a scalding cup of black sludge.

Various enigmatic expressions coursed his mum’s face as she watched him kneel down beside the groaning lump Reg Gibson made on the floor and with commendable effort pour the vile stuff down the paternal throat, not spilling a drop on the new carpet. Until, that is, Reg Gibson screamed, hurling a mess of steaming black bile down the length of a polyester suit that looked like it might dissolve on impact.

Lach was on his feet in the blink of an eye, fleeing on instinct, before his father’s paws could get a grip on some part of him and throttle him blue. The drunken mass heaved bellowing into life and stumbled up, ricocheting between the walls. What Lach remembered was the hallway getting longer and narrower the harder he tried to run and Reg Gibson charging up behind him, mad as a bullock, fumbling blind at his belt buckle and then the singing of the leather as it swung through the air. He remembered his mum’s face, just the way it always was, blurring at the edges.

Somehow he made it to his room & dived under the bed as the blows began to rain. Just because of the coffee! And then something went crash and all was silent before the light came on. As quietly as he could, Lach manoeuvred among the junk under his mattress and peered out. Reg Gibson seemed to be standing stock-still in the middle of the room. The room somehow had been altered by the silence. With utmost stealth, Lach inched forward for a better look. His father, belt hanging from his right hand, arm limp at his side, was teetering as if in a trance, staring wide-eyed at the floor.

There between Reg Gibson’s feet were the remains of a model spitfire, the one Lach’d found in a box on the top shelf of the linen press at his Nana’s house. A pair of green-and-brown camouflaged wings with the red-and-blue bullseye decal projected from a wrecked fuselage. Like in The Battle of Britain, when the Heinkels were blitzing the RAF airfields. Only instead of a hundred-pounder, it was Reg Gibson’s Florsheim that did it. The blind rage seemed to’ve drained out of him, replaced by an emotion Lach was unable to decipher. The lull, perhaps, before an even more terrible storm.

He’d meant to keep the spitfire a secret, but in his excitement before the film he’d taken it out of its box to look at and see if the wheels still turned. Behind the smudged cockpit window was a pilot done in so much detail you could even see his eyes. But there was no sign of the pilot now. Bits of the cockpit lay scattered on the floor. The gun sights. The radio set. A shattered prop, piston rods, landing gear. Then all of a sudden Reg Gibson booted the wrecked fuselage across the room and stomped out, muttering how it served someone right, only Lach couldn’t hear who it served right and he huddled there, under the bed-head with his feet touching the wall, and shivered, trying not to cry.

Uncle Eddie kept all his stuff from Vietnam in a drawer in the back bedroom at Nana’s house on Dartford Street. Slouch hat, poncho, tie, a couple of belts, mozzie net, jungle greens, dress uniform. Whenever he could, Lach snuck in there to try everything on in front of the mirror, like a midget on parade. He asked Eddie if he could take some of the stuff home and Eddie shrugged.

“Just leave the hat. Ya can do what ya like wiff the rest of it. It’s only there ’cause Mum kept it.”

“What’s special ’bout the hat?”

“Nothin’.”

Lach couldn’t make sense of that so gave up trying. His uncle’d always been a bit strange, though they didn’t really get to see him very often. He lived way out in Campbelltown on a dead-end street. It was the war that made him like that, his mother explained. Lach wondered how she knew.

He took the belt and poncho and mozzie net up to the dam, for the secret base they were making in the clearing under the she-oak where they’d put the raft together. They’d woven branches into a camouflage that hid the whole thing from view, and hung stuff inside, trophies from their raids on the farmer’s barn and the old school bus, bottles of beer, centrefolds from mildewed porno magazines, hubcaps. Lach draped the mozzie net over one side. Buzik and Robbo dragged a couple of car seats over from the back of the Speedway, stinking of sump oil. They scrounged some ratty drop-sheets to spread over them. The ground was littered with dead cicada skins, like the husked shells of aliens zapped by a secret particle beam, the death ray or the doomsday box.

White-as-Wayne dug up a billycan from somewhere and they built a fireplace out of rocks, close to the water, with a smoke hole in the canopy. Buzik scooped dam water into the can and a fistful of gum-leaves, to make billy-tea. They sat around waiting for it to boil, smoking tubes of coiled-up bark as if they were cigars. White-as-Wayne gazed at the pin-ups. Christy Canyon, Sharon Kane, Amber Lynn. Big hair and parted lips making the kind of invitation a ten-year-old’s nightmares are made of. Robbo absently flicked dead cicada skins into the fire and watched them flare and crackle and dissolve into white flame. Buzik blew out a smoke ring that rose up through the twilight of the branches. Faint shafts of sunlight filtered down.

“We should bring a girl up ’ere,” Buzik said at last.

“What’d a you want a girl for, it’d just ruin it,” Robbo said, pulling the legs off another husk.

“No girl’d come ’ere anyway,” said Lach.

Steam gusted up from the billycan. White-as-Wayne crawled over with a stick and lifted it off the coals. There was a sharp hiss.

“Don’t spill it all over the bloody place,” Buzik growled.

“It ain’t spilt,” White-as-Wayne protested.

Robbo set out the tin camping mugs and went to pour the tea.

“Yer s’posed ta whack it wiv a stick first,” Lach said.

“Wot’s that for?” said White-as-Wayne.

“Makes it taste right or somethin’. Me uncle said that’s wot you’ve gotta do when ya make billy tea. Gotta whack it wiv a stick.”

White-as-Wayne tapped the side of the blackened billycan with his stick. Lifted the lid and peered inside. Shrugged.

“Can’t see tha diffwence,” he said.

Gingerly Robbo poured the yellow brew into their mugs. Buzik reached over and took one, tossing the remainder of his bark roll into the smouldering campfire. All four of them blew into their mugs to cool the tea, stirring it sluggishly with their breaths. Buzik was the first to taste it, his face gave nothing away though. When Lach tried it he almost spat it straight out. Robbo had a sip.

“Jesus,” he gagged, “it tastes like friggin’ tadpole piss.”

They all hooted with laughter. Buzik splashed his tea on the coals.

“Give us one a them beers,” he grinned.

Robbo pulled out his Swiss Army knife with the bottle-opener on it and cracked three stubbies, passing them around. Only White-as-Wayne kept hold of his mug, gazing into it and swishing it about like he expected to find something alive in there, some sort of primordial guppy perhaps.

The art was in somehow not gauging your ribs with the valve when you slid up through the tyre tube. It was mid-morning before they started across the river to the island. “Wide as the Mississipi,” Buzik said. They had to dodge the water-skiers spraying up plumes of yellow-brown and the speedboats slapping their bellies on the water as they throttled up and down between the bridges. Lach’s uncle, Pete, owned a caravan on the Hawkesbury. He’d sit out under the awning in a deckchair with an esky of beer and get sunburnt feet. With a little persuasion he let the kids spend the weekend as long as they kept out of his hair. Uncle Pete’s mates usually showed up around five and barbequed some prawns and sank Tooheys. “Get yerself some fish’n’chips,” he’d say to the kids, handing them a couple of dollars and waving in the direction of the shops. Deep sea bream with salt and vinegar on the chips, wrapped in newspaper, though really it was shark. They’d sit down under a jetty, tossing the butt-ends of chips to the guppies mouthing about in the shallows.

The sand on the shore of the island was dark and wet, with a bog smell and mangrove roots worming up through it that stabbed into their feet. In from the water the ground turned solid and dirt paths wound through the undergrowth, so thick you couldn’t see more than a couple of metres at a time. They left the tractor inners by the shore and went exploring, but couldn’t get to the other side of the island, all the paths seemed to wind back. And then, starting out of nowhere, was a clearing with a tin shack and voices. The voices sounded drunk, a couple of men and a woman, so the two kids slipped away again into the bushes.

“Wouldn’t it be awesome if we had our own island,” Buzik whispered, “wiv a house on it ’n’ everythin’. ”

Of course they hadn’t been alone in taking possession of the dam off South Liverpool Road, either. A gang of local kids had set up headquarters in the old school bus in front of the farmer’s barn. When they’d discovered the secret base Buzik, Lach, Robbo and White-as-Wayne had built, they smashed it up and burnt the mozzie net and poncho and centrefolds and slashed the car seats and scuttled the “raft” by unscrewing the caps on the forty-gallon drums. “I’ll chop their bloody skulls in ’arf,” raged Buzik, who went and broke all the remaining windows in the wrecked school bus, but he never found out who the other gang was.

When they got back from the island, Uncle Pete was asleep under his awning, fist clenched around an empty beer bottle. With nothing better to do, Lach and Buzik grabbed a couple of Pete’s fishing lines and a bait box and wandered down to one of the jetties to see what they could catch. Past the jetty was all thorny blackberry bushes hanging over the water. Someone had snagged a lure in one of the bushes and Lach spotted it glinting in the sun. With a scaling knife in one hand he waded down the jetty to cut it free. Buzik meanwhile was scooping among the green slime that wafted off the jetty for fresh bait. He caught some guppies and threaded them on a hook and was just casting out when Lach slipped arse over tit on the algae, only just failing to disembowel himself with the scaling knife but almost taking his thumb clear off.

“Ya silly bugger,” Uncle Pete said, laying a role of sticky plaster aside, “yer old man won’t be too impressed.” He’d rinsed out the flap of skin hanging from Lach’s thumb with Detol then stuck some gauze on it and wrapped the whole thing in plaster. “Lucky it ain’t too deep or you’d need stitches.”

There was blood everywhere, it looked a lot worse than it probably was. Lach was all pale around the gills, with his head leaning against the side of the caravan. Uncle Pete faked a tap on his chin.

“You’ll be right,” he grinned, gathering up the first aid kit. “Just a scratch. Next time, do it proper ’n’ see if ya can cut yer ’ole arm off.”

The sun had gone down and there was a halo of bugs around the kerosene lamp slung under the awning. Buzik lounged in one of the deckchairs breathing in the river stink. Lach stared at his cartoon thumb swaddled in plaster.

“Reckon there’s bull sharks in the river?” Buzik said. “Wouldn’t wanna go in there bleedin’ like that, they’d smell it ’n’ come after ya.”

“Ain’t no sharks in the river.”

“There is. I saw it in a documentary.”

“You kids talkin’ bull again?” Pete lurched down the caravan steps. He held out a couple of longnecks. “Now don’t tell yer folks, ’cause they mightn’t like it.”

Buzik smirked like an idiot.

“Thanks Mr Gibson,” he said, grabbing one of the beer bottles.

“Call me Pete,” said Pete.

He handed the other one to Lach who sat there with his wounded thumb sticking up, holding the bottle in both hands like it was Communion.

“Cheers,” Pete said, settling back. “Youse fancy some prawns fer supper?”

“Aw, Miss,” Lach moaned.

It must’ve been thirty-five degrees, but still they had to stay in the classroom and finish the problem that’d been set on the board.

“And if you don’t get it right,” said Mrs Hajek, “you’ll stay here all afternoon until you do.”

The class fidgeted with their books. Buzik fired a wad of chewed up paper from his pea-shooter at the back of Robbo’s head. Robbo, marooned in the front row, tried to look diligent as the Dragon Lady turned towards him. Lach jabbed at his workbook with a blunt pencil. He got half-way through the sum and then gave up, hacking at what he’d written with a dirty eraser before starting over again. He could feel the sweat working down his back between the shoulder blades. The ceiling fan creaked. The Dragon Lady stopped in front of his desk and peered at the mess he’d made. The moment he dreaded had arrived.

“Can’t you perform one simple calculation?” she snapped.

Lach gazed morosely at the tangle of symbols he’d smudged all over the page. The Dragon Lady huffed, grabbing his pencil from his hand and leant over his desk to cross out the mistakes. He glanced up into a pair of huge sweaty boobs swaying in a white lace bra. They were so close, he could count the pores. Her perfume made his eyes and nose water. Rancid patchouli. Lach grabbed at his nose so as not to sneeze all down the front of Mrs Hajek’s blouse and in the process grazed the teacher’s fat left nipple.

The Dragon Lady jerked upright and gave him a funny look that made him gulp, nose gripped between thumb and forefinger, so now his ears popped as well. He tried to nod at least, like he understood whatever it was, trigonometry, she’d been scribbling in his workbook. There had to be something strange about her, anyhow, he thought, to make them do trigonometry on the last day of school. Maybe she was some kind of sadist, like they showed on the news, who got a thrill letting schoolkids ogle her jugs while she stood over them with a cane or whatever and made them recite the logarithmic tables.

“Lachlan Gibson,” Mrs Hajek proclaimed, “I have my eye on you!”

“Yes miss,” he honked, still clutching his nose.

There was general relief when Crazy Crittendon announced over the PA that they could have the rest of the day after lunch for cricket on the front oval and other sports activities. “Other” meant sitting in the shade and picking your nose while netball girls jumped around with their skirts flapping up. Anyone who wasn’t an outright sissy tried to get onto one of the two cricket teams. Sadleir and Buzik were picked as captains and chose their sides accordingly, one gang against the other, with sundries filling-out the lower order. Crittendon in his big floppy Denis Lilley hat was umpire. He pulled a shiny fifty-cent piece out of his trouser pocket and flipped it in the air. Sadleir called the toss heads and elected to bat. Robbo groaned at the prospect of a long innings standing out in the heat.

“No fear,” Buzik grinned, shinning the ball on his shorts before chucking it to Lach. “This bastard’ll ’ave ’em all carted off on stretchers before the end a the sixth over.”

Lach grinned. He made a lanky slinging motion with his right arm.

“Bodyline the fuckers,” Buzik said, pulling on the keeper’s gloves as they all trudged out to the middle, Crittendon with his knee socks and long sleeves, Sadleir and his chief lieutenant, “Pig Shit” Partlett, with their pads flapping and a pair of battered Duncan Fearnleys.

Lach dug his heel into the dead grass to mark his run-up, making a scar of fine reddish gravel. Buzik crouched down behind the stumps. Robbo and White-as-Wayne stood well back in the slips cordon, hands-on-knees, waiting. Partlett swatted at the weeds with his bat while Sadleir, lazily guarding middle stump, brushed a fly from his nose. The rest of the fielders shuffled forward expectantly as Crittendon, like a scarecrow sagging under its own weight, dropped his left arm and bent towards the batsman. Lach, seam gripped at a cunning angle across his fingers, fixed a beady eye on Sadleir’s stumps and loped into his run-up. The ball flew in a wide arc, bounced, leather crunched into wood. A shout went up. Sadleir and Partlett, unconcerned, jogged down the middle of the pitch, stopped and leant on their bats as scarecrow Crittendon signalled the first boundary of the day.

— Louis Armand

Louis Armand is a Sydney-born writer who has lived in Prague since 1994. He is the author of six novels, including Breakfast at Midnight (2012), described by 3AM magazine’s Richard Marshall as “a perfectmodern noir,” and Cairo, shortlisted for the Guardian newspaper’s 2014 Not-the-Booker Prize (both from Equus, London). His most recent collections of poetry are Indirect Objects (Vagabond, 2014) and Synopticon (with John Kinsella; LPB, 2012). His work has been included in the Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry and Best Australian Poems. His screenplay, Clair Obscur, received honourable mention at the 2009 Alpe Adria Trieste International Film Festival. He directs the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory in the Philosophy Faculty of Charles University where he also edits the international arts magazine VLAK.

There, Gaping: Review of Liz Howard’s Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent — Natalie Helberg

Aug 032015

Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent
Liz Howard
McClelland & Stewart
98 pages, Paperback $18.95 CAD
ISBN: 978-0-7710-3836-5

LIZ HOWARD”S DEBUT COLLECTION of poems, Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent, is astonishingly capacious: It is an extended metaphor for the mind. It is a fiery, radiant rollick through language. It is a meditation on Indigenous lineage and muted origins. It is the type of hard, crystalline speech which illuminates the social-scape from its gutters, a song gifted by an absolute Other, eerily coalescing at the junction of race, class, and gender. The poems which make it up celebrate the natural world while simultaneously attuning themselves to the toxicity of its rivers.

The collection could be described as a supernatural invocation. It could be described as a science of Wonder, a discourse on Wonder with a neuro-scientific diction. It channels scientific language as if it were part and parcel of its mother tongue. It speaks Anishinaabemowin also. It is an appropriation of various giants: Plath and Wittgenstein, many others. It is a neural riot. It is emotionally prodigious. Like the infinite citizen it is named for, the text, too, is startled by some big thing which rattles its stars; it, too, stands with a gaping maw, gobsmacked and in love, reaching beyond itself, fearlessly.

The Shaking Tent rite, in various Indigenous traditions, is carried out by a spiritual healer for the sake of procuring knowledge from the great abyss of the beyond. The healer, the shaman, is enclosed in a tent, whose quaking movements, observed from without, signal the presence of supernatural entities presumed to assist with the mediumistic enterprise. The shaking tent, in the context of this collection, is a metaphor which rebuffs the figure of the solipsistic, self-made self: Howard’s speaker proclaims that her guiding desire is “to not be / inside my own head perpetually / not simply Wittgenstein’s girl / but an infinite citizen in a shaking tent.” Within the metaphorical tent, she is thus positioned so as to be open to a variety of ‘others’: A temporal other in the form of events which have not yet occurred (hence she can “receive / the call that comes / down the barrel / of the future”) and a human Other (an Autrui): “I know myself to be a guest / in your mind a grand lodge / of everything I long to know and hold / within this potlatch we call / the present / moment.”

These others are, of course, not quite amenable to being grasped. If they are grasped at all, they are never grasped fully. The speaker’s desire for knowledge is, as the title of the collection suggests, infinite: inexhaustible, but also asymptotic (“this is my delta my neural asymptote”). That is, the speaker approaches, verges on, that which she reveres and longs for, but never reaches it. Only desire which is asymptotic can be, along with the pleasure which accompanies desire, indefinitely sustained. Only desire which is asymptotic, moreover, is compatible with wonder: it is an active curiosity which cannot conquer, and which is thus at the same time a non-violent ‘leaving be.’ The beyond, the remainder which is never colonized but which touches these poems, at times lends the collection something like a religious quality: The text nods its head to something sacred and inhuman, almost god-like (“What auspice will lend me a sacred belt?”), and possibly imperilling (“What little there is beyond impermanence / conspires with half a mind on the original / to sew us closed”).

The poems are riddled with references to time, to standard time, to time ephemeral (“the time zone of some desperate hour”) and to time unending (“O creek, bleeding hills, census inveterate / let me sleep five more minutes just five / minutes more before we default on / eternity”). How these references fit together, or fit into their respective poems, is occasionally mysterious. This is because Howard’s lines at times defy conventional sense: “I have as much stake / in speaking this / as the water / which also / discloses futurity / in a little black dress.” Lines carve out logics which exceed those of everyday communication. Many (not all) of Howard’s poems run on semantic discontinuity, on the imaginative leap: “I remove my belt / and snap it / at the stakeholders of the commonplace / at a crucifix / at the tariff of longing / at the dawn / at my own name.”

The experimental poet Charles Bernstein has observed that sense is irreducible to connotation and denotation, that meaning’s reach is total: acoustic sense (the sense, for example, Howard’s lines make to the ear, if not to the schooled mind, which is trained to unpack propositions and carry out theme-based exegesis) is still sense,^[1] even though—because at a remove from reference—it is more difficult to theorize about. The infinite citizen herself insists that “our only limit / will be of language”; “feral,” she tells us, “I enter / the court of words,” where “tangents come to take you away.” It would be wrong, then, to reduce the time-related mentions so ubiquitous in Howard’s book to anything like a series of genuinely-intended claims—which is not to say that they are never genuinely intended—and to hold their enigmatic character against them. Still, we can say that temporality exists as part of the book’s conceptual-scape. It is a conspicuous motif:

The speaker casts a casual eye toward an apocalyptic future (“we’re just friends / hanging out / in my apartment / until the world ends”). At times the world, the “whole earth,” seems to have ended already, seems to have already “retired from intimacy.” Elsewhere, the speaker is preoccupied with the present, “LOLing / in the middle / of mere existence.” Several of the poems included in the collection (e.g., “Look Book,” “Boreal Swing,” “1992,” and “Bildungsroman”) are essentially portraits of the speaker’s past, glimpses of poverty, records of the sensory impressions and memorable communications of the speaker’s youth (“This is our welfare half / a duplex with mint green / siding shrugged between / rail yard and main street”; “when I was / small and somewhere my / birthfather is drunk and / homeless, half-mad when / the cops ask him for his name / he’ll say, December”). These poems are, to a certain extent, set apart from the other poems in the collection in that they participate in a slightly different aesthetic; still, they exhibit continuity with the other poems insofar as they participate in the temporal triptych (past, present, future) Infinite Citizen is, elsewhere, constantly alluding to.

The colonial critique Infinite Citizen is carrying out is subtle. For the most part, it is not effected by explicit statements; rather, it is evoked by the politically charged vocabulary, or diction, Howard has incorporated in surprising ways into the poetry, a diction which, so-embedded, has become ambiguous without fully shedding its political resonances: Line sequences like “into the puffed metastatic coal became the water / into the affirmative action embryonic mortality / of the loon summit,” and “bioaccumulation became us Athabasca / sweet reconciliation spoke in / mercury, arsenic, lead, and cadmium” prime us, politically, without saying any one thing in particular. Isolated, creatively contextualized words in this way function as constant reminders; their associations haunt, invade, the text. We are not allowed to forget. The text refuses to be blatant, but it has found a way to do this, quite ingeniously, while simultaneously refusing compulsory silence. Even the text’s more positive incorporation of, for example, Anishinaabemowin concepts—such as the Shaking Tent—is a making-present, a kind of metaphysical assertion of a culture covered-over, if not outright killed, and of a portion of the speaker’s subjectivity which has been culturally minimized, or suppressed.

Infinite Citizen exhibits feminist preoccupations as well; the speaker, it seems, is a feminine subject; the colloquial language which, at times, erupts into what, at other times, seems like a specialist’s text (“hey, self / are you lovely yet?”; “with red needles I will ask you again / where is my good / gloss?”) calls to mind the work of writers like Margaret Christakos and Lisa Robertson, two of Howard’s former mentors. Wasn’t it Lisa Robertson, who, taking on the dead male poetry giants of the epic tradition, trying to outdo, or amp up, even their classical pomp, irreverently wrote “Hey Virgil / I think your clocked ardour is stuck…”? Both Lisa Robertson and Gail Scott, moreover, in different ways in their respective writings, have preoccupied themselves with ‘ornamentation’ and ‘surface,’ conceptions traditionally associated with femininity; they have made something out of these notions aesthetically as part of a feminist re-appropriation of writing itself (with Gail Scott producing texts which abandon plot in favour of imagistic and linguistic tangents, or, in other words, in favour of ‘ornaments’ which make up the text’s ‘surface’). Howard’s colloquial expressions, her speaker’s good gloss (deemed, by dint of inclusion, an appropriate subject for poetry), and the “punk psalms” she, at other times, refers to, elaborate and affirm a form of feminine subjectivity, as well as a politicized, dissident aesthetic which admits of only a recent history.

Throughout the text, Howard blurs the border between the subject’s cognition and the world which is external to it. The infinite citizen’s psychic geography is physical; it is made up of veins, blood paths, as much as it is populated with creatures and stones. A hare goes “to rut in the reverb / of precognition.” “The total psychic economy shimmers / a latent mouthpiece of maple.” The infinite citizen thus stands in relation to the environment as absolutely porous; the highway is ‘venous’; the snow is ‘hemodynamic.’ The mind and the body likewise reserve nothing from one another, extend into one another, become conflated with one another. In this text, there is only fluidity, never dualism; the spiritual is a good dirt; the spiritual is chemical.

At a technical level, Infinite Citizen is appropriative; the work, then, not only dismisses the boundary between the objective and the subjective, it does away with the territory lines gouged between texts. The poems in the collection help themselves to each other, as in the procedural poem “Ring Sample: Addendum,” which is made up of lines which occur in the book’s earlier poems.The words and rhythms of many other writers have made it into Infinite Citizen as well. Where Plath, for example, writes “O my God, what am I / That these late mouths should fly open,” Howard writes “could our late mouths ever know such a green word / as vertigo.” Where Plath writes “In a forest of frost, in a dawn of cornflowers,” Howard writes “in a daffodil chorus of posthumous laughter / this clapboard passport.” In one poem, Plath remarks: “All morning the / Morning has been blackening, / A flower left out”; in another, she speaks of a father figure at whom she cannot look much, since his “form suffers / Some strange injury / And seems to die.” Howard, who, seemingly moved by Plath, nevertheless refrains from embracing her totalizing bleakness, in a single poem, informs the reader: “All night the blood moon measures the dilation / of your pupil, pinprick or dinner plate / in this plenum where our attention fails to die.”

It is the plenum, nothing short of the plenum, which is, I think, the source of these new poems, as well as their resplendent infiltrator. Liz Howard has managed something extraordinary here, has managed, in fact, a number of extraordinary things: She has composed an incredibly thought-provoking, intelligent text and she has pulled this off in an impeccable, beautiful language. She has registered—expressed rather than turned from—life in its most gritty, sad, anxiety-producing manifestations. And she has managed to excite. And she has managed, also, ferociously, to marvel.

—Natalie Helberg

Liz Howard is a Toronto-based poet. She works as a research officer in cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto. She holds an Honours Bachelor of Science degree with High Distinction from the University of Toronto and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals (The Capilano Review, The Puritan, and Matrix Magazine). Her chapbook Skullambiant (Ferno House) was a finalist for bpNichol Chapbook Award in 2012. Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent is her first full-length collection.

Natalie Helberg completed an MFA in Creative Writing with the University of Guelph in 2013. She is currently studying philosophy at the University of Toronto. Some of her experimental work has appeared on InfluencySalon.ca and in Canadian Literature. She is (still) working on a hybrid novel.

Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

See Charles Bernstein’s “Artifice of Absorption”↵

Raccoon and Other Poems — Amber Homeniuk

Aug 022015

Raccoon

1. the one who takes everything in its hands^[1]

fat and downy, wee washer-bear descends head-
first, back feet backwards, bushy-ringed
champion omnivore, incognito i.d.,
tactile thinker in the night,
haunchy smartypants
unlocking memory,
destroyer
douser
thief

2.fmy brother’s kits

our uncle shot their mother,
gave us three chimney cubs
with needle teeth, teddy ears,
and bottle-gripping hands

milk-whiskered, growing,
they tumbled in a row
after Tom, marching barefoot in pyjamas,
his grinning jammy mouth

imprinted

3.fmascot

stuck in Scarberia, I hated campus on sight—
dank concrete bunker hulked over dim valley
up the creek, too many trees, and posters
plastered every door: missing, Elizabeth Bain
staring, dark-eyed

Rocky Raccoon, the ubiquitous totem,
charmless hail-fellow in a stuffed suit,
handsy caricature, button-nosed buffoon,
his big-headed bump and grind

tie-dyed frosh, the Purple Jesus party, packed
picnic tables, Tanya playing Three Man with fuzzy dice,
bedsheets strung from crowded dens, there was Jodi
her frizzies and braces and I drank eight beer!
and Ramona always barfing, needed carrying upstairs

skeevers from The ‘Shwa, pedophiles of Pickering,
rapists in the Guild, so bushy-tailed
and boys who saw me only halfway home—
we all wore shoes we could run in

our grads Bernardo, Williams
years too late unmasked:
who else did that asshole Rocky cheer
with his eerie plush leer?

4.ffoaming at the mouth

on the grounds crew in the valley, 1993
clearing winter-damaged trees, notching trunks and
chipping limbs, still looking for Liz in the forest

the skull was in a stand of cedar,
bottom of Old Kingston Road
near Highland Creek—
a young raccoon, smooth cap of yellow bone,
all of her biters and elegant arches
cupped in my hands

that morning in the parking lot
a masked mother, fierce and frantic,
her babies trapped in a dumpster
’til from the safety of the truck bed
we slid a long branch in

at break, we read in the paper over bagels
how Karla and Dirty Debbie went dancing
when Karly Curls met her Paul—
in the photo, dark roots and frosted tips
feathered stiff, framed bludgeoned black eyes,
the horrors inside her drooping disguise

5.froadkill

late for work again, I flew the near-empty concessions,
burned past farms behind a cherry SUV I couldn’t pass,
dogs lolling out both its rear windows, sweltering
coats flat black against back window decal,
a baby on board

noon, three raccoons hopped out of the deep ditch
gallumphed across the road, day-blind
tangled with those fat tires up ahead, terrible timing
thump rolling chaos I braked hard, swerved clear
and two bandits ran from disaster
but striped fur whipped circles in my rear-view
while the road hog with the dogs drove on,
turned a corner beyond the stop

shimmers hovered above hot pavement
I reversed fast, braced myself, missed
last bits of life ticked, I worked the transmission
and long back feet kicked, clenched and spread little toes,
black velvet pads in thick cream
paddling the air like an infant’s
offered up, soft belly,
that helicopter tail

6. mentor

Oh old boy

you’ve taught me all you can,
your dousing days are done.

Lie down with your snout at the stream
to rest in woods behind my brother’s house.

Let season’s green weave through your nest of sticks,
set age along the top of your white brow
with sutures fused, full sagittal crest

and quiet
those sore worn teeth.

Them Apples

1. Pick

among the ghosts of September
are days emphatic as egg-calling hens
tilting on their pegs like cotton candy

I stretch to haul the red-cheeked harvest down
and smears of mealy rot and crumbled bark-
stained fingers poke through

your old gloves: with how many holes
can they still be good?
which rungs do ladders need?

lips grip curves and woodsmoke
suck the sour near the core
green stems slide, catch between uneven teeth—

I cast off the not-worth-its, the stingy and gnarled
save the bird-bitten and the bug-holed
with their healed-over tough-skinned hearts

truth rolls under my ankle
fills buckets
its roundnesses bobbing in water

2. Cut

slice and cone
dig for twisting brown tracks
free jagged curls of skin

grinding knuckles wrap the knife
work wet wood, erode bone
brass tacks emerging

think of swords

notch out the cores
open them like mouths
break their silence

3. Stir

bruises surface from the rosy deeps,
flesh wounds seep, sticky black grains in wrinkles,
peelings divine a cidery stink

my mill churns all afternoon, spits out pith
into steam: blisters, jars, rings, lids
counted by feather-layered light

arms loaded, feet worm into moccasins
heated by back room sun,
another half-wheelbarrow

I also carry your knotted fist, a spot
just here at the back of my hip
folded like a wing

4. Keep

afterwards, heart-queasy and acidic,
my hands are wizened little mummies
helpless as when our girl stopped eating

last pot off the stove and cooling,
joints squeak like dry flakes of paint
jarred by every lid-popping echo

sealing up sauce in glass like myths, in this
odd season of double yolks, northern lights
and doorknobs falling off, mixed in with rattling

stars, fruit still dropping from the branches,
the thuds of celestial shot putt
tremor loose small yelps and toads

I’ve gathered the burrs and the catkins of you
caught in my clothes with memory and cinnamon
pockets full of seeds

at the edge of the field
deer pause, chewing,
bone chips hiding in their meat

Late Bloomer

1. Born Late

I am past due
the days already gone to seed
know it in the bass-heavy pulsing of myself
all throbbing aorta

this old jacket shrunk and wilted to the touch
me and last year’s apples and the quiet ground
and shine-worn split trousers—lived hard in, discarded
I have outgrown even my shoes
done with these thrift store threads

I will ease grief from my throat

heat calls me up from the earth
grave-risen all the way through the rotting roots
come to moult
I hook myself on and haul away at the tendons
braced against light, working

all the doors from their hinges
cracked open, oh my frail and soggy new self
herniating out through the tender razor-scraping edges

I will shed my skin, busting raw and wet
climb right out of my hide and fly away, drop it
gently as cicada shells from bark

2. Cicada

diving head-first and backward into deep air
my eyes without their lenses
I am sawn in half, kicking my legs out
shoulders up around my head

I will breathe open glass-paned wings to the next life
leaving behind gravity
and my clawed digging arms

just one entomological Rapture
your deserted hands
pinching crisp brown casings

trees all heaving and veiny lungs, my work half-done
distension rocking the sky
with songs of rods, reels, and muted brass
cooking, casting, and resonant monks rattling distant joy

I will bring warm and sticky life from my humming pockets

you think it won’t end—the pain or the singing—then it does
borne late into the season
my belly tympanic in the empty
our whole selves arched, hairy with need and
fast unhooking days from the year

3. The Singing Season

with each wing-click, I flip this mirror
trading dark packed dirt for dusty leaves

these vibrating voices turn tall cliffs to liquid
richer than sap from the source

when sound soars shaking so far
over creaking crevices and lines of vicious little ants
I will remember that I could be somewhere else

you may yet hear me keening in the branches
or hollering downhill with my feet lifting off the pedals
back-slit like coffin clothes, the living gone on from here

—Amber Homeniuk

Amber Homeniuk works as an expressive arts therapist and sustains a variety of individual and collaborative arts practices. Her writing appears in The Malahat Review, The Fiddlehead, and here at Numéro Cinq, as well as in Windsor Review’s tribute to Alice Munro. Amber’s poems are anthologized in Beyond the Seventh Morning (SandCrab, 2013) and Window Fishing: The night we caught Beatlemania (Hidden Brook, 2013). Her first chapbook is Product of Eden: Field of Mice (Norfolk Arts Centre, 2013). So far this year, she’s been a finalist in the PRISM International poetry contest and shortlisted for Arc Poetry Magazine’s 2015 Poem of the Year. Amber lives in rural southwestern Ontario, blogs groovy outfits at Butane Anvil, and is kept by a small flock of hens.

Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

Holmgren, Virginia C. (1990). Raccoons: In Folklore, History & Today’s Backyards. Capra Press. p. 157.↵

The Mermaid: A Conversation with Fides Krucker — Julie Trimingham

Aug 012015

I live by the salt water, and look out every day on a rock where seals sunbathe; my distance vision is impressionistic, the bodies lounging where rock meets wave might as well be mermaids. Traditionally half-fish, half-woman, and drop-dead gorgeous, mermaids, at some point, got confused with the traditionally half-bird, half-woman sirens, whose singing voices were notoriously beautiful. Both animal-woman forms caused shipwrecks, or brought bad luck, although some could bestow boons, as well. In today’s popular imagination, the mermaid/siren is commonly thought of as possessing great physical beauty and an irresistible soprano, and she seems to have lost her danger along the way. Weeki Wachee Springs, in Florida, has been featuring professional mermaids in an underwater stage with glass walls since 1947. There are now mermaid schools in Los Angeles, Montreal, Colorado, and the Philippines, among others. Students pick out a colorful monofin and dive in. Mermaiding is now a verb, a hobby, a job. It seems all fantasy, fetish, and sparkle. But I was interested in a mermaid’s interior life. And now, my friend has become one. A mermaid. So I thought I’d ask her.

Fides Krucker is an internationally acclaimed singer specializing in contemporary vocal repertoire. Based in Toronto, she is also a teacher, writer, and vocal composer. Her current role is the Mermaid in DIVE, a work she co-created with writer Richard Sanger and composer Nik Beeson.

— Julie Trimingham

Fides Krucker singing “The Pearls” from DIVE.

Fides Krucker singing “Lyghea’s Idyll” from DIVE.

Julie Trimingham (JT): Before you were a mermaid, you were a girl in baker’s whites. You’ve told me about arpeggiating in front of your first singing teacher, an Italian soprano who would clasp her left breast, squeeze it, and demand, at the end of your run, Another one for baby Jesus! I love this image. Can you please elaborate?

Fides Krucker (FK): When I was young, hardly twenty, I ran my father’s bakery. This was industrial baking, we made thousands of croissants an hour… flaky, buttery, high-end ones… but it was not glamorous or romantic in any way. Lots of flour in the air and in my hair (which was big and curly at that time). I’d show up for singing lessons still in my baker’s whites…a short sleeved dress, apron, little socks and safety shoes…practical! Maria would actually do what you describe as she taught…the squeeze, the ‘baby Jesus’… What I wish I had done in those first lessons was just imitate the way she sang…not her sound… but her healthy vocal process. She had been taught in Italy and came to Canada as a teenager. She had such an opulent voice, and the real ‘bel canto’ approach. I was only with her a few years as she did not seem ‘intellectual’ enough for my tastes. Silly me! If only I had been ready to understand how healthy she was in her animal body, embodying a sustainable singing technique due to a pure and uninterrupted line of operatic training. She would have been a great mermaid.

JT: The Pastry Chef in DIVE, is she drawn from your life?

FK: There is a pastry chef in the original story, but he is male. Even though the scene is not from my life, when I sing the vowels of all those Italian and French pastries, I take them quite personally! The words taste good! Panettone, tiramisu, cream puffs and eclairs I used to bake and brioches , cannoli and palm-leaves, I simply love to eat…I’m a bit sweet and flaky myself.

I ended up marrying too young (the first time) thanks to a cheesecake I had made and given to a cousin, who gave it to a Sicilian friend…who proposed. I think agreeing to that marriage was how I got myself out of the bakery. I did not know how to say ‘no’ to my father, so accidentally said ‘yes’ to another man. I wasn’t raised by a feminist, you know! I was impulsive and unconscious at that time. It has taken a lifetime to try and change that!

JT: DIVE is based on The Professor and the Siren, by Giuseppe di Lampedusa (http://www.nybooks.com/books/imprints/classics/the-siren/). The story follows the lovelorn narrator as he walks into a bar and strikes up a conversation with an old professor. The Professor tells a story of how he once fell in love with a mermaid. He did not follow his love, and he now regrets the dry life he’s lived. The narrator later learns that the Professor has subsequently jumped into the drink, presumably to chase some fishy tail. You are the mermaid, yes?

FK: Oh yes I am! And just at the right time in my life! I am undoing so many things that no longer serve me, and she is part of the undoing.

The mermaid I play in DIVE is amoral. (With the exception of Disney’s Ariel I imagine all sirens and silkies live somewhere outside of human rights and wrongs). She is fun to inhabit, she gets to break all sorts of vocal rules, and she will have a great costume. In the script she tells us that she is Lighea, the daughter of Calliope. No little mermaid here…she is descended from the biggest muse of all.

You know, a mermaid is utterly undomesticated. She is not domiciled. She inhabits the ocean. She lives far beyond of my idea of ‘house’. To bring her to life I have to use this house, my body.

JT: How did you become her?

FK: The mermaid’s songs were a real collaboration between Nik, the composer, and myself. I improvised, singing with wolves and with whales. I imitated their sounds and I let myself be wild…I ululated, howled and shrieked. The mermaid is a stand-in for the parts of me not yet fully present…for the parts of me I have learned to hide because they seem dangerous or threatening to society, to men, to other women. This is not because the sounds I am making are inherently rough or aggressive or damaging…it is because they’re real…and unfettered.

JT: What is the hardest thing about being a mermaid?

FK: Getting past predictable behaviour. I realize how conditioned and patterned I can be. Sometimes I overreact, sometimes I repress. These are not part of the mermaid’s repertoire. She is animal and divine. An extra challenge is that this mermaid appears as jilted girlfriend, pastry shop waitress, barmaid and house keeper, as well as her elemental self. I play them all, and in each of these assigned female roles, there needs to be a little of her pointy teeth and fishy scent.

One thing I dearly love about this mermaid is that when she asks Rosario to come with her under the sea and he says he can’t, she simply slips back into the water and goes about her business. I can feel her sadness, but still, she lets go and returns to her element…swims in what is current.

JT: Are you worried about ocean acidification, or is it only the crustaceans that are complaining?

Yes, I am worried. When I was at college, I took Marine Biology. I thought for a few years that this would be my career. Embodying this big mermaid reminds me of that early passion, takes me out of Toronto, and plunks me back into the ocean. I remember scuba diving at Race Rocks, off the southern tip of Vancouver Island. We were in the water at least twice a week swimming with the extraordinary invertebrate life….colours and shapes galore…sensitive anemones, prickly sea urchins, sluggish sea cucumbers, and masses of bull kelp. Acidification absolutely affects any sea creature that makes a shell. It upsets other processes in virtually all varieties of sea life…reducing an organism’s ability to reproduce, heal, grow and respond to stress. Sea life is sensitive life! We need to listen.

JT: DIVE is set in Mussolini’s Italy. What’s the relationship between fascism and your mermaid?

FK: That’s a great question. Fascism refers to a bundling together in order to find strength. This is a good idea. But the fascism or ‘bundling together of peasants’ in Italy at that time was under the dictatorship of Mussolini.

The mermaid is elemental. She is as wild and powerful as a storm, she has an intrinsic violence. In the way she uses her voice, we can tell that she knows how to reign that violence in. Mussolini just rages and roars. I suggested to the composer that we stretch out his voice to really explore the sounds within his yelled speeches. This made them more musical and more animal all at once. Nik did beautiful work with this stretched vocal material, and I respond as the mermaid to it through my own stretched, nonconforming sounds. Mermaid and Mussolini go toe to toe, howl to howl.

JT: Mermaids can’t spread their legs. What do you make of this?

FK: Heaven! Peace of mind! Power! A different type of intimacy…and maybe a little loneliness?

In ancient Greece a woman’s voice was equated to a woman’s vagina. A physician from that time would say that you could hear when a woman was menstruating, thanks to the sound of her voice. Women were also expected to speak in pleasing tones within the city walls of Athens. Women did not have the vote, could not own property. They were not full citizens. To make loud sound they had to leave civic space. Out in nature or in the suburbs they could engage with the ritualistic female sound called the Ololyga. This high piercing cry would have functioned cathartically, a communal blowing off of steam.

So a mermaid making any sound she pleases…dangerous sound to boot…and not spreading her legs, seems logical and useful to me. Very undomesticated. It makes me want to re-read the Lysistrata. The women in Aristophanes’ play withhold sex as a way to try and secure peace and end the Peloponnesian War. That’s a whole society of women closing one mouth with the hope that the words coming out of the other will be heard and heeded. This strategy has been used in modern times to protest violence and corruption and effect change…Nigeria, Kenya, Togo, South Sudan, Liberia, The Philippines and Colombia.

JT: Mermaids don’t wear clothes.

FK: My voice is an intimate thing. It is my familiar. It knows me and my job is to be naked with it and let it be naked. And then know where I left my clothes!

JT: Your mermaid screams and groans as well as sings.

FK: Screaming is a human survival tool. It sounds alarm. Growling, shrieking, sobbing, whining, these non-verbal sounds express exactly what is going on for us.

JT: When you are singing, where does the song come from?

FK: The place that aches behind my chest. Maybe this is my heart! But it feels more like soul or even a very specific intelligence. It is not always listened to or respected…by me, by others.

The ache is is a disciple of the emotions, learning all of their curves, no matter how painful, or how riskily bright and optimistic. It is devoted to the spaces between the notes on the page.

JT: Diving into the ocean is deep work. What do you think, Mermaid?

FK: This morning, that sentence makes me tired. I am too aware of all the work that needs to be done…in relationships within the family, within society, with the planet itself. For me, a woman with two legs, I am glad that I can go for a vigorous walk and let go of worry for a while.

The mermaid in our piece takes on big things, she represents big things, and even though I try to house her when singing…and many of us are housing these big thoughts and feelings every day…there is only so much any one person can do.

I am so grateful for art…for its ability to point things out and its audacity to imagine…and if that can inspire truthful and hopeful conversation within community, well, that is even better. That’s what I am interested in now…imagining a more expansive and flexible and integrated existence for us all.

— Fides Krucker & Julie Trimingham

Watch a bit of DIVE at http://www.nikbeeson.com/dive/

CDs available at http://www.nikbeeson.com/merch/

Sonic Theatre Performance
July 30 – August 9
Array Music Studio
155 Walnut Avenue, Toronto

For more information on the upcoming performances go to http://bit.ly/1KrirH0 or http://www.fideskrucker.com/DIVE/

Julie Trimingham is a filmmaker and writer. Her first novel, Mockingbird, was released in 2013. Way Elsewhere, a collection of fictional essays, is forthcoming from Lettered Streets Press. She loves writing for Numéro Cinq. Stories she has told at The Moth Story Slam are posted at www.julietrimingham.com.