deeply morbid deeply morbid was the girl who typed the letters
Wednesday 3 September 2008 | 2 cookies in the jar
Because, let’s face it, I could ride my bicycle 24, 24, hours a day, and I still wouldn’t be sedated out of my preoccupation with the unwholesome. So here, for your dreary delectation, two bits of web flotsam which have made me choke up already this morning and it’s NOT EVEN 8 AM YET, and I have yet to (re)read a great wad of Pound for class this afternoon. (Save your tears! Uncle Ezra will summon them soon enough.)
• Death 101, which should be a required course at the freaking State School, where yesterday rush week began and campus was overrun with alarming displays of pulchritude, the flowering of many weeks spent in tanning booths and many gallons of hydrogen peroxide. (”And they say our students are too apathetic to be fascist!” marvelled Driamond, as outside the literature building, hordes of strong young blonde women in matching hot-pink t-shirts chanted and raised their fists in scary unison.) The Brujo says he’s reminded of a Big Joe Turner lyric: “Well you so beautiful / you got to die someday.”
• An Avaaz.org petition to the UN, concerning the incipient lethal impact of climate change on small equatorial islands, because of course yet once again it just has to be poor brown people who get the short, soggy end of the stick. Why can’t fucking NORWAY flood? (Which of course it will; just not right away.) I suppose Jared Diamond would say this is why the island countries are less-developed already, because of their vulnerability to rising waters. It still makes me want to throw back my head and howl WHYYYYYYY GOD WHYYYYYY only except of course I don’t believe in one.
God, that is. The short end of the stick, I totally believe in.
As last night, when I was standing at the sink scrubbing carrots, awash in whatever pleasant endorphins get released through domestic activity. The Brujo came in from the backyard looking pale and serious. “I just saw something really bad.” I turned to hear whatever it was: graphic feral cat death or Sky-Harbor-bound airplane plummeting into the earth. “La Migra, in the apartment parking lot. I think that’s what they were. But I couldn’t tell. They put this Hispanic woman into an unmarked paddy wagon and she was hysterical. Screaming and crying, I’m begging you, I’m pleading with you, please, no, don’t do this. Her English was really good. Then they were just standing around outside waiting for something, these three white guys. They weren’t treating her roughly. one of them was trying to calm her down. But it wasn’t marked, I don’t know who they were. Maybe it’s something totally different, like she was drunk and disorderly, or they were taking her to the psych unit, or I don’t know what.” We look at each other blankly. “Should we do something?”
What should we do? Can we just lean over our back fence and say: Um, hey, strange men in our neighborhood, taking sobbing women away in unmarked cars, who are you? Show us your stinkin’ badges. Are we allowed to ask questions like that? Allowed?! If we’re not, who is? Neighborhood watch, citizen witness. How many people can get taken away in the night, in your country, before someone starts to notice? “Let’s go see if they’re still out there.”
But when we get to the backyard they’re gone, tracelessly, and everything is completely quiet in the apartment building behind our house. Many, many Mexican immigrants live there, whatever the status of their paperwork. “They’re probably all terrified.” The air is soft; the gray feral cat sits hunched up on the concrete-block dividing wall; it lets the Brujo get a few inches closer to it every night. We try to imagine having a job, a boyfriend, a sofa, a television, a cellphone, a landlord, a favorite restaurant, shoes, clothing, dishes, a toothbrush in the color of your choosing, and then just being up and carted away of a Tuesday evening, never to see or have any of these things any more.
And on that happy note, I leave you to your own sordid ruminations, and I go to read the slavering manifestoes of young Ezra. It amuses me, in a queasy sort of way, to think that so much of our unquestioningly accepted American poetics comes straight from the brain of a barking madman and his misunderstanding of Chinese linguistics. I mean, don’t-get-me-wrong-I’m-all-for, for example, going in fear of abstractions. I just wonder, per the Brujo’s Panchromaticon, why we have to absorb these truisms as the Only Way to Do Poems Right, swallowed from lyrical infancy along with our hormone-laced milk and Wonder Bread.
And then there’s ChickieNobs. But don’t even get me started on those.
2 cookies in the jar
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Loomis? Loomis. Loomis?
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Pound-addled narrator: And Weston! Don’t forget the Weston.
Dusting off my only Ezra Pound book on the shelf…from the intro (collected early poems):
Blazes of color intermingled,
Wondrous pattern leading nowhere,
Music without name,
Knights that ride in a dream,
Blind as all men are blind,
Why should the music show
whither they go?
I am Swinburne, ruler in mystery.
None know the ending,
Blazes a blending in splendor
Of glory none know the meaning on,
I am he that paints the rainbow of the sunset
and the end of all dreams
wherefore would ye know?
Honor the glow
Of colors care not wherefore they gleam
All things but seem.
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Pro-Swinburnian narrator: Well, and even though here he’s being sarcastic, Uncle Ezra could also be deeply, deeply sappy (when he’s not slavering at the mouth), and I wish sometimes he would just admit that he spent his adolescence weeping like a little girl over Tennyson. All his ranting manifestoes are, I suspect, more than half addressed to his younger self, because in his early writing, frankly, he could out-Victorian the worse of ‘em. (PS—I’m sorry we lose his stylish indentations! I’ve never been able to figure out how to preserve them in CSS….)