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Do you ever find yourself longing for a good, old fashioned 19th century illness? Perhaps you’ve been reading Susan Sontag and you’re feeling ever so swoonish in your whale bone corset or your itchy Czarist underwear with the hundred mother of pearl buttons. Anyway the point is that you’re just not feeling yourself. Don’t you long for the days when, out of sorts, half crippled with malaise you could go to Herr Doktor and he, pink, hirsute, bespectacled, well fed, well furnished would talk to you for over an hour because after all you were always beautiful whether you were a boy or a girl, man or woman. You were always impossibly beautiful to Herr Doktor who would give you a glass of good Russian tea and talk to you as the twilight filled the tall windows and the Egyptian figurines seemed to move slightly in the deepening shadows. Of course there was something wrong with you. Something carved like mahogany but far inside. Something stained and sequestered like the frame of a hidden door. And Herr Doktor would know enough not to open it. All he had to do was make you feel like a reasonable neighbor and accordingly charge very little. Going home you could watch the orphan boys light the gas lamps with their long tapers.Yes. Those were the days.

  

S.K.

What does this mean? I look as through a glass darkly. The candle sputters. The rest of my tribe is asleep. I must write quickly before they wake. I think the sleepers would be angry to know I’m using their precious wick in the matter of writing these notes. The soul and its properties are negligible to those who must work. The candle is for finding our clothing in the pre-dawn darkness. 

Write quickly. Open the throat of your hands. Put freedom on the page. Orphic animals . Let loose the electrolysis of sunlight on water. Let no one imagine that he or she is alone. 

 

S.K.

So you are watching  MSNBC or CNN or CNBC or Fox or Lordy, the “local news” and in a frequency effect game you promise yourself a drink of Gray Goose every time a suited type explains that Detroit’s problems are the direct result of employee benefits, as if the unprecedented collapse of credit to consumers has not occured; as if the auto industry has not failed to invest in a new generation of cars that will get better mileage–say for the sake of argument we’re talking about the same mileage that cars are getting in Europe.

You start to get a little drunk. The unions are at fault over at CNN. Have another drink. Don’t think at all about the fact that the Big 3 U.S. auto makers have been replicating largely unsaleable product lines for over a decade. Don’t imagine that management has had a key role in undermining the health of our nation’s leading manufacturing industry. Look. Even today on MSNBC a suit was overheard saying that the unions are the problem. Pour some more Goose. Drink like a rich man or woman. Play at selective economic memory loss. Ignore that American workers are not the problem and that their benefits are a minor slice of Detroit’s shrinking pie.

You might as well play the drinking game all the way to its conclusion. Pay no attention to the fact that a national health care plan would be good for business and for industry or that the business of union bashing is essentially an argument against the inclusion of blue collar workers in the middle class.

Peter S. Boyer writes over at the New Yorker that the whole sad decline of the U.S. auto industry has to do with the unions but in fact the estimated $1,500 that Boyer asserts must be added to the cost of an American car as opposed to a Nissan that’s manufactured in Tennessee where there are no unions is a red herring. If Barack Obama’s efforts to bring low cost medical insurance to every American can be realized those costs in the arguments concerning Detroit’s woes will be erased.

Los Angeles

by Andrea Scarpino

 

This week, as fires burned in Santa Barbara (about 80 miles north of where I live), I thought a bit about loneliness. Seeing photographs of evacuated people lying on cots in shelters, of homes reduced to scorched earth, of trees burnt black all the way to the tips of their branches, made me remember how much we, as humans, are really alone. No matter our technology, our missions in space, our explorations to the very depths of the earth, we are lonely creatures, unable to commune with very much outside of our species and dependent on the simplest things for our survival. A spark of fire and a mountainside goes up in flames, a hundred houses burn. Fire rages unpredictably through canyons, lifts unpredictably on the wind, jumps across highways and rivers without any discernable pattern. And at the end of the day, all that we’ve created for ourselves looks like loneliness. Broken. In ashes.

But there’s a beauty, too, in those photographs, in the billowing smoke moving down the coastline. A beauty of the ephemeral, that which passes faster than we would like. A beauty of the delicate. Because even mansions are easy to destroy. Even metal and stone and bricks—given the right temperature, conditions, heat, everything that humans create will burn. All the physical things of our life will dissolve back into earth, air, water—the most basic elements.

Of course, this isn’t to say that people who lose their belongings and homes to fire should look on the bright side of things, should relish the beauty in it. Natural disasters are terrible for many reasons, just one being that they remind us of our fragility, how no matter our wealth or brilliance or kindness, we are all susceptible to the terror of a spark, a lightening strike, a fierce wind. This is just to say that fire is a type of loneliness, a reminder of the strange place of humans in this world. How we have created more than any other animal, and yet, at the end of the day, we are just as vulnerable, just as subject to the laws of nature as the rattlesnake, the tumbleweed.

 

Andrea Scarpino is the west coast Bureau Chief of POTB

 

Visit her at: www.andreascarpino.com

The call came in at 3 a m: a body burned beyond recognition in the hills (insert location, Laurel Canyon, Newton, the outskirts of Moline.). The detective (insert socio-economic thumbnail here: a Tai Chi master and Lesbian loner,a sharply loveless  nearly middle aged military veteran who, if he held strong beliefs would resemble Robert Jordan, but because of ((insert malady here:  the Viet Nam War; divorce and bourbon; downward economic mobility; manic depression; disability; or other invisible neurological disorders)) he can only live in the moment like a restless and superior animal.(You can insert other liminal sleuthing figures: shaken priests, rabbis, awol professors, secretive homeboys, just remember that your shamus needs her or his alienation for the private investigator must be a ritual figure who  functions best when he or she is out of town by choice or exile.)

The call came in at 3 a m. The body was found in an empty swimming pool like some character in a Robert Altman film but  it was unidentifiable, only the soles of the feet intact. 

Detective Ernest Fenellosa lit an Egyptian cigarette and peered down at the remains. He could smell the eucalyptus leaves or the wood smoke or the wild cinnamon ferns–it doesn’t matter, he had a good nose.

He saw how the body straightened itself as it burned.

He remembered a hundred cruelties and kept them to himself.

The detective possesses dramatic irony.

He can hold several thoughts in his head simultaneously. He knows that Sordello can be Browning’s Sordello or Ezra Pound’s or the Sordello belonging to the girl next door.

His only sentimentality occurs in sleep.

He doesn’t believe in lyrical epiphanies. For instance he likes the people who love the opera but not the opera itself. He has conditioned reflexes.

He sees that the victim is a message but of an infinitely small type.

His book of science often comes apart in his hands. He reshuffles the pages.

One tends to like him more than the poets. He understands that not all movements are for effect.

This is a relief.

Those whose fidelity is engaged with silence are the best at asking questions.

 

S.K.

I have a friend who loves distance running and he has no problem working against a 20 mile per hour wind in the Boston Marathon. He recently ran a five day race inCosta Rica. I think its safe to say that he’s made for resistances. He knows how to take them inside himself and convert oppositions to opportunities.

I admire this more than I can easily say. I want to be a runner of   sideways or spindrift forces. For myself the matter is more inside the man. I want to be a local Pythagoras who changes the numbers he must endure. I’ve been carrying perfect numbers up a long hill. I’ve been carrying them all my life. I imagine you have as well. The numbers are stiff, grey, elastic, green, revelatory, silent, futuristic or steeped in the past. Oh but they are always heavy. I walk uphill in the sunlight of late spring and the numbers are no lighter today than they were in my youth. I was a lonely child. Blind. Often in solitude. I am lonesome now. I am so very lonely. I imagine you are just as alone. We are, each of us carrying our weighted numbers against the seasonal winds. 

I remember as a boy listening to my grandmother’s 78 rpm records. She had a recording of the Red Army chorus singing some kind of Stalinist anthem and I would play the thing over and over in her dark parlor and see in my mind’s eye a boy’s idea of a forested brotherhood though I did not attach faces or uniforms to it–the brotherhood was synesthesia. My brothers were blue and hemlock green like the trees. And in this way my brothers became numbers I could carry beneath my shirt. Little Stalinist-Pythagorean chorus numbers of a wished for identity. I played the record repeatedly.

Now firmly in middle age I walk in all seasons feeling the losses as they accrue. I like people but cannot understand them. Perhaps this is because I cannot see their faces. Perhaps its because I am meant to be solitary although I have a talent for conversation at least some of the time. I like it when others succeed. I know they are walking with their own numbers, those cobalt and watery integers of loss and wishful meanings that are privately heavy as all valuable things. I wish I could be Pythagoras. Could tell others what their secret numbers will give them if they sing in the proper keys.

Our job is to sing our numbers and run without a chorus. Or say the wind is chorus enough.

Or the numbers are my chorus: all gravity and teeth and the labored breath.

 

S.K.

They are back in Iowa: our prairie version of the swallows that return to Capistrano though they arrive with less fanfare taking their places in the tall grass beside the roads or in the untended fields. Out walking I hear them making their variable announcements. One or two actually sound like a minor problem with the ignition–something is wrong with the magneto–they give up a metallic spattering although they sound happy about it. If I could see them I’d know why they’re happy–I mean I’d see it for myself as opposed to merely saying it. They are alive. They are in love with the new green that’s everywhere, even inside their hollow bones. And they are beautiful. They are jet black and red as the occult   hopes of palm readers and they talk from the tops of fence posts. They are birds of the hot weather. They are the advance guard of summer. They brought me some swift joy today, doubly good for its being unexpected; doubly good because I was worrying about my life when I heard they were with me.

S.K.

 

Last night at the White House Correspondents Dinner in Washington comedian Wanda Sykes turned her “tell it like it is” brand of humor to bear on  the G.O.P. and Rush Limbaugh. Citing Limbaugh’s oft repeated assertion that he’d like to see President Obama fail Sykes suggested that this position is really a desire to see the United States fail–a stance which she argued is “treason”. Sykes then went on to say that Limbaugh is no different than Osama Bin Laden and she wished him a good, old fashioned case of  “kidney failure”. 

Of course I’m no fan of Mr. Limbaugh. I abhor his views about race in America and I think he’s dead wrong about the role of government in upholding the social contract and I don’t like his bluster which invariably reminds me of a drunken uncle shouting at the kids forgetting the pages of the magazines all sticky. Who needs all that hot headed , avuncular blather?

Kidney disease is a terrible thing. I wouldn’t wish it on anybody. Yet my point has more to do with the easy availability of disability as pejorative symbolism even in liberal circles. 

Apparently its okay to use disabling illness as a comedic lancet. You can say that Wanda Sykes employment of kidney disease was arbitrary, that she was really wishing Mr. Limbaugh a debilitating and painful demise and that she might have used any figurative device to get the point across. For instance she might have wished Mr. Limbaugh a long, screaming fall into an active volcano. 

But that is not what she wished for Mr. Limbaugh. The context of her remark had to do with Limbaugh’s famous problem with oxycontin, the highly addictive pain killer which will in fact cause kidney failure if you are unlucky enough to be addicted and you never get help. That of course is the world of the poor and Wanda Sykes was playing with schadenfreude meets Munchausen’s by Proxy. Why not? Mr. Limbaugh doesn’t seem to like the poor very much.

Disability as metaphor or as symbolism is almost never used to promote a positive human characteristic (though there are exceptions–Tiresias’ blindness or the compensatory powers of superheroes    who are exposed to toxic chemicals) and so more often than not a disability appears in a novel or movie as a figure that reflects bad character flaws. Blind Pew in Treasure Island comes to mind or Captain Hook.

Disability as vengeance fantasy is nothing more than the reapplication of a second rate Victorian story telling custom and in these times, in this age I demand more from my entertainment from Washington.

 

S.K.

 

I’d just gotten off a flight from Iowa and was about to board another for Brainard, MN and I was standing near the gate in a cerebral limbo quandary thinking about time vs. getting coffee when a woman’s voice said: “Will your dog bite my cleaning cart?”

“What?” I asked.

“Will your dog bite my cleaning cart.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “Your CLEANING CART?”

Now she was impatient.

“Yeah, I’m cleaning the women’s room and I have a cleaning cart. I thought your dog might bite it because it has chemicals.”

“No, my dog won’t bite anything or anyone.”

“Well good.” Cleaning cart woman pushed her appliance with its chemicals and foamy liquids right on by us.

I wondered if as a girl this woman had been attacked by a dog while pushing a baby sized cleaning cart.

 

S.K. 

Like everyone I’ve decided I need a spring outfit. Something cheerful to the eye. In this way I am thinking of my fellow citizens. I’m thinking of their eyes. What will lift their spirits? Make them feel young, coltish, have them gambol by the river? 

What shall I wear? First I think a new spring hat is in order.

In a kitchen store I find a spaghetti strainger made of aluminum with a couple hundred little holes. I take it home and put tinfoil wrapped Q-Tips in every hole. Its a lot like reading Braille. Soon I have a wonderful space age topper with glittering ex-cephalic dendrites stretching toward the sun. Its perfect for spring. 

For a shirt I’ve chosen a serapemade from a hundred  store bought bread wrappers. Wonder Bread works best. Red, blue and yellow dots all over and words too. Words like poly-sorbate 80 and partially hydrogenized particulate matter. I’m a poet from the shelf life school! I’m vertiginous as Charles Dickens writing another happy ending. So what the bread wrappers are a bit hot? Its no different than living in Tucson in July.

Pants? Nah. I’ll wear my uncle Mert’s tartan plaid swim trunkswith the attached telephone lineman’s toolbelt. (His boat you see was always in danger of sinking.)

I think this will get me started.  

Anyway its really spring in Iowa. Yesterday a bumble bee about the size of a baseball followed me as I made my way down the sidewalk outside the library. He had a little spaghetti strainer on his head and these cute little tartan shorts.

 

S.K.