Category: Uncategorized

In my second memoir “Eavesdropping” (which is really a linked collection of essays) I wrote the following passage:

When the doctor appeared he caught me by surprise. His shoes made no sound at all. He pulled back my sheets without warning and stood and looked down on me in silence.

He addressed himself to people I couldn’t see as I lay in the fetal position and held my breath. This was my first experience of being described for others. The doctor referred to me as “this boy” or “this particular case” and the people behind him took notes. I could hear the pencils moving over paper.

When he was through the doctor departed without a word and his retinue followed in silent obedience. I could hear their voices murmuring in the corridor as they walked to another room.

I remember one other sound from the hospital: children weeping in the night.

If we were to name our age I’d call this the era of “Children Weeping in the Night.” In my case I was just a little boy who’d had eye surgery and had become a specimen in a hospital ward. But we’re now facing a global catastrophe of children starving, children with HIV, children whose lives have been literally torn apart by unspeakable violence, much of it state sanctioned. In the United States where medical insurance and social services have been largely taken away one can hear weeping and weeping.

If only tears were percussive. If only the tears of children and their families could be heard beyond Gaza or the Sudan; beyond Ukraine; beyond inner city Cleveland or the Caribbean. What are tears? In the United States we no longer ask. We don’t have to. We simply pass bills that ensure that hospitals will close down. No hospital, no tears. Let them weep in the back alleys and laundromats. Let them weep where the wealthy don’t have to hear them. And while the weeping grows and grows lets build a golden ballroom.

Uncle History has always loved Kurt Schwitters
Who was known as “Stinky” by his friends
For he gathered refuse from the gutter
Roquefort wrappers and such
And from these he made collages
Mandalas of aleatoric beauty
What should History love more?
Even in tidy Vienna
You find false teeth
Lodged at storm drains
Human beings and angels
Throw things away
Which gives Uncle
What is commonly known as
“The giggles…”

When Uncle History employs a shovel
There’s a shovel inside
He knows its there
But keeps digging
Earth piles up around him
Alas poor Yorick
He thinks, despite the evidence
That he’s burying men
But its the inner shovel
Does the work—
Spading up ghosts of conscience
People get sick
They get well
They require help
They don’t require help
But you’ll never know
If your shovel is just a shovel
From the hardware store

Uncle History says:
Let’s all run out and buy cheap TVs
So we can watch the world end
They’re going to cancel your favorite show
The one about lakes and dogs
Look at the clarity of the picture
Look at that picture
You better hurry
The store is closing
Pay no attention to the elderly
Who’ve fallen in the parking lot
Ignore the children crying in shopping carts
The cheap tv sale won’t last long
And just think—
Even it you don’t get one
You were in the store
The bloody dark monolith
Of end times

One day in a museum a companion described for me the exquisite, soulful, miniature drawings by Daumier. She told me of a little dog, a dog made of curlicues. He was jumping in the wholly invisible wind. And I loved him, though I’d never see him at all. This is what Rainer Rilke understood as creaturely love, a tenderness. And its the understanding that while human beings are burdened by consciousness there is “the animal” underneath us who lives in the present. Of course this is imagination and sentimentality in equal measure. If we could interview a fox she’d tell us that the present is often filled with terror. But let’s have some Romantic animal consciousness mixed up with joy. Not potential joy. The hear and now kind. And lets not forget that someone described Daumier to me. That was the present also. Can we turn our language toward the present? The best in poetry does so. We must change our lives. Say what you like, the best poets are open to tenderness and being alive right here and now. If you don’t think so you have plenty of other choices. Pharmaceutical factories abound.

Aunt History doesn’t sleep well
For one thing she hears things
Real things—last breaths for instance
She’s like God herself
A field mouse in Germany
Behind a haycock
Breathes its last
And spiders
With their book lungs
Have their last gasps
Deep in the night
The whole world
Is like the final act of Aida
Lovers sing gently
As their oxygen runs out

Someone has to come down the stairs
So it might as well be Uncle History
Beside him, Doctor Hoffman
The discoverer of LSD
They agree
The Greeks ate moldy grain
Athena popped straight out of their heads
Back in the day
Everyone was Zeus
Mythology sparkles
But its hard to feel your feet

Before there was history
There was nature—all alone
A stage for appetite
Huge lizards eating everything
When it was time for “the past”
Well, appetites were refined
Eating no longer a sport
Cultivation and lingo
The new tooth and claw
Uncle History is made of such stuff
He’s equal parts hunger and necessity
Though there’s poetry mixed in
Solzhenitsyn said it best:
“The belly is an ungrateful wretch,
It never remembers past favors,
It always wants more tomorrow.”
About tomorrow, Uncle is bewildered…