Waltzing with bears

John Muir said that if it ever came to a war between the races, he would side with the bears.  That day has arrived. 

Dave Foreman

"Strategic Monkeywrenching"

 

quoted in I'm With the Bears. Short Stories from a Damaged Planet, edited by Mark Martin

"Catch The Fire"

 

(Sometimes I wonder:
What to say to you now
in the soft afternoon air as you
hold us all in a single death?)
I say—
Where is your fire?
I say—
Where is your fire?
You got to find it and pass it on.

You got to find it and pass it on
from you to me from me to her from her
to him from the son to the father from the
brother to the sister from the daughter to
the mother from the mother to the child.

Where is your fire?  I say where is your fire?
Can’t you smell it coming out of our past?
The fire of living…not dying
The fire of loving…not killing
The fire of Blackness…not gangster shadows.
Where is our beautiful fire that gave light
to the world?
The fire of pyramids;
The fire that burned through the holes of
slaveships and made us breathe;

The fire that made guts into chitterlings;
The fire that took rhythms and made jazz;

The fire of sit-ins and marches that made
us jump boundaries and barriers;
The fire that took street talk sounds
and made righteous imhotep raps.
Where is your fire, the torch of life
full of Nzingha and Nat Turner and Garvey
and DuBois and Fannie Lou Hamer and Martin
and Malcolm and Mandela.
Sister/Sistah  Brother/Brotha  Come/Come

CATCH YOUR FIRE…DON’T KILL
HOLD YOUR FIRE…DON’T KILL
LEARN YOUR FIRE…DON’T KILL
BE THE FIRE…DON’T KILL
Catch the fire and burn with eyes
that see our souls:
WALKING.
SINGING.
BUILDING.
LAUGHING.
LEARNING.
LOVING.
TEACHING.
BEING.
Hey.  Brother/Brotha.  Sister/Sista.
Here is my hand.
Catch the fire…and live.
live.
livelivelive.
livelivelive.
live.

Sonia Sanchez 

"Words born of turmoil and misunderstanding/I write of visions I see through the haze"

"San Diego Evening Tribune." The speaker is a woman.  "A simpler question than Gary's: Can songs change the world?"

Too much like hard work for me, thinks Dean, looking at Elf, who looks at Griff, who says, "Hey I just drum along."

"Songs do not change the world", declares Jasper. "People do.  People pass laws, riot, hear God, and act accordingly. People invent, kill, make babies, start wars."  Jasper lights a Marlboro.  "Which raises a question.  'Who or what influences the minds of the people who change the world?' My answer is 'Ideas and Feelings.' Which begs a question. 'Where do ideas and feelings originate?' My answer is, 'Others. One's heart and mind. The press. The arts. Stories. Last, but not least, songs.' Songs. Songs, like dandelion seeds, billowing across space and time.  Who knows where they'll land? Or what they'll bring?" Jasper leans into the mic and, without a wisp of self-consciousness, sings a miscellany of single lines from nine or ten songs.  Dean recognizes "It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)," "Strange Fruit", and "The Trail of the Lonesome Pine."  Others, Dean can't identify, but the hardboiled press pack look on.  Nobody laughs, nobody scoffs. Cameras click. "Where will these song-seeds land?  It's the Parable of the Sower.  Often, usually, they land on barren soil and don't take root. But sometimes, they land in a mind that is ready.  Is fertile. What happens then? Feelings and ideas happen. Joy, solace, sympathy.  Assurance. Cathartic sorrow.  The idea that life could be, should be, better than this.  An invitation to slip into somebody else's skin for a little while.  If a song plants an idea or a feeling in a mind, it has already changed the world."

Bloody hell, thinks Dean.  I live with this guy.

"Why's everyone gone quiet?" Slightly alarmed, Jasper asks the band.  "What that weird? Did I go too far?"

 Utopia Avenue

David Mitchell

'

Days of Future Passed

 Five years later, I take a deep shuddery breath to stop myself crying.  It's not just that I can't hold Aoife again, it's everything.  It's grief for the regions we deadlanded, the ice caps we melted, the Gulf Stream we redirected, the rivers we drained, the coasts we flooded, the lakes we choked with crap, the seas we killed, the species we drove to extinction, the pollinators we wiped out, the oil we squandered, the drugs we rendered impotent, the comforting liars we voted into office -- all so we didn't have to change our cozy lifestyles.  People talk about the Endarkment like our ancestors talked about the Black Death, as if it's a plague of God.  But we summoned it, with every tank of oil we burned our way through.  My generation were diners stuffing ourselves senseless at the Restaurant of the Earth's Riches knowing -- while denying -- that we'd be doing a runner and leaving our grandchildren a tab that can never be paid.  

The Bone Clocks

David Mitchell 

(c) 2014 

"Is is strange to say I miss the bodies of others?"

In the way that absence illuminates desire, and breakage illuminates function — you don’t notice the doorknob until it twists off in your hand — quarantine has made it plain to me how much I miss the daily, unspoken, casual company of strangers, the people whose names and lives I’ll never know, who populate my ordinary urban days with their bodies on the subway, their glances on the sidewalk, their stray comments at the A.T.M., their hands holding whole milk and gummy bears in front of me in the bodega line.

It was in the early months of my separation that I started to become acutely aware of this gratitude for the peculiar anonymous company that urban living offers — for the cafe just downstairs from my new apartment, where many of the same regular customers gathered each morning: the amiable elderly man chain-smoking and mansplaining trans-Atlantic politics; the mom-friends with their parked bassinets; the 20-something boys reading Bakhtin and Heidegger who never offered to help me carry my stroller up the stoop stairs. In the aftermath of my household unraveling, it was an acute and unexpected comfort to find this daily ragtag cohort just downstairs — a looser household, but a household nonetheless.

Walking late at night on Flatbush Avenue, I appreciated all the anonymous strangers I passed for the ways they suggested, even if I didn’t know their stories, how many different ways it was possible to craft a life. The man buying mangoes at the bodega just before midnight? Maybe he was a father of five. Maybe he was a single father of five. Maybe he and his husband were trying to adopt. Maybe he and his wife had been trying to have a child for years. Maybe he and his wife knew they didn’t want a child; maybe they were saving up to travel the world instead. Maybe he lived alone with his aging mother. Who could know his story? I never would. But I didn’t need to. I only needed to know, through his presence on that sidewalk, that so many plotlines for a life were possible.

When we lose the ability to live among the bodies of strangers, we don’t just lose the tribal solace of company, but the relief from solipsism — the elbow brush of other lives unfurling just beside our own, the reminder of other people’s daily survival, the reminder that there are literally seven billion other ways to be alive besides the particular way I am alive; that there are countless other ways to be lonely besides the particular ways I am lonely; other ways to hope, other ways to seek joy.

Leslie Jamison

The New York Times

September 27, 2020

Mississippi: A Poem, In Days

 

Humiliation, agony, and death, are what I feel.

It could all be so much worse, is what the worst of white folks want us to recite.

The worst of white folk will not be persuaded; they can only be beaten. And when they are beaten, they fight more ferociously. They bruise us. They buy us. That is why we are so tired. That is why we are awakened. We are fighting an enemy we’ve shown exquisite grace, an enemy we’ve tried to educate, coddle, and outrun, an enemy that never tires of killing itself, just so it can watch us die.

Titillation.

I lather my hands in sanitizer and google gun shops in Lafayette County on my phone. I do not believe in guns. I do not believe in prisons. Yet I know I need one if I am to continue living alone in this Mississippi, American town.

I look at the grizzled cotton fields outside my truck window on Highway 6. I want to ask, where am I?

But I know.

This is not home.

If this is home, it is not healthy.

I do not want to humiliate. I do not want to be humiliated. I do not want to kill. I do not want to be killed. I want us to be free. I know what I feel. I know what I’ve felt. I must buy a gun if I continue to live in Oxford, Mississippi, so I cannot continue to live in Oxford, Mississippi, no more. It took way too much Black death to get here, and here is where I’d love to live without guns, without prisons, without monuments of humiliation, without the undervalued expected sacrifice of essential workers, without the worst of white folks. Here is where I’d like to tenderly, honestly, radically live and love with you.

And here, one day, will be Mississippi.

 

Kiese Makeba Laymon

Vanity Fair, September 2020  

The word "my" brings pleasure.  The word "my" brings pain.  These are true words for masters as well as slaves.  When they are drunk, we become invisible to them.  Their talk turns to owning, or to profit, or loss, or buying, or selling, or stealing, or hiring, or renting, or swindling.  For white men, to live is to own, or to try to own more, or to die trying to own more. Their appetites are astonishing! They own wardrobes, slaves, carriages, houses, warehouses, and ships.  They own ports, cities, plantations, valleys, mountains, chains of islands.  They own this world, its jungles, its skies, and its seas.  Yet they complain that Dejima is a prison.  They complain they are not free.  Only Dr. Marinus is free from these complaints.  His skin is a white man's, but through his eyes you can see his soul is not a white man's soul. His soul is much older.  On Weh, we would call him a kwaio.  A kwaio is an ancestor who does not stay on the island of ancestors. A kwaio returns and returns and returns, each time in a new child.  A good kwaio may become a shaman, but nothing in this world is worse than a bad kwaio. 

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet
David Mitchell

One of what we all are, Pelly. Less than a drop in the great blue motion of the sunlit sea. But it seems some of the drops sparkle, Pelly. Some of them do sparkle!

My recent adventures have made me quite the philosopher, especially at night, when I hear aught but the stream grinding boulders into pebbles through an unhurried eternity.  My thoughts flow thus.  Scholars discern motions in history & formulate these motions into rules that govern the rise & fall of civilizations.  My belief runs contrary, however. To wit: history admits no rules; only outcomes.

What precipitates outcomes? Vicious acts & virtuous acts.

What precipitates acts? Belief. 

Belief is both prize & battlefield, within the mind & in the mind's mirror, the world.  If we believe humanity is a ladder of tribes, a colosseum of confrontation, exploitation & bestiality, such a humanity is surely brought into being, & history's Horroxes, Boerhaaves & Gooses shall prevail.  You & I, the moneyed, the privileged, the fortunate, shall not fare so badly in this world, provided our luck holds.  What of it if our consciences itch?  Why undermine the dominance of our race, our gunships, our heritage & our legacy? What fight the "natural" (oh weaselly word!) order of things?

Why? Because of this: -- one fine day, a purely predatory world shall consume itself. Yes, the Devil shall take the hindmost until the foremost is the hindmost. In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul: for the human species, selfishness is extinction.  

Is this the doom written within our nature? 

If we believe that humanity may transcend tooth & claw, if we believe diverse races & creeds can share this world as peacefully as the orphans share their candlenut tree, if we believe leaders must be just, violence muzzled, power accountable & and the riches of the Earth and its Oceans shared equitably, such a world will come to pass.  I am not deceived. It is the hardest of worlds to make real.  Torturous advances won over generations can be lost by a single stroke of a myopic president's pen or a vainglorious general's sword.  

A life spent shaping a world I want Jackson to inherit, not one I fear Jackson shall inherit, this strikes me as a life worth the living.  Upon my return to San Francisco, I shall pledge myself to the Abolitionist cause, because I owe my life to a self-freed slave & because I must begin somewhere.

I hear my father-in-law's response: "Oho, fine, Whiggish sentiments, Adam.  But don't tell me about justice.  Ride to Tennessee on an ass & convince the rednecks that they are merely white-washed negroes & their negroes are black-washed Whites! Sail to the Old World, tell 'em their imperial slaves' rights are as inalienable as the Queen of Belgium's!  Oh, you'll grow hoarse, poor & gray in caucuses!  You'll be spat on, shot at, lynched, pacified with medals, spurned by backwoodsmen! Crucified!  Naive, dreaming Adam. He who would do battle with the many-headed hydra of human nature must pay a world of pain & his family must pay it along with him! & only as you grasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean!"

Yet what is an ocean but a multitude of drops? 

Cloud Atlas
David Mitchell
2004

The world never stops unmaking what the world never stops making.

blackswangreen
David Mitchell

Whitey on the moon

A rat done bit my sister Nell.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Her face and arms began to swell.
(and Whitey's on the moon)
I can't pay no doctor bill.
(but Whitey's on the moon)
Ten years from now I'll be paying still.
(while Whitey's on the moon)
The man just upped my rent last night.
('cause Whitey's on the moon)
No hot water, no toilets, no lights.
(but Whitey's on the moon)
I wonder why he's upping me?
('cause Whitey's on the moon?)
I wuz already paying him fifty a week.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Taxes taking my whole damn check,
Junkies making me a nervous wreck,
The price of food is going up,
An' as if all that shit was't enough:
A rat done bit my sister Nell.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Her face and arm began to swell.
(but Whitey's on the moon)
Was all that money I made last year
(for Whitey on the moon?)
How come there ain't no money here?
(Hmm! Whitey's on the moon)
Y'know I just about had my fill
(of Whitey on the moon)
I think I'll send these doctor bills,
Airmail special
(to Whitey on the moon)

Gil Scott-Heron

I watched clouds awobbly from the floor o' that kayak.  Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an' tho' a cloud's shape nor hue nor size don't stay the same, it's still a cloud an' so is a soul.  Who can say where the cloud's blowed from or who the soul'll be 'morrow? Only Sonmi the east an' the west an' the compass an' the atlas, yay, only the atlas o' clouds. 

Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell

Archivist: Weren't you curious about Union's blueprint for the briter tomorrow? How could you know the new order would not give birth to a tyranny worse than the one it xpired? Think of the Bolshevik and Saudi Arabian Revolutions. Think of the disastrous Pentecostalist Coup of North America.  Surely a program of incremental reforms, of cautious steps, is the wisest way to proceed?

Sonmi-451: You show xtraordinary erudition for an eighth-stratum, Archivist, I wonder if you encountered this dictum first spoken by a twentieth-century statesman: "An Abyss cannot be crossed in two steps". 

Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell

Archivist: Fantasy, lunacy. 

Somni-451: All revolutions are, until they happen, then they are historical inevitabilities.

Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell

"When I think of the road we're travelling on, I can't help but wonder what's gone wrong."

"Your ignorance, Bat!  It's not funny! It's agony! You're Einstein's tea-lady, Newton's wig-delouser, Hawkings's puncture-repairer!  You fanfare your 'Information Revolution', your e-mail, your v-mail, your vid-cons!  As if information itself is thought! You have no idea what you've made!  You are all lapdogs, believing your collars to be halos! Information is control.  Everything you think you know, every image on every screen, every word on every phone, every digit on every VDU, who do you think has got their hands on it before it gets to you?  Comet Aloysius could be on a collision course with Grand Central Station, and unless your star guest here chose to let the instruments he controls tell your scientists, you wouldn't know a thing until you woke up one morning to find no sun and a winter of five hundred years!  You wouldn't recognize the end of the world if it flew up your nose and died there!"

Ghostwritten
David Mitchell

"If the affluent cannot afford hope, you cannot expect the destitute to pay for desperation."

Ghostwritten
David Mitchell

If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all"

Ferron – It Won't Take Long Lyrics

They said some men would be warriors and some men would be kings
And some men would be owners of land and other man-made things
And false love as the eternal flame would move some to think in rings
And gold would be our power and other foolish things
But you who dream of liberty must not yourselves be fooled
Before you get to plea for freedom, you've agreed to being ruled
If the body stays a shackle then the mind remains a chain
That'll link you to a destiny whereby all good souls are slain
And it won't take long, it won't take too long at all
It won't take long, and you may say
"What has that got to do with me" and I say,
"You mean to tell me that's all?"
 
Of three men in a desert wandering, one is knowing and two are scared
They say time is in the river, but the river is not there
Dry in spirit dry in body two will lend themselves to death
And in grief one weeps into his hands and drinks his bitter tears
'Cause it don't take long, it don't take too long at all
It don't take long, and you may say,
"I don't know what you're talking about," and I say
"You mean to tell me that's all?"
And as I stand before you now, I am hopeful in my rage
You know love has finally called for me, I will not wilt upon it's stage
But still smaller than my nightmare now do I print upon the page
Do we have to live inside it's walls to identify the cage?
'Cause it takes so long, why does it take so long,
But it takes so long, and you may say,
"I don't really care what you're talking about," and I say,
"Are you trying to say you don't belong?"
 
I am my mother's daughter, but I have seen myself in you
It's this blessing that I follow now, and so I must speak true
I dreamed of thousands dying, it was you and you and you,
And while the city sleeps so quietly there is something we must do
And it won't take long, it won't take too long at all,
It won't take long, and you may say,
"I don't know if I wanna know what you're getting at,"
And it makes we wanna say, "So long."
Because grief will come in measures, only grief alone will know
And you'll see it on your family, on your own face it will grow
And they'll try to keep you hungry, then they'll tell you to eat snow
You know pride can be a moving thing if we learn the strength of "NO!"
And it won't take long, it won't take too long at all,
It won't take long, and you may say,
"I don't think this has anything to do with me,"
"But did you ever think you could be wrong?"
 
At noon on one day coming, human strength will fill the streets
Of every city on our planet, hear the sound of angry feet
With business freezed up in the harbour, the kings will pull upon their
Hair
And the banks will shudder to a halt, and the artists will be there
'Cause it won't take long, it won't take too long at all,
It won't take long, and you may say,
"I don't think I can be a part of that," and it makes me want to say,
"Don't you want to see yourself that strong?"
Division between the peoples will disappear that honoured day
And though oceans lie between us, lifted candles light the way
Half will join their hands by moonlight, the rest under a rising sun
As underneath the sun and moon, a ritual'd wailing has begun
And it won't take long, it won't take too long at all,
It won't take long, and you may say,
"I don't know how to be a part of what you're talking about," and it makes
Me want to say, "Come on!"
 
And beware you sagging diplomats, for you will not hear one gun
And though our homes be torn and ransacked we will not be undone
For as we let ourselves be bought, we're going to let ourselves be free
And if you think we stand alone, look again and you will see:
We are children in the rafters, we are babies in the park,
We are lovers at the movies, we are candles in the dark,
We are changes in the weather, we are snowflakes in July,
We are women grown together, we are men who easily cry,
We are words not quickly spoken, we're the deeper side of try,
We are dreamers in the making, we are not afraid of "Why?"

The War Is Over (full version)

Silent soldiers on a silver screen
Framed in fantasies and dragged in dream
Unpaid actors of the mystery
The mad director knows that freedom will not make you free
And what's this got to do with me

I declare the war is over
It's over, it's over
All the children play with Gatling guns 
Tattooed mothers with their tattooed sons 
The strong will wonder if they're surely strong 
It doesn't matter lately whether we are right or wrong 
But surely we've gone on too long

I declare the war is over
It's over, it's over

Cardboard cowboys in a new frontier 
Drowning Indians in vats of beer 
The troops are leaving on the Trojan train 
The sun is in their eyes but I am hiding from the rain
 Now one of us must be insane

I declare the war is over
It's over, it's over

Drums are drizzling on a grain of sand
Fading rhythms of a fading land
Prove your courage in the proud parade
Trust your leaders where mistakes are almost never made
And they're afraid that I'm afraid

I'm afraid the war is over
It's over, it's over

But at least we're working, building tanks and planes 
And a race is coming so we can't complain 
The master of the march has lost his mind 
Perhaps, some other war, this fabled farce would all be fine 
But now we're running out of time 

I declare the war is over
It's over, it's over

Angry artists painting angry signs
Use their vision just to blind the blind
Poisoned players of a grizzly game
One is guilty and the other gets the point to blame
Pardon me if I refrain

I declare the war is over
It's over, it's over

So do your duty, boys, and join with pride
Serve your country in her suicide
Find a flag so you can wave goodbye
But just before the end even treason might be worth a try
This country is too young to die

I declare the war is over
It's over, it's over

One-legged veterans will greet the dawn
And they're whistling marches as they mow the lawn
And the gargoyles only sit and grieve
The gypsy fortune teller told me that we'd been deceived
You only are what you believe

I believe the war is over
It's over, it's over

Phil Ochs 

And the world disappeared as though shot with a warm whisky gun
As proudly we played and frolicked in desperate fun
The cold night was laughing and waiting outside of the room
So here's where I'll stand and drink with the damned
And take it out of my youth.

Phil Ochs

 

"It Seems There Are No More Songs"

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.   

Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.   

In time the curtain-edges will grow light.   

Till then I see what’s really always there:   

Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,   

Making all thought impossible but how   

And where and when I shall myself die.   

Arid interrogation: yet the dread

Of dying, and being dead,

Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse   

—The good not done, the love not given, time   

Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because   

An only life can take so long to climb

Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;   

But at the total emptiness for ever,

The sure extinction that we travel to

And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,   

Not to be anywhere,

And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid

No trick dispels. Religion used to try,

That vast moth-eaten musical brocade

Created to pretend we never die,

And specious stuff that says No rational being

Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing

That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,   

No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,   

Nothing to love or link with,

The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,   

A small unfocused blur, a standing chill   

That slows each impulse down to indecision.   

Most things may never happen: this one will,   

And realisation of it rages out

In furnace-fear when we are caught without   

People or drink. Courage is no good:

It means not scaring others. Being brave   

Lets no one off the grave.

Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.   

It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,   

Have always known, know that we can’t escape,   

Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.

Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring   

In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring

Intricate rented world begins to rouse.

The sky is white as clay, with no sun.

Work has to be done.

Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

Philip Larkin

"Aubade" 

Collected Poems. 

The Right Mindset for Our Times?

I was at that time a stupidist, and probably still am. Stupidism is the theory that people are stupid in the measure of their most powerful agency. They’re stupid precisely when we need them not to be stupid. Much as I didn’t want to be a stupidist—it’s dispiriting, for starters—I recognized that it improved my grasp on things. Whereas I used to listen with great respect to what the Treasury Secretary or the C.E.O. of a booming conglomerate or even your regular talking head had to say, now I presumed that they were full of it. It was revelatory. The world makes a lot more sense when you accept that it’s run by dingbats. And once you’ve recognized the nature of stupidity—that it expresses a relation between a person and that person’s situation; that it describes the gap between what ought to be understood and done and what is, in fact, understood and done—you begin to recognize the magnitude of the problem. Stupidity isn’t inevitable or constant, of course, but in the long run it almost always prevails. Alan Greenspan? Stupid, ultimately. Barack Obama? Not as smart as he needed to be, at the end of the day. Joe Schmo? Amazingly stupid.

The Flier
Joseph O'Neill
The New Yorker
November 11, 2019

At the Ruins of Yankee Stadium

It is that week in April when all the lions start to shine,
café tables poised for selfies, windows squeegeed
and fenceposts freshly painted around Tompkins Square,
former haven of junkies and disgraceful pigeons
today chock-full of French bulldogs and ornamental tulips
superimposed atop the old, familiar, unevictable dirt.
Lying on the couch, I am drifting with the conversation
of bees, a guttural buzz undergirding the sound
from a rusty string of wind chimes hung and forgotten
in the overgrown beech tree marooned out back,
limbs shaggy with neon-green flame-tongue leaflets
forking through a blanket of white blossoms,
long-neglected evidence of spring at its most deluxe,
pure exuberant fruitfulness run amok.
Rigorous investigation has identified two dialects
buzzing through the plunder-fall, hovering black bumblebees
and overworked honeybees neck-deep in nectar-bliss,
as the city to us, blundering against its oversaturated anthers
until the pollen coats our skin, as if sugar-dusted,
as if rolled in honey and flour to bake a cake
for the queen, yes, she is with us, it is spring and this
is her coronation, blossoming pear and crab-apple
and cherry trees, too many pinks to properly absorb,
every inch of every branch lusting after beauty.
To this riot of stimuli, this vernal bombardment
of the senses, I have capitulated without a fight.
But not the beech tree. It never falters. It is stalwart
and grounded and garlanded, a site-specific creation,
seed to rootling to this companionable giant,
tolerant and benign, how many times have I reflected
upon their superiority to our species, the trees of earth?
Reflection, self-reflection—my job is to polish the mirror,
to amplify the echoes. Even now I am hard at work,
researching the ineffable. I loafe and invite my soul,
for Walt Whitman is ever my companion in New York,
thronged carcass of a city in which one is never alone
and yet never un-nagged-at by loneliness, a hunger
as much for the otherness of others as for the much-sung self,
for something somewhere on the verge of realization,
for what lies around the corner, five or six blocks uptown,
hiding out in the Bronx or across the river in Jersey.
Somewhere on the streets of the city right now somebody
is meeting the love of their life for the very first time,
somebody is drinking schnapps from a paper sack
discussing Monty Python with a man impersonating a priest,
someone is waiting for the bus to South Carolina
to visit her sister in hospice, someone is teleconferencing
with the office back in Hartford, Antwerp, Osaka,
someone is dust-sweeping, throat-clearing, cart-wheeling,
knife-grinding, day-trading, paying dues, dropping a dime,
giving the hairy eyeball, pissing against a wall,
someone is snoozing, sniffling, cavorting, nibbling,
roistering, chiding, snuggling, confiding,
pub-crawling, speed-dating, pump-shining, ivy-trimming,
tap-dancing, curb-kicking, rat-catching, tale-telling,
getting lost, getting high, getting busted, breaking up,
breaking down, breaking loose, losing faith,
going broke, going green, feeling blue, seeing red,
someone is davening, busking, hobnobbing, grandstanding,
playing the ponies, feeding the pigeons, gull-watching,
wolf-whistling, badgering the witness, pulling down the grill
and locking up shop, writing a letter home in Pashto or
Xhosa, learning to play the xylophone, waiting for an Uber X,
conspiring, patrolling, transcending, bedevilling,
testifying, bloviating, absolving, kibbitzing,
kowtowing, pinky-swearing, tarring and shingling,
breaking and entering, delivering and carting away,
enwreathing lampposts with yellow ribbons,
reading Apollinaire on a bench littered with fallen petals,
waiting for an ambulance to pass before crossing First Avenue
toward home. No wonder they fear it so intensely,
the purists and isolationists in Kansas, the ideologues
in Kandahar, it is a relentless negotiation with multiplicity,
a constant engagement with the shape-shifting mob,
diversely luminous as sunlight reflecting off mirrored glass
in puzzle pieces of apostolic light. Certainly this is not
the Eternal City but it is certainly Imperial, certainly
tyrannical, democratic, demagogic, dynastic, anarchic,
hypertrophic, hyperreal. An empire of rags and photons.
An empire encoded in the bricks from which it was built,
each a stamped emblem of its labor-intensive materiality,
hundreds of millions barged down the Hudson each year
from the clay pits of Haverstraw and Kingston
after the Great Fire of 1835, a hinterland of dependencies,
quarries and factories and arterial truck farms
delivering serum to that muscular heart, a toiling collective
of Irish sandhogs and Iroquois beam walkers and Ivoirian
umbrella venders collecting kindling for the bonfire
that has lured, like moths, the entire world to its blaze.
As with my tree, the hubbub of bees its exaltation.
Apis, maker of honey, Bombus, the humble bumbler,
and the tree a common American beech.
It rules the yard, overawing a straggling ailanthus
hard against the wall of the Con Ed substation.
Along the fence some scraggly boxwood shrubs,
a table collapsed into rusted segments, two piles of bricks—
what’s their story?—who made them, carted them,
set them as a patio, and who undid that work to create these
mundane, rain-eroded monuments to human neglect?
Why does nobody tend this little garden?
Undisciplined ivy scales the building in thick ropes
and coils of porcelain berry vine, whose fruit will ripen
to obscene brilliance come autumn, those strange berries,
turquoise, violet, azure . . . Ah, I’ve lost my train
of thought. Berries. The city. People, bricks, the past.
Bees in a flowering beech tree. Symbiosis. Streams and webs
and permutations, viruses replicating, mutating, evolving.
Books in a library, bricks in a wall, people in a city.
A man selling old golf clubs on the corner of Ludlow Street.
A woman on the F train carefully rubbing ointment
up and down her red, swollen arms. Acorns—
tossing them into the Hudson River from a bench as I did
when I was Peter Stuyvesant, when I was Walt Whitman,
when we were of the Lenape and Broadway our hunting trail.
Then the deer vanished, the docks decayed, the towers fell.
The African graveyard was buried beneath concrete
as the memory of slavery has been obscured by dogma
and denial. The city speaks a hundred languages,
it straddles three rivers, it holds forty islands hostage,
it is an archipelago of memory, essential and insubstantial
and evasive as the progeny of steam grates at dawn,
a gathering of apparitions. The Irish have vanished
from Washington Heights but I still see myself eating
a cold pot-roast sandwich, watching “McHale’s Navy”
on black-and-white TV in my grandmother’s old apartment.
I remember the parties we used to throw on Jane Street,
shots of tequila and De La Soul on the tape deck, everyone
dancing, everyone young and vibrant and vivacious—
decades later we discovered a forgotten videotape
and our sons, watching with bemused alarm, blurted out,
Mom, you were so beautiful! She was. We all were,
everyone except the city. The city was a wreck and then
it was a renovation project and now it is a playground of privilege
and soon it will be something else, liquid as a dream.
Empires come and go, ours will fade in turn, even the city
will retreat, step by step, as the Atlantic rises against it.
But water is not the end. Bricks are made of clay and sand
and when they disintegrate, when they return to silt,
new bricks will be made by hands as competent as ours.
People will live in half-flooded tenements, people will live
on houseboats moored to bank pillars along Wall Street.
It’s all going under, the entire Eastern Seaboard.
The capital will move to Kansas City but nobody will mourn
for Washington. Someone will invent virtual gasoline. Someone
will write a poem called “At the Ruins of Yankee Stadium”
which will be set to a popular tune by a media impresario
and people in Ohio will sing it during the seventh-inning stretch
remembering, or imagining, the glory of what was.
Time is with us viscerally, idiomatically, time inhabits us
like a glass bowl filled with tap water at the kitchen sink,
and some little pink stones, and a sunken plastic castle
with a child’s face etched in a slate-gray window.
Fish swim past, solemn as ghosts, and the child smiles sadly,
wondering, perhaps, how bees will pollinate underwater.
He seems a little melancholy. He must miss his old home,
a skin-honeyed hive of multifarious humankind,
a metropolis of stately filth doused in overrich perfume.
The castle door swings open and the boy emerges
like an astronaut stepping warily onto the moon.
When he sees us, through the warping lens of the bowl,
watching him with desperate, misfocussed passion, we are
as cartoonishly gargantuan as the past, and he as spectral
as the future, raising one small hand to wave goodbye.

 

 

Campbell McGrath

The New Yorker, April 27, 2020