Works Cited, Middle C

Jesting! Jousting, rather. You heard the bray—the hee-haw—the yawp—and then the fairgrounds music? pretending to be a rodent running down an alley. Now, just because the second movement is designated, by the composer, “a game of pairs,” we mustn’t confuse it with boarding Noah’s ark—you know—bassoons two by two, oboes as twins, clarinets a pair, next two flutes, and, lest they be too overbearing and brutish, trumpets with mutes. Nor should we allow ourselves to be misled about the seriousness of these blurts. I was told that, while Bartók was composing the concerto, he heard a performance of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony on the radio and laughed when one of its subjects announced itself. He said it sounded like a Viennese cabaret song. This theme was so vacant of any real energy or significance that Bartók promptly borrowed it to use for an interruption he might ridicule. Why would he do that? Hands. [……] Hopeless. In the middle of a serious sermon, why would the preacher stick out his tongue? [… um …] Rather, my young friends, why would he stick out someone else’s tongue?

What was happening around him when he wrote this work? Sorry—when he composed this work. [……] Well, yes, he was ill. He was dying. [……] Okay, he was also a pauper. But he had more important things on his mind. [……] What? His family I suppose. [……] Nothing more? [……] The world was at war, sillies. Everywhere. It was a very large war, deserving the name of “World.” It contained countless smaller ones, and the smaller ones were made of campaigns and battles, deadly encounters and single shootings, calamities on all fronts. But history can hold up for our inspection many different sorts of wars, and World War Two was made of nearly all of them: trade wars—tribal wars—civil wars—wars by peaceful means—wars of ideas—wars over oil—over opium—over living space—over access to the sea—whoopee, the war in the air—among feudal houses—raw raw siss-boom-bah—so many to choose from—holy wars—battles on ice floes between opposing ski patrols—by convoys under sub pack attacks—in the desert there might be a dry granular war fought between contesting tents, dump trucks, and tanks—or—one can always count on the perpetual war between social classes—such as—whom do you suppose? the Rich, the Well Off, the Sort Of, the So-So, and the Starving—or—the Smart, the Ordinary, and the Industriously Ignorant—or—the Reactionary and the Radical—not just the warmongers for war but those conflicts by pacifists who use war to reach peace—the many sorts of wars that old folks arrange, the middle- aged manage, and the young fight—oh, all of these, and sometimes simultaneously—not to neglect the wars of pigmentation: color against color, skin against skin, slant versus straight, the indigenous against immigrants, city slickers set at odds with village bumpkins, or in another formulation: factory workers taught to shake their fists at field hands (that’s hammer at sickle)—ah, yes—the relevant formula, familiar to you, I’m sure, is that scissors cut paper, sprawl eats space—Raum!—then in simpler eras, wars of succession—that is, wars to restore some king to his john or kill some kid in his cradle—wars between tribes kept going out of habit—wars to keep captured countries and people you have previously caged, caged—wars in search of the right death, often requiring suicide corps and much costly practice—wars, it seems, just for the fun of it, wars about symbols, wars of words—uns so weiter—wars to sustain the manufacture of munitions—bombs, ships, planes, rifles, cannons, pistols, gases, rockets, mines—wars against scapegoats to disguise the inadequacies of some ruling party—a few more wars—always a few more, wars fought to shorten the suffering, unfairness, and boredom of life.

Gass, William H.. Middle C (Vintage International) (pp. 368-369). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Works Cited, Middle C

 So, Bruno Schulz—you wonder what is the connection?—he was a writer and a draftsman after all, not a musician—so you should wonder at my claim to relevance. He wrote great Polish prose. He drew nudes—you naughties would like that. One of his drawings depicts a dwarfish man and a hurdy-gurdy—that exhausts his relationship to music. As far as we know. And how far do we know? Anyhow, Schulz is another example of what happens to greatness in this world of ours. Like Webern—shot as a dark marketer by some stupid corn-fed pop-singing assassin who at least had the decency to drink himself to death during the years that followed, from guilt, we may like to imagine. Only the Pole’s case was worse and more so. It happened—Schulz’s life—the lesson of his life, our lesson for today—it happened in Drohobycz which was a small provincial town like Webern’s Mittersill, but located in Galicia, not Austria—you know where is Galicia? nah, no hands—well, it is now the western Ukraine, a region also rich in composers, artists, scholars, and oh yes influential Jews including the founder of Hasidism, a movement of which you know? how many? show hands? nein? with a name like Bruno sewn on him you’d never think … of Jews. They slid slowly away from their faith, the Schulz family, in evidence of which I cite Bruno’s mother, who changed her name from Hendel to Henrietta, though what would be the use? what? well, I spare you Schulz’s low-level life, except he wrote wonders, pictured domineering women, drew men down around the women’s ankles like sagging socks.

Misfortune would not leave Bruno Schulz alone. Early in World War One—eh? … many hands for World War One …? six, twelve … congratulations … his house and the family store were burned, as they say, to the basement. In the middle of the thirties, his brother-in-law suddenly died, and Schulz became responsible for the welfare of a bereft sister, son, and cousin. But let us skip the merely syrupy third movement to enjoy the finale. In 1939 Poland is eaten by the two hogs wallowing in their sties nearby. The Nazis devoured the eastern half, and the Reds swallowed what was left in the west, including a little morsel called Drohobycz. This annexation ended Schulz’s publishing career, as meager as it was, for the Soviet Union specialized in propaganda and hero worship, neither of which our writer had any talent for. Two years passed—one wonders how—and the hammer and sickle was raised to affront the dawn and claim ownership of each dismal day.

Then the Nazis invaded Russia and the Huns came. They were far worse for the Jews than the Reds had been because the Gestapo sat behind the city’s desks and made dangerous its streets and corners. Among these minions was a man with a murderous past, a man alas from Vienna, a man named Felix Landau … one of many but one to remember … Happy Landau … called by some Franz, more acceptably German, Franz is … well … how fluid names were, then as now—people, places, identities, owners—no matter … whether Franz or Felix he was a man who eliminated Jews the way he moved his bowels. For a slice of bread and a bowl of soup, Bruno Schulz painted the walls of this art lover’s villa, including the nursery … Landau had commandeered the house from another Jew … it was later known as the Villa Landau, isn’t that—as you say—a hoot … and there he had multiplied himself, imagine … now his son had a room with a crib and a wall full of happy Felix-like scenes from the brothers Grimm … actually a princess, a horse-drawn carriage (Schulz had done a lot of those), two dwarfs (a lot of misshapen souls as well) … anyway, do not let the nursery be a surprise, they always do this—barbarians do—they go forth, they occupy, they consume, they multiply. Moreover, Felix bragged among his thuggish friends about the talented little slave who colored walls for him, a miserable painter who must have wondered what it meant to be actually a submissive man rather than a dreamed and drawn one.

Political criminals require accomplices—their power is based upon obedience, obedience upon dependency, upon bribes, threats, promises, rewards—consequently: so that his sister might live, Schulz acquiesced; so that her son would survive, Schulz said sir; so that a cousin could continue, Schulz kowtowed; and so that Schulz should gain a brief reprieve for himself as well, he took care to please his captor with his painting. On walls stolen from a Jew, another Jew depicted reassuring fairy scenes for the child of a man who murdered Jews and thereby earned a smidge of notoriety; moreover a man who, not as merely an afterthought, had a nice family he considerately looked after. Meanwhile, the Polish underground had not been idle. They provided the highly valued Bruno Schulz with forged documents designed to facilitate his escape from Galicia. He was to become an Aryan. His papers so described him. He was to leave Drohobycz, where he was known, and hide away someplace—someplace elsewhere—in the guise of a person of good blood and docile character who would therefore not write or draw or dream of washing a woman’s feet. Meanwhile, a German officer—a genuine Nazi, too, another Gestapo goon, with his Luger handy at his hip, a man whose name we know as Karl Günther—unlike the GI whom the Americans hid in anonymity—had grown envious of Landau’s gifted lackey, and, during a roundup of leftover Jews on November 19, 1942, shot Schulz in the head while he was bearing home a loaf of bread.

I have heard it said: All dead are identical. Do not choose but one to mourn. Broken toys are broken toys, and useless legs aren’t legs. 

Thus Bruno Schulz—born an Austrian, raised a Pole, and about to become a Gentile—though a freethinker—died a Jew.

Gass, William H.. Middle C (Vintage International) (pp. 216-218). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Works Cited, Middle C

 Joseph Skizzen decided that given the constraints of the rabbi’s beliefs his reasoning was ingenious if not otherwise acceptable. Clearly, God had to be absolved. It was not he but Hitler who had to be horrible. Theodicy had excused many of the sufferings of the Jews by insisting that Yahweh was using the enemies of the Chosen as a rod to punish them for irresolution and waywardness. So that part of the explanation was ready-made. Then the rabbi simply borrowed a strategy devised by the wisdom of the East so he could conveniently claim that these persecuted, executed Jews had been previously alive and had died once before. They had been recalled to life by God in order that they might be punished—on account of sins committed in former times—in the hell our world would become for the occasion. It was to be, not the Last, but an Intermediate, Judgment. No doubt the ordeals of the countless slain would be cautionary and contribute to the perfection of the world, an aim of every righteous Jew.

The rabbi was sternly urged to reconsider his suggestion, and, to Joseph Skizzen’s disappointment, he rapidly did so, though with what recalcitrance was not reported. Surely the Holocaust victims did not deserve their fate. This was an objection most effectively aimed. That the rabbi’s solution required a resurrection in the midlife of the world was not an issue for the papers and was not reported, though it might have been raised. Surely theologically prepped reporters would have said that these Jews had been transmigrated, cleverly inserted into unsuspecting wombs by many an innocent but impetuous penis. After all, rotten karma had already humiliated, maimed, impoverished, killed the populations of the world many times by the ring of the bell towers. Professor Skizzen certainly approved of the idea that birth was our first punishment, and that there would most certainly be others. Camp guards who had lost their lives to old age were even now being readied for victimization on future killing grounds.

Gass, William H.. Middle C (Vintage International) (pp. 210-211). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Works Cited, Middle C

During the same week that Professor Joseph Skizzen was preparing his final lectures on Arnold Schoenberg’s Moses und Aaron, the newspapers were carrying reports concerning a celebrated Israeli rabbi who had, at last, solved the greatest theological question presented to the faithful by the Holocaust—namely, why? and six million times why? why? why? … why?

There will be no Judgment Day until we undertake to celebrate it. There was a why for Jews, of course: what had their people done to breach the Covenant so utterly and so reprehensively as to deserve annihilation? There was also a why to trouble Christians unless they could forget that German Catholics and German Lutherans had murdered all those German Jews; unless they could somehow reconcile God’s bloodlust with their own thirst by viewing the Almighty’s malevolence as carte blanche to give heretics and Christ killers what they surely deserved—a punishment long in coming and therefore most acceptable. There should be a similar why put to the followers of Islam about Allah, the One and Only God, because to single out Jews to exterminate, as he obviously had, particularly Polish and German ones among countless equally deserving Spanish, Russian, or American specimens, not to mention oodles of additional infidels of all sorts, is … well … odd … Was Allah merely miming the Christian God Almighty, already an epic anti-Semite? The consequences were especially unexpected because the remnants wound up unwanted on the doorstep of the Palestinians—not, one would think, a result in Allah’s plans. No one has seemed similarly concerned that Joseph Stalin murdered many more millions than Adolf Hitler (Professor Skizzen had ample documentation stuck to flypaper in the south dormers). He had finally decided that the reason for this (apart from left-wing reluctance and unremitting Jewish propaganda) was the absence of an organized state campaign against a specific racial target. In any case, what were all these deities—G-d, Jehovah, and Allah—allegedly up to while their minions were slaying even one soul not to say massacring so many? because they were all responsible, weren’t they (those Gods, that is, that existed)? since their power and their wisdom were such decided particularities of their nature like our height and brain size; they were the culprits, surely, weren’t they? these Notables of the Sky? if not for turning on the gas directly, at least for closing their ears to the hiss, turning their backs to the passing trains, washing their hands lest they be stained, taking a snooze through repeated beatings … yes, every one of those Gods … silent bystanders to innumerable shooting parties held till the bodies of the dead lay in heaps like potatoes, and all that human consciousness, all that awareness—in each victim the very candle of the Lord, it was always said, the very Light asked for at creation—was snuffed … ah yes … snuffed … snuffed … —so that’s what the smoke was.

But Professor Skizzen had noticed that God was always excused. Any and every God. For any and every thing. A tornado might trash a trailer park and the poor wretches who survived would thank him for sparing them, as well as preserving a children’s plate and one photo of the family grinning at the Falls as if they’d pushed the water over by themselves.

Perhaps the Gods alternated fucking off. “I won’t interfere with the destruction of the temple, if you won’t prevent the crucifixion of the Savior.” The pagans, the Christians, and the Muslims had taken turns burning the Library of Alexandria, but it was a moment of rare cooperation. Most of the time the celestial bodies were at one another’s figurative throats. The thought of burning drove Joseph to his attic where there was nothing but paper, sticky strings of clippings, rows of books, piles of magazines, stacks of newsprint, rolls of placards and posters, so he was always frightened by any word that implied ignition. The fact that burning had occurred to him was significant. Set those mountains of painful testimony ablaze, shred the evidence, erase the stories: of the young woman who was raped by her judges in punishment for the adultery of her brother, for instance. Out of what dark corner of the human mind …? or is it all dark, even in the light? or do our murderous desires lie hidden in the closet of the entry? under the runner unrolled down the hall? or disguised as that spot under the dining table where the rug is stained? By whom are we ruled if not by our nature? Remove all signs of those murderers who now make movies of themselves going through their grisly motions; and there will remain the badgering of sweet maids by their horny masters or the drowning of babies in their baths. It is impossible to conceal all the evidence. Yet how easily we forget who we really are. Because it should give us the creeps.

Gass, William H.. Middle C (Vintage International) (p. 208–10). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Works Cited

When you’re young, time is a puzzle, like interlocking nails. You wonder what you ought to be doing or what the future holds or how things that don’t seem to have worked out will work out; and in such a mood, even when you are focused on the future because you are yet to get laid, to bloom, to beget, to find your way, to win a tournament, you nevertheless don’t detail far-off somedays in your head; you don’t feel your future as you feel a thigh … because the present is too intense, too sunny, brief as a sneeze, too higgledy-piggledy, too complete, too total a drag already, whereas there is simply so much future, the future is flat as the sea three miles from your eye while the beach you are sitting on is aboil with sunshine and nakedness. The future is constantly killing off the present by becoming it. The future is too—thank God—vague to deal with. The future may not arrive. Yet that is all you value, all you hope for: fine future things; so you think, I’m not here at present; I’m just a movie made of slow-motion dreams; haven’t I always been, then and now? wondering about when: when the dust will settle and the sky clear, when I will hear cheers and I’m handed my trophy.

Gass, William H.. Middle C (Vintage International) (p. 130). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Works Cited

 But there is one sort of heresy belonging to this class of which both the Catholic and the Protestant Churches have always shown a quite peculiar terror. It is that which consists in taking literally the very frequent allusions in the Scriptures to the wickedness and consequent damnation of the rich and the blessedness of the poor. This had been the crime of the Circumcellians, a militant sect of the fourth century which sprang up on the African latifundia under much the same circumstances as the Spanish Anarchists, and it was also the crime of the Waldenses and of the Anabaptists. What the authorities could not forgive in these sects was the emphasis they laid on the social teaching of the Gospels. And it will be remembered with what almost insane fury Luther urged the destruction by fire and sword of those peasants who were compromising him by taking his teaching on Christian freedom in a literal sense.

The reason for this violence is obvious. The Bible, and especially the New Testament, contains enough dynamite to blow up all the existing social systems in Europe, only by force of habit and through the power of beautiful and rhythmical words we have ceased to notice it. An intelligent Chinaman has been more observant. Sun Yat Sen, when he visited Europe, was amazed that a religion which persistently extolled the poor and threatened and condemned the rich should be practised and maintained chiefly by the richest, most selfish and most respectable classes. The political skill and duplicity required for such a feat seemed to him to go far beyond anything that simple Orientals could run to. The danger has therefore always existed that any weakening in the influence of the Church, any desertion of the interests of the poor by the priesthood, would lead to a greater emphasis being placed upon the social principles of equality, voluntary poverty and brotherly love that, along with many other things, lie at the root of Christianity.

Brenan, Gerald. The Spanish Labyrinth (Canto Classics) (pp. 307-309). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

Works Cited, A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving

 Owen used to say that the most disturbing thing about the antiwar movement—against the Vietnam War—was that he suspected self-interest motivated many of the protesters; he thought that if the issue of many of the protesters being drafted was removed from the issue of the war, there would be very little protest at all.

Look at the United States today. Are they drafting young Americans to fight in Nicaragua? No; not yet. Are masses of young Americans outraged at the Reagan administration’s shoddy and deceitful behavior? Ho hum; not hardly.

I know what Owen Meany would say about that; I know what he did say—and it still applies.

“THE ONLY WAY YOU CAN GET AMERICANS TO NOTICE ANYTHING IS TO TAX THEM OR DRAFT THEM OR KILL THEM,” Owen said. He said that once—when Hester proposed abolishing the draft. “IF YOU ABOLISH THE DRAFT,” said Owen Meany, “MOST AMERICANS WILL SIMPLY STOP CARING ABOUT WHAT WE’RE DOING IN OTHER PARTS OF THE WORLD.”

- Irving

Works Cited

Remember that? Remember then?

I remember what Owen said about "Project 100,000," too--remember that? That was a draft program outlined by the secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, in 1966. Of the first 240,000 taken into the military between 1966 and 1968, 40 percent read below sixth-grade level, 41 percent were black, 75 percent came from low-income families, 80 percent had dropped out of high school. "The poor of America have not had the opportunity to earn their fair share of this nation's abundance," Secretary McNamara said, "but they can be given an opportunity to serve in their country's defense."

That made Owen Meany hopping mad.

"DOES HE THINK HE'S DOING 'THE POOR OF AMERICA' SOME FAVOR?" Owen cried. "WHAT HE'S SAYING IS, YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE WHITE--OR A GOOD READER--TO DIE!"

-Irving

Joyce Carol Oates is Silly

 Joyce Carol Oates:

"they" will not become a part of general usage, not for political reasons but because there would be no pronoun to distinguish between a singular subject ("they") & a plural subject ("they"). language seeks to communicate w/ clarity, not to obfuscate; that is its purpose.

https://twitter.com/joycecaroloates/status/1445581438175223816

It’s remarkable how blissfully unaware people can be of their own ignorance. So let’s count the ways this is wrong:

1. Fun fact, the pronoun “you” is singular and plural, and has been for centuries, and English seems to still function.

2. Singular “they” has existed longer than any one of us, included Ms. Oates. Again, English still seems to function.

3. If we really do need a plural “they,” then it’s perfectly permissible to just coin one. “They all” comes to mind.

4. With thirty seconds of Googling, you can verify for yourself that there are plenty of languages that mark plurality only optionally, or not at all. These languages all appear to function. Not surprising that Ms. Oates didn’t know this, but it is surprising she didn’t bother looking it up before making a pronouncement.

5. There are countless ways that English is ambiguous, and it still functions. We do not distinguish between inclusive and exclusive first person plural pronouns, unlike, say, Hawaiian. We do not mark whether we witnessed something directly or only heard of it from others as part of our verb tenses, unlike, say, Turkish. We do not distinguish, typically, between groups of two and larger groups like, say, Slovenian. And so on.

6. Finally, the purpose of language is not to communicate with clarity. It can be used in that way, but it can be used in just the opposite. Many a politician, or lawyer, for example, uses language to obfuscate. You can object to them doing so, but you can't deny that they're using language.

Poem After Reading the Long Loneliness

The Long Loneliness is the autobiography of Dorothy Day, published in 1952 by Harper & Brothers. In the book, Day chronicles her involvement in socialist groups along with her eventual conversion to Catholicism in 1927, and the beginning of her newspaper the Catholic Worker in 1933.

- Wikipedia

Poem after reading The Long Loneliness

I.

I read your book, Dorothy, 

Looking for answers you didn’t have

Nor claimed to have

But when you contemplated the mystery

Of the seeds and your daughter’s crown

You saw Rome and lovely pomp

Decode what was good

And what endured

Through the nights of the race

As we muddled the classifications that bound us,

Denied the chromosomal match,

Saw no miracle in the fact

That a lemur manufactures ascorbate

Whereas you, and you, and you, 

And Andaman savages 

And the Davos jet set

All have carried a bit of wrecked code

That once meant a necessary amine

And now means only that we need each other

Much more than we need anything.

We, Toba’s orphans,

Who once huddled in the dark, 

Our dank fear redolent

Amid the tang of gopherwood.

I think we agree,

Dorothy.

II.

I read your book, Dorothy,

Because you’re a better person

Than I’ll ever be

Or ever want to be, I suppose, 

Because I’ve not these thirty-nine years

Ever learned to domesticate

The disgust

That rides through me

When the beggars near.

Because I watched a war unfold

In dull contemplation

And kept a languid opinion

That it might be a bad idea

Buried in notes on my desk.

Maybe I supposed,

Socratically, 

Dorothy, 

You could teach me something I know,

Weave courage from this

Mess of tissue and lymph

And trim and tack

Until some wind 

Impregnated the sails.

III.

In your book, Dorothy, 

You found God

In joy

And the pico-unknowns

That underlay your cosmos and apple trees, 

And I, 

Naïve, 

Could tell you that a web search

Is all that separates us now

From the secrets of the yearning seed

And the neurotransmitters

That fire our contentment.

But let’s be frank, Dorothy,

(I will not lie to you

Because I can’t keep track of my lies):

I will confess the arcana of dark matter

And tick down Hilbert’s list of the unsolved.

I will tell you a tale of fractal realities,

Of a frond of futures that they tell me

Come endlessly from the quantum breakers.

I will even grant that whether the Turing box halts

The Nazarene solved halfway to Cana.

And we cannot.

IV.

Still, Dorothy Day, 

As history closes its damascene folds

Over your testament,

As the unknown changes its shape with its magnitude intact

(I want to be fair, Sister,

I want the accounting honest)

You refuse to believe

That none of this leads to the stoup.

That the crucifix is only

The first attempt 

At something we still strive

To perfect, ever faithful,

In strategic hamlets

And hospitals perched

In the far away myth of Al-Anbar.

(Of course I came for your accusation, too.

I came into the purgatory of these yellowing pages

For embers that might brand

With something life has so far spared.)

Please, Dorothy.

On the beach of Staten Island, 

Let’s gather driftwood for the evening fire.

I will tell you how we’ve economized

The Gnadenhuttens of yesteryear

By ensouling drones and whetting the

Anthropocene scythe

And you will respond with Dostoyevsky

And the rosary.

I’ll venture that the pump was primed

With the delta’s firstborn blood

And you will tell me of beatitudes

And John of the Cruz.

I will proffer martyrs of Hiroshima

You, a sobornost,

And we will both agree only

That the water and blood

Have sprung rich from Golgotha

These two millennia.

V.

Dorothy, 

Will it seem ironical

Or perhaps pat

That I found a sacrament

In an old mp3

Of you recounting the annals of anarchism,

Of communism prior to the Stalinite kiss,

And as your voice fought through fifty years

Of static—

(So much entropy, 

We lift our heads above only once)—

I did think:

Here’s a wonder

(If wonders can teem, as they do in an HTML world,

And still signify).

My phone a brief tabernacle

For your will.

And I stopped and I considered this.

That’ll preach.

VI.

Maybe, Dorothy, 

When we are both shades,

When you’ve tired of Tolstoy’s eccentricities, 

And Madam Krupskaya is busy educating the lumpen-Cherubim,

When we both drift between the darkling angles

In the lattice of the axioms

That man throws up against the sky

To pin moons on filaments galactic, 

You’ll wait with me

Through ten to the power of thirty-four

Intent to see if the proton cracks

And what radicle creeps forth.

You’ll hold me 

As the wavefunction falls around us

And our possibilities entwine—

Those worlds where you cowered 

And those where my heart bled enough bravery

To stand at your shoulder when the bludgeons fell.

(How thick does my disgrace flood these forking corridors?)

Only don’t save me from the talion, Dorothy.

Let’s tell ghost stories of orgasms, 

And holocausts,

Of serotonin and seraphim.

Let’s sort all this ash,

And make sense of it as we can, 

With a qibla for you, 

With a qibla for me.

VII.

Does it matter, Dorothy?

For there’s only the one lesson,

Surely.

We can do better, and we do not.

And yet, when we’ve been cracked open, 

Like ruddy lobster shells,

And our hearts wriggle on the scale, 

And Ammit drools, 

We will be oh so zealous in our defense:

We did our best!, we shall say. 

They held the bullhorns, 

They wrote history,

And we believed them.

And they said: 

Help them not!

For they are perverts and they are already damned!

They are greedy. They are lazy.

They are against the revolution.

They are for the revolution.

They spy, they spawn, they steal, they stink.

They are disloyal and they are armed

(And they are having this very conversation).

We were so very scared, you see.

Miserere nobis.

Nescivimus nos.

We didn’t know better.

Does it matter, Dorothy?

Just who gives the verdict?

Which gouty judge clambers up the dais,

And clears his throat,

Saying,

Goddamn you fucking apes.

How many mujaddids and mahatmas, 

How many avatars and Avalokitesvaras

And siddhas and scientists and saints

Do I have to wind up and set forth

To get you to stop torturing each other?

I have given you brains that can count infinities, 

Minds that can unfix time.

I have watched you poke stars, 

Levitate steel, 

Map bereshith

In the shifting sands of the shifting void, 

And you claim ignorance

And plead for forgiveness.

You love me? What need I of love?

I am clad with scales thick beyond all measuring,

My carapace infinite, my blood neutronium.

My tears so heavy

They debase elliptical purities.

I pick quasars from my hair.

How shall you injure me?

And then, what can I forgive?

And what can I send?

To clear the clear,

To make the obvious more so?

Another novel? Another opera?

One more documentary?

A new, subtle exegesis of Samaritans

And figs?

Or shall I waterboard you in the gutter?

Incarnate you as tapeworms?

Flense the delusion,

De-rationalize,

Commune with you once again

The shriveled horror:

To be poor

To be powerless

To be persecuted

To be condemned to picking

The cluster bombs from the cyclopean teeth 

Lining the Plain of Jars.

You have made me state it so often

That it turns to moist cliché in my mouth.

But once more, for the stenographer:

Love each other.

Be kind to each other.

Before the wind dies.

Most nights, I cannot sleep for the ticking of the argon clock.

It has been one point eight million years

Since you told your first story, 

And curled your toes in the Olduvai muck.

Time enough to know better.

VIII.

Don’t misunderstand me, Dorothy.

I damn and am damned.

I will wait in harrowing hell

Until the Hawking radiation

Releases every last soul.

After we forget why we suffer.

After we forget how.

Only then will I tunnel free,

More eschar than man,

And watch the nebulae 

As they resolutely refuse to coalesce.

IX.

In the closing static, 

The universe, physicists augur:

A garden of singularities, 

Black holes murmuring secrets.

We know now—did you?—of the mausolea

That anchor galaxies, 

But even they conclude their testimonies

And leave the manifold virgin as once.

And Dorothy, 

I have to say, 

I still think those seeds managed it alone.

On the shores of Tottenville,

Mastodons still wallow.

Lenape yet abound.

We come again to gather driftwood, 

For the Sabbath Atash.

I don’t know if there’s time or humanity enough,

For these seeds to dehisce

And speak a coy green wonder in twilight.

But better we than I,

To pray in this starless hall.

Hold my hand, Dorothy, 

For I am amazed.

Pad-footed comes the night.

Adulthood Fairy

The man turned at the gang of teenagers, and drew back his lips to reveal sharp eel teeth.

“Yo man, you sell drugs or what?” they said.

“I’m actually the adulthood fairy,” he said. “I go around granting adulthood to the children of the world.” Leathery wings extended and trembled in the wind ripping through the alley.

“Sick, dude.”

“I also sell drugs.”

“Sick, dude.”

“So, are you all ready to become adults?”

“I mean, we were just after some molly, but, yeah, what the fuck.”

“I have to warn you, there are pros and cons to being an adult.”

“Like what?”

“Like, you’ve got to work a job, and some of you get hemorrhoids. And you, you lose two fingers at a Guatemalan zoo.”

“Damn.”

“And that’s not even the worst part of the trip.”

“Damn. I don’t want to be an adult then.”

“But, also… no homework.”

“Sick, dude.”

“And you get to have sex.”

“Awesome!”

“Most of you at least. Not you. Or you. And you will have sex, but it’s with an elderly and semi-lucid Casey Affleck.”

“Not sure how to feel about that.”

“No one is. Much of adulthood is learning how to feel about that.”

“Anything else?”

“Yeah, you know when you were a little kid, and you were super excited for Christmas, and you couldn’t wait for it to come? Well, when you’re an adult, all that anxiety and expectation gets moved to Election Day. And, while on Christmas, there’re always presents waiting under the tree, and family and eggnog and cookies and all that shit, and lo, what wondrous joy—on Election Day, half the time, the results will be so completely horrible that they will fill your soul with terror for the fate of the human race, and challenge your faith in the universe and your fellow man, and you will find yourself poisoning your brain with whatever chemical you can find in liquid form to somehow scrub the afterimage of that Lovecraftian horror called the American democratic process from the halls of your memory. And the other half of the time the results will be slightly less bad.”

“Whoa." They exchange looks. "How much sex though?"

Works Cited

Yes, there are a hundred, and a thousand voices crying. But what does one do, when one cries this thing, and one cries another? Who knows how we shall fashion a land of peace where black outnumbers white so greatly? Some say that the earth has bounty enough for all, and that more for one does not mean less for another, that the advance of one does not mean the decline of another. They say that poor paid labour means a poor nation, and that better-paid labour means greater markets and greater scope for industry and manufacture. And others say that this is a danger, for better-paid labour will not only buy more but will also read more, think more, ask more, and will not be content to be forever voiceless and inferior.

Who knows how we shall fashion such a land? For we fear not only the loss of our possessions, but the loss of our superiority and the loss of our whiteness. Some say it is true that crime is bad, but would this not be worse? Is it not better to hold what we have, and to pay the price of it with fear? And others say, can such fear be endured? For is it not this fear that drives men to ponder these things at all?

Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country

Works Cited

He was grave and silent, and then he said somberly, I have one great fear in my heart, that one day when they are turned to loving, they will find we are turned to hating.

Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country

Works Cited

I always used to think I'd like to stay seventeen or eighteen if I could. But not anymore. I'm not a teenager anymore. I've got a sense of responsibility now. I'm not the same guy I was when we used to hang out together. I'm twenty now. And I have to pay the price to go on living.

Murakami, Norwegian Wood

Works Cited

Fifteen years after Independence, in 1975, a group of Senators called the Church Committee took it upon themselves to look into the secret operations that had been brought to bear on the Congo. The world rocked with surprise. The Church Committee found notes from secret meetings of the National Security Council and President Eisenhower. In their locked room, these men had put their heads together and proclaimed Patrice Lumumba a danger to the safety of the world. The same Patrice Lumumba, mind you, who washed his face each morning from a dented tin bowl, relieved himself in a carefully chosen bush, and went out to seek the faces of his nation. Imagine if he could have heard those words-dangerous to the safety of the world!-from a roomful of white men who held in their manicured hands the disposition of armies and atomic bombs, the power to extinguish every life on earth. Would Lumumba have screamed like a cheetah? Or merely taken off his glasses, wiped them with his handkerchief, shaken his head, and smiled?

On a day late in August, 1960, a Mr. Allen Dulles, who was in charge of the CIA, sent a telegram to his Congolese station chief suggesting that he replace the Congolese government at his earliest convenience. The station chief, Mr. Lawrence Devlin, was instructed to take as bold an action as he could keep secret: a coup would be all right. There would be money forthcoming to pay soldiers for that purpose. But assassination might be less costly. A gang of men quick with guns and unfettered by conscience were at his disposal. Also, to cover all bases, a scientist named Dr. Gottlieb was hired to make a poison that would produce such a dreadful disease (the good doctor later testified in the hearings), if it didn't kill Lumumba outright it would leave him so disfigured that he couldn't possibly be a leader of men.

On the same August day, this is all I knew: the pain in my household seemed plenty large enough to fill the whole world. Ruth May was slipping away into her fever. And it was Rachel's seventeenth birthday. I was wrapping up green glass earrings in tissue paper, hoping to make some small peace with my eldest child, while I tried to sponge the fire out of my youngest . And President Eisenhower was right then sending his orders to take over the Congo. Imagine that. His household was the world, and he'd finished making up his mind about things. He'd given Lumumba a chance, he felt. The Congo had been independent for fifty-one days.

Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

Works Cited

In a rencontre of this kind, having left my antagonist for dead, I was wise enough to make my retreat into France; and a few days after my arrival at Paris, entering into conversation with some officers on the subject of politics, a dispute arose, in which I lost my temper, and spoke so irreverently of the Grand Monarque, that next morning I was sent to the Bastille, by virtue of a lettre de cachet. There I remained for some months, deprived of all intercourse with rational creatures; a circumstance for which I was not sorry, as I had the more time to project schemes of revenge against the tyrant who confined me, and the wretch who had betrayed my private conversation. But tired, at length, with these fruitless suggestions, I was fain to unbend the severity of my thoughts by a correspondence with some industrious spiders, who had hung my dungeon with their ingenious labours.

“I considered their work with such attention that I soon became an adept in the mystery of weaving, and furnished myself with as many useful observations and reflections on that art, as will compose a very curious treatise, which I intend to bequeath to the Royal Society, for the benefit of our woollen manufacture; and this with a view to perpetuate my own name, rather than befriend my country; for, thank Heaven! I am weaned from all attachments of that kind, and look upon myself as one very little obliged to any society whatsoever. Although I presided with absolute power over this long-legged community, and distributed punishments and rewards to each, according to his deserts, I grew impatient of my situation; and my natural disposition one day prevailing, like a fire which had long been smothered, I wreaked the fury of my indignation upon my innocent subjects, and in a twinkling destroyed the whole race. 

Smollett, The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle

Works Cited

Ah hate cunts like that. Cunts like Begbie. Cunts that are intae basebaw-batting every fucker that's different; pakis, poofs, n what huv ye. Fuckin failures in a country ay failures. It's nae good blamin it oan the English fir colonising us. Ah don't hate the English. They're just wankers. We are colonised by wankers. We can't even pick a decent, vibrant, healthy culture to be colonised by. No. We're ruled by effete arseholes. What does that make us? The lowest of the fuckin low, tha's what, the scum of the earth. The most wretched, servile, miserable, pathetic trash that was ever shat intae creation. Ah don't hate the English. They just git oan wi the shite thuv goat. Ah hate the Scots.

Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting

Works Cited

A contingent of howling simopaths swing from chandeliers, balconies and trees, shitting and pissing on passers-by. (A simopath--the technical name of this disorder escapes me--is a citizen convinced he is an ape or other simian. It is a disorder peculiar to the army, and discharge cures it.)

William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

Works Cited

Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, had always been the systematic organization of hatreds, and Massachusetts politics had been as harsh as the climate. The chief charm of New England was harshness of contrasts and extremes of sensibility --a cold that froze the blood, and a heat that boiled it --so that the pleasure of hating --one's self if no better victim offered --was not its rarest amusement; but the charm was a true and natural child of the soil, not a cultivated weed of the ancients.

The Education of Henry Adams

Works Cited

And there we have it – the moment of supreme agony on the raft, taken up, transformed, justified by art, turned into a sprung and weighted image, then varnished, framed, glazed, hung in a famous art gallery to illuminate our human condition, fixed, final, always there. Is that what we have? Well, no. People die; rafts rot; and works of art are not exempt. The emotional structure of Géricault’s work, the oscillation between hope and despair, is reinforced by the pigment: the raft contains areas of bright illumination violently contrasted with patches of the deepest darkness. To make the shadow as black as possible, Géricault used quantities of bitumen to give him the shimmeringly gloomy black he sought. Bitumen, however, is chemically unstable, and from the moment Louis XVIII examined the work a slow, irreparable decay of the paint surface was inevitable ‘No sooner do we come into this world,’ said Flaubert, ‘than bits of us start to fall off.’ The masterpiece, once completed, does not stop: it continues in motion, downhill. Our leading expert on Géricault confirms that the painting is ‘now in part a ruin’. And no doubt if they examine the frame they will discover woodworm living there.

Barnes, Julian. A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters