The Ghost in the Machine

I've been thinking hard and heavy on the importance of the mother/child symbolism in Deus Ex Machina by Andrew Foster Altschul (the December book for Rumpus Book Club). It was something that completely escaped my notice until a fellow Rumpuser brought it to my attention during an online discussion. What does the mother/child connection represent? The truest form of love? Connection, in the sense we've talked about before? Acceptance? Potential? If we assume that the parent/infant relationship is a proxy for love (Love??) then what of:

• The Producer and his wife - conceiving love but unable to bear it into the world, expelled by the body before it can survive, not even still-born, but early abortion of a never fully formed thing. Who/what is at fault when the body cannot sustain it's creation?

• Patel and his wife and child - when Patel's wife says, "I see you." the intimacy of her voice "stabs the Producer near his solar plexus" (p 74) and he literally begins to crawl away on all fours, away from the tableau of father, mother, Baby. But there is something wrong with the girl. "Her face is blank and strangely slack, her eyes dull and drowsy; she's being held by someone off-camera..." Even when love is born into the world, you can't control what it will look like, how it will behave, if it will absorb all you have to give without giving back. The Producer watches the interaction from the shadows, and the interaction is not happening in front of him in the flesh, it is happening over 1000s of miles, remote, "flattened by the camera". He leaves the control room and thinks of the cave, the invisible but real thing in the cave and then Gloria Hamm and his concern for her.

• And then - the native woman and child - "In her arms she holds a tiny black bundle: the Producer can make out a wizened scalp, a lumped face with no eyes, a small mouth frozen into a cry." (p. 190) An eyeless black bundle (eyes and windows and souls), mouth open. A love that is not love. A child that should not have been born into the world and was punished. A connection the result of a rape, of abuse, of avarice. "A stark figure of accusation, of fear, shame." And Gloria doesn't look away and she eventually takes the dead child out of the mother's hands. Miley squeezes the Producer's hand. Shaneequio collapses into Alejandra's arms. Paco doesn't slaughter the goats. Connection, Connection, Connection.

So perhaps, DEM is a book about love and connection, defined by their absence? Our connection isn’t that we were all brought into this world covered in blood. Our connection is that we have all somehow forgotten. We have forgotten that we were vulnerable to the tender mercies someone gifted us. Covered, as we were, in blood and shit and urine, someone washed us, pulled the plugs out of our nostrils and unblocked our mouth so that we could pull that first great suck of wind deep down into the well of our throats and release our guttural cry into the world.


We have lost the memory of our base sameness. We have come to believe- to the point of truth- that we are somehow different, better than or worse than each other. We put on our fine clothes, our hard-soled shoes, run a blunt-edged nail around the corner of a business card and think it means something real.


We ignore those of us who live on the shadow-side of the street. We beat each other with a measuring stick we call beauty. We bare our teeth and call it a smile. We pass judgment and we are found wanting. We are so closely watching each other we never notice the ant mill until we die of exhaustion.


We are a special kind of insane.


Our connection begins at birth in blood and chaos and ends at death. Between the alpha and the omega, we navigate our contemporary inferno with love and sorrow, but no cheap pity or promise of ultimate happiness. Our human task is to suffer, shudder, and struggle courageously in the face of relentless self-criticism, inescapable fallibilism, and inevitable death. And to talk about love.

Rumpus Book Club goes slightly off topic

SX posed a question: "@everyone I'd like to use the impetus of that Bucky Sinister poem on The Rumpus today and today's fluid, fluent TRBC thread on music from Johnny Mathis through Bob Dylan to Kanye or Arcade Fire to ask a simple question of all of you that I do not know the answer to. This question is nothing but sincere, and pleading, maybe. Why is it so easy, and so fulfilling, to talk about music, inc. the rhymes, lyrics, thoughts, craft, precedents in music, and so daunting to talk about or react to any kind of poetry? That is the question. I would be so grateful for anything large or small any of you are willing to say on this today or at any future date. Thank you in advance. (Please answer . . . ) —sxr

I responded:
@SX I'll counter your question with a sincere question of my own: how are music and poetry so different? Is that a naive question? I'm asking honestly. I have always believed the two were twined together, a twisting banyan tree of our efforts to grasp appearance and reality, opinion and knowledge, illusion and truth - of beauty, love, our deepest passions and yearnings, and the collective struggle of learning to live by learning to die. Maybe the conversations on music represents a modern lightness of being, a new dialogue on poetry.

I don't know what I don't know about music/poetry- I don't uncover them, seek them, excavate them, so much as let them fall on me as rain would. Until recently, music and poetry have been interesting background static, white noise to take up space - squatters in the open gray spaces of my mind. But now that I am going insane, which is its own thing all together, a different kind of chaos, the result of plugging into a connected network without an adequate firewall in place, I find myself crumpled by two words next to each other, gored open by a coda, and poured out by the turn of a phrase, like bathwater over a tiled floor, seeping behind the drywall, flowing down wooden steps. Music and poetry, when they are good are a grand expedition into and transfiguration of our guttural cry. Music and poetry, when they are very good, when at their best, transfigure our guttural cry into a call to care - for causes bigger and grander than our own precious cry.

But a personal response to your question - I do not understand the mechanics of music or of poetry, form and function, I don't have the vocabulary to describe the power of poetry and music to yank me from my anchor. I don't feel qualified to even say, I like - I love - I hate. But poetry and music have the power to unhinge me; perhaps I don't want to talk about such insane things in polite company.
- Show quoted text -

Connection is a form of insanity

Connection is not communication. Connection is not one hundred people writing some variation of “happy birthday” on a Facebook page or a blog post. It isn’t Paris on Christmas Day or the ring on the left hand or the shared bed or a tattoo. Connection is not found in a box of folded letters or between the thighs. It isn’t blood. Connection isn’t elements linked by time or pattern or result, though it is easy to be confused.

Connection is not being afraid to be the first to say, “I love you”. Connection is telling someone you love you aren’t happy and things might not be ok. Connection is floating on salty swells under the dome of a dark heaven knowing that there are dangerous creatures below you and still turning all of your focused attention to the marvelous outlines of the lunar seas. Connection is a state of openness; a willingness to be seen and heard. Connection is the act of listening. Connection is having patience with every unresolved thing in your heart and the will to live the questions now. Connection is a form of insanity.

If faith is an absence of fear, connection is an absence of shame.

The things we could tell each other about shame. If I shared my shame with you and you shared your shame with me, would we wound each other? Would we automatically fall in love? Would I be dramatic and would you get quiet or would we just pretend that we weren’t vulnerable, the conversation a fever-dream hallucination had at opposite sides of a couch on a random Wednesday evening.

Connection is the one thing that I want in life, above all other things, in a word.

strangely poetic g-chat

me: i read the Julie Greicius essay last night
instead of Bukowski
and I wept
and turned my face to the wall
so that my tears
would be mine
alone
and I had a dream
me: in this dream
i kept trying to push
a great sadness out of my body
and my body would clench
to both push
and hold on
me: and I dreamed a poem
that dissolved
just before I surfaced
to the buzzing of an alarm
and the soft static of the shower
and i lay there
with my soul half leaning out of me

There is a certain perspective that pulling away can give you.

The sailboats seen from the small oval window of the plane look like white freckles on the face of the bay. The water is calm and green and I follow our rippling black shadow as we pass over. The beach is empty. A lone jogger traces the delicate curve of the waterfront. We bank over a harbor, colorful cargo crates stacked one upon another like a toy blocks. A cruise ship releases great puffs of smoke from two fat stacks while idling in port, flags sparkling and wind-snapping from its decks. Tugboats, scuffed and dirtied, cut the surface of the water leaving white scars of wake behind them. A Coast Guard cutter skims along a trajectory that seems intent, contrasting the leisurely pitch and roll of various pleasure craft. I soar over all of this as if a great white sea bird. Wings steady, riding a draft towards a faraway destination. I have no concern for the dark things laying quietly in the depths of the ocean, under shadow of boat, beyond the reach of morning light. These shapes twitch and shudder in response to slight sounds, vibrations of a world they inhabit and a cosmos above them that they cannot know without dying, cannot comprehend even in death. Later, when the gloam deepens to indigo, into the purple of black grapes, the bay a mirror that reflects back the night blooming sky, the dark things will begin to feed. The ships will rock on their moorings and the ropes will rub in their knots. All around, the lights will turn on, small yellow orbs of safety, calling people into the hearts of their homes. The hard men and women of the harbor will rest and breathe in the steam of thick soup. A man cups the head of his child and pulls his wife to him, forming a shoal of safety against the unknowable night. The sea ripples as the dark things feed and feed and feed.

writing truth

I stole this (can you steal quotes? maybe just fail to give attribution? what is plagiarism in the age of google?) from Stephen Elliot's Daily Rumpus.

Page 50 of The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker:

You have some control over what comes before your mind—you can influence the influx by reading, or by looking through your old notes, or by going to movies, or by talking to people, and you can choose what room of the house or what corner of the yard to sit in, and you can choose to write before or after you've masturbated—this is crucial—and you can choose to tell the truth or not to. And the difficulty is that sometimes it's hard to tell the truth because you think that the truth is too personal, or too boring, to tell. Or both. And sometimes it's hard to tell the truth because the truth is hard to see, because it exists in a misty, gray non-space between two strongly charged falsehoods that sound true but aren't.

If you write your truth, and no one reads it, does it matter?

Do you think less of me now?

I once read an Ann Coulter book. I had just moved to DC from Texas. I'm not sure how I got the book but I would read it on the metro to and from school. There was a guy that I knew who worked for the newspaper. He told me not to read it on the train, or to at least put a book cover over the jacket. At the time I didn't understand what he meant by that. I never finished the book. I can't remember why. I seem to recall thinking that the book was funny. But then I changed, or the world changed. Maybe I started to notice the people on the train more. Maybe my sense of humor changed. Maybe I lost my ability to be objective. Maybe it wasn't a good book after all. It was a long time ago. I gave the book to my father-in-law. He put the book in his bathroom with the other reading material. Faded motorcycle magazines. A book on wood-working. I don't think he ever finished it either.

I was never political before I moved to DC. And even when I moved here, I fell into it more or less by accident. The accidental political intern. The accidental policy analyst. The accidental government employee. DC is a funny place.

Subconscious - you aren't even trying...

I dreamed that I was standing on a crossbeam at the pinnacle of a skyscraper. It was night. I needed to reach a box that was beside me on the beam but my hands were full. I needed to put the things I carried down so that I could pick up this box. It was important that I touch the box. But I couldn't get the balance right. I tried to bend at the knees, to slowly lower myself to the beam, but I pitched backwards, and then I was falling falling falling. When I landed, I was an old man in a young girl's room. I asked to leave but she wouldn't let me go. I felt like I shouldn't be there, but I didn't want to leave, not really. I only felt like I ought to leave, but really I wanted to stay and be angry and in love with a selfish sixteen year old.

Then I woke up. And I was lonely.

It burns like the sun in the pit of my chest.

I don't watch movies like 'Precious' for the same reason I don't go to the Holocaust Memorial. I can't compartmentalize the emotions, I can't get the distance right. The horror and the anger and the sadness and the fear becomes my own and I don't know how to leave it at the door and walk back out into my life. Extreme emotions change me the way that extreme pressure melts rock.

I lack something that other people seem to have. Is it a switch? I don't understand how people can watch realistic abuse and then go to the grocery store, out to dinner, home. I can't seem to tell myself that it isn't real, that it is Hollywood. Replica airplanes, fat suits, child actors. Wasps for other people are bees for me; I am stung and the barb stays with me, embedded.

I try not to feel too deeply. I exercise a lot. I try and get regular sleep. I don't drink too much now. I used to feel wildly. Enormous fluctuations from high to low. Unbridled happiness at times, passion, lust, euphoria. But I would also feel such sadness. There was no room inside my chest for all of my sadness so it spread and touched everything that I touched. And I made the people around me hurt and miserable. And then I got older. I aged out of my hysteria and my joy and my sadness. I aged out of my crazy self and into a stranger. A stranger that exercises and sleeps and doesn't drink too much.

I am an emotional creature, as Eve Ensler would say. I can feel the things you feel inside you. I feel things that are not even real, emotions created on a sound stage in California, in a music video, a commercial for coffee. I am afraid that this makes me crazy. Akin to hearing things that are not real, seeing things that don't exist. I feel insane as myself so I've traded for contained estrangement. I choose exercise and sleep. And I don't drink too much. I don't laugh too loud. I don't say the first thing that I think of. I don't watch PETA commercials. I don't make eye contact with the homeless. I don't read about the war. I don't look at pictures of the Gulf. I don't. I turn away. I turn off. I exercise. I sleep. I don't I don't I don't. I don't exist too much.

notes from a journal/how to kill time

can't seem to get things started at work so I am taking a break. Here are some sketches/notes/thoughts from my writing journal.

A woman goes missing. Her car is found near a popular suicide spot but her body is never found. There are multiple sightings but no confirmed encounters.

A doctor falls in love with an anesthetized patient while operating on him. Feels he will never touch another person as intimately again.

A girl believes that as long as she doesn't open the Christmas present from her grandfather, he will never die.

A fish falls in love with the moon and it is caught on a silver lure.

A package never arrives.
###
"The world is not beautiful, therefore it is."
###
You ever seen pictures from Hiroshima, Nagasaki, people burnt, in pain. Terrible images. One picture, forever on display in a dark hallway of my mind: steps, a black smudge resolving itself into the outline of a man. A person incinerated, only his shadow left behind, burnt into the stone.

"We are the light of the fucking world. U.S.A! U.S.A! If we're so god damned awful, why are there so many fuckers killing themselves to get here?"

The brightest lights cast the darkest shadows.
###
Outside
the birds chirp
they sound like lasers
I gather information
like I am building a wall
but all it is
is throwing cutlery
at a home invader
you won't stop them
but you might
draw blood
ultimately
you just piss them off.
Outside the car
the soft static of rain
###
my grandma cut cantaloupe
and sat down in the pale
yellow kitchen
when she looked up
she didn't know herself
###
The immigrant experience of Army brats. Some people grow up in a different country. I grew up on another planet - a new world. There were no fathers in this world. Just grown faceless men - square jawed, buzz cut, sharp edged intermittent others. There was a lawlessness particular to groups of inadequately supervised children. We did what we wanted and we didn't have to be home before dark. There was physically no way we could stray too far.
###
"The term 'beasts' belongs properly to lions, leopards and tigers, wolves and foxes, dogs and monkeys, and all others (except snakes) which rage by mouth or with claws. They are called 'beasts' from the force with which they rage; and they are termed 'wild' because they are by nature used to freedom and they are motivated by their own free will. They do indeed have freedom of will and they wander here and there, going as their spirit leads them." - Peterborough Bestiary
###
I am small and soft, flesh and blood
and his heart is an axe
that strikes to the core of me

character sketch for a short story

The cab driver grew up in a small village in Siberia, Russia. He left Moscow in 1992, landed in Miami, and made a declaration in the translucent Floridian light and gentle warmth, that he would never leave. He was a long-haul truck driver for ten years. He had been to every state in the Union. The vast stark sky of Montana in winter was beautiful to him. Arizona in summer with its alien saguaro and deeply etched canyons awed him. Still, he returned to Florida. The mild winters, the flat horizon of blue and green. The salty kiss of the ocean. He sends money to his sisters and mother in Siberia, but he will never return in the flesh.

Andrew. He'd been Andryeĭ, Andrei, André, but now he is Andrew. There is an enclave of Russians in Miami. Tall buildings along the water where wealthy Russians send their families to live without fear of kidnapping. America is the only safe place he thinks. He follows the news by reading the locally produced Russian newspaper. He is not interested in football, the Superbowl meaningful only because more people arriving at the airport, more fares for him. He has tried and failed to understand the rules of football. He gives up, a mental shrug

His fares are fascinating to him. Some ignore him completely, never looking up from their phones or small black devices even when giving their destinations. Sometimes two or more people share the town car, their conversations peppered with strange words or hidden subtexts. Lovers on honeymoon, kissing and sighing into each others' faces or sitting in stony silence. Some passengers just stare out the window with wan bemused looks on their faces, as if they are sleep walkers just surfacing into consciousness, unsure of how they got there or what their destination might be. Rarely, a passenger will ask him where he is from and how a Russian emigre from Siberia came to be in Miami. He is alternately happy and nervous when questioned directly. Suddenly self conscious of the time it takes to hear the question in English, translate to Russian in his head, compose his reply and back translate into English. Despite his awkwardness he craves this random recognition and he always drives these fares at slightly slower speeds, stretching out the time with them until the final destination is reached.

Literary Isolationism

Today, the top item on the list of things I don't understand: book clubs. Reading is such a solitary activity that it seems artificial to try and make it into something social. I suppose the understanding of the book can be shared, but even then the entire thing strikes me as intellectual vanity. "Well, what *I* thought...", "Did anyone else notice...", "I found it interesting that..." and so on and so forth blah blah blah and yes - we all think you are brilliant and we agree to overlook each others' posturing for the sake of our own five minutes. For reasons that are apparent, I've never successfully participated in a book club. Though, I did read Ender's Game upon the suggestion of a club and I enjoyed it immensely. However, I believe that I got lost while driving to the discussion and ended the evening crying into the phone while stopped on a residential street somewhere in Southeast D.C.

I prefer to read in the mornings before work. Our row house sits along a Northeast/Southwest axis and the sun arcs over the house from the back left (as you face the house) to the front right. Attached to the front of the house is a covered porch and just beyond the porch a well-established cherry tree. The front room is blue with shadow most of the day and in the evenings the setting sun slants through the wooden slats of the blinds and the light becomes diffuse, as if the sun were setting over a rippling lake and I was viewing the play of the light from underneath the water. A reading lamps sits on top of the rusted radiator cover and coffee cups, soda cans and water bottles take up residence next to stacks of books on dark brown bookshelves.

My morning rituals are not extensive. A refusal to wake up followed by repeated attempts to fall back asleep as a hungry cat chirps and trills in my face while my spouse stomps between the bedroom and the bathroom occasionally offering up titillating trivia such as the time, the time and the time. Once resigned to consciousness for another day I'll feed the cat, take a quick shower during which the spouse pops in to give a kiss goodbye, pull a comb through my hair, moisturize with sunscreen, pet the dogs, grab some caffeinated something and just before I pick up my keys and head out the door I think, "I have time to read just one chapter before I go." And then in the way of things, one chapter - which is always a very short chapter - becomes two and then possibly three and I'll find myself admiring a particular turn of a phrase when it will occur to me that I do actually need to go somewhere.

I revel in the solitude of reading in the morning when the house is slowly recovering from the frenzied aerobics of waking. The cat - now fed - curls up like a white comma on the corner of the bed, nose tucked into his fuzzy belly while occasionally an ear might twitch in response to a sound only audible to cats and the insane; the dogs settle back into their basket of blankets, snoring gently on each others' rumps; the low thrumming of the radiator pump in the basement is an undulating whisper through out the house. All around is quiet, the neighbors having left for work, the back alley absent the illegal craps games and late night ruckus of the night people. It is then that I am truly content, as if I have exhaled after holding my breath for too long.