by Nick Flynn
At the end of They Came Back, the French zombie film, one woman nearly follows her lover back into the earth. It’s always a choice, the film suggests. Fuck zombies, I mutter to myself, fuck ghosts—only those who have never lost anyone believe in the undead. Fuck resurrections, fuck transmogrification, the only miracle is flesh and consciousness, the only miracle is now. Lulu is the only miracle (the word “Lulu” is the only miracle). That Inez and I keep figuring it out—to be together, to be with Lulu, that it’s all a daily practice—this is the only miracle. It’s so simple—sometimes we just need to be held, sometimes we just need to be told we’re beautiful. Sometimes we might even need to believe that the dead will come back, but they never come back, not really. It’s just a dream, maybe the same dream that makes you feel safe as you try to force an answer from someone tied to a chair. We lived for so long believing the ivory-billed woodpecker was gone, but it wasn’t gone. It had merely flown deeper into the woods, and then it flew back. The only question now is how long it will stay.
(2008) At dawn I sit on the couch and slide The Wizard of Oz into my computer, Lulu asleep in my arms. Almost immediately, for some reason, tears well up in my eyes. Dorothy, right from the start, is trying to get back home—mythic, yet simple as a fairy tale, like following a trail of breadcrumbs through a dark forest. Lulu stirs, smiles up at me, reaches for my nose, then gets distracted by the leafy plant behind my head. I shut the computer, a pure simple joy filling the room. The leaves she is staring at now, she can’t even see them, not the green, not the shapes, she is simply staring into this world—everything hazy, but slowly coming into focus. Soon she will have her Wizard of Oz moment, the rods and cones in her eyes already developing, soon the world will transform from black and white to color, like the moment Dorothy first steps into Oz.
[some notes]
Listed below, by chapter, are the principal works referred to in the text, as well as other works that supplied me with facts or influenced my thinking. Also, if it seemed more needed to be said on a topic, those thoughts are included below as notes. Most of the articles mentioned below can be linked to through www.nickflynn.org.
a field guide to getting lost
Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost (Viking, 2005), p. 22.
Erik Jonsson, Inner Navigation: Why We Get Lost and How We Find Our Way (Scribner, 2002).
handshake
Sam Harris, The End of Faith (Norton, 2004), pp. 199, 193, 52.
crank
note: That the PEN judges were three women somehow bewilders me, in much the same way that some of the torturers at Abu Ghraib are women bewilders me—is this what the pioneers of feminism envisioned? Angela Davis points out that by now the term equal opportunity has been twisted to often simply mean equal access to the instruments of oppression.
note: The reviews of The End of Faith cited are from the Chicago Tribune (no mention of torture), the San Francisco Chronicle (no mention of torture), and the New York Sun (no mention of torture).
note: For more on the secret history of America’s involvement in torture, see School of the Americas Watch (www.soaw.org).
pleaid
Edgar Allan Poe, The Pit and the Pendulum: It was not that I feared to look upon things horrible, but that I grew aghast lest there should be nothing to see.
welcome to the year of the monkey
Seymour M. Hersh, Chain of Command (HarperCollins, 2004).
note: For one (of many) ongoing, grassroots rebuilding efforts in New Orleans, see www.paydirt.org (Mel Chin).
one simple question
note: The observation about schools named after Martin Luther King comes from Jonathan Kozol, Shame of a Nation. For good work being done in Harlem schools, see Geoffrey Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone (www.hcz.org).
note: The third and final stanza of Stafford’s A Story That Could Be True is:
They miss the whisper that runs
any day in your mind,
“Who are you really, wanderer?”—
and the answer you have to give
no matter how dark and cold
the world around you is:
“Maybe I’m a king.”
you don’t take pictures
note: Torture apologists cited in this chapter include Rush Limbaugh, Trent Lott, and Charles Krauthammer (Weekly Standard, 2 December 2005).
note: The secretary of defense at that time was Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld grew up in the same town as a close friend of mine, where, as a child, he was known around the neighborhood as “Bully Don,” the meanest kid on the playground.
note:…was it possible they were there and not haunted?—Michael Herr, Dispatches (approximately).
thrown it all away
note: “Since You’re Gone” is from the third Cars album, Shake It Up, which didn’t come out until 1981, but by then we were driving smaller cars and listening to cassettes.
the book of daniel
Dante, Inferno (my own translation).
god’s loneliness (known)
note: The repeated refrain of God’s loneliness…is from Fanny Howe’s essay “Bewilderment,” in her collection The Wedding Dress: Meditations on Word and Life (University of California Press, 2003).
the allegory of the cave
note: “Jewish lightning” was my mother’s phrase for when someone burns down his or her own house to collect the insurance money, which, like the phrase my grandmother used for Brazil nuts (“nigger toes”), did to me what such derogatory expressions tend to do to children—they confused the hell out of me, and left me with a deep sadness. Do not water the seeds of hatred, Thich Nhat Hanh urges.
note: Some scholars dispute whether Plato dreamed this allegory, or whether it came to him when fully awake.
note: In 2005, in a debate in Chicago, John Yoo, a former Department of Justice lawyer and one of the architects of Bush’s torture doctrine, stated that, in his opinion, the president has the authority to order a child’s testicles crushed, if deemed in the interests of the United States. Yoo now teaches law at the University of California, Berkeley.
note: Elaine Pagels, in The Origin of Satan, argues that Satan in the Old Testament was more obstructionist, rather than an active force of evil.
note: The vice president, Dick Cheney, was speaking on Meet the Press, 16 September 2001.
note: The clandestine program known as “extraordinary rendition” was begun by the Clinton administration, and then expanded geometrically under G. W. Bush. In August 2009, the Obama administration announced it would continue the program.
note: The secretary of state at that time was Colin Powell. In his autobiography, My American Journey, Powell discusses, with some pride, the effectiveness of a program used during Vietnam, whereby military-aged men (MAM) would be targeted for execution, even if they were unarmed—If a helo spotted a peasant in black pajamas who looked remotely suspicious, a possible MAM, the pilot would circle and fire in front of him. If he moved, his movement was judged evidence of hostile intent, and the next burst was not in front, but at him. Targeting unarmed civilians for execution is deemed a war crime by most of the world.
note: An essay on the ineffectiveness and degradation of torture by a former Soviet human rights activist, Vladimir Bukovsky (Washington Post, 18 December 2005), begins with an old Soviet joke from the 1950s: One nasty morning Comrade Stalin discovered that his favorite pipe was missing. Naturally, he called in his henchman, Lavrenti Beria, and instructed him to find the pipe. A few hours later, Stalin found it in his desk and called off the search. “But, Comrade Stalin,” stammered Beria, “five suspects have already confessed to stealing it.”
john doe
note: Touch any strand and the whole web trembles—Stanley Kunitz.
note: Coincidence is just the tip of the iceberg—Tad Flynn.
horror vacui
note: Did I leave out the part where John Doe died on me, or am I simply fated (samsara) to keep confessing to this one night?
proteus (sciamachy)
Saadi Youssef, from his poem “America, America” (last stanza), collected in Without an Alphabet, Without a Face: Selected Poems, translated by Khaled Mattawa (Graywolf Press, 2002).
Fanny Howe, from her essay Bewilderment, collected in The Wedding Dress: Meditations on Word and Life (University of California Press, 2003).
istanbul
note: The lawyer is Susan Burke, of the law firm Burke O’Neil LLC. The companies named in the lawsuit are Titan and Caci—cases are also pending against Jeppesen/Boeing (see Trevor Paglen, Torture Taxi [Melville House, 2006], or Stephen Grey, Ghost Plane [St. Martin’s, 2007]) as well as against Blackwater, the mercenary-for-hire corporation (see Jeremy Scahill, Blackwater [Nation Books, 2007]). Daniel Heyman, Tara McKelvey, Chris Bartlett, and Jennifer Schelter are some of the artists who have participated in the gathering of testimonies with Burke’s legal team.
istanbul (dream, reality)
note: Daniel Heyman also etched portraits and text onto copper plates—he had to etch each word backwards, and each sentence right to left, which, oddly, beautifully, mirrored Arabic script.
transmogrification
Backbeat (film), 1994.
istanbul (the happy-bus)
note: Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) examined “Amir”—his story is documented in Broken Laws, Broken Lives—Medical Evidence of Torture by U.S. Personnel and Its Impact, 2008.
two dogs
note: The idea that two dogs live inside us is a Native American parable—George Bernard Shaw is often credited with first bringing it to Western audiences.
facts about water
note: Elsewhere I’ve written that the last words in my mother’s suicide note were Why don’t you use the gun?—which is true, yet these words seemed to have been dictated by a voice in her head which was not her own.
the tricky part
Martin Moran, The Tricky Part (Beacon Press, 2005).
mistress yin
Stephen Elliott, My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up (Cleis Press, 2006).
the invisible city
note: He already had the water…—Thich Nhat Hanh, on the Buddha.
unknown, known
note: Here, Bullet is the title of a book of poems by Brian Turner, a veteran of the Iraq War (Operation Iraqi Freedom).
note: The one book of poetry in our house when I was growing up was Ariel—it had a sacred place on my mother’s bedside table. Janet Malcolm, in The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes (Knopf, 1994), writes:
Life, of course, never gets anyone’s entire attention. Death always remains interesting, pulls us, draws us. As sleep is necessary to our physiology, so depression seems necessary to our psychic economy. In some secret way, Thanatos nourishes Eros as well as opposes it. The two principles work in covert concert: though in most of us Eros dominates, in none of us is Thanatos completely subdued. However—and this is the paradox of suicide—to take one’s life is to behave in a more active, assertive, “erotic” way than to helplessly watch as one’s life is taken away from one by inevitable mortality. Suicide thus engages both the death-hating and the death-loving parts of us: on some level, perhaps we may envy the suicide even as we pity him. (p. 58)
sheepfucker
Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Metropolitan Books, 2007).
note: My statement to Harris that his book contains much to admire is specious hyperbole. In The End of Faith, Harris rails against religious fundamentalism, which seems obvious, as well as against religious moderates, which seems intolerant.
note: As early as 2004, several former U.S. military interrogators, including Anthony Lagoranis, Eric Fair, and Sam Provance, each of whom had served in Iraq, came out publicly against torture. In 2007, a group of World War II veterans, who had interrogated Nazis at Fort Hunt (N.Y.), also expressed their outrage at the use of torture, which they deem both ineffective and immoral (Washington Post, “Fort Hunt’s Quiet Men Break Silence on WWII,” 6 October 2007). These individuals were followed by thirty retired admirals and generals who, in a joint statement, published in the New York Times, also called for an end to torture (12 December 2007). By 2008, “Two hundred leaders ranging form former secretaries of state and counter-terrorism experts to religious leaders and legal experts issued a call today for a presidential executive order that would ban torture and cruel treatment of detainees” (Nukes & Spooks, 25 June 2008).
note: Fred Marchant, in his introduction to Another World Instead: The Early Poems of William Stafford, 1937–1947 (Graywolf Press, 2008) writes:
In “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force,” an essay written during the first year of World War II, [Simone] Weil celebrates the virtues of hesitation, pausing, swerving. Examining several blood-stained scenes in the poem, she notes that those who conquer and kill—be they Greek or Trojan—are inexorable. No one imposes the slightest halt in what they are doing. No one, she writes, insists on “that interval of hesitation, wherein lies all our consideration for our brothers in humanity.”
It is also important to note that many of the Greek playwrights—Sophocles, Euripides, etc.—came from the military, and wrote their plays as a way to deal with the trauma they’d witnessed, both in battle and in the returning warriors (what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder).
the ticking is the bomb
note: The story of the man crying Allah every time he is struck by his U.S. captors is from Alex Gibney’s documentary film Taxi to the Dark Side.
note: In a critique of the television drama 24, Slovoj Zikek writes:
There was a further “ethical problem” for Himmler: how to make sure the executioners, while performing these terrible tasks, remained human and dignified. His answer was Krishna’s message to Arjuna in the Bhagavad-Gita (Himmler always had in his pocket a leather-bound edition): act with inner distance; do not get fully involved (“The Depraved Heroes of 24 are the Himmlers of Hollywood,” The Guardian, 10 January 2006).
the fallen tower
note: Many of the frescoes in Assisi’s upper basilica are Giotto’s, but the fresco of the fallen tower is in the lower basilica—I am uncertain whether it is, in fact, a Giotto.
note: The trend of using torture to sell things began immediately after the release of the Abu Ghraib photographs, for everything from Diesel jeans (images of flagellation) to Charles Schwab (Nickel and dimed? Try quartered!) to Altoids (Ve have vays of making you talk).
paradise lost
John Milton, Paradise Lost.
note: Herman Melville commented on Paradise Lost: Milton’s Satan is morally very superior to his God, as whoever perseveres despite adversity and torture is superior to whoever, in cold Vengeance, takes the most horrible revenge on his enemies.
mexico (the war)
note: One of Duras’s biographers is fairly certainly that her depiction of herself as a torturer is likely hubris, overcompensating for the fact that she actually worked for Nazi censors during the war (New York Review of Books, June 2008).
note: In fact, a universal ban on torture was implemented by most Western countries centuries before the Geneva Conventions. George Washington put it this way: “Should any American solider be so base and infamous as to injure any [prisoner]…I do most earnestly enjoin you to bring him to such severe and exemplary punishment as the enormity of the crime may require. Should it extend to death itself, it will not be disproportional to its guilt at such a time and in such a cause…for by such conduct they bring shame, disgrace and ruin to themselves and their country.”
dear reader (oblivion)
Margaret Wise Brown, Goodnight Moon (Harper, 1947).
roulette
note: Freud came to believe that the death drive (thanatos), represents an urge, inherent in all living things, to return to an original state of calm: in other words, an inorganic or dead state. “An original state of calm,” though, sounds like it could also be a meditative state.
too loud a
solitude
note: In Bohumil Hrabal’s novel, Too Loud a Solitude (Harcourt, 1990), the hero is, among other things, a hoarder. The form this hoarding takes is that he collects books from his job at the dump, so many that by the time we meet him hundreds of volumes strain the rickety shelf over his bed, threatening to one day collapse and crush him in his sleep. At night he lies in bed, reading, occasionally glancing up, thinking about this, imagining this collapse. As I remember it he is finally crushed beneath his salvaged books, but I could be misremembering.
note: Unlike my father, who’d be insane not to drink, I become insane when I do.
lexington, kentucky
Alfred McCoy, A Question of Torture (Metropolitan Books, 2006).
the gulag archipelago
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago (Harper & Row, 1973), pp. 103, 177.