by John Keene
PERMANENCE OR EVANESCENCE, THE PROCESS OF THE REAL
The studied obscurity of those avant la lettre poets derives primarily from their desire to conceal. In your eyes, however, she reckoned the plight of the artist, which seduced her even more thoroughly, though you protested rightly that such suffering pales in comparison to what most other human beings endure. Trumpet-in-the-morning. Then mother left for work as father was returning half-asleep from his shift, so bundled up we too set off along the longer route that passed the stately “Century” houses. Another path, across the train tracks near the home for “wayward girls,” where he leered and poked his crotch through the fence, until the stones began to rain upon him. Recall how before you had spent the afternoons with Nana, and how when you grew old enough to walk to school your peculiar cast of companions, though your dispositions often left you all at war. Our legs are the pistons that fire our march through life, or at night two pipes through which each previous day’s dramas drain. Circuits, circadia. The long way had led past Mr. Ward’s gas station, where Gandy, known as “Sarge” from his army days, repaired cars. The other way promised a leaf-canopied stroll through a modest residential section, which you imagined had been the haunts of that playwright’s “Toussaint,” and the store not far from the abandoned trolley tracks, where one could linger over stalls of tangerines and Chinese apples or on hot days purchase taffy and “Bomb Pops.” Comparing this much later to the daily drives out to the Priory in Crève Coeur, what strikes you most is how fundamental and relative the relations are between distance and perspective. Back-and-Forth. “What will it take to get this garden growing?” a clarion to lift the rake and hoe, though the result would remain that patch of scrub that cumbered in the shade of the collapsing carport. Through the window of the backporch where the great-aunt sheltered her orchids, one surveyed with admiration the bay of asters, zinneas, and marigolds, and by stretching one’s senses just a quarter of a yard, one could almost touch the impatiens that cloaked the edges of the gangway. Grandfather, on the other hand, cultivated several plots of fruits and vegetables, among them tomatoes, turnips, carrots, sweet potatoes, onions, and watermelons, which sated both mind and stomach, especially during the desperate years. A little work is a wondrous thing, too much toil becomes a torment. Consequently when they began to cook peas as well as plant, pick, and shell them, it clarified once and for all the formerly central role of agriculture. Therapy, and not analysis, is our normal mode of reaction. This interpretation, however, of the poet’s striking originality failed to cite his filial reliance on preexisting discourse. By clever manipulation of a French accent, he convinced the teacher that he had lived in Martinique. She grimaced as you described fishing in São Paulo because she knew you were no longer just recounting but had crossed the lying-line. “Is that any way to behave around adults,” the emphasis primarily falling on adults. For while one might presume that originality overrides any deficit of the recollective faculties, more often than not it marks memory’s return in an unforeseen guise. Usually they could laugh off the slight attacks and raillery, but even the mildest comments hooked their self-perception like an angler’s gaff. Any fellow can break a rule, and every fool will mend it. “Monkey, monkey, swinging from a tree, better run and hide or he’ll jump on me.” You beseeched them but they belittled this as mere unmanliness, sure any empathy might blunt the sharpness of your sorrow. Listening implies a desire to surrender. In one of his most spectacular fits, he confessed to having fathered other children during his libertine days, yet their resulting expressions barely altered their pre-formed masks of dismay. And yet what distinguished this moment from all of the others was the announcement that one of these too-numerous offenses had earned him a black-magic curse from the forsaken girl’s mother. Good rhetoric always resurrects an argument. Hothouse. By propounding these theses and their concomitant antitheses, she subjected us to her usual welter of theories, and in so doing she appeared to have shrunk the polymorphous body of history into one monoeth(n)ic narrative so as to create a signifying medium that posed and answered all of its own questions. Huh. Blues, shoes, and a districtful of booze. In other words, private property and “propriety” are to the EuroAmerican bourgeois what the land and ancestors were to his other forebears, the fulcrum around which their entire sociopolitical view turned, and turns.
INTUITION, INFORMATION, A HANDY INDEX OF BEING
Gripping the chrysalis between the thumb and index finger you could divine the outlines of your future, for if such beauty might arise from a thing so hideous, you were persuaded that, despite your present, inelegant form, at least a few momentous transformations must await you. Out of nowhere. In back of the house sprawled the tree-nursery’s dun and barren acres which had long since closed to commerce. To the neighborhood kids we claimed this as our own yard despite the blatantly red-tagged markers, until Ebony, our beloved Labrador retriever, fell dead from some herbicides the land’s real owners had sprayed there. Behind the tool shed they retreated: behinds, bared teats. What would be sufficient under such trying circumstances. “Colored ABC Darians.” Eventually a “camp” experience assumed the status of a “solution,” though the reality of day camps, summer camps and scout camp depended on the year and their ever precarious finances. Prolonged exposure to sunlight will lead to yellowing or further surface degradation. Jumping double-dutch, till the night sky touched the ground, or jacks, but still the girls would play too fairly. Among our crew Kill the Man with the Ball prevailed or else a few rounds of Red Rover, and on days when there were only two of us, we might even resort to hopscotch. Each of them pined for a particular counselor, Kay M. being the one that he chose, for in spite of their snickers at her red hair and freckles, he found her laugh and wry spirit irresistible. Alone, and at best bereft. At scout camp the man was showering with his “sons,” which sent a shudder of recognition up their spine. Numerous dissimilarities, however, distinguished the boys, yet in general they were thought to think as one. L’envie, envy. Written records exist as testimony beside the oral accounts of those present, as though the accumulation of all these voices would effect a kind of “explication.” Who would cut such a big piece of the sweet-potato pie when so many good people in Africa go hungry. Peru, se compriende, is the country north of Chile and south of Colombia, he reread in those encyclopedias at the great-aunt’s house, which not only listed Thailand as “Siam” but Zimbabwe as a colony called “Rhodesia.” “If I were she,” she corrected, digging sharply into your statement, to ensure that proper diction would take root. The source of oratory. Not infrequently some would express a yearning for a return to the era of the city’s ascendancy, which was fitting as nostalgia rarely broaches the enigma of reason. Hiram R. Revels. In spite of the concatenation of family disasters they were still running with that bourgie crowd. A boon, apparently, when they won that all-expense-paid trip to Mexico, since, as that gossip announced to all around her at the luncheon, they both held such “menial jobs.” Cotillion de León. How long would you be away from us, what would you bring us back, or would you decide to forsake us altogether. A lingering terror, an absence of breath. The parents, politically active in those heady days, eagerly lent their time and support, because that decent Irish family, and not the others they had come across, led the local corps of Democrats. Amid them, the middling ones. Shortly thereafter the actor assumed the nation’s highest office, which precipitated the local organization’s disintegration through anger, distrust, and apathy. “St. Louis Movement.” With much fanfare, they commenced the beautillion militaire, which would be written up in all the Negro papers, and which he eschewed, to the dissatisfaction of certain relatives, out of an unexplained personal disinclination. In which affect becomes a guide and source, but to what: all, and nothing. The hurly-burly that ensued exceeded what we had expected, and yet we did not kowtow, but stood our unstable ground, knowing that later events, in which we determined our future, would bear such decisions out. Your feet are the very rotors that propel you
through today, or on occasion two trusty harrows that render the moment around you fertile. Still no one could explain why on that side he had so many “grandfathers,” who arrived and departed as regularly as the dun-notes. Mercy, mercy, me. “I’ll turn my tail to the wind to make sure y’all have something to eat,” thus who would dare to question the deeper contradictions in her reasoning. Let’s cool one. Which portended obliquely the theater of our future, but left to chance the curtain calls to come. They were horrified, however, that you could dredge up such minuscule details, since they had invested their reserves of faith in the telescopic movement of the years.
WORDS, ACTS, A SEARCH FOR VALIDATION
From their perch on the telephone wires a choir of songbirds greeted him, thereby slaking his starved sensibilities with a scenario that the whiter months had withheld. Lily, thou gay and hardy flower. Geraniums, jotted in your curling stenographer’s notebook, in “plastic graves on the windowsill,” belied, as did the charging, mewling cat, the dispassion of the afternoon’s unfolding. Never wearying of his records of these private adventures, he began to expend even longer hours on recondite projects, including the creation of a pseudo-African board game and a private linguistic mythopoetics. “I said put down that pen and pick up that football, and go out and play with the other boys,” thus condemned, without jury, to the tribunal of the outdoors, the others. O oriole, oracle! Abstraction is a literal and figurative subtraction which incurs no net loss of value. In suburbia someone has to mow the lawn, of course, thus it fell within your purview, so you heaved and you hove, wrenching the mower along the slope, until it accidentally plunged into the sinkhole. Recriminations bloomed like shrapnel, as though the action, though an error, were a crime. Emprizes, for others more enterprising. Both poetry and fiction, however, find their roots in the act of making, a supposition grown gradually clearer as he explored the possibilities of reading. Upon your five-speed, across the asphalt, whirring as the blackbird flies. Dreams consequently assumed the contours, colors of the interior of the town’s modest main library, where months seemingly elapsed as he maundered among the stacks, yet these reverie-journeys sometimes transmogrified into horrifying, recurrent nightmares in which, after each withdrawal of a careful selection of books, he arrived home to find himself either blind or illiterate. Such fears, though they initially seemed to possess an immobilizing permanence, disappeared amid the evanescence of each day’s flux, a fact that displayed for him the shifting character of being, or phrased more prosaically, the process of the unreeling of the real. An alphabet, analphabet. All information will be kept confidential. Unlike that of our parish church, the Priory’s plan was circular, with its white concrete parabolas by the Italian architect Neri and its collection of hand-crafted station altars, which usually seemed to be swathed in an otherworldly aroma of incense. Then his gaze would follow the black band of cassocks attenuating towards the entrance, entranced as he was by the stark and formal beauty of this relic of the ancient, Christian past. Silence poses a shrewder dilemma. Yet one had to endure the monks under other, more trying conditions, such as when they called upon one to conjugate the pluperfect subjunctive of the Latin verb “to bear,” or to find the maximum and minimum areas of a football field. The essence of mathematics lies in these abilities to order and abstract. Aural, unreal. Our souls, consequently, are the assembly plants from which all passions emanate, but as we have come to recognize it is easier generally to list the classical passions of the soul than to define adequately either “passion” or “soul.” Legei hoti touto alethes estin, a phrase he memorized so as to keep a good Greek motto at heart. Whatever flew up into the flue. Initially he would feign a stomach ache to gain his parents’ sympathy, but alas, once this pattern had established itself, these pains became valid physiological crises. One should not, on the other hand, dismiss the portents of recurrent, minor aches. Elephant Rocks. In any case you were said to wield a vibrant, plastic tongue. Browsing as they had so many times at this particular local record store, they were trying to concentrate on the album and cassette-tape titles before them, but they could not shuck their nervousness at being stalked about the aisles by the floor and assistant managers. Pooseyite, hoosier. “Don’t you ever turn your back to a nigger and a cash register,” the cashier, thinking us out of earshot, asserted baldly. Esteem, mise en abîme. “A white freak like her is what I’m looking for now, y’all, ’cause when I was your age I had me quite a few,” to which they wrinkled their mouths in disgust, the gestures a seal of their future. If you’re light, you’re all right, if you’re brown, hang around, if you’re black, get back. There are some taboos best left unbroken. Ask me now. Such expansive lyricism might be worthy of reprobation were not the very phenomenon of our lives a boundless source of poetry.
INQUIRY AS THE ACT OF LIVING, VITAL IMPROVISATION
Missouri, being an amalgam of nearly every American region, presents the poet with a particularly useful analogue for an articulation of the “American,” though close inspection shows a sum less metaphorically potent than its metonymically dissoluble parts. Show me. Having seen over four hundred skirmishes during the Civil War, the state ranked second only to Virginia in battle quantity, yet this factlet often receives scant mention in the most authoritative studies of that conflict. Yet with her Confederate government-in-exile and Republicanism on the wax, it was hard to keep up interest in the failing Southern cause. When later we spent a few days in Columbia, in Kansas City, in Jefferson City and the Ozark region, the breadth and diversity of the region’s people and landscapes impressed themselves on us such that we vowed never again to reduce them to an anecdote. Shepherd of the Hills. And so, despite his urgings and the many texts they were poring through, they never discussed the implications of Duden’s Report, the failed revolution of 1848, or the impact of the free blacks and their relationship with the Union Army in any class or forum, believing such trifles of the past at most a burden, and at the very least distasteful. A thirst for the trueness of lives and language, he anguishes ever. “Old Mazoo.” More amusing always to prattle about the flailing baseball Cardinals, who, with the acquisition of Ozzie and Dale and Willie, and the stewardship of Whitey and Red, would reprise their winning ways within a year. To wit, intuit. “Salus populi suprema lex esto,” uttered as much to contradict reality as to invoke it. In bygone years a community led by cooks and chauffeurs, carpenters, day laborers, and bootblacks, governed by ministers and Pullman porters, with that rare doctor or lawyer occupying the social summit. Knobnoster. By the time of the Miami riots they had selected new names and identities, thereby casting off another aspect of their oppressive heritage. The legacy as your grandfather and father had bequeathed it, which you rejected in favor of more compelling fantasy. Assembling all these puzzling pieces really requires the skills of a geographer-historian, which put his meager training and interests in some stead. Credit history for its luminous legerdemain, its adroit, unseen revisions, what the first six years write the next six erase, what one century pens with the most illuminative articulation, the consequent one hundred years transform into an entirely new text, unrecognizable at first glance. There but for the great hoax go our eyes. Having outgrown their former diversions, such as bike riding, crawfishing, and skateboarding, they locked themselves up in their rooms where they drew the shades before listening to records alone, or when not on the phone arranging dates and rendezvous, prowled the streets in someone’s mother’s car. Others might elect drugs as their chief form of recreation, though liquor was certifiably more common. This entails a decentered notion of the “subject.” Reefer, rifer. The parents misread the signals or misconstrued each scene as they doggedly followed the trail of assignations. Please wait for dial tone before inserting quarter. The maliciousness of the storeclerks and the indifference of the teachers was later demonstrated to be part of a greater structural problem. Few, however, admit a predilection for improper relations of power, so as to present a front of probity, propriety. In the absence of a system
of pure and unmediated signs, he nearly gave up on living altogether. Our recollective faculties extensively employ this function, dredging doggedly through the muck in search of that vital image. Free rides on the roller coaster and ridiculing the tourists from Iowa were the chief benefits of working at Six Flags, yet others who had traveled told of far more gravity-defying attractions and far more gullible targets elsewhere. The genius lies, in the execution. Bidding their co-workers adieu, he drove her home, where she begged him to come in, blow off a few hours, yet he declined, afraid she might be seeking more, for he had been warned innumerable times about their motives. Most lives are held together by this unspoken chain of commitments which we honor or break as the moment demands. “Now look here, baby, don’t be wasting my time,” as if one’s presence alone were insufficient. Your spirit, a small fluorescent candle, never cedes to any circumstance its gleaming. Festival of Lights. Throughout he could recollect no negative references to Jews, though not because his parents rarely encountered them. Your recourse to a chain of corrections thereby functioned as a method of establishing certainty.