The viewers, amazingly, applaud. Katarina’s mother says, ‘Why didn’t anyone tell me? Oh, I’m so proud!’
All of Kras’s muscles petrify. The general turns his prickly gaze on him and snaps, in a whisper, ‘Where did you get that? This is serious, Wolf, a breach of the Cut!’
‘I had nothing to do with it, looks like Bernard put it together.’ I had nothing to do with it. I had nothing to do with it. The sentence slips out of his mouth and swims around his head, mocking him. Something starts flowing around his eyes. Kras wipes them, in disbelief. He sniffles, discreetly at first, like he wanted to deny it, and then out loud, he’s not ashamed, dammit. Fathers have the right to be emotional too, every now and then. He avoids the gazes, he doesn’t know how to behave honestly in public. He’d most like to burrow into the ground and deal with things in his own way, or no, he’d rather see the others burrow into the ground, disappear, who the hell crammed them all in here to witness all this stuff that isn’t and never will be theirs? The doors fling open in the background. Through the veil of moisture Kras sees his father, who’s carrying a body in his hands. ‘General, I don’t care about your codes and commandments, my brother has no right to act like he has no son.’ That’s what Kras hears Bernard saying. Kras flares up. He lets loose. He strikes, firmly. Bernard falls to the floor. Across-the-board shrieking. Now, now, Olga hisses, Kras hears her clearly. Edgar is by him, holding his hands, squeezing. Kras doesn’t defend himself. He can’t see anything, his eyes are sliding down from the sockets. His jaw hangs freely. There’s a fresh round of smacks in the air. Who’s doing the hitting? Who’s getting hit? Kras can’t see. More across-the-board shrieking. Stoja’s voice, ‘Leave me alone!’ What? He wipes an eye with a shoulder, half discerns what’s happening. People are scattering about, someone’s with Bernard, on the floor, Raven drops the body and sprints over to Stoja, to help his wife, Svetlana and Magda have jumped on her, are pulling her hair and tenaciously smacking away at her, he clears his eyes again, he can’t believe it, he’s gone nuts, then another cry, a child, a little black boy screams, ‘Grandma did it, Grandma did it,’ it’s hard to spot him in the fracas, among the legs, somewhere, he’ll get trampled, Alenka runs to her son, ‘Grandma cut me,’ what the hell is going on, then a flash blinds him, a piece of glass in the air, Olga is clutching the bloodied shard of glass, and with a war cry of ‘Scoundrel!’ thrusts it, with all the strength the old woman can muster, into Edgar’s side. During the mass screaming and crowding, Raven pushes the reckless sisters out of the way and protects Stoja in a hug, Grace and Katarina run to Edgar who, stabbed, is about to drop, Bernard’s nose is bleeding and he crawls under the table where he fixes his glasses, Kras stands there and his head is about to explode with rage, Olga is trying to faint, she’s already kneeling down, little Po is standing at the door with a smile on her face and now even Meslier is awake, he releases his right hand and cuts the air vertically and horizontally, ‘In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit…’
POETRYLITICS
In a cone of light, attention.
Her.
‘…some new, bad poetry.’ And a laugh.
rip me
make some space
for you
Do you know which word I find interesting?
rip me in half
Which one?
Kindness. In kind. He is kind (because he likes me), he is kin. I mean, it doesn’t even matter how he behaves, it’s not even about him… You see? In kind. We are kin. If I find him kind, he is near me, close to me, we form a kinship.
Rip me in half. Come on, put pliers between my ribs
‘Or, you know what? What if you’d rather…’
Scissors! With scissors into the waist, over fifty, yeah, you know, phases of the moon
‘…because I’ve had enough of all this, you already know it all by heart, don’t you?’ Warm, truly warm, applause. It’s obvious they love her.
I can see nothing, because I planted my eye into someone else
now I’m waiting for what will grow
Some have come from far, far away to see her. Zoja’s a star. Everybody knows her. When things are tough (‘do you know how tough, how truly, truly tough things are, for so many people?’), they read her. Her words don’t function like words, her words are part of nature, they grow from the earth, on trees, she has collected them from creeks, she has plucked them from the sky. Her words are edible. They truly are. Calorie-rich. They fatten you up.
I dry up, all rough and shabby, between the cracks in the wall
‘No, tell me seriously, is this working out for anyone?’ A roaring response, fingers between their lips, they screech through saliva. For days little cars have been flocking to Brooklyn, people have been camping out, because she said she was willing to read, after they beseeched her, kindly beseeched her, she stopped putting up a fight and said she would read. To hear Zoja! Live! Her vocal cords and her voice and how her lungs take in air, and her beating heart right there, right in front of you, you can, if you try, if you really try, you can feel it! Her heart! Wow! And they came, boy, if you saw them, their souls have colds, they have ridiculous haircuts, and they are all somewhat
rip me in half, otherwise I can’t breathe!
sad. They breathe warmly. They are strangers to violence. Who knows where they all crawled out from, and so young. Ultimately their parents let them down once again. Their parents were so damned scared that they can’t be scared, they want to be open to others, not to flee from them. They will have to be victims of crimes because their parents didn’t even want to think about those crimes. An entire generation that is once again open to getting slapped by strangers, finally!
‘Trust everybody! Be dogs, puppies, trusting puppies, and dig away with your little paws, and press your muzzles into them, and act innocently, I mean, you are innocent, you’re all entirely innocent, basically, you little snouts, just be who you are!’
Devoted, gentle, indulgent and friendly. But the back does not forget. Carious cuttle.
At the outset of the twentieth century, this space belonged to a nail factory. After Black Thursday (the stock market crash on 24 October 1929), the factory went out of business. Five hundred and twenty-three people lost their jobs. In the 1930s the local branch of the Salvation Army (a Protestant organization founded in 1865 in the United Kingdom by William and Catherine Booth) was based here. During the Second World War the space was turned into a bullet factory. Sixty million people died during the Second World War. After the war, when the demand for bullets fell, the space became an animal shelter. The animals were treated cruelly. In 1975 the young activist Alex Pacheco (who would found PETA five years later) broke into the shelter and, using a Leicaflex camera (35mm SLR), photographed the impossible conditions. He sent the photographs to the editorial board of the Village Voice. The monochrome prints made storm waves. The shelter was closed down. The local authorities purchased the space and rented it out to artists’ groups who drew emotional power from its past. It was frequented by Annie Leibovitz, Andy Warhol, Gil Scott-Heron, Jean-Michel Basquiat. At the height of the crack epidemic (in the late ’80s) it was taken over by drug dealers. When the crack market declined (for not yet fully explained reasons the opiates market suddenly crashed), the space was completely given over to junkies. The social worker Edna Welquer operated out of here (the drug addicts affectionately called it Hell’s Diner) for twenty-five long years, helping the unfortunate and writing down her observations in a diary. When a client suffering from withdrawal stabbed her to death, her son edited her diaries and published them as a book. The police pushed out the drug addicts, the local authorities filled the entrance with concrete. Since then the space has been deserted.
The organizer of the Poetrylitics festival, Max Adorcuse (the name is an invention), who rented the space, had dreamt up all of the above and printed it on the back of the flyers. Zoja is his star and her presence will ensure the presence of NYC’s anarcho-intellige
ntsia, all the hip, true, cool, real, down-and-dirty people the city has to offer. He can hardly wait.
(but a lot of people really did die during the Second World War)
A time-stifling heat creeps over the city. Someone is sledge-hammering away at a fire hydrant, someone else is drowning his head in a fountain. Tiny heart attacks are knocking pigeons out of the sky. The streets have merged into a single, sweltering dog’s tongue. There’s a brown-out and old men are tucking bags of ice under their armpits. Bang, a traffic accident. Bang, another one. The people are going to go nuts, just watch, one degree warmer and they will all lose it. The sewers have risen and flown into the rivers, a cardboard leper colony. Someone lights a cigarette. Someone puts one out. A street fight, fuck it, nothing’s for free. Rays beat down on concrete, the heat is trapped between walls, it refracts, grows, fries the soles, someone is blow-drying their hair. What an idiot.
Zoja opens her eyes, warily. It’s hard to believe all of this exists. Right when you’re having coffee, looking out. And you people of God, you’re going to get it, get back to your flats!
Ludovico Överchild is trapped in a manic phase that has been going on for decades. It’s hard to say what triggered it. The electric collapse or a conflict between the strings of matter, perhaps the singular mill of contradictory quantum states. One is not one until you look at it. Simple axioms disintegrate when you look at them from another angle, and if you test them a thousand times and then take the average of their outcomes, you get a completely different picture. Some people are born in a rage. Others are enraged by the universe. During the day Ludovico seems perfectly normal; he trudges along like everyone else, painting and tidying, and thumping his hammer, hauling skids and punching out pieces, offering his hands where hands are needed, though he’s not one for talking much. But come midnight mysticism befalls him. Murky visions, slices of signs. From chaos to order; the legacy of the savannah-dwelling Adam and Eve. When you’re lying in the tall, dry grass and something moves, the faculty of sight comes in handy. Maybe it was the wind, maybe some tiger got a whiff of you. Those who didn’t know how to fill in the blanks, to draw conclusions, to paint a whole picture using fragments of input, to tie the wavering grass into something coherent, were devoured by tigers. Those brains did not beget offspring. And now we are radical in the opposite direction.
In the evening Ludovico changes skin and dons amulets, hisses spells through gritted teeth; he’s almost a religious fanatic, all the horoscopes are talking about him and only him, and he’s in love with history; the crosses on pharmacy signs lead him to Jerusalem, red traffic lights are hands pointing the way to Wounded Knee. This heat is not good for him. He’s predetermined, and that makes his shoulders droop. He won’t make the Cut. He sometimes emerges from nightclubs like Cortés from Tenochtitlan during the Night of Sorrows. He’s lured into gay bars by mesh shirts, the scent of sea foam from the Pequod, the whaling ship. The doormen are Albanians. For the time being, the feline general eludes him. The ZOIA-graffiti enwraps him in a premonition of evil. Z=7, O=7, I=1, A=1 = 7+7+1+1=16! Sixteen is under the influence of Ketu, a karmic collection of good and bad, the descending lunar node. The magnetic poles will reverse and the Earth will be turned upside down. The tectonic plates will thrust up entire continents and all that will remain will be fossilized remnants, folded into the new Himalayas, and in a few millennia monocled grandfathers will carve them out to show their grandchildren: look here, the collarbone of a nyuyorcus complexus, and the key to unlocking the gates of hell, which will lie beyond our heaven – a fact Ludovico has worked out from when the last light in the Flatiron building will go out – though he’s completely missed the mark.
‘Do you, let’s say, not feel the difference between being alone and being with somebody? Don’t you feel how different it is, how physically different it is, inside you? When you’re alone, you’re your own master and you have everything planned out and your will spurs you to action, or, I mean, to whatever, you can also be weak, and you can destroy yourself, but the battle goes on and on in your head, you know, you feel, you understand the battlefield, you know what you have to do to direct your will differently, it’s completely clear to you, and it’s only laziness, or, like I said, weakness that’s preventing you from obeying, but all of that is so immediately irrelevant when you make contact with someone. Another rule, a completely different rule, and I, let’s say, believe that the battlefield is taken to another level, a level that’s not present in the individual, it’s hovering up there in the air somewhere, some sort of social membrane, I don’t know how I should put it.’
‘Like some kind of holism, that sort of thing?’
‘Maybe, I mean, could be, I don’t know, holism, the whole is different from the sum of the parts, I get it, but it’s even more different than that, it’s not just that the whole is different, but that as soon as the parts start interacting they change their physical properties, they’re no longer that which enters the equation, since the result of the equation reaches down and changes parts, so they would equate with it, I mean, do you get it? The result’s already there and it sucks you up, it changes you as soon as you begin to multiply.’
‘Ok, fine, let’s say I understand, though I’m extremely sceptical about these metaphysical concepts, as you say, an equation, social membrane, something that already exists and changes us, so that it could exist, it seems like such a cheap Platonism, but ok, let’s say I, for the sake of argument, accept this because I’ve just read a great article about some guy, a mathematician, Nobel Prize winner, complete genius, who was tired of working for the tech industry because, in the end, any way you look at it, you’re working for the war industry and he, using mathematics, takes on the social sciences, specifically, he takes on metropolises, he plugs a massive database into a programme, everything, the population, income, employment, crime, all these parameters, basically, and he arrives at a surprising conclusion, namely, he concludes that if, for example, the population doubles, the productivity of each inhabitant goes up by a given percentage, and that, if you look at the big picture, is then reflected in all the parameters, that is, the more people you have crammed together, the more each individual contributes.’
‘Social contact lies at the heart of exponential growth. The engine of civilization.’
‘Yes, but that doesn’t mean that civilization is necessary, or that it’s hovering somewhere up in the air, just waiting for that contact to occur, before it will unfold like some self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s possible we have just made a completely banal point.’
‘That’s possible. But doesn’t this put all those conspiracy theories – that there are whole squadrons of automated bombers flying above us, ready to unhesitatingly take out any place where too many people gather – in a completely new and a somewhat more credible light?’
‘Why wouldn’t they, whoever they is, want people to gather?’
‘Because they’re satisfied with what they’ve created? Because they don’t want the thing to grow? Because they believe they have enough?’
‘So greed is dead? Are you mad?’
More or less this sort of communication is going on all over the car park in front of the ‘former factory for nails, bullets and failed fates’ – sincere and introspective talk, capable of surplus, but in the end hermetically sealed. In this case (the speakers were Rupert ‘Rust’ Stiglitz and Brian Baedekker, fairly representative specimens) it was concluded by an expression of scepticism, which is a milder form of manifesting the impotence of dialogue – the firmer of conclusions, aside from the barbaric ‘You’re clueless, shut your mouth!’, almost always come down to ethics. Nothing silences enlightened people more effectively than the possibility of evil.
‘Belt out your ideas! Be loud!’
Max Adorcuse (he wants people to pronounce it Adorku’, but everyone pronounces it Ador’kus) is elated. He’s marching around with a megaphone in his hand and shouting out slogans at a rate of two a minute. The visitors find him
annoying but they put up with him because word has quickly spread that ‘that nitwit with the megaphone is the one who got Zoia to come’. ‘Anomie, never! Society should socialize!’ He’s earned himself a little affection – he’s poured all of his savings into the festival, and he’s sacrificed his job, his girlfriend, friends, and over the past few months he’s slaved like a Bolivian subcontractor, cleaning up, installing electricity and lighting, scrubbing the toilets, dragging in a water tank and even playing interior decorator, adding that aesthetic touch so that the space wouldn’t look so empty and bereft even without people.
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