XCIX

 

So many goddesses and gods borne out of the sea foam – anadyomene and shining – amidst the oil and bits of ship, run aground off storied Rhodes.

 

Pathos, yes, but many a nautical mile from Paphos

Showing only that Aphrodite may be born, or resorbed, anywhere – even off Zephyros beach.

 

 

“They are souls, like us,” said Babis Manias, a fisherman, breaking down as he recalled saving a child. [“Migrant Boat Rescue,” The Guardian online, 4/26/15]

 

[Walter] Dunbar came in, unctuous and reassuring, his pipe his badge of respectability. Bob Douglas, he said, had taken time ‘to digest the matter you presented to him and is presenting it to the governor and will get back to you.’ Douglass, this suggested, was at that moment on the line to Rockefeller and would soon return to the Stewards’ Room. But he never did. [Wicker, ATTD, p. 210]

 

I was down to Del Monte today and they will quite probably put me on in the beginning of August. We finally got together enough [money] to have a good dinner today after going sort of lean for a couple of days. We were pretty desperate and hungry, having eaten lots of plums, chocolate, creamcheese and radishes which was all that was in the house.

There are still quantities of plums gradually rotting in the freezer from when I got half the yield of a ripe tree the other day for picking it for this very old woman. I figured I’d hock the radio (for a quarter of what it’s worth) just to fill up the car because there was $20 left and C’s parking had to be paid for.

In any case, I’ll try to sell the radio, since I know I can get more bread for it, but it was a uniquely enraging experience to feel all hot, weak and cramped from hunger to stroll around the Co-op’s aisles bulging with food.

Amazingly enough, we had enough to have a really decent meal, but this is something I won’t forget.

The money pressures and all this are not a totally new experience for me, and they have been light ones compared to many, with survival within reach most of the time. But the denial of food is a serious matter. Food is a pacifying as well as a vitally nourishing thing. Deny an animal food and it will become psychotically obsessed with its procurement. I felt dangerously trapped, cornered, and mad today. I’m hip to that glimpse I got of what real bad revolution is about. Take the food from the libs and before you can flash a V-sign, they’ll be grabbing guns and stomping shit down on the pig. Take half the already frustrated population of America, say working-class union members, reduce the buying value of the dollar to shit and you’ll have the biggest spontaneous motherfucking red army the world has ever seen. [Journal note, July 16, 1970, Berkeley, CA]

 

A FILM FROM THE SIXTIES

This adult male. This person on earth.

Ten billion nerve cells. Ten pints of blood

pumped by ten ounces of heart.

This object took three billion years to emerge.

He first took the shape of a small boy.

The boy would lean his head on his aunt’s knees.

Where is that boy. Where are those knees.

The little boy got big. Those were the days.

The mirrors are cruel and smooth as asphalt.

Yesterday he ran over a cat. Yes, not a bad idea.

The cat was saved from this age’s hell.

A girl in a car checked him out.

No, here knees weren’t what he’s looking for.

Anyway he just wants to lie in the sand and breathe.

He has nothing in common with the world.

He feels like a handle broken off a jug,

but the jug doesn’t know it’s broken and keeps going to the well.

It’s amazing. Someone’s still willing to work.

The house gets built. The doorknob has been carved.

The tree is grafted. The circus will go on.

The whole won’t go to pieces, although it’s made of them.

Thick and heavy as glue sunt lacrimae rerum.

But all that’s only background, incidental.

Within him, there’s awful darkness, in the darkness a small boy.

God of humor, do something about him, OK?

God of humor, do something about him today.

[Wisŧawa Szymborska, “Written in a Hotel,” Poems: New and Collected. Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh, trans. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1998]

 

 

The committee of observers in Attica Prison is now convinced a massacre of prisoners and guards may take place in this institution. For the sake of our common humanity, we call upon every person who hears these words to implore the Governor of this state to come to Attica to consult with the observer committee, so we can spend time not lives in an attempt to resolve the issues before us. Send the following telegram immediately to Governor Nelson Rockefeller in New York City: “Please go to Attica Prison to meet with the observers committee.” [Statement issued September 12, 1971. From Wicker, ATTD, p. 208]

 

Good evening, all me jolly lads, I’m glad to see you well;

If you gather all around me, boys, a story I will tell.

For I’ve got a situation, and begorra and begob!

I can whisper I’ve a weekly wage of nineteen bob.

It’s a twelvemonths come October since I left my native home,

After helping in Killarney, boys, to cut the harvest down;

But now I wear a jersey and around me waist a belt,

I’m the gaffer of the squad that makes the hot asphalt…

[“Hot Asphalt,” The Shuttle and Cage: Industrial Folk Ballads. Ewan MacColl, ed. London: Workers’ Music Association, 1954. p. 26]

 

Pilgrim’s palimpsest

 

Someone else’s selfie

 

Someone to wash over me

 

“If I had his number I’d call him,” Wicker said. “How do we know Oswald and Douglas were giving him the whole story? They might not make it clear how bad the situation is. They might not understand themselves how much killing there is going to be once these guys are turned loose with those guns.”

“I’ve got his number.” [State Assemblyman] John Dunne had moved into their small circle. He produced a pocket address book. “Rocky’s a Pocantico Hills.” Wicker was not sure where Pocantico Hills was, although he had a vague idea that it was a magnificent Rockefeller estate.

“If we call him,” Wicker said, “it ought to be from all of us. Will you all speak to him?” Jones, Badillo, and Dunne agreed. Dunne gave him the number and Wicker – who usually hated telephoning, a severe handicap in his trade – went to the phone at the end of the room and dialed. [Wicker, ATTD, pp. 213-214]

 

What’s really astounding are the hard-hat riots around the country. It betrays how fucked-up America is on the inside. No upheavals of a discontented minority, instead the boiling shit-scared fear of a class that’s just managed to pull itself out of its traditional hole and is starting to acquire some middle-class attributes. The enemy is communism, hippies, anarchy. The rallying cry calls them to defend the country, the flag, the pigs and greedy fucks who have ground them under their heels for generations and who now chuck them a bone (in the form of unions) when their back is up against the wall.

What these hard-hat dudes have been programmed to hate is the symptoms, not the disease; but unknowingly they’ve become a symptom themselves. It’s only a matter of time before the more entrenched bourgeoisie gets shaken off its pedestal by an earthquake of rebellion, and after that, it won’t be long before all these former libs and fascists are swelling the ranks of a people bent on survival. They won’t instantly turn into ardent Marxists, but a nationalistic, fascistic alternative will only appeal to people if it is the only way to feed themselves and their families. If anything is around, and it will be, to say, dig, this is how we care for everybody, clean up the environment and provide better than trapped plastic survival for the total population, people will absolutely dig it. Because they will understand it. Because it will be real. [Journal note, July 16, 1970, Berkeley, CA]

 

But, Eric, you did not, could not, see it, for it was outside your frame and when your frame shifted, you had no idea how to endow it with signification: Nixon in China, the dollar set free from the dragging chains of Gold. What seemed the monster’s death crisis turned out to be another round of growing pains.

And echoing down the spiral coil of forty-four years, the final line of the chorus to a song you heard a woman sing – but the one time and never before or again – in a dark, Village, feminist cabaret – a line that recurs in your mind and ear intermittently, though all surrounding circumstances have fled the scene, with a host of good, bad and indifferent actors. Her guitar was in tune and her strumming rich and full: Squeeze the baby from the belly of nineteen seventy-one.

 

A secretary answered. Wicker gave his name and pointedly added “associate editor of The New York Times.” Somewhat to his surprise, in about 30 seconds, he heard Nelson Rockefeller’s familiar, hearty, rather nasal voice on the line calling him by his first name.

“Governor,” Wicker said, “I’m up here at Attica, and I…”

“I know you are,” Rockefeller broke in. “And I just want you to know how grateful I am and how much I admire what you and the others are doing up there. I know you’ve all worked hard and taken great risks and I appreciate it. I really do. It’s just great… just great.” [Wicker, ATTD, p. 214]

 

 

What is the currency of our distinctions among things – the tolerances of fungibility? If an airplane is, in many ways like a guided missile, cannot an airplane also be a guided missile?

How to domesticate reality so it and its phenomena may better conform to a subject object exclusivity?

Do we give the Nobel prize to Writer X because her or his work is so significant? Or do we award ourselves the prize for finding so much significance in his or her work? Or both. Or neither.

 

There are people on earth so frightened that reality can only appear to them in the form of fantasy

 

The Case of the Capacious Carapace

Hard

Boiled