The Wolf Eel: Recent Episodes
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At Schiphol robots seemed to be everywhere. One customer service robot in a gift shop reminded me of the robot in the new series Sunny; a cleaning robot repeatedly bumped into people in the lounge and spun around aimlessly. Yeah, the robots are everywhere. Where else will they take charge?
With more distance from humanity – either via being served by robots or by isolating in the forest, I wonder about things like… that unique terror that comes over us when we face sudden death and loss. Being gripped by the urgency of now – the cavernous hole that opens up with a fresh absence and the action that tries to launch in us.
When my friend E and I made plans to meet after many years, we were just days from the lifting of Covid lockdown border closures. And before we could nail down a plan to meet, which was only a few days after we had spoken, I learned that E had died suddenly. And this made me want to seize life with greater gusto – after all, we can’t wait because we don’t know what will happen. And yet, that urgency fades – fairly quickly. We make our excuses. Where do those feelings of exigency go?
Losing E didn’t make me take any action on connecting with others in more real ways. I thought about it. But did nothing. In some cases, the losses aren’t those kinds of connections. Earlier this year I wrote about a distant friend who passed away suddenly but who had not been a close or integral part of my life in decades. It’s a shock to the system when confronted by this kind of loss, but also not one where you regret not having taken action because it’s not that kind of friendship.
Similarly, a former manager in a former job suddenly died only weeks after I had last spoken with her. We had made plans to speak regularly and compare notes on writing. She had spoken frequently about how she would undoubtedly outlive her much-older husband (she didn’t). It was a shock but somehow after experiencing a string of these early-and-too-soon-gone deaths around me, the shock, though present, feels like numbness and doesn’t spark action.
I haven’t felt minded as I once did to reach out to people from the past to reconnect. I am as much in contact as I want to be with most of the people I care about. Sure, I may not see them as much as I would like – but I make the effort to stay in touch. Those who don’t reciprocate, I can’t do very much about (and they probably don’t wish to be in contact with me; their prerogative). Perhaps in my own way I have become my own robot, taking in data about the people around me (and their demise) but not doing or feeling anything human in response.
Immediately after writing about the price of ice and similarly critical matters, I was seated on a plane next to a woman with whom I had a remarkable amount in common. She expressed worry that she would not be able to satisfy her constant need for ice in the UK (or anywhere else in Europe). I reassured her. Ice may not be as popular or as desired in massive quantities by Europeans as it is by Americans, but it is nevertheless widely available.
It’s strange to meet people who haven’t traveled much. It’s easy to forget how unknown so many basic things really are for people who haven’t ventured outside their own countries. With globalization, things don’t tend to be that different, even in very different countries, until you dig under the surface. Spending five or ten days in the UK won’t likely cause major culture shock for an American tourist, even if there are obvious differences, such as driving on the other side of the road. Or in other parts of Europe, there are different languages to account for – but even that isn’t such a barrier to a brief visitor.
It takes time and familiarity to find the real divides, even if superficial ones are plentiful.
Some moments in life feel frozen – not just me and my inability to take action one way or another. But the moments themselves. Nothing is moving around me – at least not in my vicinity or sphere of influence. Even though I make decisions, make changes, move pieces around the chess board, I’m paralyzed by a sense of being stuck.
A few ill-advised decisions coupled with corporate ineptitude and the most capitalist-greed-driven set of economic conditions of my lifetime (and I’ve seen some blizzards in my day), and I’ve got a whirlwind of new decisions to make. And even though I keep making them and continue to actually skate along, I still feel a bit like I’ve fallen into a frozen lake and can’t find my way out.
I wonder: What does ice cost? Ordering a coffee today, I got the coffee and asked for a separate glass of ice. Normally I get some combination of this to create coffee-flavored ice. But I think I get more coffee and more ice ordering them separately, and I don’t have to pay for the ice. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before. At least I hope I can start to thaw some of the other suspended things in my life by thinking about them in a new way as I have done with the cost of ice.
The advice goes, “Don’t hedge; don’t use filler words – they dilute your statement.”
“Don’t use ‘just’ or ‘sort of’ because you can’t let uncertainty show.”
But what if I am uncertain? What if I just don’t know and I want that uncertainty to be clear?
Years go by and memory, though not erased, dims. Characters who played instrumental roles in our lives, however briefly, also fade into the background. The drift is imperceptible as life grumbles along, shifting under our feet, repopulating with new casts of characters. And suddenly 30 years of life’s adventures, turmoil, joy, curses and cravings pass with almost no connections to these past characters.
When suddenly they reappear – but are no longer among the living – it’s such a gut punch. The tattered memory revives all the conversations you had, the things you shared in common, the influence they had, the tangible help they provided, even when it wasn’t easy for them to do, the confidences they shared and struggled with. The sense of lost closeness floods back in, and the regret at having let the connection fray bubbles up. Nothing really happened to create a rift. Living in different places at different stages of life, wanting and expecting different things, forcing different things to happen… people drift apart for no reason, without actively deciding to, without effort. And all of a sudden, someone who was once a part of daily life, important in a way that words can’t really convey, is gone forever. Not just gone from daily life, which happened so many years ago between us, but gone for good.
It is hard to know what to do with or how to process this information. The discovery of the sudden and unexpected death of someone who was once so close. It’s facile and inadequate to say “they will be missed” but equally impossible to find a fitting alternative tribute.
So highly critical of everything despite being unqualified to criticize (that is, offering blind critique of films he had not seen, theories he had not studied, and so on), listening to him was instructive in ways not to be, i.e., behaving in pseudo-intellectual going against the grain for the sake of going against the grain… but it was also unproductive, spending time on ineffective, uninformed opinions crafted for controversy’s sake without even being wrapped in the blanket of devil’s advocacy.
It was all Moonlight (which he had not seen) was “pretentious navel-gazing only praised because it was a ‘black movie’”. Or “women are routinely jealous of other women, and that’s why you don’t appreciate Kate Tempest” (now Kae Tempest, whose coming out as non-binary is probably another thing he’d have uninvited commentary on). Or worse yet, and most offensively, it’s “not numerically possible for as many people to have perished in the Holocaust as commonly claimed” (a “theory” relayed to me by phone in the waning moments of our acquaintance, as I sat in a Jewish restaurant glancing across the street toward a heavily guarded synagogue).
Now of course my brain screams the words I should have blurted out then without hesitation: “What happened to you, dude? What happened to you that makes you like this?! Why would these be the thoughts you think are worth sharing?” I was so much in it at the time, in the moment, wanting everything to progress in a linear stitch, that I did not dare voice my disbelief. I was so much in my own cloud of grief and recovery from a variety of unrelated things that I didn’t see it clearly at the beginning of the conversation. I sewed myself into this predicament that could never yield anything. This is what happens when you believe that any change will be preferable to the current circumstances … and the more dramatic and jarring that change, the better.
Years and years removed from this brief, quilted little mess, it’s these incongruous utterances, betraying a strange mix of what I can only characterize as a mix of jealousy, unconscious bias, latent prejudice, and a need to be perceived as driving dialectical arguments that were nevertheless completely subjective, that occasionally spring to mind. It’s impossible to say if these vignettes reflect who he really was, who I interpreted him as being, or someone he projected or pretended to be in a bid to get rid of me without having to be direct. Or some combination of all of these.
While none of these things matter and don’t figure into my life, sometimes while driving long distances in the dark (my favorite way to drive), listening to music I collected during that period in my life, the mind wanders.
And now in the present, I think, my god, what did I see in this person? I was so tightly wound, I’d have overlooked a lot and basted a patchwork of excuses over the top of both of our inconsistencies and shortcomings. All to prevent my own unraveling. In truth, I never knew this person. I tried to live according to a pattern that was less a form and more a bubble. Being in that momentary bubble, we were not who we really are – on so many levels. We were ephemeral, interim people. Or at least I was … just a thread – loosely connecting one part of my life to an entirely different one. And I can only interpret him and his presence in my life through that lens.
Beyond that, though, and once again only through my own filters and limited information, I can only wonder what his actual partner saw in him? I can only think – based on what little I knew of her and what pieces of himself he showed me – that she suffered. For years. Even if he complained about her (which was exceedingly and respectfully rare), he spoke reverently of her intelligence, her potential, and of all the beautiful things that made her her. She sounded so much more enchanting, patient and forbearing than he could ever be, and certainly more than he deserved if he really did put her through the things he described doing in the course of their lives together. I thought I understood why they were, as he claimed, splitting up, given their long and complex history (the first thing of which I can’t pretend to know about), but even so, I could only guess that she wasn’t living the fullest life she could have been by staying with and relying on him. She sounded like she deserved so much more. It’s not as simple as that, and it’s easy for a rootless character like me to dismiss roots, ties, history and even – or perhaps especially – love.
I find myself thinking of these kinds of people – the person in a partnership who must get something fulfilling from it but who suffers at the hands of the whims, addictions, fickleness and capriciousness of the partner to whom they’ve tied themselves. It’s not rare. Another man I’ve known for years is a serial philanderer (I use this word without assigning a moral judgment to it); I have always wondered what his wife thinks and how she feels. She, like the aforementioned woman, is deeply intelligent, worldly, talented, beautiful, and at least on paper, everything her husband could ever want. But it’s still not enough (or rather, he is not enough so constantly has to prove and reprove that he is attractive to anyone and everyone else). To satisfy his own low self-esteem, some aspects of his choices and behavior must erode her self-esteem. I hope not, but I can’t see how it wouldn’t.
But what do I know? Desensitized to joy, indulging in the purchase of preposterously expensive keychains, seeking out highly practical portable air compressors and searching out capellini in a pasta wasteland, I am always casting an eye on the past and the scales that blinded me.
Each year at Christmas, nothing tickled my brother and me more than hearing John Denver’s ”Please Daddy Don’t Get Drunk This Christmas” (since remade by the ever-nauseating Alan Jackson). We laughed uproariously upon hearing, “You came home at quarter past eleven and fell down underneath our Christmas tree”. How hilarious! How delightful! A man so inebriated he could ruin a perfectly lovely Christmas scene. We didn’t think about the painful reality of it. It sounded so comical that we lost sight of the beleaguered mother holding back tears, trying to pretend everything was fine, sending the kid to bed while she dealt with the drunken consequences.
We were maybe five and three years old, if that, and we didn’t grow up in a household with a raging drunk, so the festive, jolly tone of the song masked the (repeated) tragedy (“every goddamn Christmas you do this…) of the song. But we weren’t far removed from this kind of life. My father had grown up with an abusive, alcoholic father, and we had seen glimpses of this man’s mania, his binges, his violence and threats, the way he became depressed and talked to himself – and terrorized everyone around him.
We did not understand then how simultaneously frightening and tedious it is to live with an addict. After all, artistic depictions of the alcoholic often veer toward the jovial: the drunken father coming home, wrecking the Christmas tree laughing and hollering “Merry Christmas!” as in the song, or film scenes in which a drunken rage is so heightened, unbalanced and berserk that you almost laugh, thinking this level of drama surely cannot be real.
A scene comes to mind from the fictionalized bio-series George & Tammy, about the tempestuous relationship between musicians George Jones and Tammy Wynette. In it, Jones comes home piss drunk and, as several media outlets (and possibly Wynette’s own autobiography) describe it, “chases Tammy around with a loaded gun”. This comes to mind possibly because (if I recall) in the series it happened to be set at Christmastime but also because the scene, while it should be terrifying, has the frenetic energy of something willfully comedic. These kinds of scenes on film often feel this way. Someone is fleeing for their life, but it’s almost like the equivalent of Benny Hill theme music is playing in the subconscious mind, possibly trying to square reality with the chaos that’s unfolding.
Watching such scenes in a film, or hearing John Denver croon, beseeching his father not to come home drunk this Christmas (unlike so many others), doesn’t begin to convey the exhaustion, the pain, the tedium, the heartbreak, the ache, the disappointment, the fear, and so many other emotions that living with an addict – in particular angry, depressed drunks – ignites.
The drunk person is insufferable, unpredictable, dangerous, threatening (to themselves and to you) but somehow he truly believes he is fine, normal, more than themselves, entitled and empowered by drink. Yet their self-loathing, bitterness, pettiness, nastiness erupts from them without ebb. And then suddenly, days or weeks later, in a fit of sobriety, they may apologize for what they did or said – but they don’t remember any of it and will repeat it, and worse, later. It’s a Jekyll and Hyde existence, and everyone else bears the burden and picks up the pieces.
In Douglas Stuart’s recent Young Mungo, which was good but struck too many similar chords to his earlier Shuggie Bain to be quite as original as I would have hoped, the strongest takeaway is the realism of the alcoholic mother and the fraught relationship with her children. While you did not get the same Jekyll and Hyde feel from the mother character, Mo-Maw, as you might get from real life alcoholics (I don’t recall meeting Mo-Maw sober in the book, after all), Stuart nevertheless comprehends exactly how the alcoholic lives the life of two distinct people:
“Mungo knew fine well that people had demons. Mo-Maw’s showed itself whenever she jangled for a drink. Her demon was a flat, eel-like snake with the jaw and beady eyes of a weasel and the matted coat of a mangy rat. It was a sleekit thing on a chain leash that shook her and dragged her towards things that she ought to be walking away from. It was greedy and it was cunning. It could lie dormant, wait for the children to leave for school, to kiss their mother goodbye, and then it would turn on Mo-Maw, throttle her as though she was some shivering mouse. At other times it coiled up inside her and sat heavy on her heart. The demon was always there just under the surface, even on good days. On the days that she gave in to the drink, the demon could be quieted for a while. But sometimes Mo-Maw could get so far in the drink that she would become another woman entirely, another creature altogether.”
Her utter hopelessness, selfishness and disregard for her own children is shocking, but worse than that – and this is the hardest part because I understand it so well – is how angry yet still loving the children are. She abandons them, she abuses them, she uses them, and yet despite their suffering at her hands, they keep taking her in and giving of themselves, cleaning up mess after mess.
Alcoholics and addicts will ruin your life and not think twice about it. And it’s a whole lot worse than a knocked-down Christmas tree.
In keeping with the theme of things not being what they seem, it sometimes becomes clear that we are not who we think we are. We think we are one thing, pretend to be another, and are probably some third thing that we ourselves are not self-aware enough to recognize or describe with any accuracy. (And we are yet another thing to those who know or think they know us. Perceptions are manifold.)
These thoughts arise as I read about the doppelganger phenomenon in Naomi Klein’s most recent book, Doppelganger, but also when I reflect on my own behaviors and how they line up (or do not) with what I have always believed about myself.
I’ve never considered myself a troublemaker or boat rocker. But then I rethink. As an adult, I am quite different from who I was as a child but have struggled to see myself the way I am now. I was quiet, shy, and (really) fearful of interaction. I assumed other people also tacitly understood this about me, but I have since learned that most people had an entirely different impression of me.
As a silent victim to mild bullying as a child (which I probably took to heart more because of my own crippling shyness and less because it was actual bullying) and a witness to childhood tyrants bullying others (to whom I rarely stood up), it’s not something I can stand by and watch silently now.
… when I see bullying behavior, I am not someone who will tolerate it as an adult. I don’t always say something in the moment, as bullying unfolds – it depends on the circumstances and how much disruption saying something will cause (i.e., will it do more harm than good?). But I observe more carefully the behavior patterns and words of bullies (usually in the workplace), take note and, if I am in a position to do so, I report it. I have learned that just trying to confront it verbally – without a record, without witnesses – leads to nothing, changes nothing, and gives bullies a chance to regroup and make excuses. While I also replay the mantra “don’t put this in writing” in my head after getting fucked over by things I put in writing, I also recognize the power of putting things in writing. A black-and-white record of observations is much harder to refute or excuse. As many managers confronted with the written record lament, “Now I have to do something about it”. Yes. Exactly. Ignoring it does not make it go away. Someone has to be unafraid of sounding the alarm, even if it ends up making them a lightning rod.
Having been through something like this recently, I felt firmly convinced that this was unusual behavior for me. Like, wow, I stepped outside the lines. But when I really started digging into the past, I realized I’ve been like this for a long time. My entire working life, really: the mousy, timorous child who would not speak up even when asked a direct question has become a troublemaker (when given cause) who directly questions everything.
Hunkering down in deep snow and sustained lows of -30C (and highs of -15C) accompanied by a painful and persistent cough, I can’t say January has launched the most auspicious start to a new year.
And while I attempt to breathe and sleep through coughing fits, overdosing on more crap streaming films and tv and reading books (at least that’s one joy/goal I can still pursue), I am preoccupied by a burning hatred for perfume ads. The fact that I am taking the time to record my thoughts on the subject speaks both to how deeply annoying I find these ads and to just how incapacitated I am by illness right now.
I don’t generally consume regular television so don’t see that many ads but in Glasgow I tend to watch a lot more linear tv with advertising than I see when traveling. And my god – there is a lot of dismal advertising. But nothing seems more wasteful, indulgent, ridiculous, tedious and overwrought than those for perfume. And for some reason it almost reaches the level of making me angry. In a world where there are countless and unimaginable real problems, over-the-top, insipid ads capture the screen and glossy pages, covered with actors taking home bloated paychecks to hawk fragrances most people don’t want, can’t afford and can’t wear anywhere thanks to the superabundance of allergic/hypersensitive reactions to smell.
I find myself categorizing these ads, angrier at some than others. From the overindulgence of the Natalie Portman Miss Dior ads to the long-running and increasingly out-of-touch and incomprehensible Johnny Depp Dior Sauvage ads, to the more recent ludicrous spectacle of Emma Mackey peddling Burberry Goddess to the frivolous and annoying “Quando Quando Quando” nonsense of Emilia Clarke shilling Dolce & Gabbana’s The Only One. All of these bother me in a way that I cannot explain.
The only ad that doesn’t inflame a sense of injustice and fury is the very brief and basic Bleu de Chanel ad featuring Timothée Chalamet and a soundtrack of “Nights in White Satin”. And this is because it does not seem overdone, although when you dig into the backstory of the brand partnership, you discover that Chalamet is raking in USD 35 million to promote this fragrance. There’s also another 60-second ad directed by Martin Scorsese.
It’s fucking perfume, people. I don’t have the energy to explore why this kind of advertising is absurd and frankly, much like athletes’ distorted, fat salaries, a travesty.
I had never given much thought to the experience of not knowing one of my parents. Nor had I really given a great deal of thought to the myriad ways and expressions of not being a part of one’s child’s life.
I spent the holidays with individuals (half-siblings) who share the same mother but different fathers – and neither of them had much contact with or knowledge of their fathers. They met them only when they were older, and for whatever reason have never expressed much curiosity about who these fathers were. During childhood and adolescence, the not knowing appeared to be more tantalizing than knowing for sure. They could imagine that their fathers were anything they wanted them to be – important, busy, wealthy, foreign – any kind of character and lifestyle. Any kind of fantasy life that kept them away.
In reality, meeting these absent fathers made whatever illusions they may have had disappear. But it was not as though they had held onto or truly believed in the many other possibilities they had concocted. It was better to live the lives they had and ignore the reality, even after being confronted by it.
Pop culture is full of these parentless (many fatherless, in fact) stories, in which the father figure’s absence is treated as important but not central. In stories like Douglas Stuart’s Young Mungo, the main characters are depicted as living with a ne’er-do-well alcoholic mother and no mention is made of the father. The working class Glaswegian experience is peppered with these kinds of stories – struggling, often strong, single mothers and absent (and barely mentioned) fathers. It’s not clear from the stoic ways characters front whether they miss their fathers or the experience of having known a father.
“They say you can’t miss something you never had,” a little girl, Mad, states, in the story Lessons in Chemistry (which is, incidentally a subtle advertisement for the power of the public library and librarians), referring to her deceased father. She goes on to say that this cannot be true. She never knew her father at all – he was killed before her mother even knew she was pregnant. It is an entirely different kind of absence… but does the way of absence matter? What prompts the longing, the curiosity in some… while others live as though the presence of a father has never mattered?
In the now-ended Reservation Dogs, most of the main characters have absent fathers, and some are without parents at all. Throughout the series, the character Bear pins his hopes on his shiftless, absent father and eventually comes to terms with the nature of the relationship (or lack thereof). As the series ends, a poignant episode follows the character Elora as she seeks out her father for the first time. She had never given his existence much thought until she decides to go to college and needs to complete financial aid forms using the information of her parents. The meeting between father and daughter is perfunctory at first, yet filled with a tense awkwardness. Elora plays tough and indifferent, and her biological father (Ethan Hawke) grasps for the right words to say. Eventually Elora softens and agrees to meet her half-siblings. The shift in their dynamic is small and incremental and depicted delicately through light-touch dialogue, silences, and subtle facial expressions.
For those of us who never experienced such an absence, it would be hard to understand what someone who never had a father at all might feel. One imagines emptiness, a longing or even an idle curiosity, but frequently it seems as though whatever is felt, it’s buried – or out of sight, out of mind – until something triggers the questions. Even if you don’t miss someone or something you never had, surely you would be curious about it?
Things are not always what they seem. You know, Phil Groovy Collins is not – and never will be – Lenny Kravitz. How it could seem so is… unknown. But referencing Phil Groovy the other day reminded me that as much as I dislike most of this dude’s music, he continues to pop up in different areas of life.
One of my most highly annoying traits is my tendency to tune in to the music playing in public places, and then I grill my companions, “Name that tune!” So many of my friends are not particularly musical in the sense that identifying musicians and songs isn’t important to them – fair enough – and this activity is a little bit like torture. Somehow, though, I can’t help myself.
Years ago, in Iceland, I quizzed a friend over coffee at a long-defunct shopping mall café. It was Phil Groovy (what song, I no longer remember). Flustered, she blurted out, “Lenny Kravitz”. I’ve never forgotten this. No one wants to be put on the spot this way, and yet, I can’t stop myself from repeating this scene.
In fact last year in Iceland, with this same woman and her now-teenaged daughter (to give you an indication of the time lapse, the woman was pregnant with said daughter during the original name-that-tune incident), I subjected them both to this nonsensical game. We were eating dinner in a loud restaurant, and the music playing was so faint as to be unrecognizable. I was sure, though, that it was George Michael’s “Father Figure”. My friend’s daughter quietly used Shazam to try and pick up the sound and found that I was correct. “How are you even hearing it over all this noise?”
Who knows? This is just where my attention goes. And no matter what, Phil Groovy is never Lenny Kravitz.
But this theme – things not always being what they seem – is important. How many split-second judgments do we make just by looking at someone? How often do we just trust what is presented to us? Lately, having taken up reading and watching series and films more actively than I had in some time, I am struck by how often the theme arises.
In the tv series Silo, those living in the silo are shown the “outside” on a screen and they accept what they are shown. But is it real? Questioning the reality creates nothing but trouble.
In the series Dark Winds, a Native American woman cautions a tribal police officer, “There are those among us who are not what they seem”, seemingly referring to the new tribal deputy (who turns out to be an FBI plant on the reservation). The lieutenant character (the always lovely Zahn McClarnon) already seems aware of this truth but hasn’t yet let on. Sometimes there are reasons for failing to acknowledge reality — for better or worse.
In the tv series Fellow Travelers, young gay men working for the US government during the McCarthy era are forced to hide their identities (in the face of insane hypocrisy – nothing new there). While the whole story is compelling, the idea of surface-level appearance remains acute. Matt Bomer’s character plays the dutiful heterosexual man, marrying and having a family, but leading a double life. Many characters did by necessity. But as time wore on, and the characters make their way into the 1970s and 80s, and a time of new openness, his friends’ lives opened as well. They stopped hiding. But it was not until his character was confronted by the death of the love of his life that he could stop living a lie. To all outward appearances, his character had seemed to have it all, but in hiding his reality, he suffered and lost an unimaginable amount.
We never know what is going on just under the surface. And even when we do, it’s often easier to let it be, not to acknowledge the truth. What someone has suffered or been damaged by, what has hurt and wounded them. Whether it’s searing loss that hasn’t been adequately dealt with, or repeated exposure to the torture of Phil Groovyesque name-that-tune sessions, nothing, and no one, is ever quite what it seems.
"You have always known he was beautiful, but it’s only now, in his stillness, in his vulnerability, that you see the miracle of his being, how so much life fits in so small a space" - José A. Alcantara
I was cautioned, "You can't live another person's life for them. You can help, but they have made their choices." I should have listened rather than getting dragged in.
"I don’t know their names, just pull with faith in the prior owner, in her fertile excess that even my blunders won’t undo." -Dan Rosenberg
"The country says Freedom, crushed under
its own dream weight. I did not make up this song." - Dawn Lundy Martin
"One way to fall asleep is paradoxical intention: trying not to fall asleep.
So the thinking goes, this reduces your performance anxiety.
The question is, who are you fooling, if you really want to fall asleep?" -Elisa Gabbert
Maybe it’s not real “niceness” if you’re “bragging” about or even mentioning doing positive things, but my point is not to draw attention to my own actions. (I feel I have to balance out my impatience and negativity somehow.)
Mostly I wanted to highlight that it costs nothing to quietly compliment people. Whether it’s the dude in the elevator with a really stunning coat, or the lady in the airport wearing a gorgeous sweater but looking dissatisfied with everything, or the guy reading a really good book… what does it cost to break the silence (as much as I hate noise) to tell them that that they look fabulous and alive in the color they happen to be wearing, that they have a superb sense of style, or have great taste in books?
Sure, the person might not respond well. Breaking the silence and distance bubble and saying something personal is not the norm (depending on where you live, of course). But usually the person lights up and smiles and seems to appreciate that someone noticed. I wish the world were more like that all the time.
Are we living in a world that is louder than ever? There are the standard sources of noise pollution, but today when searching for a quiet space I realized just how loud the world, and everyone in it, is. So much coughing (people are coughing so freely and casually now as though we didn’t just come through a pandemic), the grating sound of scraping bowls and plates, louder-than-needed phone ring tones, people talking (yelling) in public when having their mobile conversations, people watching videos and listening to music without headphones so we all have to hear. And so many other examples that hit me with such sensory overload today that it has been virtually unbearable. It doesn’t seem like people are remotely aware of the sound they make as they trundle and thunder noisily through the world around them.
It’s funny that even when the catalyst for change is a fly-by-night con man, the impetus for change and fire it lights under you is real.
It is like being shaken awake, all excuses discarded in the face of needing to be sensible, you face everything you had avoided with urgency. It is easy to wander through life, even when you are unaware of doing so.
The lack of spontaneity sometimes feels like a collection of lost opportunities. But in fact reality delivers grace and acceptance. Foolish ideas like, “Maybe it will be different this time” or “Perhaps my caution is overkill” or “Maybe I will be surprised by…”, are seductive but misplaced. And not falling prey to them, you end up the stronger.
It takes distance to feel the relief, though, of not being taken in.
“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”
I saw this sentence written somewhere. I don’t live as though I might die tomorrow (trying and failing to be more spontaneous), but I learn and experience – in a solitary way – constantly. There is no time that I am not trying to inject some kind of information.
A recent acquaintance, despite a surface-level tenor and brevity, gave me pause for in-depth self-reflection. There have been some rough things in my life that I’ve attempted to bury. The acquaintance, by launching into rapid-fire, almost interrogation-style questioning, prompted a lot of buried feelings bubble up.
He didn’t seem to really care about the answers to these questions (which also makes me realize once more the value of active listening, being heard, detail and memory – and how much I do not relate to people who don’t care about these things). But I understood suddenly that I have to start to confront and deal with more of these things.
I also came to understand more acutely than ever what a serious person I am. That is not to say I don’t have fun, laugh, joke or have a sense of humor. It’s just that I am not the kind of person who feels the need to disconnect from heavy subjects or depressing ideas or concepts to decompress. It takes all kinds, of course, but I am going to spend my spare time studying Hungarian and reading about business psychology and watching thought-provoking and often sad films in a host of other languages. I mean, I once longed to see a film about nomadic people trying to get one of their camels to accept its baby and start lactating. I whined about missing its theatrical run for months before finally getting to see it. I know this is not going to be for everyone – people are, for the most part, never going to share my unusual interests. But maybe I am finally accepting on a more finite level that they don’t have to – and I don’t have to share theirs.
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*Uses*
– Ama Asantewa Diaka
He used “I love you”
as compensation
for all the ways
he failed to love her
She used “I love you”
as an antidote
to pause the rot
"So much we coveted. So much/That would have saved us, but lived/Instead, its own quick span, returning/To uselessness with the mute acquiescence of shed skin" - poetry - Tracy K. Smith
"And something blunt in me/remembers the old charade/about putting a thing out/of its misery" - poetry - Tracy K. Smith
"To say that you love someone or something to death is to hover around the draw of irrevocability.
More faith is asked of us, a trained imagination against the ice-white" - poetry - Sandra Lim
"The sunflowers did not teach me this, but their small faces look so cheerful
bouncing in the slipstream of traffic— I will believe anything they say." - poetry - Natalie Homer
"Ocean maw and mountain blade recede. At last, at least—this. A figure gathers line and edge. She is between two roars. Who devours or drowns." - poetry - Paula Mendoza
"Work without Hope draws nectar in a sieve,
And Hope without an object cannot live." - poetry - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
"A small good miracle, were I swallowed into a black hole
I could live without shadow. I could live inside that sunless system of tunnels." - poetry - Kristene Kaye Brown
"Everybody says the stars are dead.
By the time the light reaches us blah blah blah.
As if the light itself is not enough." - poetry - Nicole Callihan
"I’m saying mercy is a big dark lake we’re all swimming in." - poetry - Chelsea DesAutels
"And if nothing will free us from death at least love will save us from life." - poetry - Javier Velaza
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*Poem That Leaves Behind the Ocean*
–Jim Moore
1
I’ve always wanted to write a poem that ends
at the ocean. How the poem gets there
doesn’t much matter, just so at last
it arrives. The manatee will be there
we saw all those years ago,
almost motionless under the water
like a pendant swaying at an invisible throat,
the one my mother used to wear
on the most special of occasions. My God
is still there, the one I prayed to as a boy:
he never answered but that didn’t keep me
from calling out to him.
2
I turn off the notification app for good,
no longer needing to know exactly how many gone.
After all, clinging to life
is what we have always done best.
We are still trying to hide
from the truth of things and who
can blame us.
Lists don’t make sense anymore,
unless toilet paper and peanut butter head them.
Last-stage patients are not being told
how crowded the ferry will be
that will take them across the river.
3
We are forbidden cafés, churches, even cemeteries.
Fishing by ourselves, however, is still permitted. As long
as we keep nothing at all. As long as we walk
back home, in darkness, empty-handed,
breathing deeply, having thrown back
what was never ours to keep.
Photo by Conor Sexton on Unsplash
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*The Spring Cricket Repudiates His Parable of Negritude*
–Rita Dove
Hell,
we just climbed. Reached the lip
and fell back, slipped
and started up again––
climbed to be climbing, sang
to be singing. It’s just what we do.
No one bothered to analyze our blues
until everybody involved
was strung out or dead; to solve
everything that was happening
while it was happening
would have taken some serious opium.
Seriously: All wisdom
is afterthought, a sort of helpless relief.
So don’t go thinking none of this grief
belongs to you: Even if
you don’t know how it
feels to fall, you can get my drift;
and I, who live it
daily, have heard
that perfect word
enough to know just when
to use it––as in:
Oh hell. Hell, no.
No ––
this is hell.
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Wilderness Years
–Amy Gerstler
Photo by Anastase Maragos on Unsplash
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The Seconds–Derek Sheffield
Last patches of snow all but gone and first wildflowers flecking the lawn, I walked out to the shed and pulled open the door with a woody squeak, and there, rising from the dirt floor, surrounded by a dusty clutter of tools, a little mountain, the kind of thing my daughters might have scooped together in the fall and left for the faeries if it weren’t a perfectly conical accretion of turds. What to make of such a thing, holding the door, and beholding it in the spill of the first light—and then I knew the droppings. Here she was, my old dog, that golden shuffle of paling wheat fields who’d retrieved and licked clean how many rocks thrown from this hand? What was left of her, here. What creature had carried each dried nub from the yard’s far corners to form this strange cairn? There, under the nail-hung weed whacker, my grease rag on the floor pressed flat: a little bed I kneeled to touch. Something had curled here in the gasolined nights all winter as snow and more snow made a world of white mounds. I walked around back, searching for a gap, and stopped mid-step— a big, squirrel-like bulk on my scrap wood, the black, unblinking shine of a left eye tilted toward mine. No glimmer of flight in that orb, no twitch of scurry, only the deepest calm as if the ages of the earth were taking my measure. I felt like a pane of glass even as I took all I could of it, its weight and whiskers and wide, rounded ears, a long bottlebrush tail stretched out over my pile of sawed lengths of lumber and plywood, and later I would look for it in a book among my stacks. That night, after I turned out the lights, and my daughters asked for another story, I told them of its midden while I sat on their floor, becoming another dark shape among the heaps of their clothes and stuffed animals; at first, “Eww!” and then only the sounds of breathing as they remembered their old dog, those restless slopes that passed through their arms, the river sounds she made licking those rocks to death. Let us not let go ever, is what I took from your cave-wall stare, wood rat, who would grab every bloody tooth my girls have tucked under their pillows, pack rat, who would make hill after hill of all the years of their homework, vestigial historian, who’d cleave to the locks of do-it-yourself haircuts and clutch every tremor of their changing voices, their first words, every shape and shade of their widening gazes, and all the hard shit, too, the nights of no sleep, the wet beds and fits and screams, slammed doors and shaken fists (how long have you been with us? how many iterations of you and them and me?), even as you turned at last toward the woods behind our house and slowly, one careful step at a time, slipped away as if you’d already snatched all the rain-colored seconds from all the clocks that ever were or will be.
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Greed
–Pamela Cochran
I would never have believed that I’d awake one day in a lonely cell, having stripped myself of everything precious that I’d always taken for granted by shaking a fist at my creator for ending the suffering of my beloved in a way other than I’d imagined while on my knees; awaiting transport to a place no one belongs, except to the state, whose main concern is the bottom line; bodies for which they receive top dollar, but never humans, never souls, never mothers whose lives have been nothing more than a series of tragic events, and are now doomed to walk this journey through the wilderness with no prophet to lead, no cloud by day or fire by night to prevent the aimless wander of the hopelessly exhausted, desperate to be anywhere but here; or destined— and placed, precisely on this map, at this point— a testament that it doesn’t have to end here, that life’s treasure chest of grace, hope, and redemption can be uncovered if we don’t stop digging.
Photo by Chris Yang on Unsplash
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Of a Vanished Kingdom–Yehuda Amichai
Put your face to the wind
For I do not know when again
We have too little time left to forget.
We cannot rely on forgetting.
The wind pasted an old newspaper to the olive tree.
Put your face.
Once we stood together
As a symbol of a vanished kingdom:
wild beasts, banners, and obsolete weapons
In one bundle, tied with a band of soothing words
In an ancient language.
A phrase from the prayerbook of history
In your voice a tune still remains
of Talmudic students.
“Do you love me?”
If we don’t remain together, we won’t remain at all.
Let alone live.
Photo by Flor Saurina on Unsplash
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Forgotten
–Jennifer DeMott
Like cream skimmed off the top— foam running down the sides and I am left, rich residue wasted at the bottom just to be wiped up later and suddenly nobody knows where I am.
Photo by Nikolai Chernichenko on Unsplash
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Of a Lack in Our Administrations–Hannah Brooks-Motl
In all this system I watched a cloud fall Carted wet down the design Need is a big pool Lo go its creaturely waves
Commerce came open and bright like a starfuck “I hear, with great shame for our century” Last zing on the stairs
“So-and-so wants company to Paris; so-and-so is looking for a servant with such-and-such qualifications”
Execution too diddled back then
“So-and-so wants a master”
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Black-Handed Curse–Wanda Coleman
May the sky widen between your eyes
and a storm twist across your thoughts.
May the false images you create devour all you
give birth to. May the false images you worship obscure love.
May you look in the mirror and see the malignancy.
May you writhe in dishonor. May you writhe hearing the voices
of those you have dishonored. May you writhe knowing the
whole of the pain you’ve caused others.
May the limitations you impose on those more gifted
than yourself steal the beats of your heart.
May you be kept out of the heaven
from which you have kept others.
May no one hear your last words.
May a small rodent eat your last words.
Photo by Giorgio Trovato on Unsplash
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Chimera–Vievee Francis
She’s not “maternal,” she’s dangerous.
—Jamaal May
I have no charms. Admittedly. No gold comb can move through This mane. My skin is not translucent. Mine is a tail to fear. I know. And though a mother may destroy, She too sees fit to create beauty That would eventually grow into forms I would swallow if I gave in To my hungers. But, up from my wounds— From this goat’s body— Up from my wood-smoke lungs, from The milk of me, comes a song, a melody To open yours, then lick them clean.
Photo by Orlando Madrigal on Unsplash
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Human Interest Story
–Sandra Lim
Snow would have been breaking the drifts that day, on a mild
mood.
My father was boarding at the home of a missionary couple in
Seoul, getting by on books and the radio and cheap noodles.
His older brother hanged himself that winter in Pusan. They
would say afterward that it was a plain death, funded by bad
numbers, some selfishness, unusual cold.
Think of a needle dropped into the sea.
He had a pleasantly objective feeling about himself that morning,
as the early sky gently ripped into red. He thought about Business
English, the truth of money.
Across town, a diary opened. And there were the white, cooling
coals in barrels.
There was a pretty young wife and one serious boy and one very
quiet girl. They awakened one day to a new planet, where the
spaces between people appeared slightly widened.
Maybe you can’t penetrate events with reportage, but facts have a
sly, unanswerable texture that appears social.
To relieve ourselves of open-ended narrative, we read into the
winter stars all evening. There are just stars and stars and stars.
We know what it’s like to fall in love and be disassembled, but we
still want to pull death right off the bodies of one another.
These were spectacular nights, said my father. They were full of
philosophy and political theory, noisy reversals, French movies.
The romantic grace we comprehend sits with ease in the real
world; it is almost nothing.
Now he is carrion, stitched forever in the cramp of a trial.
No one can evict us from books! he used to say, running through
astonishment at full speed.
Photo by Adrien Olichon on Unsplash
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‘Lost’ First Languages Leave Permanent Mark on the Brain, New Study Reveals
–Tiana Nobile
To experience the world muffled
through the wall of skin
is like wearing earmuffs
while deep sea diving.
Cacophony of whalesong
and sunken earthquakes,
tonal pitches seep in.
How do I translate
the sound of my mother’s
moaning? It’s a soft wail
I hang on the wall
of my windpipe.
They say the circulatory system
is the first to develop
in an embryo.
That the body generates cells
to divide and multiply, to form
a swelling ball.
That your blood weaved and whirled
to become my blood.
Who was the first you told?
At week eleven, fingernails begin to appear.
I bet you didn’t know that nails
are made of dead blood cells.
How something could grow inside you
that’s both alive and dead.
Once I learned how to talk, I did not
stop. I drew blood and licked my teeth
with language, English spilling down my chin.
Later, I learned how words can wound
without touching, and I tucked myself
in a bed of silence.
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