Amore

Time is not a liar. The motion’s forward. Period. Capitalized letter. Hello. Goodbye. See you soon, when the sky changes color and familiar shadows sashay onto the face of the moon. Aloha. Didn’t you feel my body assuming that sacred space. Me, empty, Namaste. Time is not a liar. The dignified and exiled stare inside mystified. The galaxy, flag fabric. Lick wind. Ciao. Time is not a liar. Period. Capitalized letter. Blades of grass against your palm. Cool wind, closed eyelids. Amore.

Irish Code of Silence

Of course the bottle is empty

And the job is steady

You never break promises

Because

You never make promises

It feels like violence, this silence

Comparing Cities in ‘Let the Great World Spin’ and ‘A Man of the People’

Civilizations exist, but they are difficult to build and maintain. Two books demonstrating this statement are ‘A Man of the People,’ by Chinua Achebe, and ‘Let the Great World Spin’ by Colum McCann. The fictionalized city traversed by our main character, Diligent, in the former book, is a tenuous seed capable of growing. Through the narrative, Achebe describes the impossibility of such advancement due to both government failures and citizen indifference:

Max began by accusing the outgoing Government of all kinds of swindling and corruption… many in the audience laughed… the laughter of resignation to misfortune. The ex-policeman put it very well. “We know they are eating,” he said, “but we are eating too.” (Achebe, pp. 125)

The setting of the former book is a reversal from ‘A Man of the People.’ McCann delves into multiple characters inhabiting New York City during 1974. Philippe Peitt’s daredevil tightrope stroll between the twin towers serves as a loose framing device. The alternating reactions of the ensemble cast to this event serves as an exploration of their faith. The Catholic Monk believes it to be sign from God, while the experienced Judge is amused. The performance of Petit is a living representation of Manhattan’s magical undercurrent, the mysterious energy pulsing beneath the architectural achievement and ceaseless commerce. Why are freaks drawn here, to create beauty? And does a small spark of that beauty settle inside the people walking the streets, no matter where they came from?

New York City, as an idea, is the completed crown jewel of western civilization, the answer to a mathematical equation adding together wealth, location, freedom, endless death and constant birth. But the free market’s child had been abandoned during the era in which ‘Let the Great World Spin’ unwinds. Citywide debt and rising crime engendered a sense of helplessness among citizens, the hopelessness unique to this specific moment, when both the national and local government seemed unable to implement solutions. The character of Solomon Soderberg, the father of a son killed in Viet Nam, and a weathered judge in the New York judicial system, finds himself taking an existential viewpoint, identifying the city as an entity unable to pause:

New York had a way of doing that… It assailed you with an image, or a day, or a crime, or a terror, or a beauty so difficult to wrap your mind around that you had to shake your head in disbelief… it happened, and it re-happened, because it was a city uninterested in history. Strange things occurred because there was no necessary regard for the past… no, the city couldn’t care less where it stood. New York kept going forward because it didn’t give a good goddamn about what it left behind. It was like a city that Lot left, and it would dissolve if it ever began looking backward over its own shoulder. (McCann, pp. 247)

Even the bloody late eighties saw embattled Mayor David Dinkins enacting new tactics for the police force, aiding a decline in crime during his final months in office, and providing Rudolph Giuliani with enough momentum to corporatize Times Square. The continuing collapse of the murder rate, along with the nineties’ boom economy, allowed Giuliani to preside over the city’s renewal:

“Dinkins faced a very sharp economic downturn, and he was in the very difficult position of coming in with high expectations from many constituencies,” said John H. Mollenkopf, a political science professor at the City University Graduate Center. “Yet he expanded the police force and rebuilt neighborhoods; he deserves more credit than he gets for managing that time…” Mr. Dinkins’s most lasting achievement might have been in the very area where he now fares worst in popular memory. He obtained the State Legislature’s permission to dedicate a tax to hire thousands of police officers, and he fought to preserve a portion of that anticrime money to keep schools open into the evening, an award-winning initiative that kept tens of thousands of teenagers off the street. (Powell, Michael. Another Look at the Dinkins Administration, and not by Giuliani. New York Times. 25 October 2009. Online)

‘Let the Great World Spin’ takes place in the New York City of 1974, where the horizon held few such glimmers of hope. Considering the blackout riot in ’77, and the tumultuous eighties, one could argue the worst only got worse. An understandable desire to escape strengthened the developing suburbs, and also rustic upstate. The great fleeing is excellently represented in the book’s narrative through Blaine and his wife Lara, two burnt Greenwich Village veterans of the late night shadow show, who seek refuge in a cabin:

In 1973 Blaine and I had swapped our lives in the Village for another life altogether, and we went to live in a cabin in upstate New York. We had been almost a year off the drugs, even a few months off the booze, until the night before the accident… we were returning to the old grandma notion of sitting on the porch swing and watching the poison disappear from our bodies… Had lived without electricity, read books from another era, finished our paintings in the style of the time, hid ourselves away, saw ourselves as reclusive, cutting edge, academic. (McCann pp. 118, 120)

Lara ultimately finds happiness by delving deeper into the troubled city she has abandoned, unable to wash her hands of a crime committed by Blaine. Her conscious decision to get involved with the life of a stranger, Carian, the brother of a man accidentally killed by her husband in a car accident – is made more poignant by the signification that she is no longer denying her place in time. McCann delivers this message clearly by invoking time during the conversation where Lara and Blaine fallout over the accident:

-What happens if we make a series of paintings and leave them out in the weather? We allow the present to work on the past. We could do something radical here. Do the formal paintings in the style of the past and have the present destroy them….

-The girl died, Blaine. (McCann, pp. 134)

The novel’s structure, which extended from the seventies into the contemporary time period, displayed the unpredictable effects of complicated decisions, rippling through decades. Cities change, and at the same time, they do not change, and the same could be true for people. Instead of searching the surface for altered behaviors that could be traced to the past, ‘Let the Great World Spin’ seems to argue for a better gauge, reflected through relationships. How did one person touch the life of another? And where does it lead? The dream of civilization is an imperfect monster, crushing thousands incidentally, helping a few intentionally, and housing all the others like science experiment creatures, witnessing their world through the eyes they own.

Diligent, real name Odili, belongs to the first generation of post-colonial Africa. Colonialism was not only terrible for human rights abuses, but also from a practical, state building standpoint. The tyrannical interference set the entire region backward. Just as a single human being would be developmentally blocked by a controlling, outside influence, so too was an entire country:

Just the assumption that the previous patterns of political development would continue is sufficient to argue that these countries would be more developed today. Colonialism not only blocked further political development, but indirect rule made local elites less accountable to their citizens. After independence, even if these states had a coherence others lacked, they had far more predatory rulers. These polities also suffered from the uniform colonial legacies of racism, stereotypes and misconceptions that Africans may not have had and which have since caused immense problems, most notably in Burundi and Rwanda. (Heldring, Lester. Robinson, James, A. Colonialism and Development in Africa. VOX. 10 January 2013. Online)

Of course, the complicated question emerging from freedom: who deserves to create the new world? The militaristic rule emerging from colonialism forced citizens to accept a compromised, and ultimately ineffective governance:

The history of police and military formations in several parts of the world can be traced to the need to protect citizens and ensure territorial integrity. Conversely, in the case of Africa, the police and military were established primarily to crush civilian opposition to colonial rule. Police engagement with the populace was founded on the need to enforce hateful and debilitating colonial laws, including forced taxation, segregation, and quelling of anti-colonial uprisings. At the end of colonialism, the newly independent African government inherited institutions that had internalized a culture of citizen oppression and extortion. The immediate post-colonial police and military were designed to inflict terror on innocent citizens, and citizens had internalized the art of buying their way off unwarranted harassment. (Origin of Corrupton in Africa and the Way Forward. Anonymous. ChikaforAfrica.com. 21 August 2012)

Odili intellectually understands the corruption of the new government, but initially has the discipline not to be swayed emotionally. The novel portrays him as a reasonable person, seemingly only enflamed by the politics of women, a trait that both serves the narrative and makes him an empathetic figure for males attracted to girls. Diligent’s quick witted, humorous, and generally clarion disposition in the opening pages are quite effective at distancing the western reader from the potentially dangerous setting. One comes to understand the setting is less dangerous for people behaving like Diligent. His early behavioral stability is not only a likable character trait, but a self-protection mechanism, too. Diligent begins as an entrenched teacher more concerned with the obnoxious flattery of his superior, the school principal and proprietor Mr. Nwege, attempting to impress the visiting local minister Chief Nanga, than any political ideals. He’d been involved with a student’s branch of a reformist minded political organization while attending college, but became discouraged by both corruption and the people’s inability to discern the truth about their constantly lying leaders:

Chief Nanga was a born politician: he could get away with almost anything he said or did. And as long as men are swayed by their hearts and stomachs and not their heads the Chief Nangas of this world will continue to get away with anything… he had that rare gift of making people feel – even when he was saying harsh things to them – that there was not a drop of ill will in his entire frame. (Achebe, pp. 66)

Unstable societies such as the one described in ‘A Man of the People’ will challenge their citizens in a different way than New York City. The phrase that serves as the title for Achebe’s book could apply to politicians across all regions. Americans running for political office will wear masks carefully pieced together by public relations firms, designed to connect with voters on surface levels. However, the brilliance in Achebe’s exploration of this phrase, within the context of a post-colonial Africa, could be found in the immediate pages of the novel. The reader observes Odili while he observes Chief Nanga, his former teacher treated like a returning king. Achebe does not break into a long explanation that summarizes why the two will eventually be personal and political rivals. The reader is only made to understand that a fragile system creates turbulent social, political, and personal identities. Nanga has gone from being a teacher to wielding power. The equivalent of Odili, in a place like America, most likely would not rationally see himself assuming the power of Nanga, without a fortuitous break or the decision to pursue politics as a career. But in post-colonial Africa, the lines are thinner. Herein resides the realistic and literary value of the Nanga character being a former teacher, the current job for Odili. The phrase ‘the student becomes the teacher,’ is universally understandable, and effectively conveys, even to western readers without any knowledge of the region, the close proximity between Diligent and his old teacher, despite them leading incredibly different lives.

Life shows that the actions of people are often driven by both their perceived opportunities and boundaries. In ‘Let the Great World Spin,’ all the major players have either been molded by the city, or are being changed, the permanence of both processes beyond their conception. Despite all the dysfunction, the city remains a container, not a blank space. Corrigan, arguably the most important character in the novel, his daily presence in the Bronx influencing events far past his death, came to New York from Ireland on a priestly mission. The city is somewhere to go, a complicated, sometimes dangerous, sometimes beautiful, sometimes unbearable reality, but a reality above anything. When a city and state can barely function on a daily basis, controlled by soldiers disconnected from the citizens they are supposed to serve, without any semblance of a local economy beyond dependence on foreign product, while also lacking the infrastructure to support such dependence, this setting could be labeled as more of an existential problem than a real place. Human beings delineate the real and unreal through the methods that constitute routine. When the roads aren’t being built, when the schools aren’t being funded, when the generals sleep in mansions and feel poisoned after drinking a different brand of coffee, certain dissidents will step forward and want to change the situation. In this respect, for all the flaws of New York City, the character of Judge Soderberg, in ‘Let the Great World Spin,’ seems to demonstrate the human ability to move forward within the chaotic system. He is a Judge, and in a certain sense, he is everyday in New York City. He is the exhausted force continually pushing back against chaos, the shaky hand flipping the calendar. But what would a man like Solomon Soderberg do, if he were in Diligent’s situation? A man like Soderberg would attempt to create a place over which he could preside. Diligent eventually believes he must oppose Chief Nanga. Similar to Lara, he realizes that different surroundings (in his case, Nanga’s mansion, where he is an invited guest) have caused him to deny the reality of his setting (the unnamed state). And also similar to Lara, his awakening occurs due to a personal incident. Chief Nanga seduces his girlfriend, Elsie. At last, Odili registers what has been stirring within him throughout the entire novel, to that point. Chief Nanga, and his brethren, cannot build the new world. He must. In life and fiction, setting is often destiny, and different people can be surmised to come from different places.

To Aurora, from the Protector

Let me protect you from the bastards

I think I’m serious

I’m never shy about disgracing myself

Someone has to vomit on the hip messiah

While mumbling Aurora

Then the lines

Aurora’s a half awaken angel

Drunk on the salty dust of the morning

Those lines, again and again

From my masterpiece unwritten

Because I get distracted by the emanation

Arising from the antiseptic disinfectant towelettes

My more patient, graceful custodial self

Utilized to sparkle the floors

Of my aggressive monkey mind

After the vomit

Burst from my lips

Like erupting lava

…………….

So don’t waste your time in these bars

That the bored liberals romanticize

Because the neighborhood’s not gentrified

And they can annihilate their inhibition

In the bathroom stall

Then inform some unwashed Internet contemporary

That Time is the new God

And love died inside their broken

Dreams of Christmas

…………………..

Bar, bars

The barriers trapping the prisoner

A word

An object preventing freedom

Also the place where we’re supposed to be drunk

Happy believers in the flag

That the stone statue died for

That you should want to fuck on

Because we’re the best dressed meat

Bobbing our heads to the bass line

No, damn it no

Don’t think there’s uniqueness

Some old time touch and feel experience

Tongues of deliverance

I’m just sitting in the bar waiting to protect someone

In the bar, behind our bars

Native Celebration

(previously ‘This Way’)

………………………………

I feared a revolution

For I knew I would be a commander

Intuitively understood I would lead

A legion boot deep in blood

Down a hollowed street

The eateries turned holes

In the walls of a world that

Used to be

…………………………..

It started when they broke the lock

Invaded my bed kicked me in the head

Loaned me a chain then said

Your game, your time

Stand in line

…………………………..

Life was different but the seconds progressed

Into the present circumstance

My mustache gray

My holsters brown

My solutions black

Mastered with experience

………………………

Memories, though

Walking my dog

Down

A hill and feeling

Sin dry

Through the God in her eyes

And the setting sun above the tree line

And the paradise on city property

And the blue blanket of empty

Safety’s the highest priority

A God that gives permission

Was the God I believed in

………………………..

I feared it was always going to be this way

I had to stand above you

And choke the life out of you

To save a bullet

Your skin was forgiving

………………………

Later in the evening

During the Native celebration

That old song’s playing

And I can taste the vodka on my tongue

A tongue never forgets

A tongue never lies

I used my tongue

To commune with you

All those nights

Then, when

It was an explosion of light and noise

It was a fear of women

It was the dance-floor in Miami

Where I forgot my name

It was the promised change

It was peace at the apex

Of a swinging pendulum

Waving hello, goodbye

Hello, goodbye

………………………..

It was always going to be this way

……………………….

So tell me the dark matter

Holding the universe together

Can take a joke

Because I feared

A revolution

Coming to know

The self

A New Truth

(previously Melanie)

Midnight was written

Across the orange street

Under the paper moon

And the white screen

Owned your eyes

The screen was all

A spiral we demand

Because we get what we want

And you want the news about you

It says you need to hate me now

And don’t you?

But hey, I’m standing here with my

Mouth in my hand and I’m reaching

Reaching for you

The one with them

But I’m the one aware

They only see a shard of you

A convincing image

Like

That shattered champagne glass

On the cement

I really liked you, Melanie

And sometimes I hate me

Like you hate you

We’re trapped in the truth

Me, you

Caught in the light-tower together

You pull on my waist

While I guide my beam

Over the black waves

Searching for that second shipwreck

That the insurance man prophesized

Fact was the name of the first ship

Fact, with sea spiders crawling

Over her cutlery

In the dining room

A million leagues deep

Found and disavowed

So, there goes my light

Cast onto the ocean of indifference

In the name of a new truth

But that’s the lighthouse

And this is the street

Where I finally speak

To say your condescension

Is like condensation

Naturally occurring

Coming and fading

Water between the webs of my fingers

Then steam filtering through that bullshit bar

A cute magic trick

Performed to elicit my embarrassment

And accumulate their merit

They like it when city kids

Whore themselves before the neon altar

And confirm their suspicion

So they feel free

To educate me about my identity

Yet you’re above it, Melanie

Above every irony

Above every novelty

You are inconvenient

Like this conversation

Under the paper moon

On the orange street

Outside the bullshit bar

Look away, will you?

My love look away from that screen

Melanie

Midnight

On the orange street

Under the paper moon

The white screen

Owned your eyes

They told you the news

The news about you

Now you have to hate me

Don’t you?

But allow me a few lines

_Listen_

All you do is try to impress them

But it’s just a shard of you

A convincing image

Like

That shattered champagne glass

On the cement

I really liked you, Melanie

But until now

I never had the words to tell you

Time and only time

Reveals every lie

And your condescension

Is like condensation

Naturally occurring

Coming and fading

Water between the webs of my fingers

Then steam filtering through this bullshit bar

A cute magic trick

Performed to elicit my embarrassment

And accumulate their merit

They like it when city kids

Whore themselves before the neon altar

And confirm their suspicion

So they feel free

To educate me about my identity

Yet you’re above it, Melanie

Above the cardboard sunglasses

And clothes with commands

But when I play ignorant

You encourage me with promises

Then grind your teeth when I have an opinion

It’s all so fucking inconvenient

Like this conversation

Under the paper moon

On the orange street

Outside the bullshit bar

Look away, will you?

My love look away from that screen

Dirty Love by Andre Dubus III

After reading ‘Dirty Love,’ I’d have to say Andre Dubus III is a master of immediacy. But he’s also unique in making memory immediate, too. Usually in prose, even in great works, there’s a noticeable sag while describing the past, as if the moment had affected the character but had also become inflexible, a fixed proposition. Because Dubus maintains the intensity of his sensory descriptions while describing the past, we are treated to a double awareness of a character’s circumstances that does not quarantine memory. I realize after reading ‘Dirty Love’ that I have probably written scenes that treated memory like a trial exhibit instead of something alive. It’s not so much what a character can say after describing a memory, but how they can behave! To let the reader know they are attempting to break a mold the past had cast. Or that they have succumbed to the allure of external perception masquerading as identity. Especially in the last novella, we see characters communicating with their past through a behavior in the present. I guess we could do this automatically from a basic storytelling standpoint, (I think writing detailed scenes and getting to know your characters will bring up this depth naturally, even if there’s no specific intention other than putting forward an honest effort) but the simmering and subsequent explosion of memory, identity, decisions and consequences for characters in this book was remarkable to me.

oh, football

A historian in 2087
Assessing our history symmetrically
Noticing a certain psychological similarity
Between the murder of nature
And the worship of old rules
To a violent game
Played on Sunday
An archive!
A flash drive!
Footage!
It’s a politician on a podium saying
The who cares approach has been proven empirically
For centuries
And who cares if it works
Who cares, who cares?
It’s empirically proven to have worked for centuries
This is who we are
And if you see my face
Through this screen
You are with me
A historian in 2087
Needed a little whiskey to finish
This latest chapter drawing parallels ‘tween
This and that century
He works late
He works hard
Only the fast food place is open

Marsh-Mellows

The Ultimate
I win
You lose
And I watch you fail from afar
While toasting marshmellows
Picking that charred goo
Between my teeth
With your personalized toothpick
The fire’s enough for two
But I’m alone and content
Your voice dances on the breeze
Like Adagio for strings