A Handful of Poems

~ joshkeidan

I haven’t posted in a while, but here are a handful of poems I have written:

1.
50 minutes. the not-quite-full-moon teasing the sky. an oreo’s faultlined, crumbling coast. the way you wake in the night sweaty, sit up and lose the oily tail of a dream, sheets of rain thrown in handfuls on the roof outside your window, the sky a sickly grey orange. if you could only hold it, if the hour hadn’t already chosen sides, partial, hadn’t made its move away, again and again away. tomorrow another lick of the sucker, another partially wrapped sweet, another tooth throbbing with love for all that would destroy it. just past the hour.

2.

[a “radically edited” poem in the style of Annie Dillard’s Mornings Like This. All lines have been culled from the book Diana Wynne Jones: Children’s Literature and the Fantastic Tradition, by Farah Mendelsohn]

The playground
Begin with a simple arrangement of notes:
a small band of previously neat children.
Expand to produce apparently endless variations.
Think this through. You want to get from A to B —
that kills it dead. Survey conditions in the real world,
hints and clues — they will not follow the rules.
Adults are very rarely directly cruel.
Thinking and rethinking, we give ourselves
unnecessary problems. Local changes of season
are cosmic in origin; naked and covered in mud,
we ride invisible seismic quivers.

3.
October. Ceaseless rain. Roads impassible, low-lying
homes underwater. Drizzly morning paddling round the village
in a soft-wood dugout. Bags of snacks float by, bloated
carcass of a drowned cow. The corner store — lower floor
of a house — is shoulder deep, shelving fallen. Wicker baskets
and plastic toys hang in clumps from the ceiling.
Days are grey, diffuse, light evenly spread.
Nights cluster around thin paraffin tapers. Sans electricity,
upstairs mattress too hot for comfort; downstairs hammock
less clammy, more fetal. I curl and sweat, read against
the shadows on the wall. Steady drum of rain on roof.
In the night, respite.
Doze disturbed when the pounding water stops. The conductor’s
baton waves: Rain down, frogs up. Shrill cries and raspy bass croak
pass through concrete walls like rice paper. So loud the sound
seems to have no outward source, to be a product of brain and
skull and timpani. I am the frog, the croak, the high-
pitched trill. One voice among many, I cry for love, despite the heron’s
hunger. Now I am all longing, all rasp. When the rain begins again
I will quiet, rest. Write letters, swathed in netting. My tongue darts
forth silently as the mosquitos gather.

4. Sestina

We had hoped that once we arrived there
everything would be bright, the windows open,
People in the streets would greet us, as is,
accept me for myself, you for your
grace, would ignore our flaws, let nothing
bother them. We’d have it all in hand.

And then we were there, and every hand
was closed to us; no one there
wished us well, they gave us nothing
we had not brought ourselves. “Open
Sesame!” we exclaimed. You turned your
key in the lock. It jammed. It is

frustrating, this. Being what it is.
The light hairs stand out on the back of your hand;
your friends aren’t answering their phones. 
We thought of home. Why did we leave there?
Had you left the kitchen window open?
Had I forgotten to turn off the lights? Nothing

in memory seemed stable; nothing
in the present could be counted on to be what it is.
At your 10th birthday party you tore open
your gift, razor-thin paper cut your hand.
You froze with pain, a line of blood rose there
and then your mother came with a towel, your

father with a bandage. What was your
gift? Forgotten now. Nothing
stable in your memory. Nothing adheres, here or there,
it all works loose, an old bandaid is
sticking to itself, flopping off your hand,
and you think, it’s ok, you open

the sticky sides; the cut re-opens.
bleeds down your
hand: 
you feel nothing 
but relief. The angry red is  
still there.

The sign says open; you pull but there
is no give to the door. Your arm is
tired, your hand sore. Inside the store? Nothing.

5. evenings when the enemy sun had dropped
into the mountains’ corner pocket he’d walk
the roads that shimmered angry pale red
during the day, raised wounds against the neon
>of the paddies, now bruised maroon shadows.
The monkeys on the jungled hill
beside the school lapsed into silence.
a motorcycle’s lone headlight in the distance.
He’d leave behind the ugly electric glow
of the school, each pole its own insectile
snowstorm, let his eyes adjust. the cows heading
home from pasture negatives against the night,
blackness against the lower dark, shading
through the spectrum of blues into the sky
where Venus glinted. He’d circle the hill,
stand on the road just in range of the caves’
ammonia stink. Hold out his arms and wait.
The first few bats would zoom past, then the flood —
a horizontal rainstorm, waterfall, small hot
hands of darkness pouring from the cave.
Freed into the night, they’d bob and dance.
He imagined himself the nucleus of some
unknown element, these barely seen, hardly-
felt beings a cloud of electrons. The image
was apt but false, he knew; what drew him there
sheer indifference in flight. When the cloud
dispersed he’d return home. Shut himself
inside its concrete walls, circle his bed with
a line of “Miracle Insecticide Chalk,” and
hope that nature’s indifference would hold
til morning.

6.

They’re all beautiful, the animals. The sleek brindled flank
of the mutt, the geometric browns and blue flash
of the female mallard. The mud-legged sheep lowing<
in the field. Why, then, do we find ourselves so ugly?
Does the mere fact of belonging, existence inside the sausage
factory of humanity, mean that we can’t help but see
ourselves, each other, as broken, faded, ravaged
by time? Do the cats and dogs with whom we accessorize
our lives see each of us as beautiful, as a lovely
new pet deserving coddling, treats, the finest tail swipes
and licks they can provide? Or perhaps we are more like
maltreated monkeys in the great laboratory of culture,
mangy, starved or fattened, sallowed by nicotine or reddened
by alcohol, oversunned, underexercised, or surgeried
and injected to maintain a youthful gloss. What oversight
board would approve this experiment? Outside our cages,
the orange-chested robins chutter and the jays cry out.
The squirrels groom their catkin tails. It’s spring, and down
the road they have opened the barn door. It will take
the cows a while to realize they can wander out
time they like.

7. The book I’ll never write

is packed full of love action drama
and pain, gothic ruins. In it the past
is never just the past, the way in every
mystery novel the kernel of the story
is never the current crime, always a different
one hiding beneath it in the past, the
story of the book is the story of
the past growing inside the present like
a cyst inside a tooth, the spot of red
on the surface just a teasing hint of
the rot beneath, or not rot exactly
but the growth of tissue inside
the seemingly implacable surface.
The tooth destroys itself.
They pull it out and dig out the root,
screw in an anchor and glue
a veneer in place, the detective
solves the mystery, the crimes of the
past uprooted and sealed over
in the moment of the story.
The book I’ll never write resolves
things nicely, ties up all the loose
ends and lets the past remain the
past, settles the ghosts, the ruins
collapse and the young couple
walk away, restored, into the sunlight,
the villains punished. The history
of the mouth effaced, surfacing
only in the x-rays the surgeons use
before they dig again.

Continuing with the wreck…

~ joshkeidan

Day 3 of my Oulipo experiment. The vowels are the hardest, of course, but with “a” and “e” out of the way, and “i” today, the road may get easier (although of course consonants like “s” and “t” also present their own challenges. Here are pieces missing “g,” “h,” and “i,” all continuing the story of this shipwrecked person….

No G.

Have to not worry about the continuance of any action, have to remain firmly in the present. To visit the past would also be a mistake, he realized — too easy to slip into the warm embrace of memory, to try and live in a time before the shipwreck — a perilous temptation. So here he was, by the water. Days had passed. He had eaten a bit, more of the fruit that had stayed down, seemed not to require either an immediate return (on investment?) or to be forcibly ejected in the opposite direction. He could walk more easily, and while too much time in his head wasn’t a useful idea, he had formulated a partial idea — perhaps some flotsam from the wreck might have washed ashore? What had become of the ship itself, part of him wondered, had it sunk? Was that a possibility for a sunken ships in this day and time, or did their wrecks float on eternally, until they came ashore somewhere? 

A hazy plan formulated; back to the shore, then back to water, dependent on what he had or hadn’t found. A broader plan could involve attempting to circle the island, yet even as he formulated it he realized he was terrified to leave the steam that had sustained his life behind — to make his way around the island only to die of dehydration seemed a stupid and avoidable fate.

No H.

And so back to the sand, to a tiny edge of ocean. Even as it appeared in imagination it grew larger and larger, island smaller and smaller, as if inside a camera’s iris, a lens drawing rapidly away from the planet, a sense of smallness burgeoning inside all Jim, all pained meat of being. Pulled up to feet, walking stick in grasp, faltering steps toward sunlight, toward sand, toward small imagining of rescue, salvation, another survivor, some assistance of some kind. Mental fingers crossed, mental energy directed toward only a solitary next step, a grasping forward of stick and legs. Almost like walking meditation, Jim reflected, almost like Ajahn Vim instructed back on deck, on cool mornings offering leisure time to passengers and travelers making for futures unseen.

No I

He had a hard go, a challenge of a slog. To traverse the whole shore, he thought, would be more than he was capable of — seven steps along the way and he shook, the effort brought sweat all over the body, from scalp to calves, and when he paused to breathe small no-see-ums from the sandy ground would cloud around sweaty ankles and feast. They were more an annoyance than a real threat, but he hated them, rage red and throbbing, and had been able to bend and scratch, slap, push them away, bat them out of the wet atmosphere and back under the turf he would have do so, repeatedly. Trudged onward. Fought heavy damp, fought sun’s beat, fought roots that attempted to catch legs, swampy roots that dangled from banyans and clogged and cluttered the route.

The journey continues

~ joshkeidan

Last post I began putting up some of my recent Oulipo experiment with a linguistic challenge — in each paragraph I have availed myself of the entire alphabet except for the letter mentioned. For me it allowed me to test out the boundaries of each letter, and what avoiding that one (of 26) did or didn’t allow for. So the paragraphs contain both story and a bit of reflection on what particular letters seem to demarcate — for example, without “e,” there can’t really be any gendering — no “he” or “she,” no “male” or “female” — as my entry below explores, without using that letter. (For letters A-C see my previous post, where the story that continues here began…)

No D

He closes his eyes again, tries to sleep. Every noise startles him, his imagination can’t stop populating the blackness that fills the space with every kind of creature, real or imaginary, can’t stop imagining a hostile universe (even if it is a pocket universe, small, precisely the size of the little piece of rock and plants on which he now lives) more than eager to enact violence upon him and his barely alive shell. 

Still, he strung together a bit of sleep through the night, or at least some shut-eye (he wasn’t sure which), and when he opened his eyes next it was morning, the jungle before him all green, a-speckle with sunlight where it was able to make its way through the leaves and branches to the floor. He was on the verge of where the beach met the jungle, where the beach, from solid yellow near the water, here gave way to palm trees with clusters of coconuts high in their branches; where the trees grew closer together the beach began to give way to jungle, other plants using the break from the monotonous sunlight which was given to them by the palms like a sort of magnanimous boon, so they were able to grow without the full force of the solar energy beating and burning them. And so beach gave way to palms gave way to jungle. Scooting on his butt he approaches the stream again, gulps heavily, so much so that he retches for a bit, strings of saliva seeming to tie his mouth to the mossy ground, stomach empty but still heaving.

No E

A lack: a way to distinguish: child or adult? Girl or boy? Man or woman? No thought of which an individual would find capability to signify. I only know that I am trying, doing my utmost, and if you can do a significantly more apt job of it, you should run with it, I don’t doubt that at all. Look how much work all akin sounds must do now, to pick up slack from gaps I can hardly avoid driving through, as if ruining a car’s supporting parts. Sand: hot. Palms: shady. Bay: calm. Lianas dropping downward, plants thick. Air thick, living things sounding and calling, hooting and crying out. Mid-day: drowsy, thirsty, hungry, in pain, back aching, burns aching, dappling skin with lashing flush, burning blush (burning bush? Laughing at stupid puns). Dark: cooling wind off water, salty air, hoots and crying.

No F

When he next awoke, he seemed slightly better, his head ok, his eyes ok — though it was early still, the dawn just breaking, as evinced by a lightening in the air around him, particularly out at sea, where he could see a mass of clouds gathering, one which seemed likely to offer rain later. He couldn’t worry about shelter at the moment, a little rain — or even a lot — was nothing he couldn’t handle. He needed to see about tracking down something to eat, some berries or something like that. He looked up at the coconuts high in the trees above him, clustered below the leaves were growing, but that seemed too challenging a task to take on at present. He drank some water, lay on the moss near the stream, then when he almost thought he was up to the task he hoisted his body to a standing position (using a tree to help with this). He leaned heavily against the tree, then with some work bent down and picked up a stick that looked like it might serve well to support him as he tried to walk. He put as much weight as he could on the stick — his right side wasn’t as strong as it should be, there was a kind of pulling that he didn’t like in his ribcage when he tried to stand up all the way and to take a deep breath; he hoped this was just a pulled muscle or a cracked rib, but whatever it was there wasn’t much he could do about it at this point. He hobbled along the margin of the jungle, scanning as he went, until he stumbled upon what seemed to be something edible, clusters of grape-like berries with a thick skin; with a little trial and error he was able to determine an easy way to remove the skin, digging a nail in at one of the ends and letting it kind of pop the edge of the skin, which helped the rest of it then peel away easily. He tried not to gorge himself despite how incredibly hungry he was, but knew that eating too much would probably make him sick.

The start of an experiment

~ joshkeidan

(Because sometimes we are better at starting than finishing?)

The writers in the OuLiPo group (it’s a French acronym, roughly meaning “workshop of potential literature”) believed in taking on a range of challenges in their writing to spur their creativity, and to push their production beyond the bounds of what they might normally be capable.

Perhaps the most notable work produced by any of these writers was Georges Perec’s novel “A Void,” a full-length novel that does not contain the letter “e” — the most common letter in both English and French writing! (Ironically, the plot revolves in part around the vague sense that something is missing, though no one can figure out what…).

A Void - Wikipedia
The cover of Perec’s book. Image credit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Void

Inspired by Perec’s experiment, as part of my daily writing I thought I’d spend some time trying out paragraphs in this style, each omitting a different letter of the alphabet. Here is my beginning. (If you bear with me a few letters, you’ll see a story beginning to emerge, one which will continue on future days…)

No A: Tricky, this one. Common yet sometimes hidden, frequent yet it might turn out to be the truth that its commonness is less so if we just try, judiciously. I’d been down, been blue, been thinking nightly, been drinking frequently. I don’t possess the druthers to effectively tell you, this is like the other thing, this is more, this is less, there’s just too much missing, too much empty inside my mind, my body, even my muscles. I’m depressed, it’s true, keep hoping to rhyme, not quite on purpose, but not quite not on purpose either. The end of December is close by, lingering on the doorstep, loitering just beyond where my senses might detect it, even my Spidey sense, which is not so strong, since being bitten by spiders is something I try to keep from occurring. Let’s be honest, some tenses find themselves off limits now, like the end of the month they linger just beyond the threshold, it is difficult for me to begin doing something that I wish to continue, to hold something tightly in my fingers, like droplets of rain it simply slides out between the flesh, the fingertips try but in the end, they hold onto nothing. On Mergot Shore I don’t find connecting nothing to nothing possible, or it might turn out in the end that connecting nothing to nothing is the only thing we possess the strength to do, to misquote Eliot terribly. Connecting nothing to nothing, like spiders hurling lines into the void, noiseless spiders seeking to tie the emptiness together. 

No B: Simpler, an easier task, clearly, though it foxes some of our range of action, our range of prepositions, things can take place with or against or happen for or through. Some of our objections are cut off as well, and one (minor?) tense, as well as the world of the infinite — or at least the world of the infinitive. Yet I don’t feel so alone anymore, don’t feel as incapacitated, or as challenged by my lack of range of motion. Perhaps (sigh with relief when uttering that ever so useful word!) it is like having one’s range of motion restored after an accident, having one’s speech or leg musculature now again freely open to oneself (so formal, all these “ones” and “oneselves,” just the way the cookie crumbles, I suppose). Walking is certainly an improvement over having found oneself confined to a chair, stationary, stuck in one place, although equally certainly there are plenty of folks who have found ways to make themselves free, having ended up confined to a chair, a seat, a place from where there was no standing or rising — freedom is always freedom within a range; as I used to say to my students when teaching English, the possible interpretations of a work of literature is indeed infinite, yet at the same time it has endpoints, in the same way that there are an infinite number of points sandwiched amidst zero and one on a line of integers, yet that range is confined within those endpoints. So too the possible interpretations of a work of literature finds itself within the range that the text allows: if you cannot find textual support for an interpretation, that interpretation cannot stand. If you can find textual support, even if it is partial or meagre, then that interpretation at least can claim that it is worthy of consideration, even if ultimately we dismiss it as lacking the proper support to find itself upheld.

No C: Lost at sea, ship tossed upon the waves, brought down by the hammer fist of a white-tipped indifferent hand of water, smashed to bits, floating upon bits and shards, flotsam and jetsam. He wakes to find himself rimed with salt, dried out and feeling like half a man and half a kind of squid jerky, not unlike that sold down at the piers by young boys bearing sticks of white-yellow  formerly live, lively and brightly darting sea beings. It seems funny, in a way, that the sea is our setting here, perhaps (though I admit I’m not sure about this) one of the more difficult ones for this task, seemingly abundant with “sea” life. He drifts amidst the junk, sometimes rising high atop swells that lift and fall, sometimes settling into a gentle sleep when the water is almost tender in the way that it bears him, swings him like an infant borne along on its mother’s breast, bound there by swaddling. Finally, he is borne into a bay, settles upon the shore of an island, pulls himself with difficulty up the hot, heavy sand, and awakens next with his head set down upon moss beside a small brook that empties into the sea. He must have drunk, he must have sought shade, for he is burnt and dried out, he gulps water vigorously, at first using his hands to bring it to his lips, slurping it from them, and then when he feels able sliding his head nearer to the water and drinking directly from the stream.

When he wakes the next time his body is throbbing with burn, but his head isn’t hurting the way it was, and his eyes feel less dried out, more able to look around and see. He pulls himself to a sitting position and eases his tender spine, and the flesh around it, whose redness he hasn’t seen but is easily able to imagine, against the rough trunk of a nearby palm tree, supporting his weight. He shuts his eyes again. When he opens them it is later, nearly dark, at ground level everything is a hazy patina of shadows against shadows, ebon on ebon, though when he lifts his eyes to the sky he sees a deep blue, the first stars or planets just winking into visibility.

Next post — Oulipo continued!

Dead branches of the past

~ joshkeidan

The interlude that begins section 2 of Invisible Cities places Marco Polo and Kublai Khan in silent conversation, each imagining what the other says, the first from the vantage point of the traveler who contemplates his travels from his stationary position atop the steps of the palace, the second from the vantage point of the stationary ruler who roams widely in his mind. What has Polo gained from his travels? What does Khan gain (or hope to gain) from hearing the description of those travels?

Marco Polo imagined answering (or Kublai Khan imagined his answer) that the more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there; and he retraced the stages of his journeys, and he came to know the port from which he had set sail, and the familiar places of his youth, and the surroundings of home, and a little square of Venice where he gamboled as a child.

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities [interlude at the start of part 2]

The more we travel, the more we understand our past, Calvino offers here. Yet this answer leaves Khan dissatisfied.

At this point Kublai Khan interrupted him or imagined interrupting him, or Marco Polo imagined himself interrupted, with a question such as: “You advance always with your head turned back?” or “Is what you see always behind you?” or rather, “does your journey take place only in the past?”

            All this so that Marco Polo could explain or imagine explaining or be imagined explaining or succeed finally in explaining to himself that what he sought was always something lying ahead, and even if it was a matter of the past it was a past that changed gradually as he advanced on his journey, because the traveler’s past changes according to the route he has followed: not the immediate past, that is, to which each day that goes by adds a day, but the more remote past. Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.

To Khan’s challenge – “Is what you see always behind you?” – Polo offers a challenging, satisfying answer. It is not that we simply come to know our past by traveling, by visiting new places, but rather that “the traveler’s past changes according to the route he has followed: not the immediate past, that is, to which each day that goes by adds a day, but the more remote past. Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.”

We discover our past through travel, but the past is not something hard, objective, but rather something open and malleable. We change our past through travel, discover a new past, discover who we no longer are, what we no longer possess.

Marco enters a city; he sees someone in a square living a life or an instant that could be his; he could now be in that man’s place, if he had stopped in time, long ago; or if, long ago, at a crossroads, instead of taking one road he had taken the opposite one, and after long wandering he had come to be in the place of that man in that square. By now, from that real or hypothetical past of his, he is excluded; he cannot stop; he must go on to another city, where another of his pasts awaits him, or something perhaps that had been a possible future of his and is now someone else’s present. Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.

            “Journeys to relive your past?” was the Khan’s question at this point, a question which could also have been formulated: “Journeys to recover your future?”

            And Marco’s answer was: “Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have.”

Traveling, here, becomes a way to explore the paths our lives did not take, to discover the infinite pathways of human variety, and to recognize again and again how many doors are closed to us, how many pathways our feet have never traveled, how many routes we will never take. In this vision of experience, as the self looks into its negative mirror we discover our self, ever smaller, ever more sharply defined. If there is an endpoint to such journeys, it must be when we become infinitely clear and refined, and infinitely small, like a piece of carbon slowly turning into a more and more multifaceted diamond at the same time that it shrinks itself out of existence.

The uncertainty of power.

~ joshkeidan

“On the day when I know all the emblems,” he asked Marco, “shall I be able to possess my empire, at last?”

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, [interlude at the end of part 1]

This interlude focuses on the language with which Marco Polo communicates with Kublai Khan. It begins by outlining how the envoys of the Great Khan make their reports:

Sent off to inspect the remote provinces, the Great Khan’s envoys and tax-collectors duly returned to Kai-ping-fu and to the gardens of magnolias in whose shade Kublai strolled, listening to their long reports. The ambassadors were Persians, Armenians, Syrians, Copts, Turkmans; the emperor is he who is a foreigner to each of his subjects, and only through foreign eyes and ears could the empire manifest its existence to Kublai. In languages incomprehensible to the Khan, the envoys related information heard in languages incomprehensible to them: from this opaque, dense stridor emerged the revenues received by the imperial treasury, the first and last names of officials dismissed and decapitated, the dimensions of the canals that the narrow rivers fed in times of drought.

Here we begin to understand what it means to rule: “the emperor is he who is a foreigner to each of his subjects.” Remember that we are each our own emperor, each our own subjects. Or are we? What would it mean to think of ourselves in these terms? To consider in what ways we are foreign to ourselves?

And yet the central premise of modern psychology is that this is the case. The idea of the unconscious is nothing more than this: that we are alien to ourselves, that our selves emerge out of an “opaque, dense stridor.”

And the most important communication is even more opaque, as Marco Polo shares with Kublai Khan his own discoveries despite their lack of shared language. This communication relies on gestures, sounds, and the display of relevant objects.

But when the young Venetian made his report, a different communication was established between him and the emperor. Newly arrived and totally ignorant of the Levantine languages, Marco Polo could express himself only with gestures, leaps, cries of wonder and of horror, animal barkings or hootings, or with objects he took from his knapsacks – ostrich plumes, pea-shooters, quartzes—which he arranged in front of him like chessmen. Returning from the missions on which Kublai sent him, the ingenious foreigner improvised pantomimes that the sovereign had to interpret: one city was depicted by the leap of a fish escaping the cormorant’s beak to fall into a net; another city by a naked man running through fire unscorched; a third by a skull, its teeth green with mold, clenching a round, white pearl.

This communication has two hallmarks: it is uncertain, and it is powerful:

The Great Khan deciphered the signs, but the connection between them and the places visited remained uncertain; he never knew whether Marco wished to enact an adventure that had befallen him on his journey, an exploit of the city’s founder, the prophecy of an astrologer, a rebus or a charade to indicate a name. But, obscure or obvious as it might be, everything Marco displayed had the power of emblems, which, once seen, cannot be forgotten or confused. In the Khan’s mind the empire was reflected in a desert of labile and interchangeable data, like grains of sand, from which there appeared, for each city and province, the figures evoked by the Venetian’s logogriphs.

Here communication becomes a riddle or puzzle (a “logogriph” is a particular kind of puzzle built around the letters of a word), and meaning becomes unstable (“labile,” meaning unstable, from a latin root which means “to fall”). To govern his empire means playing chess against the babbling, fallen world of miscommunication. The only way to rule is to accept the instability of the sand beneath his feet, his inability to understand the empire which nominally belongs to the Great Khan, but is neither comprehensible nor governable. Power relies on and is interwoven with uncertainty.

Yet Marco Polo slowly learns the language of the Khan, and communication between the two becomes easier. The more fluid their communication, though, the more facile (shallow, seemingly meaningful but actually lacking meaning) it becomes; Kublai Khan is always drawn back to the hazy language of pantomime and gesture:

As the seasons passed and his missions continued, Marco mastered the Tartar language and the national idioms and tribal dialects. Now his accounts were the most precise and detailed that the Great Khan could wish and there was no question or curiosity which they did not satisfy. And yet each piece of information about a place recalled to the emperor’s mind that first gesture or object with which Marco had designated the place. The new fact received a meaning from that emblem and also added to the emblem a new meaning. Perhaps, Kublai thought, the empire is nothing but a zodiac of the mind’s phantasms.

All of this leads the Khan to ponder when he might actually possess his own empire, when he might pin it down linguistically (like a patient etherized upon a table, as Eliot might say?):

            “On the day when I know all the emblems,” he asked Marco, “shall I be able to possess my empire, at last?”

            And the Venetian answered: “Sire, do not believe it. On that day you will be an emblem among emblems.”

Here Khan expresses his hope that by knowing all the emblems (and note that the goal is to know the uncertain emblems, not the certain linguistic communication) he might finally possess his empire. The more expansive his knowledge, though, the more uncertain he himself becomes, so that the most he can hope to become “an emblem among emblems,” another uncertain sign, powerful and unstable. The only way to possess something, to become powerful, is to hold on loosely, and to ourselves become emblematic of the workings of power, less a person and more a symbol – power itself derives from one’s status as a symbol.

Drawing on our depths

~ joshkeidan

Returning after hiatus.

I got sick. A summer virus, according to my doctor brother. Was laid up for a week. And then inertia took over, and I (mostly) stopped writing, although I picked up my morning journaling about a week ago. This blog, and my reflections on Italo Calvino’s beautiful, meditative Invisible Cities, fell by the wayside.

And now I return, with reflections on his chapter “Thin Cities 1,” which describes a city mirrored by an underground lake:

Isaura, city of the thousand wells, is said to rise over a deep, subterranean lake. On all sides, wherever the inhabitants dig long vertical holes in the ground, they succeed in drawing up water, as far as the city extends, and no farther. Its green border repeats the dark outline of the buried lake; an invisible landscape conditions the visible one; everything that moves in the sunlight is driven by the lapping wave enclosed beneath the rocks’ calcareous sky.

Italo Calvino Invisible Cities, Thin Cities 1

First of all, note the word “calcareous.” Let it roll around in your mouth and ears. You don’t know this word. I don’t know this word. And yet we know this word. It hurts our teeth, it is chalky and sharp and bony, full of calcium. And this is exactly what we would find it to mean, if we were to look it up. The word choice is Calvino’s, not his translator’s (William Weaver, who has done an astounding job throughout, I’m not trying to critique him), the Italian word “calcareo.”

Now we dive deeper. I have written in earlier entries that all the cities Calvino describes (or Marco Polo describes to Kublai Khan, or Kublai Khan describes to himself) are the same city, are all cities. And that these descriptions of cities are also descriptions of us, of people.

Consider, then, what it would mean for our self to rise out of a “deep, subterranean lake,” one which precisely shadows us, mirrors, us, whose boundaries extend exactly as far as our own. We might think of this lake as our unconscious, were we thinking in Freudian terms – the unknown terrain from which our conscious selves spring. Or perhaps we might think of this subterranean lake in Jungian terms as the shadow which mirrors our selves, and which must be respected, honored, and acknowledged – the parts of ourselves which we hide from ourselves, for fear of what they might reveal.

St. Leonard Lake, Valais, Switzerland.
Photo credit: © Borsic at English Wikipedia

Our shadow selves might represent the darkness within us, but often contain positive aspects of ourselves (especially if we have grown in ways which have made us question or mistrust ourselves, a relatively common phenomenon in the world we live in). Keith Johnstone, author of the wonderful book Impro, argues that most of us are socialized to mistrust ourselves, and to quash our own spontaneity. Hiding in the lake beneath us is our spontaneity, our creativity, our trust in ourselves.

Calvino’s description of Isaura continues:

            Consequently two forms of religion exist in Isaura.

The city’s gods, according to some people, live in the depths, in the black lake that feeds the underground streams. According to others, the gods live in the buckets that rise, suspended from a cable, as they appear over the edge of the wells, in the revolving pulleys, in the windlasses of the norias, in the pump handles, in the blades of the windmills that draw the water up from the drillings, in the trestles that support the twisting probes, in the reservoirs perched on stilts over the roofs, in the slender arches of the aqueducts, in all the columns of water, the vertical pipes, the plungers, the drains, all the way up to the weathercocks that surmount the airy scaffoldings of Isaura, a city that moves entirely upward.

Italo Calvino Invisible Cities, Thin Cities 1

Here we see two ways of relating to our shadow selves, to our unconscious. We can see it as the source of our inspiration, as the hiding place of the “gods” who “live in the depths”; or we can see worship the “gods” that move these depths upward – the pulleys and windmills, the pipes and aqueducts that allow us access to our own depths.

I think of this in terms of improvisation (which makes sense, because I think of many things in terms of improvisation). Does it make more sense to honor the processes which open us up to the improvisatory moment, which allow us to succeed as improvisors? The responsiveness to what we are offered, the desire to say “yes, and” to the gifts others give us, and to the gifts we give ourselves? Or should we care more about the results that these processes offer us, the insights and performances which they make possible?

For me, as for Calvino (if not stated explicitly, at least indicated through his syntax, through his extended and closing riff on the “city that moves entirely upward,” the right form of worship (to borrow his language) is one that cares more for the processes of improvisation, which sees them as worthy of embrace because of what they make possible. As so many improv teachers have preached and written about, if we create honest scenes, scenes that arise out of our mindful responsiveness to our scene partners, we will arrive at self-knowledge, at wonder, at humor, and at beauty. We need not aim at these targets to arrive at them.

“Memory is redundant”

~ joshkeidan

Why do memories stay with us? Calvino explores this question in his chapter “Cities & Signs 2,” in which Marco Polo describes his visit to the city of Zirma.

Zirma is a city that sticks in the mind: “Travelers return from the city of Zirma with distinct memories: a blind black man shouting in the crowd, a lunatic teetering on a skyscraper’s cornice, a girl walking with a puma on a leash.”

The secret of these memories, is that each sight is repeated so that it might stay with the viewer:

Actually many of the blind men who tap their canes on Zirma’s cobblestones are black; in every skyscraper there is someone going mad; all lunatics spend hours on cornices; there is no puma that some girl does not raise, as a whim. The city is redundant: it repeats itself so that something will stick in the mind.

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, Cities and Signs 2

For some reason Polo sees through this city in a way that other visitors are unable to:

I too am returning from Zirma: my memory includes dirigibles flying in all directions, at window level; streets of shops where tattoos are drawn on sailors’ skin; underground trains crammed with obsess women suffering from the humidity. My traveling companions, on the other hand, swear they saw only one dirigible hovering among the city’s spires, only one tattoo artist arranging needles and inks and pierced patterns on his bench, only one fat woman fanning herself on a train’s platform. Memory is redundant: it repeats signs so that the city can begin to exist.

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, Cities and Signs 2

Here Calvino suggests that the city lives a double life – it is, itself, and at the same time there is a new city recreated in the mind of the visitor. Or perhaps we should say there are an infinite number of cities recreated individually in the minds of visitors, just as the visitors described by Polo hold in their minds a different Zirma than the one belonging to him.

Thinking of memory as built from redundancy rings true to me. I think of the waterfall in my childhood backyard. Why can I remember it so vividly? Just beyond the outflow of the pond there was a concrete wall, maybe eight feet high, over which the water flowed and dropped. We would cross it, edging over it with our feet sideways, slide-stepping them across the rough pebbled grey concrete, pushing perpendicular to the flow of the water, the fear of falling over the wall to the slab below, and the way that fear would yield to the rush of excitement each time I reached the far end.

This memory is so firmly planted in my mind because of its redundancy, like Calvino’s Zirma – the repetition of the experience means that I have carried that waterfall with me for all these years.

Yet if existence is carved out through memory, and repetition or redundancy are what allow memories to solidify, at least for a time, repetition is also the enemy of memory. Think of a time you parked your car regularly (or semi-regularly) in a particular structure or lot. The more memories of doing so you possess, the harder it is to find your car on any individual visit, because the layered memories interfere with the specific memory of this trip. I have traded the specificity of any single visit to that waterfall from my youth for a generalized waterfall, the somehow generic specific experience of crossing that strip of concrete. Thus we trade a kind of truth for a composite lie. And yet as Calvino suggests, perhaps the only way to hold onto anything is by making this kind of trade off….

The horizon of the other

~ joshkeidan

In Despina, Calvino presents a city with two faces: “The city displays one face to the traveler arriving overland and a different to him who arrives by sea.” The first face offers itself to those who arrive by land:

When the camel driver sees, at the horizon of the tableland, the pinnacles of the skyscrapers come into view, the radar antennae, the white and red windsocks flapping, the chimneys belching smoke, he thinks of a ship; he knows it is a city, but he thinks of it as a vessel that will take him away from the desert, a windjammer about to cast off, with the breeze already swelling the sails, not yet unfurled, or a steamboat with its boiler vibrating in the iron keel; and he thinks of all the ports, the foreign merchandise the cranes unload on the docks, the taverns where crews of different flags break bottles over one another’s heads, the lighted, ground-floor windows, each with a woman combing her hair.

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, Cities & Desire 3

From land, the city appears to be a kind of ship, destined to carry the traveler far away. In contrast, to those who arrive by sea, it offers the opposite:

In the coastline’s haze, the sailor discerns the form of a camel’s withers, an embroidered saddle with glittering fringe between two spotted humps, advancing and saying; he knows it is a city, but he thinks of it as a camel from whose pack hang wineskins and bags of candied fruit, date wine, tobacco leaves, and already he sees himself at the head of a long caravan taking him away from the desert of the sea, toward oases of fresh water in the palm trees’ jagged shade, toward palaces of thick, whitewashed walls, tiled courts where girls are dancing barefoot, moving their arms, half hidden by their veils, and half-revealed.

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, Cities & Desire 3

For each traveler, then, the city offers respite from the desert in which they have traveled, promises the bounty of a less parched world.

The irony which Calvino describes here is a version of “the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence” – both the camel rider and the sailor believe that the city they gaze up promises more than their current locale, and both see exactly that which their counterpart hopes to escape: “Each city receives its form from the desert it opposes; and so the camel driver and the sailor see Despina, a border city between two deserts.”

And what if we ourselves are each a border city between two deserts, a site of possibility when seen from the outside? Think of the promises of friendship, of relationships. We are drawn to others because being with other human beings (at least, those human beings whose company we enjoy) promises something more, draws us out of the desert of our self, promises the bounty of a larger world, and they are drawn to us for the same reason. So the city between two deserts is the place where we encounter others, and we approach these encounters like Calvino’s camel rider or sailor, seeing possibilities that represent the bounty of the space of those other individuals.

Killing the present

~ joshkeidan

Zora is a puzzle. What would it take for something to be indelibly inscribed in memory?

Consider my last post, about the significant and insignificant. Here Calvino describes a city that is memorable because it is entirely significant – everything within it does the work of signaling something else, and consequently it cannot be forgotten:

Beyond six rivers and three mountain ranges rises Zora, a city that no one, having seen it, can forget. But not because, like other memorable cities, it leaves an unusual image in your recollections. Zora has the quality of remaining in your memory point by point, in its succession of streets, of houses along the streets, and of doors and windows in the houses, though nothing in them possesses a special beauty or rarity. Zora’s secret lies in the way your gaze runs over patterns following one another as in a musical score where not a note can be altered or displaced. The man who knows by heart how Zora is made, if he is unable to sleep at night, can imagine he is walking along the streets and he remembers the order by which the copper clock follows the barber’s striped awning, then the fountain with the nine jets, the astronomer’s glass tower, the melon vendor’s kiosk, the statue of the hermit and the lion, the Turkish bath, the café at the corner, the alley that leads to the harbor. This city which cannot be expunged from the mind is like an armature, a honeycomb in whose cells each of us can place the things he wants to remember: names of famous men, virtues, numbers, vegetable and mineral classifications, dates of battles, constellations, parts of speech. Between each idea and each point of the itinerary an affinity or a contrast can be established, serving as an immediate aid to memory. So the world’s most learned men are those who have memorized Zora.

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, Cities & Memory 4

Here the city functions as a kind of memory palace, the kind that the ancient Romans would use as a mnemonic device. When they wished to commit something to memory they would create one of these geographical memory aids. For example, if Cicero were memorizing a speech he planned to deliver at the Forum, he would create a memory palace, shaping a visual geography for the speech within their head. Each element of the speech would be placed in a room – the introduction would take up one room, filled with objects that cued the mind to remember other pieces of information, the next section another room.

Yet as Calvino describes here, the consequence of being a literal memory palace is erasure. The city that cannot be forgotten, because every element is a signpost of something else – some event or idea – ends up disappearing:

But in vain I set out to visit the city: forced to remain motionless and always the same, in order to be more easily remembered, Zora has languished, disintegrated, disappeared. The earth has forgotten her.

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, Cities & Memory 4

Why is this the case? As Calvino suggests, we cannot live within a static world. That which is entirely memorable is already obsolete. To visit a place that cannot or will not change is to visit a place that is frozen in time, and unliveable.

This makes me think of the beaches of Thailand. When I lived in Thailand many beaches were already overdeveloped, over-visited. There were full moon festivals on the islands off the east coast of the southern peninsula. By the time I took a student group to visit in 2006 the beaches were even busier, even more developed. What had been full moon festivals had grown into full moon festivals, half moon festivals, an ongoing party that continued to trash things. Now the government is resorting to closing beaches for multiple years at a stretch, in hopes that the coral reefs and surrounding area will be able to somewhat recover from their treatment.

Loving the beach to death.

Ok, so change was happening. This wasn’t Zora, which remained the same, frozen in memory.

And yet… it was like Calvino’s city. Each visitor tried to capture a feeling, a meaning, that they believed the beach carried, from previous experiences, from stories and movies etc. We love things to death because we don’t actually love them. We love an older idea of them – the less developed beach, the innocent partying – even as we spend time in the actual contemporary place, in our mind we’re embracing an older vision of a place, one that allows us to let our mind skip over the trash, the crowds, the awfulness of it. It is the kind of vision that allows us to forget the interminable lines at the amusement park and hold onto just the photographic evidence, the pictures of us with the park mascot in their heavy costume. And that picture also hearkens not to the moment of the picture – the sweaty day beneath the heaving sun, but rather our time in the air-conditioned living room, watching a cartoon version of that mascot traipsing merrily across a screen. Each layer of memory conjures an older, static memory, and in this way we embrace the ugly, the destructive, the decline, because we hold tight to a glimpse of a shadow of a memory when we once, too were happy.