Bullet-Point Friday: Significance

• The first time I had sex after my father died my orgasm was amazing. It was as if my physical joy was supplemented by the knowledge that his body already lay rotting in a casket, unable to feel pleasure again. If it ever did. In many ways I feel I was cheated out of my father's death. After spending the majority of my childhood wishing him dead, he did not finally die until almost a full 16 years after I cut all ties to my parents. Far too late to give me any possibility of having a more pleasant childhood. His death, much like his life, was useless to me by that point.


•  When my sister finally called to give me the news I had already learned from other sources days earlier, she related his last hours, embellished to give the impression that his death was imbued with significance. The last time he had been rushed to the hospital for his heart condition, he had had his "path toward the light" experience that had somehow relayed to him that the afterlife would embrace him, would enfold him in eternal peace. So he had told my mother that he did not want to be resuscitated the next time. That everything would be alright. Oh, the lies horrible people tell themselves to "make up for" their truly horrible lives!


• My eldest sister drove up from central Texas to sneak into the funeral home to pay her last respects, to say her farewells when the "rest" of the family was gone. After several years of not having contact with our parents. I briefly toyed with the idea of an after-hours visit with my father's corpse, not to say goodbye, for I had already done that 16 years prior, but to stuff a bag of my own feces into his casket so he would smell my shit for eternity. But that seemed a bit over the top. So I did not make the late-night trip to an east Texas funeral home with the other estranged members of my family.


• My father "departed" February 10th, slightly more than a week after my birthday. I like to think he was thinking of me the days before his death. That I was nothing like him. That I had too much self-respect and dignity to ever be like him. The last "conversation" I had with my father was almost sixteen years prior, when I threatened to be the one to call the police myself.... In some ways I feel I missed that window of opportunity when abused children could murder their abusers and get out of a prison sentence for being too young or too emotionally damaged. But the healing that has come in the time since lets me know that that route was never truly an option.


• The official obituary listed one child and two grandchildren. Basic arithmetic was never my parents' strong point. Nothing basic ever was. (This mathematical oversight was no less meaningless than trying to pass off my eldest sister as a ten-pound premature baby when she was born eight months to the day from their wedding. But I digress.) Being absent in that petty way makes my estrangement somehow sweeter. And yet my name was listed--or the name I share with my namesake--as one who preceded my father in death. "Brother" and "son" are empty signifiers anyway. Much like "father," itself even empty as a signified.


• This past Tuesday, the day after my birthday, I received a note from Tetsuya, one of the most significant men in my life. He wrote, "After all, blessed are your parents who gave birth to a wonderful man like you." It is only by way of the love I have received in this life that I am able to give love at all. Even to and for the insignificant man who gave me life.

Quaeritur: Aber ein Sturm...

How does a poet write history? I once began with this question. But after several years of focusing on the first part of my questionable query, I find myself now drawn more to the latter half: history--a story we tell ourselves about who we are, a narrative creatively employing the past tense, a systematic account of methodically documented or transmitted records.

Benjamin's assessment: "a pile of debris": Wo eine Kette von Begebenheiten vor uns erscheint, da sieht er eine einzige Katastrophe, die unablässig Trümmer auf Trümmer häuft und sie ihm vor die Füße schleudert. I'm rereading Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals in preparation for my spring course, Smith's translation: "Human history would be a much too stupid affair were it not for the intelligence introduced by the powerless" (I.7).

Rereading Nietzsche I've been struck by the dominance of language's seduction toward the domestic belief in a subject behind action, thought, and will. Is this the originary (modern) glimpse into the abyss, a sight unseen since Parmenides, Heraclitus, Anaxamander? A lacuna of wisdom covered over neatly by Platonic ideals? Something immanently not there? Nietzsche speaks: "But no such substratum [as the subject] exists; there is no 'being' behind doing, acting, becoming; 'the doer' is merely a fiction imposed on the doing--the doing itself is everything" (I.13). I imagine Professor Luanne Frank pounding her fist on the table after reading aloud this line. But of course she would recite the original German.

Is there no subject then behind the movement of Benjaminian Katastrophe? No dwarfish hunchback beneath the table manipulating the chess-playing, hookah-smoking puppet in a fez who wins every game? History is after all a fiction, as evidenced by its aphetic, its pathetic story. Do we merely need to will forgetting this fiction, this noble lie upon which we base what we loosely call reality? Or do we simply need to stand back in utter passivity and allow for the forgetting to come on its own, outside all subjective control and desire?

As we no longer attempt to split the thunder from its crash, to separate the lightning from its flash, we already still (as yet) resort to our domestic tricks and techniques of history, reading and writing and rewriting that which writes itself outside of willing, released of the metaphysics of the subject as well as of the object. Pure processuality: es gibt Geschichte. Es gibt nichts.

Es gibt kein (Da-)Sein. Not even a there in which to find oneself at the end of one's own history. A history that writes itself in its unwriting as it unravels the metaphysics of narratology, of grammatology. It's like Carolyn Forché's book recommended by the philosopher who told me that philosophy does not care for or about history. And yet all the philosophers I care both for and about care both for and about history: Heraclitus, Nietzsche, Benjamin, Heidegger, Blanchot. Even the historians who write philosophically: Herodotus, Thucydides, Procopius.

Benjamin, we always return to thee: who penned your most prescient words on history only days before succumbing to the end of your own history, before History caught up with you in the foothills of the Pyrenees, with half a handful of morphine tablets--after giving the other half to Koestler--by, as history tells us, your own hand. Smuggled manuscripts to Arendt, stolen kisses given to Bataille, who rendered them guiltless, treasonous. Even earlier: imprisoned for three months for existing in a state of statelessness in the telling town of Nevers.

If I could, I would write poetry like Miguel Murphy: "... The way the frame of his body went / slack to ruins. He knew what is dark and forgotten // rises in the body. Epilepsy / how a star is a struggle / of light. And we are very deep. And we are wounded // ...." And not just because he's beautiful and intelligent, but because his words matter. They are matter, the very material (of) language, (of) poetry, [of (even)] history. Hermeneutic lifeboats swirling about the dizzying eddies of meaning. Of meaninglessness.

How does a poet write history? How does a poet provide us access to something lost in the past, whether its our own personal story or the story of humankind? How does a poet bridge the chiasmus between the here and now and the there and then? History, that Agnostos Theos. Si deus si dea.

Bullet-Point Friday: Holday Gifts

The Gift of Travel
Saw the new Jason Reitman film (based on the Walter Kirn novel) Up in the Air Tuesday evening at the Plano Angelika with the great unwashed suburban masses. I'm not sure it's entirely unfair to hate a film because you share the experience with such despicable humans. Well, I didn't actually hate the film. It simply was not the film I wanted it to be. My friend Luis called it "a love letter to America," and I can see what he meant. That part I enjoyed: the traversing of vast geographical and emotional landscapes in order to find the center-most point called "home," the very essence of the ideatum of America. But there was just too much sentimentality, amplified exponentially by the audience gasping (when the enlarged photograph blew into the water) and the constant Hmm expressed by the affected woman to my immediate right every time there was an overly poignant scene, overly poignant line, or overly poignant situation. While I was driving Luis to the airport Tuesday morning I confessed that the happiest I had been in my life was when I traveled the most, while living in Japan and spending time in flight home or on my way to summers in Europe. Or even just traveling around Japan itself, with a surplus of hard cash, loads of free time to fulfill personal goals, and creativity to spare. The best moment of the film for me, however, was when Bingham "proves" the validity of his personal philosophy, his cosmology: by crashing into Goran's overwrought domesticity, which seems to be just the thing to get him back in the air, above the things and people who would only weigh him down. Ah, what I wouldn't give (up) to reach 10,000,000 miles and be able to say, "The stars will wheel forth from their daytime hiding places; and one of those lights, slightly brighter than the rest, will be my wingtip passing over."

The Gift of Writing
Wednesday afternoon I finished watching the ninth and final season of Roseanne, a personal project I started a few weeks ago.I was a huge fan of the sitcom for most of the years it was on. And I always thought that the final episode was the classiest and most uplifting finale of all television, itself a real meditation on television, on loyalty and love, on creativity. I wasn't as sad to see it end when it went out with such style and guts. Many people have expressed disappointment over the last season, over the way it ended by rewriting itself, but I maintain that it only remained true to its original intentions by reinventing the metadiscursivity of not only the last season, the very last episode, but the entire series itself. We discover that Roseanne did finally become the writer she always dreamed of being, that she took that most difficult step of not just talking about what you wanted to do but actually doing it. Nothing is more positive or powerful. Sure, her narratives, especially from the last season, were tempered, restricted, and informed by blue collar television (i.e., wrestling, soap operas, other sitcoms, Roseanne itself), but therein lies the brilliance and humor of this most postmodern of postmodern narratives. Finally Phoebe Snow's voice wraps up the theme song and this quote from T.E. Lawrence is superimposed on Roseanne sitting on the couch we had thought was gotten rid of in the wake of the renovations: Those who dream by night, in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that all was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, and make it possible. I still feel like I can change the world. Or at least myself.

The Gift of Friendship
Yes, it's true: I deactivated my Facebook account. It is the most positive change I've made in my life in years. Even when compared to joining a training program and running a half marathon.

Bullet-Point Friday: Rings

• I saved $50 dollars on my senior ring because I had a friend in the town over who had family who ran a jewelry store. All I had to do was pass out fliers for them at my high school to get the discount.
• All I really did was slip a couple of them into some juniors' lockers. That was enough to ease my conscience about getting (to what seemed to me at the time) such a substantial discount. I was the only person who purchased my senior ring through my friend's family. Instead of actually saving $50 though, I purchased a ring design that cost about $50 dollars more than what I would've bought in the first place. It was a form of breaking even to my naive mind.
• When I was a freshman in college I lost my senior ring one night while walking around a cemetery out in the country with some friends. Almost exactly a year later, I determined that I would return to the cemetery by myself in order to look for it. I found it within thirty minutes beneath the light of an almost full moon. I considered it fate.
  
• Years later, and with the same level of determination, I decided I had to visit Mexico for Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. To this day, I can't recall why it was so important to me to go. I was driven mad to some extent about trying to impress a professor as well as claim my own fate as a world traveler, starting right then. I paid for airfare by maxing out my credit card. I drove around visiting ATMs in an attempt to trick them into giving me more money than I actually had in the bank. To some extent, it worked. I had several overdraft charges I had to deal with when I returned. Not knowing how I was going to pay for the hotel that I had had the gumption to call directly from my apartment and using my high school Spanish managed to reserve for my two traveling companions and me, I struck a deal with one of them. I sold my dignity and self-respect by agreeing to clean out her mother's garage after coming back. That was perhaps the only thing I did that wasn't really worth it, even in the end.
• Determined to have slightly more cash on hand during this all-too-short trip, I sold my senior ring--the ring destiny thought I should have--to a pawn shop for less than half the price I had paid just a few years earlier. I would've gotten less money if I had wanted to return for it later and re-purchase it, but I decided on the spot to go for bigger cash and sell it for the gold. Goodbye, senior ring. Whispered: forever....
• While I was in Mexico, my friends and I took a bus tour to Teotihuacan. Even though one of my friends purchased our two tickets with her credit card, she was never charged for one of the tickets. She agreed because of my situation that the free ticket would be mine.
• And since this story is really about Shayne, we'll end with something about her and yet another miraculous sign from destiny that I was traveling down the correct path: my truck was parked at the airport for four days, and I had no idea how I was going to pay to leave. As we arrive back in Dallas, Shayne finds a $20 bill on the floor. And I make my last deal with destiny, asking Shayne if she could use that money to pay for parking. She agreed. With no strings attached, no mothers' garages to clean. And that's one of the many reasons why I love her: not because she freely gave me money that had randomly come her way but because she is obviously a vehicle through which destiny pushes me along on my own path.
  

Bullet-Point Friday: New York

• I've now been to New York City four times: to march in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in November 1986, to enjoy spring break of 1989 with my cool friend Linnie, to celebrate my birthday with old (read: even older) friends in February 2009, and to support Stephen as he ran the marathon a few weeks ago.
• The first time I visited New York City, we stayed tethered to the touristed sites: the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, and the Rockettes' holiday show at Radio City Music Hall. And of course Christmas shopping at Macy's. I have a photograph I took of the World Trade Center from the Liberty Island Ferry.
• After one hellacious semester at my undergraduate alma mater, my friend Linnie and I decided to head to New York for spring break. It promised to be a great trip, especially since Linnie had lived there before, and she had a friend who had offered to let us stay with him. It turned out he was an RA for a college on Long Island, so we ended up living in a dorm while most of their students were celebrating spring break in warmer climes. Taking the train into Manhattan every day was part of the excitement.
• Linnie is an older African American woman I became friends with over the fall semester when we worked together in the basement costume shop under the proscenium stage theater. Our sewing machines were on the same table, so we faced each other every time we worked on a project. And we talked and talked. We had the same taste in music at the time. So while on vacation we hit as many hot spots as we could in Harlem: one night a blues bar, another night a small jazz ensemble. And reggae was provided by the one Bahamian student who stayed in the dorm with us. We saw Mike Tyson and Arsenio Hall at amateur night at the Apollo. We saw the musical revue Black and Blue on Broadway.
  
• While riding the subway one afternoon, a homeless man boarded. Linnie leans over and whispers in her thick Black Southern accent, "I smells a CHUD." There was a time when this story was part of my repertoire during small talk at parties.
• Now I don't remember if that was on the same day as the "Long Island Iced Tea Incident" or not. While ordering a meal at a fancy restaurant, I asked for an iced tea. I have spent most of my life in Texas after all. The waitress clarified: "A Long Island Iced Tea?" Knowing that I was on Long Island, I assumed it was just a local variety of "iced tea". It tasted a bit strange, but I didn't mind. It wasn't until I stood up to leave that I felt the effects of the alcohol. You must remember too that at that age I was quite a lightweight when it came to drinking. I remember slurring something like, "I think my tea had some alcohol in it" to Linnie, who laughed and explained to me what I had drunk. The subsequent subway ride was a blast.
• I stayed in touch with Linnie for many years after that. But we lost touch with one another after we last spoke on September 12, 2001, the day I was scheduled to move to Warsaw.
  

Days for the Dead

Holiday wishes to all those who celebrate All Hallows Eve, All Saints Day, and All Souls Day. This is a photograph I took about a year-and-a-half ago in Austin from the Congress Street Bridge. The Mexican fruit bat colony was leaving for the night when I snapped this, capturing some bats in flight as well as reflections from the Colorado River below. I like how it looks completely tweaked in Photoshop, but aside from a slight contrast adjustment, the photo is untouched. And as you can readily notice, I didn't even try to crop out anything.

Bullet-Point Friday: Words

• I somehow managed to pass the 10,000-word mark on Chapter Two this afternoon. That was my goal when I sat down several weeks ago to work on my dissertation. I figured five chapters of about 40 pages each would put me around a 200-page final product. Now I feel like I've barely scratched the surface of this topic. I need to relearn how to be done with a project, even a smaller project that's part of a much larger one.

• Last night at the re-dedication ceremony for the Caelum Moor sculptures I grew increasingly annoyed with the wordy speeches by the self-congratulatory politicians who worked so tirelessly for the community and for public art. All I could think of was why did you allow this piece to be packed away at the water treatment facility in the first place all those years ago? Then none of us would be out here freezing our asses off while you stroke your own pathological ego.

• Word on the street is that I'm running eight miles tomorrow morning after getting up at 4:00 AM. It will be my longest run ever. I'm amazed that I've gotten this far in my training program, but tonight the word buzzing about my brain is anxious. I need a small vacation from working so hard both on my dissertation and on my training. Then giving up my early mornings, Friday evenings, and Saturdays won't seem so painful.

• I wonder if there will be any interesting poetry readings or events in New York while I'm there next weekend. There's something very appealing about hearing words spoken by professional wordsmiths in the capital of the world. Word.