Germany

Went to Dachau
the other day:

We went together as a group: Americans, Germans, Romanians. We have been meeting and sharing discussions of culture, theory, mobility, politics for a week. And today we walked around quietly and thought about history. History in the present. The past brushed against the grain of contemporary knowing, questioning, feeling, trying to understand.

Arriving by train, the town of Dachau is a little outside of Munich, and is a beautiful little Bavarian German "suburban" town. It is spring so everything is green. Flowers. By afternoon the sun was out and everything seemed clean and quaint. Apparently, when the concentration camp was liberated, the local townspeople were brought in to see just how much violence and destruction was caused there. The film image shows onlookers turn away in disgust when they see the pile of corpses, in various states of decompose, in the crematorium; the bodies in the last months before the liberation were piled up, or buried in mass graves, because there wasn't enough coal to run the cremation fires.

We think how strange to live in this town, with this memorial site right in the middle.

From the train to the bus and we are left off in what seems like a lovely park. Trees. A little river. The stone road continues on into more residential areas. We walk through the memorial site, on the path lined with trees, and then through the gate that opens into the prisoner area. The roll call area. The barracks area. The "maintenance" building that once housed the baths, and where prisoners were hung up by their wrists from the ceiling as punishment or just for torture, now serves as the museum. History explained in texts and displays. Artifacts and photos.



Walk down the gravel road past the former barracks' foundations, pass the religious monuments, erected for reflection from a variety of denominations, and across the bridge into the crematorium area. The small original building and the larger, assembly line style buildings are set among trees and pathways lead out into a small woods that reminded me of the paths one might take for reflection and meditation at a retreat center. But here, instead, one now reflects on the graves marked for the thousands who died, were cremated, and buried en masse.

The experience is obviously strange and difficult. Intense and quietly meditative. History in memorial. Signs and paths and museum displays show us history on site. Site non site of trying, still, to make sense of. It seems strange to eat lunch in the cafeteria after, head back tired, eventually moving into the conversations that locate, help some of us think further, or at least, think present, in the context of.

from The Transformation by Juliana Spahr

“Flora and fauna grow next to and around each other without names. Human add the annotation. They catalogue the flora and fauna, divide them up, chart their connections and variations, eventually name them, and as they do this they read into them their own stories” (13).

“Huehue is the name of a climber native to the islands. Haole is the word that is used to describe some of them in this story, people who arrive from somewhere else. In the world of plants it is also used to describe a particularly noxious and invasive species” (14).

The politics of the island were more complicated than the boths of the beauty of the island. The politics were not really built around boths but instead around the one or the other. The politics were something else altogether. They were a part of the island that bit into them and those around them with bladelike, piercing mouthparts that stabbed through the skin and then injected a saliva that teemed with digestive enzymes, viruses, and anticoagulants. This bite often left behind an annoying itch, a reminder that things were not both the one and the other, could not be both the one and the other because both made no sense because there could not be both colonialism and sovereignty. (39)

The expansion did not happen overnight and one could point to how the local languages and the languages that were often created by the arrival of the expansionist language, the pidgins, and creoles, the burrowing languages, the negotiated languages refused to go away as evidence of how the expansionist language might not be as good at expansion as one might think. (95)

The gray matter at the back of their brain told them to move to the islands in the Atlantic because the islands were known for their perversions and various sexualities and they wanted to live someplace known for its perversions and various sexualities. The gray matter at the back of the brain wanted to move to the place that self identified as a place of complicated sexuality, a place for people who liked to be getting in and out of various beds in various different ways. A place that celebrated different beds and different ways of bedding down and around. The islands in the Atlantic, were full of perversions of all sorts and the stories told about the people of the islands had all genders in all the different combinations, even the ones beyond the two that so defined their culture at this moment. They liked this. They liked it that the islands in the Atlantic to which they moved were so famous for their perversions, so famous that televangelists mentioned them often as the root of all evil. (123)

Susan Sontag

from Regarding the Pain of Others

Ch 5

“That a gory battlescape could be beautiful—in the sublime or awesome or tragic register of the beautiful—is a commonplace about images of war made by artists. The idea does not sit well when applied to images taken by cameras: to find beauty in war photographs seems heartless. But the landscape of devastation is still a landscape. There is beauty in ruins…Photographs tend to transform, whatever their subject; and as an image something may be beautiful—or terrifying, or unbearable, or quite bearable—as it is not in real life” (76).

“Transforming is what art does, but photography that bears witness to the calamitous and the reprehensible is much criticized if it seems “aesthetic”; that is, too much like art” (76).

Ch 6

“One can feel obliged to look at photographs that record great cruelties and crimes. One should feel obliged to think about what it means to look at them…” (95).

“Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question is what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated” (101).

Ch 8

“To designate a hell is not, of course, to tell us anything about how to extract people from that hell, how to moderate hell’s flames. Still, it seems a good in itself to acknowledge, to have enlarged, one’s sense of how much suffering caused by human wickedness there is in the world we share with others” (114).

“The images say: This is what human beings are capable of doing—may volunteer to do, enthusiastically, self-righteously. Don’t forget” (115).

“Perhaps too much value is assigned to memory, not enough to thinking” (115).

Judith Butler

from Undoing Gender

“If I have any agency, it is opened up by the fact that I am constituted by a social world I never chose. That my agency is riven with paradox does not mean it is impossible. It means only that paradox is the condition of its possibility” (3).

“As a result, the “I” that I am finds itself at once constituted by norms and dependent on them but also endeavors to live in ways that maintain a critical and transformative relation to them. This is not easy because the “I” becomes, to a certain extent unknowable, threatened with unviability, with becoming undone altogether, when it no longer incorporates the norm in such a way that makes this “I” fully recognizable” (3).

“I may feel that without some recognizability I cannot live. But I may also feel that the terms by which I am recognized make life unlivable. This is the juncture from which critique emerges, where critique is understood as an interrogation of the terms by which life is constrained in order to open up the possibility of different modes of living; in other words, not to celebrate difference as such but to establish more inclusive conditions for sheltering and maintaining life that resists models of assimilation” (4).

Butler responds to the question of the usefulness of “increasing possibilities for gender” that “possibility is not a luxury; it is as crucial as bread. I think we should not underestimate what the thought of the possible does for those for whom they very issue of survival is most urgent” (29).

a poem for the day by Frank O'Hara

A STEP AWAY FROM THEM (1956)


It's my lunch hour, so I go
for a walk among the hum-colored
cabs. First, down the sidewalk
where laborers feed their dirty
glistening torsos sandwiches
and Coca-Cola, with yellow helmets
on. They protect them from falling
bricks, I guess. Then onto the
avenue where skirts are flipping
above heels and blow up over
grates. The sun is hot, but the
cabs stir up the air. I look
at bargains in wristwatches. There
are cats playing in sawdust.
                               On
to Times Square, where the sign
blows smoke over my head, and higher
the waterfall pours lightly. A
Negro stands in a doorway with a
toothpick, languorously agitating.
A blonde chorus girl clicks: he
smiles and rubs his chin. Everything
suddenly honks: it is 12:40 of
a Thursday.
                Neon in daylight is a
great pleasure, as Edwin Denby would
write, as are light bulbs in daylight.
I stop for a cheeseburger at JULIET'S
CORNER. Giulietta Masina, wife of
Federico Fellini, è bell' attrice.
And chocolate malted. A lady in
foxes on such a day puts her poodle
in a cab.
          There are several Puerto
Ricans on the avenue today, which
makes it beautiful and warm. First
Bunny died, then John Latouche,
then Jackson Pollock. But is the
earth as full as life was full, of them?
And one has eaten and one walks,
past the magazines with nudes
and the posters for BULLFIGHT and
the Manhattan Storage Warehouse,
which they'll soon tear down. I
used to think they had the Armory
Show there.
                A glass of papaya juice
and back to work. My heart is in my
pocket, it is Poems by Pierre Reverdy.


[1956]

from Audre Lorde's Sister Outsider

from "Poetry is not a Luxury"

For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.

Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.

For there are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt--of examining what those ideas feel like being lived on Sunday morning at 7am, after brunch, during wild love, making war, giving birth, mourning our dead--while we suffer the old longings, battle the old warnings and fears of being silent and impotent and alone, while we taste new possibilities and strengths.

review of begin with may

See Michelle's review of my begin with may: a series of moments:

Michelle Naka Pierce: no use in a centre

from Tender Buttons by G. Stein

A CARAFE, THAT IS A BLIND GLASS.

A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading.


NOTHING ELEGANT.

A charm a single charm is doubtful. If the red is rose and there is a gate surrounding it, if inside is let in and there places change then certainly something is upright. It is earnest.


A RED HAT.

A dark grey, a very dark grey, a quite dark grey is monstrous ordinarily, it is so monstrous because there is no red in it. If red is in everything it is not necessary. Is that not an argument for any use of it and even so is there any place that is better, is there any place that has so much stretched out.

a little stein thought for the day

winter wonder

the symbol of the shoe

"In Libya, he was given an award for courage."

Shoe-Hurling Iraqi Becomes a Folk Hero

from Lisa Jarnot's poem Whole Hog

after Barrett Watten and for Thomas


1.
The pig is complete.
Barns demand limits.

2.
Pigs fall down to create drama.
The materials are hoof.

3.
Daylight accumulates in work yards.
Farm hands substitute for suns.

...

44.
Flora stand up to fauna.
Science gives features to the world.

45.
Another tractor is invented.
They sniff it like a dog in heat.

46.
Plows fit into a perspective.
Photos of piglets cover the earth.

Laura Riding

"The World and I"

This is not exactly what I mean
Any more than the sun is the sun.
But how to mean more closely
If the sun shines but approximately?
What a world of awkwardness!
What hostile implements of sense!
Perhaps this is as close a meaning
as perhaps becomes such knowing.
Else I think the world and I
Must live together as strangers and die
A sour love, each doubtful whether
Was ever a thing to love the other.
No, better for both to be nearly sure
Each of each - exactly where
Exactly as I and exactly the world
Fail to meet by a moment, and a word.

from Claudia Rankine's Don't Let Me be Lonely


Sometimes I think it is sentimental, or excessive, certainly not intellectual, or perhaps too naive, too self-wounded to value each life like that, to feel loss to the point of being bent over each time. There is no innovating loss. It was never invented, it happened as something physical, something physically experienced. It is not something an "I" discusses socially. Though Myung Mu Kim did say that the poem is really a responsibility to everyone in a social space. She did say it was okay to cramp, to clog, to fold over at the gut, to have to put hand to flesh, to have to hold the pain, and then to translate it here. She did say, in so many words, that what alerts, alters.

moving through

after listening to Renee Gladman talk about narrative and writing fiction


nearness and the difficulty of arriving
placement
deferral

She intended to follow the lines on pavement
broken, faded, yet leading, or potential,
marking first the potential--and then
later realized--journey.

spatialize
miscommunicate
the space of the city bears the weight

Around one corner, and then another, the simple
whiteness of the line, like a shadow, not determined,
constructed and fading, nearly transparent, directive yet
diminishing toward total possibility.

a state of mind
something is not the way it might be

One block, a building so tall, blocking the sky.
One block, the smell of fried beef.
Each block making it difficult to remember having once
eaten. Another corner, wind whipping round like an
urban hurricane, covering her skin with layers
of grit, particles scratch out her eyes.

who are you, aren't you?
white space
slowness
reasonates

Having wandered off the line, what cannot always be
followed, what can no longer direct, orientate, circulate, each
corner marks the affect associated with each experience,
a coffee, cut of the wind, she sees them through the window,
imagines their mouths saying words in Portuguese, she
responds, the wind blowing away every language that she tries.

evoke
simultaneous
intention (unintentional)

Try this word in German. Listen in French. In Arabic the
subtitles linger for much longer than one expects--a short,
concise translation for so much language. The lines change,
move into the streets, no longer painted but built into the
structure, graph of bricks meeting curved lines in concrete.
The traffic ceasing to determine the pedestrian nature
of this city (scape).

conceptual, material, exercise

This, she decides, may be a continuous journey. Not of a day,
but of many days. Not of a language, but of the mingling of
words, vocabularies swirled like hot milk with caramel. Not of
a lined path but of paths textured with flavors, sweet for summer,
rich for understanding, acquaintance, the rewriting of history.

from Lipstick Jihad: a memoir of growing up Iranian in America and American in Iran

by Azadeh Moaveni

"What I wanted to explain...was that we had a moral obligation to care when awful things happened to people around us. That by treating beatings, lashings, or checkpoint arrests as common place--ordinary, like going to the ATM--we were becoming dehumanized to the sickness around us. A heightened threshold of suffering was necessary for getting through the day, but mentally, we had to retain some sort of perspective. Of how a functional government should behave. Of what was unacceptable. Otherwise, we would become like those blase reformists, who would look you in the eye, and say: "Look at how much progress we've made... See! I'm wearing short-sleeves...Could I have work short-sleeves ten years ago?...No!...What are you whining about human rights for? ...Aren't we better than the Taliban? Than the Saudis?" Yes, there would always be some junked, lost country we would be superior to, but that wasn't a proper ambition, was it?" (217)

"I had taken the first steps assured in myself, intent on discovering Iran, and I had eventually found that Iran, like the Simorgh, was elusive, that it defied being known. Its moods changed mercurially by the day, and even its past was a contested battle. Though with each day there I accumulated as many questions as answers, like those steadfast birds, something kept me honed on course, a belief in the obscured value of the destination. The knowledge had been unfurling in me slowly since the day Agha Joon's funeral--that the search for home, for Iran, had taken me not to a place but back to myself" (245).

story

her hands the color of mediterranean olives oiled smooth young, nails jutting out of clear skin no lines no scratches no scars rich like changing tones of day

as she paints each move of the wrist fingers choreographed against the sound of color the brush circling sure hesitant marking every note across the page

sits, against a backdrop of anger and history thinking purple sketching lyric creating lines reaching out toward every horizon

how does she, one wonders, compose each line as if set to music without tone, coming together in the realm of present fragments turned whole, continuous

turning toward breathing deeply woven with layers of incarnation imagined possibilities in each shadow from the time before and into

space, or the shape of a mango

a 20 (or so) line poem

the sound of fall cutting through, chainsaw against orange leaf
each grain layered like little chinese dragons
at the new year

the taste of buttered wine at lunch
smelling sweet like grapes pressed firm

chittering distant or the mosquito in my ear
scratched, to the bone
a piece of golden green, refracted, shadows shifting against each changed light

the clever taste of single voices, shimmering clear
not each grain but the particular flakes of wild, golden, rustling
a moving away from the understood glow
maneuver of an autumn

feel this, pig lipstick
the painting, disturbed by sound, broken, echoed
"that one"
the red wheelbarrow of hilarity

falling rocks scrape the insides of intuition
taste the root vegetables, one flavor at a time
chandelier

we will march toward the tree line and circle flowers made of teflon
each leaf laughing against blue
troubled wonder

the flavor of a shade
spliced on the wind