I wrote this research paper this semester. I'm pretty proud of it actually, but I know it needs more sources and a bit more revision. The choice of the term "enlightenment" probably needs to be reassessed too.
Joseph Campbell suggests in an interview with Bill Moyers that the typical hero must undergo a “transformation of consciousness” (Campbell) before his deed bears fruit. Although Campbell’s suggestion holds in many epics and folk tales, it lacks ground in Homer’s The Odyssey. Using examples of Odysseus’ intellectual inflexibility it is easy to demonstrate how he does not fit into Campbell’s framework, but an explanation for why that is so tends to be elusive. Drawing from feminist studies of masculinity, the aim of this paper is to demonstrate that Odysseus’ inability to undergo Campbell’s “transformation of consciousness” is a direct result of his strict adherence to a hegemonic phallic masculinity.
The best direct example of Odysseus’ inability to undergo any form of “transformation of consciousness” can be seen when Athena reduces him to rags (Fagles 13.491-501). This transformation of Odysseus from the proud and vibrant warrior who endangers himself and his crew because he feels the spirited urge to jab the blinded Cyclops (Fagles 9.558-562) to the shriveled beggar who makes a meal of the suitors’ conservative charity and brutal Antinous’ abuses (Fagles 17.507-13) offers the greatest glimmer of hope for Odysseus’ potential “transformation of consciousness”. Unfortunately, that potential is never realized; when the herald, Medon, begs Odysseus to exclude him from the slaughter it seems almost as if Odysseus has the sword raised over his head, readied to sever Medon’s head from his body despite his pleas until Telemachus vouches for the herald (Fagles 22.360-99). We furthermore see Odysseus acknowledge that were it not for his son he would have slain the herald when he says, “The prince has pulled you through, he’s saved you now” (Fagles 22.394). As if to give finality to the certainty of Odysseus’ inability to undergo Campbell’s “transformation of consciousness” we see that it takes not only a lightning bolt from Zeus but also an admonition from Athena (Fagles 24.591-7) to prevent Odysseus from bloodying the pact (24.585-91) with his hunger for dominance.
Richard S. Ruderman addresses the issue of Odysseus’ lack of transformation from a different angle. In “Odysseus and the Possibility of Enlightenment” Ruderman suggests that Odysseus sets out from early in the epic to attain Enlightenment; Ruderman says of Odysseus “he recognizes that the most heroic quest is the liberation of one’s soul from the ‘mythological’ or ‘social’ world in which it is, at first, inevitably imbedded” (140). Ruderman argues that the use of the term arnumenos, translated in Fagles translation as “to save” (1.6), “implies [instead] ‘to win what is not yet yours’” (143). Using the implied definition of arnumenos, Ruderman argues that Odysseus’ attempt to achieve Enlightenment is inseparable from his attempt to wrest his soul from the gods (143), an example of which we see when Odysseus calls Athena to task for abandoning him after the Trojan war (Fagles 13.359-62). Ruderman concludes that line of argumentation with the insistence that Odysseus ultimately fails in his endeavor because:
he is still a thymotic man who needs and accepts Athena's outlook which informs him that men can earn the eternal protection of the gods by punishing injustice and by taking risks on behalf of justice. (149-150)
We certainly see this to be the case in the example of Odysseus being forced by the bolt of Zeus and the admonition of Athena to quell his anger, or thymos, I provided earlier; rather than coming to the realization on his own that killing the peasants—who we imagine are wearing torn leather armor, if that, and are probably wielding something like pitch-forks—is unjust, it takes to intervention of the gods.
Although Ruderman defines thymos, or thumos as “spiritedness [...] the element of a person's soul that insists, often angrily, on his/her worth or dignity, and it requires the assumption of free will” (154-155), he ignores the aspect of “manliness” which Barbara Koziak begrudgingly acknowledges is typically associated with thumos (1069). While Koziak does shed light on the “manly” characteristic of thumos, she almost immediately begins to argue that thumos is not simply a masculine feeling since its range of emotional expressions are extremely varying (1069-1072). Koziak’s argument is enticing; giving the example of Achilles hospitality to Priam, she says that Achilles’ thumos is “not the anger of a militarized, overly masculinized, heroic personality, but compassion and shared sorrow, pity, and mutual fear” (1071). But Koziak’s recollection of the scene excludes the fact that Priam approaches Achilles as a suppliant (Fagles 24.560-2), which demonstrates Ruderman’s thumotic aspect of free will which he says is “granted by the gods” (155).
That’s not all that Koziak ignores; the scene in which Achilles denies Priam the instant ransom of his son and an end to the war (Fagles 24.647-69) demonstrates not only that Achilles, through his knowledge of Priam’s godly escort, adheres to Ruderman’s god-sovereignty aspect of thumos but also the “manly” thumos against which Koziak rails. Koziak is on the right track in her protest of attributing “manliness” to thumos, but her argument falls short in that endeavor because she never clearly defines masculinity. Instead, she seems to misandristically imply that the attribution of “masculinity” automatically assumes a negative connotation. In order to understand how Odysseus as a thumotic hero prevents we must remedy Koziak’s mistake and clarify the “manly” aspect of thumos.
Mark J. Justad argues in his essay “A Transvaluation of Phallic Masculinity” that “masculinity has been a reification of the experience of erection and those qualities associated with this somewhat dramatic and singular occurrence” (Justad). Using Justad’s definition, we can clarify that the masculine aspect of thumos is certainly phallic in that “it reflects the qualities and capabilities usually associated with the penis in its engorged condition—hardened up and ready to make its way in(to) the world” (Justad).
It is this phallic aspect of thumotic masculinity that prevents Odysseus from undergoing any sort of “transformation of consciousness”. Justad suggests that phallic masculinity stems from an overwhelming view of man’s body as simply an erect penis (Justad). From our first glimpse of Odysseus we see him identifying himself instrumentally phallic through his interaction with Calypso; after he weeps for his wife and is granted leave of Ogygia, Odysseus beds the goddess down before embarking on his voyage home (Fagles 5.251). The action can easily be seen as an expression of gratitude or perhaps even payment for his release since there is no implication that Odysseus is anything but ecstatic to make love with the goddess. In fact, Odysseus’ intercourse with Calypso after his release can even be seen as a way of securing his liberty with, quite literally, his phallic thrust. Odysseus, the phallic tactician, utilizes his “masculinity” on more than this occasion.
Odysseus’ adventure with the Cyclops is the first of Odysseus’ phallic exploits on his journey home. Ruderman’s assertion that Odysseus’ determination to stay and meet the inhabitants of the island is not so much simply characteristic of greed as it is of Odysseus’ attempt at reaching Enlightenment is fairly convincing (153). Ruderman suggests that Odysseus’ thumotic decision to stay on the island is the first instance in which Odysseus challenges the gods to intervene on his behalf (153). The problem with Ruderman’s assessment is that Homer gives no reason for us to believe that Odysseus has any idea of the brutality of the inhabitants of the island. I must take issue with Ruderman’s assertion that greed is not at the heart of Odysseus’ motive to stay on the island (153) since Odysseus actually says that the reason he stayed was to see “what gifts he’d give” (Fagles 9.256-258). It seems as though Ruderman were saying that any time Odysseus steps onto a foreign land and thinks of Xenia he is testing the sovereignty of Zeus. Ruderman takes for granted that since we as scholars of The Odyssey know what’s going to happen to Odysseus, he should too.
Instead of seeing an attempt at reaching Enlightenment, I see the encounter on the isle of the Cyclops as the most egregious embodiment of phallic masculinity. Although the most symbolically phallic instance takes place when Odysseus rams the sharpened log in Cyclops’ eye, it’s not until he reaches his ship that Odysseus fulfils Justad’s definition of phallic masculinity and it comes out in the form of thumos. After Odysseus’ first taunt at Cyclops, we are told that though they begged, Odysseus’ crew “could not bring [his] fighting spirit round” (Fagles 9.557-8). Admittedly, I haven’t a Greek copy of the Odyssey with which I can justify my statement, but I feel fairly certain that the “fighting spirit” that Odysseus’ crew could not “bring round” is a reference to thumos since thumos is typically translated as such (Koziak 1069). The inability of the crew to restrain Odysseus’ thumos is essentially the crew’s inability to restrain Odysseus’ hegemonic phallic masculinity; Odysseus’ expression of thumos when he yells his name at Cyclops is an expression of phallic thrust with which he aims to exercise complete dominance over his opponent.
From this point on, Odysseus continues to express thumos in some phallic sense; with Circe, for instance, Odysseus literally resorts to phallic thrust in order to dominate the nymph (Fagles 10.382-5). The encouragement from the god Hermes to use his hegemonic phallic thumos (Fagles 10.310-34) demonstrates an interesting parallel with Ruderman’s suggestion that Odysseus’ Enlightenment can only be achieved once he ceases to rely on the judgment of the gods’ (139-142) in that we see a strong desire of the god to reinforce Odysseus phallic masculinity rather than suggest an alternative. And Odysseus seems to relish in his hegemonic exercise because he stays on the island for a much longer time than necessary.
The best chance that Odysseus has to undergo a “transformation of consciousness” by alteration of his phallic masculinity presents itself when Odysseus is reunited with his son. In order for Odysseus to undergo his “transformation of consciousness,” he must achieve Enlightenment in the manner illustrated by Ruderman—he must be able to assess and dole justice without being under sovereignty of the gods—and he must do it through a sort of revaluation of his phallic identity. Justad argues:
men who choose to be fathers and are involved in the caretaking needs of children interrupt cultural gender expectations, admit to a range of revalued phallic values, and subject the (body)selves to the productive ‘baby gaze’ all in one activity. (Justad)
But Odysseus never realizes the opportunity; instead of taking time to admire his son that he’s not seen for 20 years and catching up on everything he’s missed, Odysseus launches into a tactical assessment of the situation at home (Fagles 16.265-70). As a result, Telemachus continues to view his father as the engorged member who can forcefully remove the suitors from his house.
As an old man in rags, Odysseus also has an opportunity to revalue his phallic identity. The impotence of Odysseus as an old man could help him realize that his current conception of his phallic masculinity needs to be reconsidered by forcing him to learn a more civil means of interaction better suited for everyday life. Unfortunately, Odysseus doesn’t take the opportunity to learn, metaphorically speaking, that “almost all men are genitally soft by far the greater share of the time” (Justad); he provokes the wrath of Antinous (Fagles 17.500-517) and eventually is exempted from, shall I dare say, phallic growth when he is given a chance to wrestle back his virility from the equally impotent Arnaeus (Fagles 18.102-13). Homer even goes so far in the fight scene between Irus and Odysseus to show Athena “fleshing out the limbs of the great commander” (Fagles 18.81), an action highly suggestive of phallic erection.
Athena’s intervention in the development of Odysseus’ phallic revaluation suggests further that the gods want Odysseus to remain engorged with his phallic masculinity; and they succeed. The problem with Odysseus is that he receives his phallic reinforcement far too happily; after he’s dominated the lowly beggar, despite the mocking laughter of the suitors, Odysseus rejoices in his heart while he celebrates with—appropriately enough—a “generous goat sausage,/bubbling fat and blood” (Fagles 18.130-8).
As if to deliver absolute finality in demonstration of Odysseus’ lack of a “transformation of consciousness,” the epic ends with Odysseus selecting not to restrain his hegemonic phallic thumos as he rushes after the fleeing villagers only to be stopped by the bolt of Zeus and admonition of Athena (Fagles 24.585-97). We see in this final expression of thumos that Odysseus has neither learned to reshape his own phallic identity into one more suitable for everyday life nor separated him from the hegemony of the gods that is associated with his rigid phallic identity. As a result of this lack of change, one can easily see that The Odyssey ends on a very sour note as Odysseus cheerily obeys the hegemonic phallic thumos ordained by the gods (Fagles 24.558) and we can assume that Odysseus is in for some rough times.
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Saturday, February 20, 2010
Indulgence
The atmosphere is burning dust from my hollowed bones
And all the dead are taking turns riding on the storm
It takes us back to smiling without the botoxed frowns
Where speech was never borne behind the unbolted doors
Perhaps by chance the moon could smash this damned frantic earth
A selfish thought, I know, but for men, time strangles life
Better then without.
The apartment building’s turned back
From below I hear a wounded ego burst and shout
“I need a break! I need a break!” then, “Here you’ll get none!”
Focus broken by an itch and “I must be lousy”
Then the sound of squealing brakes the man’s foreshadowed doom
Scratch the itch until it bleeds and scratching then the sores
“Who will take his room?” The tenant-master shouts. Fly, spit!
Fly! An eviction notice and power surges and
Rental trucks and collections and “Rent-to-own, my ass!”
And protein shakes and protein shakes and protein—who buys this shit?
But the itching doesn’t cease, so thoughts climb to the sky
To the atmosphere that’s burning. Before I am dust
A storm may ride the marrow from all my fleshy bones
And all the scowling slammed doors will open up to us
A smile from the holy moon unto this tantric earth
Still it’s worse to breathe in life and risk the selfish thought
I wrote this poem while I was taking one of Dr. Givan's classes. I've changed some things since then, but I'm wondering if I should perhaps revert it to its previous form. One of the problems with my revision is that I've manipulated the feet of the meter a bit too much in order to keep thirteen syllables in each line. It still retains some of the rhythm of the original, but not as much. The original on the other hand had a lot of issues that I hope I've addressed in this revision.
And all the dead are taking turns riding on the storm
It takes us back to smiling without the botoxed frowns
Where speech was never borne behind the unbolted doors
Perhaps by chance the moon could smash this damned frantic earth
A selfish thought, I know, but for men, time strangles life
Better then without.
The apartment building’s turned back
From below I hear a wounded ego burst and shout
“I need a break! I need a break!” then, “Here you’ll get none!”
Focus broken by an itch and “I must be lousy”
Then the sound of squealing brakes the man’s foreshadowed doom
Scratch the itch until it bleeds and scratching then the sores
“Who will take his room?” The tenant-master shouts. Fly, spit!
Fly! An eviction notice and power surges and
Rental trucks and collections and “Rent-to-own, my ass!”
And protein shakes and protein shakes and protein—who buys this shit?
But the itching doesn’t cease, so thoughts climb to the sky
To the atmosphere that’s burning. Before I am dust
A storm may ride the marrow from all my fleshy bones
And all the scowling slammed doors will open up to us
A smile from the holy moon unto this tantric earth
Still it’s worse to breathe in life and risk the selfish thought
I wrote this poem while I was taking one of Dr. Givan's classes. I've changed some things since then, but I'm wondering if I should perhaps revert it to its previous form. One of the problems with my revision is that I've manipulated the feet of the meter a bit too much in order to keep thirteen syllables in each line. It still retains some of the rhythm of the original, but not as much. The original on the other hand had a lot of issues that I hope I've addressed in this revision.
Friday, February 12, 2010
Flight of the Aggressor
Adam took me to
this heavy metal church
I hated god
I loved heavy metal
and
women
The service deafened me
which meant
no god-talk
and I smiled
I smiled in
church
hating god
Four years my elder,
Adam’s cousin
and
woman
small—maybe five feet—but
woman
you could see it
in her hips
Her juvenile reverse mullet
and her stretched
earlobes
couldn’t hide her
woman hips
Once she sat on my lap
I was high
on yellow jackets
I think
She looked over her
folding chair
at me
and smirked
Adam would think
“you’re going to hell”
because I knew nothing
of his “savior”
But I had a savior
she stole from me
my thirsty razor blade
and steadied my hands
and dried my cheeks
with the spiders from mars
In the heavy metal church
she gave me a smirk
before she led me
to her friend
The proselytizing screamer
previously gay
four years her elder
knotted his fingers with hers
the man she’d wed
alive
in a graveyard
I told Adam
God is like a blind man
walking on a twisting
stone
and he thought
“you’re going to hell”
because I knew nothing
of his “savior”
But I had a savior
and she abandoned me
I found a terrible poem I'd written a number of years ago with the same title and some of the same themes. It was awful--I'm not yet sure this one is any better--so I rewrote it and it turned into this memory of a girl I'd once been in love with. It needs a lot of work, I'm sure.
this heavy metal church
I hated god
I loved heavy metal
and
women
The service deafened me
which meant
no god-talk
and I smiled
I smiled in
church
hating god
Four years my elder,
Adam’s cousin
and
woman
small—maybe five feet—but
woman
you could see it
in her hips
Her juvenile reverse mullet
and her stretched
earlobes
couldn’t hide her
woman hips
Once she sat on my lap
I was high
on yellow jackets
I think
She looked over her
folding chair
at me
and smirked
Adam would think
“you’re going to hell”
because I knew nothing
of his “savior”
But I had a savior
she stole from me
my thirsty razor blade
and steadied my hands
and dried my cheeks
with the spiders from mars
In the heavy metal church
she gave me a smirk
before she led me
to her friend
The proselytizing screamer
previously gay
four years her elder
knotted his fingers with hers
the man she’d wed
alive
in a graveyard
I told Adam
God is like a blind man
walking on a twisting
stone
and he thought
“you’re going to hell”
because I knew nothing
of his “savior”
But I had a savior
and she abandoned me
I found a terrible poem I'd written a number of years ago with the same title and some of the same themes. It was awful--I'm not yet sure this one is any better--so I rewrote it and it turned into this memory of a girl I'd once been in love with. It needs a lot of work, I'm sure.
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Marquez and Roh: Gods of Magical Realism
This was a research paper I wrote for Dr. Spencer's class. It was pretty bad but somehow I got an A on it. I think I got an A. Maybe it was a B. I studied my ass off for this damned paper. When I finished writing the paper I changed the font to Times New Roman and printed it. I looked at the paper and thought that the font looked way too fat but when I looked at the document it didn't show that it was bold, so I thought I'd just forgotten what the font looked like. After she graded my paper there was a pretty annoyed note on it that said something to the effect of "NEVER CHOOSE A BOLD FONT!" and that's when I remembered I'd manually downloaded a ton of fonts since my questionable copy of MS Word installed without any fonts.
Garbiel Garcia Marquez is obviously noted for his use of a style of writing called “Magical Realism”. The simplicity of the term, however, is incredibly elusive and has led to a hefty amount of criticism due to its lack of a concrete definition in literature. Despite the difficulties in pinning down an adequate definition of Marquez’ writing style, it is peculiar that its namesake is derived from a German art critic’s term for Post-Expressionist art. Furthermore, Marquez’ repeated use of a theme I have termed “the eternal interim” suggests that the term “magical realism” does not differ as greatly as it seems from the artistic medium to the literary.
It was Franz Roh who first attributed the term to the visual artistic medium as an attempt to break away from the uninspiring term “Post-Expressionism” which, “only indicates ancestry and chronological relationship” (Roh 16). And although his statement that “with the word ‘magic’ as opposed to ‘mystic,’ I wish to indicate that the mystery does not descend to the represented world, but rather hides and palpitates behind it” (Roh 16), initially seems to be opposite to Marquez’ use of magical realism, there is an undeniable similarity in Marquez’ intentions and Roh’s somewhat enigmatic definition.
Roh’s magical realism is one which seems more realistic than magical as is evident in Christian Schad’s “Sonja.” In the painting, a woman sits at a table with a cigarette in her hand; there is no emotion expressed on her face and the image is presented without context, yet the dark circles under her heavy eyes reliably demonstrate ugliness inherent in the subject rather than the artist’s interpretation. This dreary expression which hides behind a lack of expression suggests fatigue, stress, and near collapse which seems to serve as a commentary on the state of the German nation (and the rest of the world) after World War I.
Marquez, in his Nobel lecture after receiving the Nobel Prize, echoes that same idea of destruction as that of his artistic predecessors when he cites, among other things, that “Numerous women arrested while pregnant have given birth in Argentine prisons, yet nobody knows the whereabouts and identity of their children who were furtively adopted or sent to an orphanage by order of the military authorities” (The Nobel Foundation). For Marquez, the magic which Roh suggested “palpitates behind [reality]” (Roh 16), is on more equal footing with reality as is evinced in his example of “General Antonio López de Santana, three times dictator of Mexico, [who] held a magnificent funeral for the right leg he had lost in the so-called Pastry War” (The Nobel Foundation). As such, Marquez’ magical realism becomes almost an exact reiteration of Roh’s definition.
The major difference between the two is that Marquez is able to openly express the magical aspect without compromising the realist. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, after Jose Arcadio Buendia has taken the men of the village on an exploratory mission to get in contact with the rest of the world, we are told that “for more than ten days, they did not see the sun” (11) and then that “the world became eternally sad” (11) in such an assertive manner that it is almost as if a reporter were relating purely objective facts. Arcadio’s response to the madness, “it’s all right [. . .] The main thing is not to lose our bearings” (Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude 12) is highly characteristic of Marquez’ faithfulness to reality and is eerily reminiscent of a point that Roh makes of Post-Expressionist art: “One could say that once again a profound calm and thoughtfulness prevails, a calm that is perhaps a prelude to a new flight, launched with more mature knowledge and earthly substance” (Roh 17).
Like the post-expressionist artists, Marquez experienced all of the atrocities of destabilization being perpetrated not only in his home country, but throughout all of Latin America; Anderson says in an article in The New Yorker, “The country has been engulfed in a complicated civil war for more than half a century, and most of the victims of the violence have been civilians” (Anderson). As Marquez suggests in his Nobel lecture, The Solitude of Latin America, it is both the combination of apathy on the part of first-world developed nations and the viciousness of the atrocities committed in Latin America that contribute to the dominating sense of solitude which permeates through all of Marquez’ works (The Nobel Foundation). Although that comes as no surprise to anyone familiar with Marquez, there exists also in his Nobel lecture the invocation of a more silent theme which shows up almost as frequently as that of solitude when he suggests that “it is not yet too late to engage in the creation of [. . .] A new and sweeping utopia of life, where no one will be able to decide for others how they die, [. . .] and where the races condemned to one hundred years of solitude will have, at last and forever, a second opportunity on earth.” (The Nobel Foundation). This silent theme which rears its head repeatedly through Marquez’ work is what I like to call “the eternal interim.”
From the outset of most of Marquez’ works we are introduced to a sense of “the eternal interim”; in Strange Pilgrims, we are greeted in “Bon Voyage, Mr. President” by the opening lines: “He sat on a wooden bench under the yellow leaves in the deserted park, contemplating the dusty swans with both his hands resting on the silver handle of his can, and thinking about death” (3) and we are told shortly thereafter that “the years of glory and power had been left behind forever, and now only the years of his death remained” (4). As we see the deposed president hand the few possessions he has over to Lazara in order to pay for his surgery (Marquez, Strange Pilgrims 26-27), we see in him the desperation he has to return to normalcy. Unfortunately, he doesn’t discover as we do that the real tragedy is not that he has been overthrown or that he lives impoverished or even that his pain will never be alleviated, but, as Lazara shouts at the end, that “nothing can kill that man” (Marquez, Strange Pilgrims 34). In fact, as we read through the story, it becomes apparent that the only time that the deposed president actually was at peace was during nonexistence, since every recollection of his life is filled with pain and turmoil. Life, therefore, in the case of the deposed president, is his eternal interim between the two stages of nonexistence.
This idea sees its parallel in Roh’s writing when he says of Magical Realist art: “Here, perhaps, the background is the last frontier, absolute nothingness, absolute death, from which something emerges and vibrates with energetic intensity” (20). “The eternal interim” exists much more concretely in Magical Realist art, for the evidence of its interim exists between the borders of the background; the image in that space is forever between absolute nothingness. The fact that Magical Realist artists tended to focus on people in their works only increases the similarities between the Magical Realism in Marquez’ literature and that of Roh’s essay. In “Bon Voyage, Mr. President” from Strange Pilgrims, that something which crystallizes from the void is the life of the deposed president, for Schad, it is the unknown “Sonja”.
In the case of Marquez’ home country, this makes perfect sense. Before colonialization, Latin America can almost be seen, as Marquez writes in One Hundred Years of Solitude, as a “world so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point” (1), which is obviously very reminiscent of the Garden of Eden; without any need for argument, it is apparent that this reference connotes an inherent peace in that world. The Latin American, in the current sense of the term, didn’t exist until after colonialization, and for Colombians, as well as many others, colonialization meant severe oppression. And although Colombia eventually threw off Spain’s oppressive reins in 1810 (Ruch), peace still has yet to be realized as civil wars and feuds between guerillas and drug cartels ravage the country and its populace (Anderson).
With this under consideration, we may deduce that, whether intentionally or not, “the eternal interim” in Marquez’ “Bon Voyage, Mr. President” serves as a sad sense of hopelessness extending to the state of Latin America which screams that the only time peace can be attained is through nonexistence. Yet this is not the limit to the theme of “the eternal interim.” In the short story, “The Saint” from Strange Pilgrims, we are introduced to Margarito Duarte of whom the narrator says, “was the character in search of an author that we novelists wait for all our lives, and if I never allowed him to find me it was because the end of his story seemed unimaginable” (37). Duarte carries around a cello case in which lies the rose-scented, weightless, and pristine corpse of his daughter, who is referred to throughout the story as “the Saint,” for at least twenty-two years in the hopes that he might finally have his daughter declared a saint by the pope. The theme of “the eternal interim” in “The Saint” serves as a compliment to its use in the previous story in Strange Pilgrims in that whereas “Bon Voyage, Mr. President” suggested that peace was a nearly inconceivable notion for Latin Americans, Latin America’s interim leads to a sort of saintliness to all of Latin America’s people; at the end of the story, the narrator says of Duarte, “then I had no doubt, if I ever had any at all, that the Saint was Margarito. Without realizing it, by means of his daughter’s incorruptible body and while he was still alive, he had spent twenty-two years fighting for the legitimate cause of his own canonization” (53).
Perhaps the idea of expressing the spiritual magnificence of the human being is something Roh too saw in the productions of art exhibited by the Post-Expressionists when he says that “the invention and re-establishment of the object can reveal us to the idea of creation” (Roh 24). As the sad and solitary aspects of Duarte lead to the narrator’s perception of him as a saint, Roh says of the use of tragic and harsh elements of realism that “the Expressionist ideal has not been realized because of the tragic fact that creating the best always means a compromise with what really exists” (24). This suggests that Roh senses, as Marquez does, that the use of Magical Realism in its most uncompromising sense of the term is the best way to capture the essence of the human spirit in all of its mundane glory.
The importance of acknowledging a similarity between Marquez’ Magical Realism and that set out by Franz Roh is absolutely necessary to dispelling any ideas that Magical Realism as a term is equal to fantasy or fiction as some might believe. Expressing the similarities between the two usages of Magical Realism via what I’ve termed “the eternal interim” is perhaps not the best method, but if we are to consider that “many authors, including Borges and Garcia Marquez, begin to wonder whether they themselves might not be the figments of someone else’s dreams” (Damrosch 546), perhaps the period between sleep and wake of the dreamer is just as important to Marquez’ use of Magical Realism to define a continent as it is for Roh’s desire to define an artistic movement beyond simply comparing it to its predecessor.
Garbiel Garcia Marquez is obviously noted for his use of a style of writing called “Magical Realism”. The simplicity of the term, however, is incredibly elusive and has led to a hefty amount of criticism due to its lack of a concrete definition in literature. Despite the difficulties in pinning down an adequate definition of Marquez’ writing style, it is peculiar that its namesake is derived from a German art critic’s term for Post-Expressionist art. Furthermore, Marquez’ repeated use of a theme I have termed “the eternal interim” suggests that the term “magical realism” does not differ as greatly as it seems from the artistic medium to the literary.
It was Franz Roh who first attributed the term to the visual artistic medium as an attempt to break away from the uninspiring term “Post-Expressionism” which, “only indicates ancestry and chronological relationship” (Roh 16). And although his statement that “with the word ‘magic’ as opposed to ‘mystic,’ I wish to indicate that the mystery does not descend to the represented world, but rather hides and palpitates behind it” (Roh 16), initially seems to be opposite to Marquez’ use of magical realism, there is an undeniable similarity in Marquez’ intentions and Roh’s somewhat enigmatic definition.
Roh’s magical realism is one which seems more realistic than magical as is evident in Christian Schad’s “Sonja.” In the painting, a woman sits at a table with a cigarette in her hand; there is no emotion expressed on her face and the image is presented without context, yet the dark circles under her heavy eyes reliably demonstrate ugliness inherent in the subject rather than the artist’s interpretation. This dreary expression which hides behind a lack of expression suggests fatigue, stress, and near collapse which seems to serve as a commentary on the state of the German nation (and the rest of the world) after World War I.
Marquez, in his Nobel lecture after receiving the Nobel Prize, echoes that same idea of destruction as that of his artistic predecessors when he cites, among other things, that “Numerous women arrested while pregnant have given birth in Argentine prisons, yet nobody knows the whereabouts and identity of their children who were furtively adopted or sent to an orphanage by order of the military authorities” (The Nobel Foundation). For Marquez, the magic which Roh suggested “palpitates behind [reality]” (Roh 16), is on more equal footing with reality as is evinced in his example of “General Antonio López de Santana, three times dictator of Mexico, [who] held a magnificent funeral for the right leg he had lost in the so-called Pastry War” (The Nobel Foundation). As such, Marquez’ magical realism becomes almost an exact reiteration of Roh’s definition.
The major difference between the two is that Marquez is able to openly express the magical aspect without compromising the realist. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, after Jose Arcadio Buendia has taken the men of the village on an exploratory mission to get in contact with the rest of the world, we are told that “for more than ten days, they did not see the sun” (11) and then that “the world became eternally sad” (11) in such an assertive manner that it is almost as if a reporter were relating purely objective facts. Arcadio’s response to the madness, “it’s all right [. . .] The main thing is not to lose our bearings” (Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude 12) is highly characteristic of Marquez’ faithfulness to reality and is eerily reminiscent of a point that Roh makes of Post-Expressionist art: “One could say that once again a profound calm and thoughtfulness prevails, a calm that is perhaps a prelude to a new flight, launched with more mature knowledge and earthly substance” (Roh 17).
Like the post-expressionist artists, Marquez experienced all of the atrocities of destabilization being perpetrated not only in his home country, but throughout all of Latin America; Anderson says in an article in The New Yorker, “The country has been engulfed in a complicated civil war for more than half a century, and most of the victims of the violence have been civilians” (Anderson). As Marquez suggests in his Nobel lecture, The Solitude of Latin America, it is both the combination of apathy on the part of first-world developed nations and the viciousness of the atrocities committed in Latin America that contribute to the dominating sense of solitude which permeates through all of Marquez’ works (The Nobel Foundation). Although that comes as no surprise to anyone familiar with Marquez, there exists also in his Nobel lecture the invocation of a more silent theme which shows up almost as frequently as that of solitude when he suggests that “it is not yet too late to engage in the creation of [. . .] A new and sweeping utopia of life, where no one will be able to decide for others how they die, [. . .] and where the races condemned to one hundred years of solitude will have, at last and forever, a second opportunity on earth.” (The Nobel Foundation). This silent theme which rears its head repeatedly through Marquez’ work is what I like to call “the eternal interim.”
From the outset of most of Marquez’ works we are introduced to a sense of “the eternal interim”; in Strange Pilgrims, we are greeted in “Bon Voyage, Mr. President” by the opening lines: “He sat on a wooden bench under the yellow leaves in the deserted park, contemplating the dusty swans with both his hands resting on the silver handle of his can, and thinking about death” (3) and we are told shortly thereafter that “the years of glory and power had been left behind forever, and now only the years of his death remained” (4). As we see the deposed president hand the few possessions he has over to Lazara in order to pay for his surgery (Marquez, Strange Pilgrims 26-27), we see in him the desperation he has to return to normalcy. Unfortunately, he doesn’t discover as we do that the real tragedy is not that he has been overthrown or that he lives impoverished or even that his pain will never be alleviated, but, as Lazara shouts at the end, that “nothing can kill that man” (Marquez, Strange Pilgrims 34). In fact, as we read through the story, it becomes apparent that the only time that the deposed president actually was at peace was during nonexistence, since every recollection of his life is filled with pain and turmoil. Life, therefore, in the case of the deposed president, is his eternal interim between the two stages of nonexistence.
This idea sees its parallel in Roh’s writing when he says of Magical Realist art: “Here, perhaps, the background is the last frontier, absolute nothingness, absolute death, from which something emerges and vibrates with energetic intensity” (20). “The eternal interim” exists much more concretely in Magical Realist art, for the evidence of its interim exists between the borders of the background; the image in that space is forever between absolute nothingness. The fact that Magical Realist artists tended to focus on people in their works only increases the similarities between the Magical Realism in Marquez’ literature and that of Roh’s essay. In “Bon Voyage, Mr. President” from Strange Pilgrims, that something which crystallizes from the void is the life of the deposed president, for Schad, it is the unknown “Sonja”.
In the case of Marquez’ home country, this makes perfect sense. Before colonialization, Latin America can almost be seen, as Marquez writes in One Hundred Years of Solitude, as a “world so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point” (1), which is obviously very reminiscent of the Garden of Eden; without any need for argument, it is apparent that this reference connotes an inherent peace in that world. The Latin American, in the current sense of the term, didn’t exist until after colonialization, and for Colombians, as well as many others, colonialization meant severe oppression. And although Colombia eventually threw off Spain’s oppressive reins in 1810 (Ruch), peace still has yet to be realized as civil wars and feuds between guerillas and drug cartels ravage the country and its populace (Anderson).
With this under consideration, we may deduce that, whether intentionally or not, “the eternal interim” in Marquez’ “Bon Voyage, Mr. President” serves as a sad sense of hopelessness extending to the state of Latin America which screams that the only time peace can be attained is through nonexistence. Yet this is not the limit to the theme of “the eternal interim.” In the short story, “The Saint” from Strange Pilgrims, we are introduced to Margarito Duarte of whom the narrator says, “was the character in search of an author that we novelists wait for all our lives, and if I never allowed him to find me it was because the end of his story seemed unimaginable” (37). Duarte carries around a cello case in which lies the rose-scented, weightless, and pristine corpse of his daughter, who is referred to throughout the story as “the Saint,” for at least twenty-two years in the hopes that he might finally have his daughter declared a saint by the pope. The theme of “the eternal interim” in “The Saint” serves as a compliment to its use in the previous story in Strange Pilgrims in that whereas “Bon Voyage, Mr. President” suggested that peace was a nearly inconceivable notion for Latin Americans, Latin America’s interim leads to a sort of saintliness to all of Latin America’s people; at the end of the story, the narrator says of Duarte, “then I had no doubt, if I ever had any at all, that the Saint was Margarito. Without realizing it, by means of his daughter’s incorruptible body and while he was still alive, he had spent twenty-two years fighting for the legitimate cause of his own canonization” (53).
Perhaps the idea of expressing the spiritual magnificence of the human being is something Roh too saw in the productions of art exhibited by the Post-Expressionists when he says that “the invention and re-establishment of the object can reveal us to the idea of creation” (Roh 24). As the sad and solitary aspects of Duarte lead to the narrator’s perception of him as a saint, Roh says of the use of tragic and harsh elements of realism that “the Expressionist ideal has not been realized because of the tragic fact that creating the best always means a compromise with what really exists” (24). This suggests that Roh senses, as Marquez does, that the use of Magical Realism in its most uncompromising sense of the term is the best way to capture the essence of the human spirit in all of its mundane glory.
The importance of acknowledging a similarity between Marquez’ Magical Realism and that set out by Franz Roh is absolutely necessary to dispelling any ideas that Magical Realism as a term is equal to fantasy or fiction as some might believe. Expressing the similarities between the two usages of Magical Realism via what I’ve termed “the eternal interim” is perhaps not the best method, but if we are to consider that “many authors, including Borges and Garcia Marquez, begin to wonder whether they themselves might not be the figments of someone else’s dreams” (Damrosch 546), perhaps the period between sleep and wake of the dreamer is just as important to Marquez’ use of Magical Realism to define a continent as it is for Roh’s desire to define an artistic movement beyond simply comparing it to its predecessor.
Monday, February 8, 2010
Failure of the year
This is perhaps one of the worst things I've ever endeavored to write recently. I never finished it because I kept revising and making it worse before I made any progress at all. It might be funny to someone. It's just embarrassing to me.
Hami Rothchild started his day with a piece of toast upon which he spread a 1.3 centimeter thick square of butter. Hami’s first thoughts on this particular morning were of God and his earthly son, Flarmy Periwinkle. Hami had devoted himself to Flarmy’s teachings for four dozen years and he thought it finally time to carry out the Flarmyst pilgrimage as written in the Flarmyst holy book, the Garble. He hadn’t read the Garble because he never could understand Garblical poetry, but he had been told by Flarmyst Bloggerwinkles that the Pilgrimage involved taking his firstborn son to the top of the Yaddlihoo’s prow and whispering the first four books of the Garble into his ear during a heavy storm. But now was not the time for Flarmycy, Hami thought as he looked at the idle knife and toast before him, now was the time for buttered toast. Tomorrow— yes, tomorrow he would make plans for his pilgrimage.
As he resumed the work of spreading the butter upon his whole wheat toast he thought of his eldest son, Hari. Hari was a boy of no particular talents, but there was a sort of calculated grace in his stride that made him almost godlike, Hami thought. Of course, it was certainly true what his deceased wife had said of Hari, that the kid had “spunk, no motivation, destined for failure,” but there was something about the boy that had always made Hami light up whenever the boy was in his presence. Hami was certain that the Pilgrimage to the Yadlihoo would awaken in Hari that which had been missing. “Who knows,” thought Hami, “perhaps my little Hari will be the next Periwinkle!”
Hami returned again from his Flarmyst daze to his toast. He sat in a lazily constructed folding metal chair, a product of the Taiwan-based American company, Bolognial – the owner of the company, one Christian Bassi, had named it thus because it was his greatest belief that the reason for America’s great success was entirely due to the invention of bologna, which furthermore he believed was the work of a genius American entrepreneur such as himself; sadly, Christian was completely ignorant of the fact that Bologna was named after mortadella, a meat famous in the Italian city of Bologna from which Christian’s ancestors hailed – and he thought again of Hari. This time, however, he began to brood darkly on Hari.
Hami leaned over his thin and slightly radioactive ceramic plate—also of Bolognial manufacture—to bite into his buttered toast. As he continued to think of Hari, an almost inconceivably small drop of saliva fell on a rivet from his Bolognial chair. His mouth neared the toast’s crispy crust as he thought of Hari and the lubricated rivet shot from its house and launched itself out of Hami’s third story window. It then bounced off a fire hydrant in front of Hami’s apartment complex and came to a sudden rest between the radiator fan and its housing of Billy Singh’s taxi, causing Billy Singh to pull off the road and Hami to fall awkwardly to the floor with his toast fitting him now like a slightly buttery glove. Both men cursed simultaneously.
At that precise moment, Dromi Rothchild, the youngest of Hami’s sons, walked into the kitchen and laughed.
“Hey Hari, come check dad out!” Dromi yelled.
Hari sat up in his twin bed. It was noon, meaning that Hari had already missed three of his classes at the university. The clothes hanging from his closet doorknob, on the bookcase whose books were tomes of dust, and on the floor were like casualties of the bubonic plague; here a shirt stretched its sleeve as if gasping for its last breath; here a pair of jeans pocked by bubos rest like a pair of legs collapsed under the weight of a fatigued body; and over there, beside the dusty guitar, lay a hat smelling of rotting flesh.
In the apartment next to Sami’s a crisis was occurring. Tess Ball bumped her hip on her low kitchen counter and let out a primal scream. Tears were forming in her eyes as she picked a pillow up off her couch, dropped it, picked it up again, and not being satisfied with whatever it was she was doing, dropped to the floor and peered under her couch. But she would not let the tears break free – no, not Tess Ball! She was strong! She was fierce! She was woman, hear her roar! And she could crush any man underneath her tastefully black and orthopedically smart half-inch heels – that is, if she could find them. But it was Thursday, and Thursdays never were quite right for Tess; last Thursday it was the kid at Starbucks and his inability to correctly produce the thick foam on her latte, the Thursday before that it was that cabbie who wore the weird head thing and the girly metal bracelet frowning at her repeatedly through the rearview mirror, and this week it was her favorite pair of heels.
Despite the fact that they were heels and delightfully comfortable heels at that, Tess cringed every time somebody actually had the gall to refer to them as heels. She hadn’t any better name for them but simply “shoes” but she was irritated none-the-less when people naturally assumed that they were heels and even more so when other women complimented her by saying “nice heels!” and then turned their own feet and looked at their own. But she would never give those bitches the satisfaction of replying with an, “Oh! Thanks! Yours too,” or even an acknowledging shrug. She wasn’t Victoria Beckham, damn it! She was Tess Fucking Ball!
Hami Rothchild started his day with a piece of toast upon which he spread a 1.3 centimeter thick square of butter. Hami’s first thoughts on this particular morning were of God and his earthly son, Flarmy Periwinkle. Hami had devoted himself to Flarmy’s teachings for four dozen years and he thought it finally time to carry out the Flarmyst pilgrimage as written in the Flarmyst holy book, the Garble. He hadn’t read the Garble because he never could understand Garblical poetry, but he had been told by Flarmyst Bloggerwinkles that the Pilgrimage involved taking his firstborn son to the top of the Yaddlihoo’s prow and whispering the first four books of the Garble into his ear during a heavy storm. But now was not the time for Flarmycy, Hami thought as he looked at the idle knife and toast before him, now was the time for buttered toast. Tomorrow— yes, tomorrow he would make plans for his pilgrimage.
As he resumed the work of spreading the butter upon his whole wheat toast he thought of his eldest son, Hari. Hari was a boy of no particular talents, but there was a sort of calculated grace in his stride that made him almost godlike, Hami thought. Of course, it was certainly true what his deceased wife had said of Hari, that the kid had “spunk, no motivation, destined for failure,” but there was something about the boy that had always made Hami light up whenever the boy was in his presence. Hami was certain that the Pilgrimage to the Yadlihoo would awaken in Hari that which had been missing. “Who knows,” thought Hami, “perhaps my little Hari will be the next Periwinkle!”
Hami returned again from his Flarmyst daze to his toast. He sat in a lazily constructed folding metal chair, a product of the Taiwan-based American company, Bolognial – the owner of the company, one Christian Bassi, had named it thus because it was his greatest belief that the reason for America’s great success was entirely due to the invention of bologna, which furthermore he believed was the work of a genius American entrepreneur such as himself; sadly, Christian was completely ignorant of the fact that Bologna was named after mortadella, a meat famous in the Italian city of Bologna from which Christian’s ancestors hailed – and he thought again of Hari. This time, however, he began to brood darkly on Hari.
Hami leaned over his thin and slightly radioactive ceramic plate—also of Bolognial manufacture—to bite into his buttered toast. As he continued to think of Hari, an almost inconceivably small drop of saliva fell on a rivet from his Bolognial chair. His mouth neared the toast’s crispy crust as he thought of Hari and the lubricated rivet shot from its house and launched itself out of Hami’s third story window. It then bounced off a fire hydrant in front of Hami’s apartment complex and came to a sudden rest between the radiator fan and its housing of Billy Singh’s taxi, causing Billy Singh to pull off the road and Hami to fall awkwardly to the floor with his toast fitting him now like a slightly buttery glove. Both men cursed simultaneously.
At that precise moment, Dromi Rothchild, the youngest of Hami’s sons, walked into the kitchen and laughed.
“Hey Hari, come check dad out!” Dromi yelled.
Hari sat up in his twin bed. It was noon, meaning that Hari had already missed three of his classes at the university. The clothes hanging from his closet doorknob, on the bookcase whose books were tomes of dust, and on the floor were like casualties of the bubonic plague; here a shirt stretched its sleeve as if gasping for its last breath; here a pair of jeans pocked by bubos rest like a pair of legs collapsed under the weight of a fatigued body; and over there, beside the dusty guitar, lay a hat smelling of rotting flesh.
In the apartment next to Sami’s a crisis was occurring. Tess Ball bumped her hip on her low kitchen counter and let out a primal scream. Tears were forming in her eyes as she picked a pillow up off her couch, dropped it, picked it up again, and not being satisfied with whatever it was she was doing, dropped to the floor and peered under her couch. But she would not let the tears break free – no, not Tess Ball! She was strong! She was fierce! She was woman, hear her roar! And she could crush any man underneath her tastefully black and orthopedically smart half-inch heels – that is, if she could find them. But it was Thursday, and Thursdays never were quite right for Tess; last Thursday it was the kid at Starbucks and his inability to correctly produce the thick foam on her latte, the Thursday before that it was that cabbie who wore the weird head thing and the girly metal bracelet frowning at her repeatedly through the rearview mirror, and this week it was her favorite pair of heels.
Despite the fact that they were heels and delightfully comfortable heels at that, Tess cringed every time somebody actually had the gall to refer to them as heels. She hadn’t any better name for them but simply “shoes” but she was irritated none-the-less when people naturally assumed that they were heels and even more so when other women complimented her by saying “nice heels!” and then turned their own feet and looked at their own. But she would never give those bitches the satisfaction of replying with an, “Oh! Thanks! Yours too,” or even an acknowledging shrug. She wasn’t Victoria Beckham, damn it! She was Tess Fucking Ball!
Sunday, February 7, 2010
Somebody Else's Life
Here's a short prose-poem kind of short story I wrote while reading Ulysses. I should probably change Dwayne's name since he's actually modeled after a crackhead I once knew of the same name. I doubt he reads much anyway.
Dwayne awoke on the ballast beside a set of rail tracks. No derailed train. Dwayne stood up and squinted in the glare of the noon-time sun. He brushed his hands through his hair and untangled a twig from his locks. I am the railway keeper. All of you bow and marvel at my presence. Who are the new Rockefeller and Carnegie? I wonder if mom’s home. Dwayne rubbed his dirty hands on his pants. Palms up, palms down. I smell just like shit. He hurried away from the tracks and carried his bulk down the cracked streets. Bill. What the hell happened to Bill? Wild high last night. I must have passed out before catching the train. Wonder if Bill got on. Ain’t no sunshine when he’s gone.
Dwayne spotted two old women eyeing him from a porch as he walked down the street. Dying ferns sat on the porch railing above cracked white balusters. He waved. The two old ladies looked in opposite directions. When was the last time either of them got laid? When was the last time I got laid?
— Nice plants you got there! Question of the day: Am I human? Rotting bird on the left says no. Old girl on the right says:
— Why thank you, young man. Now you recognize me, you withered cunt? When was the last time you got laid? When was the last time I got laid? I sold my brain for Cocaine. She’s all right.
The brutish sun was intent on crusting Dwayne’s flesh so he moved from the streets to the yards where he could duck under the shade of the trees in each lawn. He reached his mother’s house. Nobody home. A new neighbor was cleaning his car across the street. Old clothes. Dirty car. Lovely braids though.
— How’s it going? I’ve never seen you around here before. You just move in? Scares easily. He’s got a clean chin too. Maybe he’ll give me a cigarette.
— Yeah. I just moved in a few weeks ago. Hey listen, I was just about to eat something. Why don’t you come inside?
— Here I am at your mercy, kid – by the way, you look like some greatly gifted man and a good Christian, if not Christ himself. Yes, I see you now stooping down at the water’s edge. What a fair sight for my sore eyes. You see, yesterday my friend Bill and I set out after having lost our car to a plain-dealing villain who tricked us under the guise of good Christian charity. This morning – I know not how – I awoke sprawled upon the ballast by a set of rail tracks and have since suffered the glare of the old women and the hellish son.
The kid looked down at his feet. I doubt this dope understands anything I said. Need to get a ride.
— I’m not sure I believe all that. What exactly do you want? Kid thinks he’s better than me. Thinks me wicked. The look of contempt says all. But I’m not wicked. Far from it. Were I wicked I would eat his heart in the driveway.
— You won’t judge me with cruel eyes because I know you are a kind and generous man. Look at him! The fawning dear looks up at me with modest eyes. Ha!
— I’m not as good as you think, but what do you want? Fool’s caving! Let me eat his flesh. Joke. Not wicked.
— All I need really is a ride to a friend’s house who lives about twenty minutes from here. He can help set me straight and bring me back to Bill. Crack cocaine soon. Good. Head dry.
— Is that all? I’ll take you. Yes I will. Yes.
Dwayne awoke on the ballast beside a set of rail tracks. No derailed train. Dwayne stood up and squinted in the glare of the noon-time sun. He brushed his hands through his hair and untangled a twig from his locks. I am the railway keeper. All of you bow and marvel at my presence. Who are the new Rockefeller and Carnegie? I wonder if mom’s home. Dwayne rubbed his dirty hands on his pants. Palms up, palms down. I smell just like shit. He hurried away from the tracks and carried his bulk down the cracked streets. Bill. What the hell happened to Bill? Wild high last night. I must have passed out before catching the train. Wonder if Bill got on. Ain’t no sunshine when he’s gone.
Dwayne spotted two old women eyeing him from a porch as he walked down the street. Dying ferns sat on the porch railing above cracked white balusters. He waved. The two old ladies looked in opposite directions. When was the last time either of them got laid? When was the last time I got laid?
— Nice plants you got there! Question of the day: Am I human? Rotting bird on the left says no. Old girl on the right says:
— Why thank you, young man. Now you recognize me, you withered cunt? When was the last time you got laid? When was the last time I got laid? I sold my brain for Cocaine. She’s all right.
The brutish sun was intent on crusting Dwayne’s flesh so he moved from the streets to the yards where he could duck under the shade of the trees in each lawn. He reached his mother’s house. Nobody home. A new neighbor was cleaning his car across the street. Old clothes. Dirty car. Lovely braids though.
— How’s it going? I’ve never seen you around here before. You just move in? Scares easily. He’s got a clean chin too. Maybe he’ll give me a cigarette.
— Yeah. I just moved in a few weeks ago. Hey listen, I was just about to eat something. Why don’t you come inside?
— Here I am at your mercy, kid – by the way, you look like some greatly gifted man and a good Christian, if not Christ himself. Yes, I see you now stooping down at the water’s edge. What a fair sight for my sore eyes. You see, yesterday my friend Bill and I set out after having lost our car to a plain-dealing villain who tricked us under the guise of good Christian charity. This morning – I know not how – I awoke sprawled upon the ballast by a set of rail tracks and have since suffered the glare of the old women and the hellish son.
The kid looked down at his feet. I doubt this dope understands anything I said. Need to get a ride.
— I’m not sure I believe all that. What exactly do you want? Kid thinks he’s better than me. Thinks me wicked. The look of contempt says all. But I’m not wicked. Far from it. Were I wicked I would eat his heart in the driveway.
— You won’t judge me with cruel eyes because I know you are a kind and generous man. Look at him! The fawning dear looks up at me with modest eyes. Ha!
— I’m not as good as you think, but what do you want? Fool’s caving! Let me eat his flesh. Joke. Not wicked.
— All I need really is a ride to a friend’s house who lives about twenty minutes from here. He can help set me straight and bring me back to Bill. Crack cocaine soon. Good. Head dry.
— Is that all? I’ll take you. Yes I will. Yes.
Friday, February 5, 2010
Cork and Bottle Romance
O
Oppressor
I
She standing with lifted skirt
Her love insatiable
And her goldstopped teeth
Thrusting garlic through my hairy nostrils
Disgust
No
Lovelust
Swooned by garlic must
Back the chancre
Wench I must command you
My lucky potato whence you stole
O
Oppressor
I
I wrote this poem in response to one of the chapters in James Joyce's Ulysses. Even those familiar with the novel may have to do some searching through the book to see what I'm getting at. I was doing a lot of research on issues with masculine identities when I wrote this. The form of the poem has many phallic and vaginal images.
Oppressor
I
She standing with lifted skirt
Her love insatiable
And her goldstopped teeth
Thrusting garlic through my hairy nostrils
Disgust
No
Lovelust
Swooned by garlic must
Back the chancre
Wench I must command you
My lucky potato whence you stole
O
Oppressor
I
I wrote this poem in response to one of the chapters in James Joyce's Ulysses. Even those familiar with the novel may have to do some searching through the book to see what I'm getting at. I was doing a lot of research on issues with masculine identities when I wrote this. The form of the poem has many phallic and vaginal images.
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