"If the lost word is lost,” into a Novel Between Worlds.
Mom was talking about her favorite trees, the Copper Beech in the front of the house that the kids know as Mabel, and the Pine Trees at Grandad's farm in Bridgeborough, Ga. Every ten years they harvested the trees. Even her grandkids are gardeners. We recalled her growing up and the fights after brown vs board of education, the hateful things people said that I cant say here. I knew I wasn't going to go back, says Mom. Still the Copper Beach stands looking about at us all in the front of her yard, ever majestic. She's seen a lot.
On the way back from Mom’s, I dropped by @randolfewicker’s home in Jersey City. He meets me outside for a stroll, ever the consummate organizer, greeting everyone on the elevator, n the way up to his apartment, chatting about dogs and rent strikes. We talked about the birthday he shares with Gertrude Stein, his philosophy of life, longevity, struggles against toxic masculinity, and a show he saw, “yira yira, cruising cruising,” ...."I expected a film; instead I sat riveted by the one of the most extraordinary pieces of theater I've seen in my entire life....Each of the four characters were different types of hookers I've known in my life....most of my self chosen family have been prostitutes." It's always a pleasure Randolfe... many returns.
Both conversations seemed to permeate the novel I was reading, 2666, the dystopian work by Bolano that has turned my head around. Its a story about writing and stories we fall into, the ways we get there, finding what we find, as plans merges into a strange, unexpected, lived experience. Comprised of five novellas, the last offers a backstory, a full story of the author, who the critics are searching for decades later in the first chapter, before they learned about the crimes, that apparetly enveloped them all, throughout middle chapters of book. He grew up drifting like seaweed, becoming lost in the war, joining the senseless conflict, finding an old journal, of a perished Jew, with a new story taking shape, as he became a bit of a cult figure.
“Archemboldi’s sex life was limited to his dealings with whores in the different cities where he lived. Some whores didn’t charge him. They charged him at first but later, when Archembaldi became a part of the landscape, they stopped or they didn’t always charge him, which often lead to misunderstandings that were violently resolved,” (p. 861).
Violently resolved, was Archembaldi’s responsible for some of the violence plaging Cuidad Juarez?
I stayed up all night reading, wonderring it into the night, going to Judson the next day, walking to village works, chatting a about books and reading, super bowls, Jackie Smith and Super stumbles, maga meltdowns, and conspiracy theories.
And then after the game read some more.
“‘He seemed less like a child than a strand of seaweed.’” Bolano wrote about Archembaldi. Perhaps we all are I thought finishing this story about losing an author and finding a larger story, something in ourselves, in between it, a feeling of impermanence, between this world and that, this earth and our lives, lost in between.
Early Wednesday, I found myself reading Ash Wednesday with TS Elliot:
"If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent
If the unheard, unspoken
Word is unspoken, unheard;
Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard,
The Word without a word, the Word within
The world and for the world;
And the light shone in darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the center of the silent Word."
Valentines and Ash Wednesday overlap, “the unstilled world still whirled,” between love and forever, crass commodification and feelings, dreaded holiday gloom and abundant fun, holiday chocolates someone else was getting and a sence or eternal returns, activist comrads no longer here and those still around, spinning from here to there, our years ever passing and shaping us.
Love in the morning, dancing in the evening, love will tear us, i mean keep us together, i mean tear us apart.
Lotsa bands, lots of oysters on VD day.
By evening, I’d moved onto Savage Detectives, Bolano’s breakthrough story about a teenager, perhaps himself, writing poems, meeting girls, wonderring if its better to be a Mexicao Surrealist than a visceral realist? What was the poetry of the space in between it all, to drink and write and imagine his way through this strange time when we are here.
Book group picked Carl Jung’s Red Book, his unpublished dream journals, full of secrets, not published until decades after his death, at the age of 85 in 1961 in Switzerland.
Dad loved Jung, but saw the faith in writings as akin to a cult. He practically walked off a cliff to follow Jung’s teachings, finding a new partner at a Jung reading group, moving to Chicago as she studied at the their Jung Instititute, and becoming a priest. Before each was expelled, out into the world anew, more pain, her son perished, and she flunked her exams at the institute, as he lost his job as a preacher, and none of it made sense. That was a long time ago, but Jung still reminds us.
I find myself thinking about the active imagination, exploring the inner workings our minds, through a meditative trance like in between state Jung suggested openned our consciousness. I can’t always get there. Sometimes I find it on the dance floor or passed out on the YOGA mat, or writing, but those dreams often quiet.
There’s the dream and there are the prison walls. And then the world reminded us, Alexei Navalny reported dead in a penal colony.
“If they decide to kill me, it means we are incredibly strong. We need to use this power, not to give up, to remember that. Because we are a huge force."
I think of walking in Berlin. Outside the Russian Consulate in Berlin, they had a replica of the room where Alexi Navali was left to perish by the Russians... RIP.
Why did he go back, to be a hero?
I wonder what his days were like there, wondering about the dreams he had, that I had, that I have, that he had.
I have the same feeling, the emotions rising, crashing, feeling, screaming, aching, careening through the day, sensations bouncing against the walls in the house, in my head, shadows reflecting, deflecting, crashing, not quite what we think we are, not sure if any of its real.
We walked to the Film Forum to see The Third Man, looking at the ruins of Vienna, from 1949, black and white shots of piles of debrie after the war, and a myster unfolding, back to brooklyn, to the the international bar, winds howling from the East Village to Brooklyn, and off to Public Records, where the dancing and DJ’s get better each weekend, Geology in the Soundroom, bodies moving.
There was snow when I left the soundroom, flurries filling the air.
By the next day, the sun was out, February days, bright lights, reflecting on the snow, catching up with mom for a glass of cava and lunch, thinking about Mom aging, the teenager growing up, and family shifting, back into the magic hour with my favorite tennager... strolling down valentino pier...in holy Brooklyn.
HBD @mavericjacy I remember see you for the first time that February day 21 years ago. Wow.
Family’s are strange things, coming together, holding, and ever disappearing, kids growing up, parents and partners moving on, ever shifting, ever evolving with the world.
We turn around the kids had grown up.
No one’s sure if the world is lost or we are.
Gladys gave me permission to post this pic of us ... book club reunion, spending the afternoon with her, up in the country, north of the city, reading poems, talking about faith and fun, the boys not to fuck, if they do not have books anywhere, of being "fearfully wonderfully made..." as the psalm 139 said in the bulletin at Judson, about Ash Wednesday.
“Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, order your disciples to stop.” He answered, “I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out,” TJ preached from Gospel According to Luke 19: 37-44. The stones kept crying all day long.
I thought of them on a walk through the glaciers and bedrock, Fordham Gneiss in Van Courtland Park with an old friend, reminders of an ice sheet that covered New York City, some 22,000 and 20,000 years prior.
TS Elliot, ever reminding me of our impermanence:
"Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man's gift and that man's scope I no longer strive to strive towards such things
(Why should the agèd eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?
Because I do not hope to know
The infirm glory of the positive hour
Because I do not think
Because I know I shall not know"
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