BEHEMOTH, Jonah and Me
My friend Brad Vogol invited me to take part in a poetry reading on Monday, November 25th from 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm at the Gowanus Dredgers Boathouse 165 2nd Street. The show would be in conjunction with Jos Prol's show "ARRIVALS" featuring the installation "Leviathan.” The readers sat about the shadows of lost objects found in the Gowanus, resembling a whale vertebrae, reading poems into the night.
Drafting my contribution (see below), I got thinking about the week before, the post election ups and downs, the birthday weekend, Moby Dick and our struggles with the unknown, with nature, with something so much larger than any of us.
The weekend had been a full one, dinners with friends, a trip to see A Real Pain, a movie about a family heritage road trip through Warsaw, not unlike the one Will and I had two years prior, with some of the same ups and downs.
Mom and I toasted to the fall colors on Saturday, and friends came over to celebrate, shaking it late into the night. Everyone needs a little tenderness, not blame or condemnation.
Sunday, I woke up feeling refreshed after a night of dancing and birthday fun with my tribe. Rode to Judson for the Thanksgiving service to hear Micah preach, reflecting on Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s After Ten Years, first published in Germany in December 1942:
"We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds. We have become cunning and learned the arts of obfuscation and equivocal speech. Experience has rendered us suspicious of human beings, and often we have failed to speak to them a true and open word. Unbearable conflicts have worn us down or even made us cynical. Are we still of any use? We will not need geniuses, cynics, people who have contempt for others, or cunning tacticians, but simple, uncomplicated, and honest human beings. Will our inner strength to resist what has been forced on us have remained strong enough, and our honesty with ourselves blunt enough, to find our way back to simplicity and honesty?”
Shared a community meal and walked through the Village, looking at the pigeons, thinking about Doris, and my friends shaking off the blues, trying to reconcile themselves with the new reality, off to Rays with Ray, chatting with Dana in Tompkins, gossiping, watching football with buddies from Budapest, greeting Abby at Lucky, back to meet Baby C in Brooklyn, glad to be with my tribe.
I came home and drafted my poem for the reading.
***
Jonah and Me
I looked at down at the water flying back into JFK, at the archipelago, noticing something strange below, back from an escape to Europe, to the the ‘as the world turns,’ topsy turvy, revolution embracing, repelling, repulsing, schizoid USA, somewhere down in the water below.
Back to my novel, Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy:
“They were watching, out there past men’s knowledge, where stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea.”
I felt the water moving within me, shaking, trembling, a pit in my stomach, tidal waves inside.
A glimpse of the news, cyber wars on the horizon, blackouts separating, jolting us into a cataclysm.
This coming and that.
Second comings and third,
Enemies lists,
Ominous forebodings.
I always wondered what it was like for Jonah.
Did he see it coming, the Leviathan the water.
Did he know?
Had he really crossed a line, or betrayed God, or himself or his community?
Stuck inside, the whale enveloping him, deep in the recesses of his mind, in an underworld, with nothing but his own fear and insecurities.
Locked in solitary, like Reinaldo, caught at the beach, in a prison in Cuba, panicking as the gates shut in on him.
Like the Irish freedom fighters left behind, in tiny prisons, fearing retribution.
The whale taking him deeper and deeper.
What would become of any of us the day after?
Sometimes it still grasps at me, like that day in 1980 when I imagined the worst had already happened after watching that bad anti-nukes movie.
I still remember the feeling when we woke up and it hadn’t happened.
Or maybe the whale is in our belly?
In our heads, that Behemoth, a primordial monster, that dinosaur in the Book of Job, “moveth his tail like a cedar.” A force inside of us, leading backwards, forward, and into the trenches,
enveloped in the mud in Flanders Field, along with us.
The other.
Chasing the whale throughout the ocean.
Omnipotence. We stumble.
We all get thrown overboard from time to time.
Is there something I forgot to do, to prepare for, something lurking, I'm ignoring?
"We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds,” says Dietrich Bonhoeffer,
“we have been drenched by many storms; we have learnt the arts of equivocation and pretence…”
Enveloped in darkness...
I lose you, looking through time, searching, flying to and from, but where are you, back in the whale, sinking?
Dreams.
Waking.
Back in Brooklyn, a sunny morning on my bike, on my way to yoga,
Oooohhhmmmm together, sunlight splashing across the studio, bodies stretching, dancing warriors.
The city opening, bodies in motion, across the borough’s magic light, moving, alive, Balkan beats, screaming into the day, you gotta have house, and poems on the waterfront, dancing into the morning, the sun shining, mist blowing in the afternoon at Mr Sunday, like it did when we were together that day on the Gowanus a long time ago.
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