In the 1983 film, Tender Mercies, Mac Sledge (Robert Duvall) wonders about one kid who lost his Dad in Viet Nam, another on the highway: "Sonny's daddy died in the war, my daughter killed in an automobile accident. Why? See, I don't trust happiness. I never did, I never will.”
It’s there but it goes away, ever appearing and receding into the distance.
I recall West Texas, going to visit Dad’s college buddy there, traveling with the family, the same roads Mac traversed in West Texas.
At breakfast with Mom, we chatted about a dream she had, those days long behind us, but never entirely gone.
Was Jamie here last night, she asked.
No, he was here in November.
He was here, just not last night.
My eyes drift to Left to the Left, Anatole Dolgoff’s memoir I am reading, with a quote from Albert Einstein:
“Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”
Our dreams blur into the day. Looking at the headlines about the war, Mom recalled Fred, her friend who settled in West, Texas after college. He suggested they get a bottle of champagne to share, the two staying in a hotel in Tehran in 1965 with Dad and Tad. They had driven overland, from England, by sea, to France, across the continent, one road at a time, visiting Tehran, on the way to India.
And we made our way back to New York.
Snapping shots of the industrial waterfront, Baby C gave me a sneer as we careened past Newark. I turned back to reading Hannah Arendt, on the way to Judson.
There Micah preached about Mary Magdalene and divine femininity, ever disrupted, by Empire and patriarchy, on Transfiguration Sunday. As the story goes, Jesus leads followers up a mountain, revealing his divinity, with an otherworldly glow. He looked down at the city below, a bridge, with a clear view from Epiphany to Lent. It's hard to preach about Women’s month, as your friends are being bombed, noted Micah, in his sermon, like countless lives, disrupted by the Iran follow of the day before.
West, Ray and I walked through Washington Square, past musicians, artists, talking about poetry and Rachel Maddow’s take on the way, on the way to the Center, for a conversation with Visual AIDS co-founder Robert Atkins on the occasion of his new book, AIDS, Art & the Origins of the Culture War: Selected Writings of Robert Atkins, joined by Sarah Schulman and Jackson Davidow. The three discussed “the Culture War, defined as a Christian Nationalist assault on the increasingly multicultural society and liberal ethos that emerged in the 1960s in the new form of attacks by Americans on other Americans. Opposing this movement, a few little-known groups–artists, queers, and people with AIDS, challenged the authoritarian inroads on the Constitution’s First-Amendment guarantees of free expression.” Atkins recalled the debut of the AIDS Memorial Quilt in Washington, DC, a battle of memory against cultural erasure, Pat Buchanan' speech at the RNC in 1992, that sounded like Goebbels wrote it, Anita Bryant’s retrograde rant from 1977, Nixon’s silent majority, on and on.
The assault on trans lives and immigrants continues this movement.
Back East we strolled to Village Works, greeting Damian and Alley, at Village Works, on the way to East Broadway to chat with Anatole for a conversation about his father and dialectical anarchism, one big union and the wobbles, our eternal struggle for a sense of our humanity, wondering, was slavery or serfdom worse. Anatole recalled his favorite quote from Tolstoy: “The essence of all slavery consists in taking the product of another's labor by force. It is immaterial whether this force be founded upon ownership of the slave or ownership of the money that he must get to live.”
Back home, I signed in for our Sunday book group. Ken is talking about Kenneth Rexroth’s approach to religious anarchism. We talk about Martin Buber’s The Way of Man, a series of postwar writings on Hasidism, his meditations on religious anarchism.
Where are you, wonders one Rabbi. What have you done with your life?
Replying, Buber seems to paraphrase TS Elliot:
"We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time."
Elliot, of course, seems to be leaning on Chrétien de Troyes’ Perceval, the Story of the Grail, an unfinished Old French verse romance, originating from the Arthurian romance genre and the Grail legend. Or at least it sounds like it to me. De Troyes follows the journey of Perceval becoming a knight and encountering the mysterious Grail. The story breaks off, leaving his quest incomplete. He searches to find the grail again, not seeing it until he returns home, where it remained his entire life. He wasn’t able to see it until he returned.
What are you doing? Have you used your life well, wonders the Rabbi.
You cannot be closer to God if you are dismissing your fellow humans.
Do unto others, as you would have them do unto you.
That's pleasing to god.
Buber seems to paraphrase Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
Love thy neighbors; be good to your neighbors.
There’s an anarchism to Buber’s writings. Is Buber an anarchist? Well, certainly a "religious anarchist" or a proponent of "anarchist-socialism" and utopian community, though he did not strictly identify with political anarchism. There is certainly a theology in his thinking.
An elder in our group mentions an old testament story of a group of men about to stone a woman who has had an affair. He who has not sinned throw the first stone, says one. Yet, everyone has sinned. No one should throw a stone. Don't throw stones at anyone.
My mind trails back to our current moment.
As my lawyer Ron Kuby noted:
“The US-Israel joint venture yesterday murdered at least 115 Iranian schoolgirls. I feel so much safer. OK. Let's try this. There are nine dead Jews today who would not have died today had this war not been started by the US-Israel. How does this make Jews safer?”
Feb 27th
Amnesty International has been gathering evidence of Iran’s mass killing of protesters following an ongoing internet blackout imposed by its authorities to conceal their crimes. The situation is dire, with countless lives at stake.
Feb 28th
I met my friends from Rise and Resist, a few of whom I know during the anti Iraq War years. I had my strangest bust with Jenny in 2002 before the Iraq War. Fun to see her, to talk about history. Donna told me about her first bust. Little did we know another war was in motion. We chatted about cats and demos, the ACTUP anniversary demo coming up March 21, dancing with our lawyer at his Fat Tuesday Party into the night…
Feb 29th
Word about the bombs in Iraq in the news on Saturday.
How can I say I detest human rights violations, crackdown on protest and speech in Iran and the US. I also detest US interventions there, then and now.
My Louis Colombo says...
"Recent news with respect to Iran forced us to hold two contradictory thoughts in mind simultaneously:
1) This is likely an illegal war that will end badly.
2) The Iranian people deserve liberation from this murderous regime.
If there is anything to be hopeful here, and it’s a slim hope, it’s the 2 will be the unintended consequence of 1."
What could go wrong? Hmm, have we seen this movie before?
On August 19, 1953, the U.S. CIA and British intelligence (MI6) orchestrated a coup, known as Operation Ajax, which deposed Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh. The intervention, aimed at protecting Western oil interests after nationalization, restored absolute power to Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, establishing a long-term dictatorship, laying the seeds for long term animosity toward the US.
Feb 29th,
Later that afternoon, we made our way to Time Square for the anti war demos, the usual anti war groups and their money for …, not for war signs. It's like groundhog day here.
War with Iran? Really ? What could possibly go wrong? Not that I'm a fan of the regime that recently murdered some 7,000 people speaking up. I recall an Iran nuke\peace deal with Iran that Bolton gutted.
Says Nicholas Kristof in the Times: "When you’ve witnessed the horror of war, you believe it should be a last resort — not an abyss we tumble into without legal basis or clear objectives, pushing us all unnecessarily into a riskier world in which the only certainty is bloodshed."
Snaps of chums from the demo at Times Square.
Feb 29th
The world going nuts, I walked around the Lower East Side, to the anti war demo, to visit Mom and
the ageless Shanny, trying to make sense of it all.
My friend Cleve Jones notes..."My memory is not what it used to be. Please remind me of all those times US military intervention brought freedom and democracy to formerly repressed and abused peoples."
A strange few days since the snow came.
Feb 21/22
Spent the weekend with Will and Mom and Sophia, cooking, watching hockey. Go USA men, To Kill a Mockingbird, thinking about Moms childhood world. The books banned now. How far we've moved. First night.
First night, I took the train to Moms. On arriving I was worried I might have left Nigel, the cat, outside the night before. They regularly beg to go outside. I was petrified I had left our little one outside freezing. I couldn't sleep. Rushed home to find Nigel inside. Oh ve. Cat love. And then back out to Princeton for more hockey.
Holy shit!!! 46 years. We were kids in Dallas watching the game on the TV in Dad's study in Feb 1980. I had a party to watch the U S lose to Canada in 2010, thirty years later. Wow. Epic game Canada!
Feb 22
We've been at book group for over a decade. Nothing like meeting my comrades, on a snowy day, to read a sexxxy modern novel, Eileen Myles, Inferno (A Poet's Novel), about lesbian subjectivity in the East Village, modeled on Dante, mentors with robust derrieres, thinking about Virgil, Kathy Acker, Ted, pixie dream girls, feelings and words, being lost in a dark wood, scribbling notes on a bar napkin.
"All the details of my life were in exact order and yet I was tumbling in them-out of order like a tremendous wave had hit me and I was thrown off the ship and I awoke or dreaming, or dead I knew not-no I couldn't speak," writes Eileen Myles in Inferno (A Poet's Novel).
Reading about Eileen writing about Eileen becoming a poet, Mattie suggested we think about Borges, particularly his 1962 short story Borges and I:
“The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate; I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary,” Borges begins, writing about a writer named Borges. “Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him. I do not know which of us has written this page.”
Feb 23 / 24
Snow pours all night, into the morning. I greet Nigel, our cat, looking at the tree outside, that howled about, I guess I need to trim, that was swaying about, bumping, throwing off snow, howling in the wind, wind gusting, hurling into the window, keeping me up, alive, supernatural. Still quiet.
Strange days. A huge wave of snow, enveloping us. Digging us out, it seemed to pull back, tugging at me. By late afternoon it stopped. We're still digging out. Remote teaching today. Sigh. The skies are blue today. It's lovely and bright out.
Feb 25
Jonathan says: “The State Of The Union under the claws of this regime is a...state of disgrace.”
For a second, in the afternoon, it stopped snowing. Sidewalks were cleared. Barbes open, a table for us in front. But woke to more today. Sidewalks covered in white. Flurries drifting from the sky, filling the dreamscape.
That morning I rode to City Hall for the rally against Buffer legislation, restricting protest in New York.
“I am writing to you as a New Yorker opposed to the buffer zone legislation [S.8599 (Sutton) / A.9335 (Lasher)], and Governor Hochul’s inclusion of the proposal in her budget. I am committed to safety, and gravely concerned about the buffer zone legislation,” I wrote. “Strong, pluralistic democracy creates the best conditions for the safety of all marginalized groups. Legislation that restricts protest undermines the open society we cherish here in New York State, which has allowed diverse communities to thrive for centuries. The proposed bill will restrict New Yorkers’ right to assembly and free speech at exactly the same time that the federal government is waging war on our cities, particularly targeting protestors and legal observers. Support the right to protest!!!!”
Inside City Hall, my friend Ken testified:
“My name is Ken Schles, I’m a father, a lifelong New Yorker, and a Jewish member of JVP. I’m also a childhood survivor of antisemitic violence. I strongly oppose Intros 1a and 175a to create arbitrary deployable “buffer zones” around places of worship and educational facilities.
These bills, presented as part of a package to combat antisemitism, pit parts of NYC’s Jewish community against the right to protest. They don’t address hate. They threaten NY’s storied tradition of activism, protest and the public’s ability to speak truth to power. These bills give police “discretion” to criminalize proximal acts of protest. In Minnesota, it was also by “discretion” that DHS officers murdered peaceful protesters deemed to be in the “wrong” place. Constitutional rights should never be contingent on police “discretion.”
Intro 1a was written in response to incidents at synagogues where stolen Palestinian land was illegally auctioned. Synagogues should not be a cover for illegal acts.
In our upside-down world, even valid claims of anti-semitism have been weaponized against us. In places of higher learning, antisemitism is used as a pretext to eliminate research funding; to threaten accreditation. My daughter, currently studying for her Masters at Columbia, tells me how fearful students and faculty are to speak their minds. She describes a chill that has befallen the campus.
These bills will do nothing to reduce hate, nor would they have safeguarded me from the antisemitic violence I experienced as a child. They follow upon a pattern of federal civil rights reversals that allow egregious violations of rights to flourish. I implore the City Council to reject Intros 1a and 175. Consider seriously that only in a free society will NY’ers be safe.”
Feb 26th
Al and I talked about Trump and Hockey and the time Bobby Colomby took a pic of Monk and the ways his friends talked about LBJ. And they lit a great fire at Bijans. The snow melted a little on Hoyt Street.
“Columbia says DHS detained student after agents entered university building…”
Feb 27th
My friend Shan Shan Song's book of poems,Thick as My Noodles, Bok Choy of My Soul: Poems (North Meridian Press),
is finally seeing the light. These are gorgeous poems of a life, I wrote in a blurb. Reading Thick as My Noodles, Bok Choy of My Soul, sometimes one poem reminds you of everything, one story, one body in space, walking through a city, hoping for something. For a short while I lived in Chicago, walking, looking for something, losing everything, finding a city of characters, flop houses, trains, blues lounges and leather bars. I learned about sexologist Alred Kinsey’s explorations of prisons, queers in jail, locked up, in and out of the underworld. When Kinsey conducted research in Chicago in 1939 and 1940, he found that queer life was far more expansive than understood, the world more diverse, much like gall wasps he collected as a young entomologist, that assumptions of sexuality needed to be more tolerant and less judgmental. Chicago was a critical location for the study of queer lives, reminding us that notions of “normal” and "abnormal" sexual behavior missed the mark. I can only imagine what would have happened if he’d come across the boisterous, heartwarming, comradely poems of Shan Shan Song, who locates Chicago at the center of their queer imaginary. This is a poetry of a city, a space for lovers and mental health breakdowns, for polyamory and wrestling practice, social work and trauma, “where Emma Goldman had her ice cream shop… ” Shan Shan Song’s story is a city, Chinese-American, neurodivergent, trans amorous, of songwriting, community organizing, petting cats, making new recipes for polycules and singing. Dive in and discover a cosmos.”
