tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-72701611847238590792024-03-05T12:30:39.795-06:00Text as Instinct“...one would have to tell what happens in a life, what choices present themselves, what the world is for us, what happens in time, what thought is in the course of a life and therefore what art is, and the isolation of the actual…” ~ George OppenNicholas Gulighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05036856540488206943noreply@blogger.comBlogger38125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7270161184723859079.post-67530529213622060592013-07-07T01:45:00.000-05:002013-07-08T22:52:30.222-05:00The Restaraunt<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpcVYI3fr4bv81wr17hukTtmIk4MAuZduc6VtPZdq0aVtpqzXNj4joXJLXLQMJ44I1muUR5P5qm-_8YUuYv7JGNZ6uJ0q_bGaXBblifVvXhy_JZatIC0_0TqeiWlf53myKcFv97LCSpcM/s1600/didines+night+shot+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpcVYI3fr4bv81wr17hukTtmIk4MAuZduc6VtPZdq0aVtpqzXNj4joXJLXLQMJ44I1muUR5P5qm-_8YUuYv7JGNZ6uJ0q_bGaXBblifVvXhy_JZatIC0_0TqeiWlf53myKcFv97LCSpcM/s400/didines+night+shot+2.jpg" title="" width="225" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">Lately
it’s been raining. Around five o’clock the clouds roll in across the paddy
fields and empty. Overhead the sky is changing greys; everything is heavier; it is
hard to move about. Ann and I rest together on the cooler behind the bar, put
baby powder on our faces and our necks. We watch the motorbikes go by, a slow procession. Almost everyone
is wearing ponchos, see-through pink and orange. They look like human-shaped balloons. It’s the beginning of the
rainy season, which means that people don’t go out as much.</span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">“Do
you think it will be busy tonight?” I say.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">“Maybe,
maybe not,” she says. Then, with effort, she gets up and grabs the incense off the counter which we light to
bring the people in. Round here, smoke is magic. Ann lights the incense and puts five sticks in the
dirt of a planted pot. Then, out front, she takes a shot of Sangsom and pours a
line of whiskey on the sidewalk. </span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">“There,”
she says. “Now they’ll come.”</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">This
is how I spend my time, a restaurant in Khon Kaen called DiDines which my
friends Josh and Mike bought a couple months ago. Since coming back to Thailand
I’ve been working at DiDines from 3 pm to 3 am. I make 300 baht (9.5 dollars) a
day, just like everybody else. 80 cents an hour to pour beer, make cocktails,
wait tables, mop floors, and deal with foreigners. This is what we do. And Ann
is good at it. Really good. Fon and Mae and Luk out front, Jang and Noon in the
back, they’re good too. The women here, like most women I’ve met in Thailand,
hold the place together. </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">I, on
the other hand, am less adapted, especially when it comes to white people. Foreigners
have a habit of expecting things to run the way they do in whatever part of the
world it is they come from and of treating Thais, especially the women,
differently because they’re Thai, which makes them assholes. I feel this personally
because until I speak, nobody assumes that I’m American. There’s a certain kind
of customer, always white, always male, who lives in Thailand because they can
get away with things they can’t back home, because the world is cheaper here, because
the country isn’t real for them. Europe is real, America is real, but Thailand,
given its inherent differences and eccentricities, its distance from what
they’re used to, is less so. And until a person knows I am fully capable of understanding
them, customers speak incredibly freely around me, with crassness and candor.
And almost always they speak of money, of women, and of the ways that money and
women often intersect. </span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">“How
much would you pay for that?” I hear them say as one of the girls walks by.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">“A few hundred,” I hear them say.</span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">And
now I want their blood. If Thailand were real for them, if these girls were
real, they wouldn’t talk and act like this, I’m sure of it. What I’m not sure
of is how Ann and the other girls are able to deal with this so gracefully, but
they do. Perhaps they have always dealt with this. What do I know? I'm predictably protective. There’s one
customer in particular, a small troll of a man who owns a nearby bar and who I
want, more than anything, to drag by his collar out into the street and beat.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">“You
can’t do that,” Noon explains to me one night when we’re all sitting around
after-hours talking. “You have to smile so you can take their money, but in
your heart you fill your heart with hate for them, and they never know it, and
then you will always have their money.” </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">This,
in many ways, appears to be the sacrifice. One learns to separate the surface
from the center, the inner from the outer, and the world continues spinning. What
a person does, the performance of external social action, is not synonymous with
who a person is. This, for me, is one of the harder things to watch, the women
who I’ve come to care so much about at times performing a version of themselves
for a community of people whose intentions, attitudes, and general disposition
bothers me, a version of themselves for which, I trust, they have their reasons, but which also feels so different to me, so something other than the girls I’ve come to love so quickly and to know. </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">But
perhaps it only feels that way. Everyone performs, I get that. We each “prepare
a face to meet the faces that [we] meet,” but what that looks like, and what
the implications are of that performance, varies from place to place. I get
that also. In Thailand it mostly breaks my heart because I let it, a guilt,
however well intentioned, that highlights my own real privilege as much
as it implicates the foreigners who, like me, create the context in which so many
Thais are forced to live and perhaps, realistically, will always live. In this
light it is hard to resist the urge to tell the girls which boys aren’t good
enough for them because, quite frankly, so few are, but it isn’t my place to
make that call, to come to conclusions about a world I can look upon and think
about, but never know. Regardless, I can count the boys I’ve met here whose
intentions I trust on a single hand. And two of them own the restaurant.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">About
three months ago, Josh and Mike, two American men in their early thirties
teaching English in Khon Kaen, unlikely business partners at best, bought
DiDines from a French chef who had run the place for as long as any of us can
remember. A year ago, it would have been safe to say that Josh and Mike
probably shouldn’t, under any circumstances, own and operate a restaurant
together. Like most good friends, they have a tendency to drink too much and
bring out the worst in each other. They get kicked out of bars. They get
arrested. They piss themselves and drive their cars into lakes. If it weren’t
for Daow and Guan, the two women in their lives, I’m pretty sure neither of
them would still be in Thailand, at least not like this. What Josh and Mike
have done with the place amazes me. And it isn’t just the food, which, for the
record, is the best I’ve had in all of Issan, and it isn’t simply the fact that
the space itself is beautiful, or that the music is good, or that the pool-table, despite its unforgiving pockets,
is free, or that it’s the only place in Khon Kaen where a kid from Wisconsin
can sit down and buy an IPA and drink it slowly with his whole heart happy, its not just that on any given night the place is filled with as many Thai as foreign
customers (a feat of social integration so sadly rare in Thailand), families as
well as drunks (equally rare), or that the staff can speak to you in English,
can hold a conversation, or that the regulars who come to DiDines appear so
glad to be there, no matter who they are or where they’re from or what their
story is, the men and women I serve drinks to look and act and feel alive, even the ladyboys who sell their bodies down at Blues Bar. This
matters. It matters because one wants one’s customers to be happy and because
as long as the bar is filled with happy, decent people, it won’t be filled with
assholes. Josh and Mike have gone to great lengths to ensure the energy of the
place repels the worst that Thailand has to offer. To their credit, for the
most part, it does. </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">What
matters most, however, at least to me, is not the customers, but the staff. When
the doors come down at midnight and the lights go out, when the tables are finally
in and everyone else has left, we stay. Mike and Noon and Josh buy pitchers of
beer for the girls; Ann drinks M-150 energy drinks; Fon buys a horrible minty
cocktail we call “Around the World;” Luk goes out and brings back BBQ squid,
pork balls, hotdog slices soaked in chilies; and we stay.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">The
other night we took turns holding the pool cue for each other so we could
practice stripper dancing.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">The other
night Noon explained to the younger girls how to deal with a man if he starts
getting rough by breaking his kneecaps with your heels.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">The other
night Josh drank too much and fell asleep on the sidewalk. I poured water on
his face and Jang dried the water off with a bright orange towel.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">The
other night, on Fon’s day off, she came in anyway and started helping us
bring tables in. </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">“Why
are you here, Fon?” I ask her.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">“I’d
rather be here than anywhere,” she said. </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">And it goes on like this.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">About
a week ago Fon was sitting with me behind the bar. She had stolen my favorite hat
and was wearing it cocked to the side, which secretly made me happy. Kendrick
Lamar was playing on the stereo and she bounced her head and sang along to the
words she knew and sometimes she held her hands up and waved her fingers back
and forth. </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">“Fon,
I said, “that’s a terrible way to dance.”</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">“P’ Nick,
how come you always laugh at me,” she said. </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">“Because
you make me happy,” I said. </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">Then
she grabbed a book of poems off the counter, Richard Siken’s “<i>Crush</i>,” which I had brought to work that
morning, to practice her English. </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">“Close
your eyes,” she read. “A lover is standing too close to focus on. Leave me blurry
and fall toward me with your entire body.” </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">She
read: “My dragon-fly, my black-eyed fire, the knives in the kitchen are singing
for blood, but we are at a crossroads, my little outlaw, and this is the map of
my heart, the landscape after cruelty.” </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">She
read: “I’ll give you my heart to make a place for it to happen…a gentleness
that comes not from the absence of violence but despite the abundance of it…a
love that transcends hunger.”</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"> </span></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">This,
of course, is what I want for her, “a love that transcends hunger,” for all the
girls who work at DiDines, actually, for Josh and Mike and for myself, “a place
for it to happen.” Hell, I even want this for the foreign men who fill my heart
with hate. But in a country where so much of the love is
hungry, where so many of the relationships which are available are tainted by the deeply
rooted ways a culture of privilege so often takes pleasure in consuming a
culture with less privilege, it isn’t easy. In this context, more than anything,
I worry that Fon might not find the person she deserves, that she will, at some
point, settle for something less, for someone who will not be as kind to her as she is, but I
have to trust her. She, like everybody else, must do their best and work with
what there is. This is precisely why DiDines is so important. It is a different
place. It changes what is here. </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"> </span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"> </span></span></div>
</div>
Nicholas Gulighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05036856540488206943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7270161184723859079.post-33784329502864286062013-03-20T21:02:00.000-05:002013-03-20T21:02:30.927-05:00The Next Big Thing: Melanie Noel's "The Monarchs"<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUQ8Lkp3EXd5M5j24M2Z47_WxJzmIHNbImGcRvP1SXlaHfFAxBjnP0FLuhKvJ8pUlUWSZxAlFBbU43r9UXbYNGOqT4RAWNCQ1isQStrfs8dKBQJl-q2IaTiGHTk8yppXAAIVdZHWgjnK8/s1600/the+monarchs.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUQ8Lkp3EXd5M5j24M2Z47_WxJzmIHNbImGcRvP1SXlaHfFAxBjnP0FLuhKvJ8pUlUWSZxAlFBbU43r9UXbYNGOqT4RAWNCQ1isQStrfs8dKBQJl-q2IaTiGHTk8yppXAAIVdZHWgjnK8/s400/the+monarchs.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> What is the working title of the book?</span></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>The Monarchs</i></span></span></div>
<div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Where did the idea come from for the book<span style="font-size: small;"><i>?</i></span></span></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>California?<span> </span>The fortune teller in Cleo from 5 to 7.<span> </span>Yuri Norstein.<span> </span>Grin Without a Cat.</i></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">What genre does your book fall under?</span></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 0.5in;">
<i><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Mime, and poetry.</span></span></i></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?</span></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<i><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Yolande Moureux, Akaki Akakievich Bashmachkin, and Charlotte<span style="font-size: small;">, from Charlotte<span style="font-size: small;">'s </span></span></span></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<i><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;">Web </span></span></span></span></i></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?</span></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<i><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">What is higher innocence?</span></span></i></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?</span></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 0.5in;">
<i><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">about 8 years</span></span></i></div>
<div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Who or what inspired you to write this book?</span></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 0.5in;">
<i><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Sounds and second-hand stories of places (Lake Erie, the Arctic and Chernobyl are three; inspire might be the wrong word).<span> </span><span> </span>My nephew Evren’s birth, which I witnessed.<span> </span><span></span>Lost things. Subtitles and images from films inspire me.<span> </span>Heartbreak.<span> </span>Conversation<wbr></wbr>s
and exchanging work with friends, particularly Heide Hinrichs, with
whom I talk often, whose work I love (she's a visual artist).</span></span></i></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?</span></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 0.5in;">
<i><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Heide created the artwork for the cover.<span> </span>She worked with some of the lines from a painting by another dear friend, Bob Gronhovd.</span></span></i></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?</span></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 0.5in;">
<i><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Lori Anderson-Moseman, the wonderful poet and publisher of Stockport Flats Press, publishedThe Monarchs as a part of her Meander Scar series.<span> </span>I love the books in the series, and am honored to be included.</span></span></i></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">My tagged writers for next Wednesday are:</span></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 0.5in;">
<i><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Laura Neuman, Karena Youtz, Cody Rose-Clevidence, Matthew Klane, Giovanni Singleton</span></span></i></div>
</div>
Nicholas Gulighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05036856540488206943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7270161184723859079.post-50564645121967822452013-03-09T21:33:00.000-06:002013-03-14T01:27:59.933-05:00The Next Big Thing<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"></span><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0Gs8IFn_dDSfoQ9UpBTRAWLipViJrrQqFu3g8wzGFHGUPyBuwjz6vs6bpAyrbJLcUfdroTUyJBdHzsM151XrDrHYJAGjsrbdwlSkQWCZxrvXD-KL2-waxy7SdROtQMi4yeDKuw8id3j8/s1600/micheal+kenna+cover+image.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0Gs8IFn_dDSfoQ9UpBTRAWLipViJrrQqFu3g8wzGFHGUPyBuwjz6vs6bpAyrbJLcUfdroTUyJBdHzsM151XrDrHYJAGjsrbdwlSkQWCZxrvXD-KL2-waxy7SdROtQMi4yeDKuw8id3j8/s1600/micheal+kenna+cover+image.jpg" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"><span class="usercontent"> </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"><span class="usercontent"><span style="font-size: small;">A</span> friend of mine here in Denver, the poet Serena Chopra, recently tagged me for "The Next Big Thing." This, if you don't already know, is an entire internets worth of poets responding to a specific set of questions about their recent publications. Then, because we're curious, and because we want to help and support each other, and because we require help and support from each other, we ask our friends to do the same. Here, for better and for worse, are answers.</span></span> </div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"><span class="usercontent">_________ </span></span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"><span class="usercontent">What is the
title of the book?</span><i> </i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"><i>“North of Order”</i><br />
<br />
</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;">
</span><br />
<div align="left" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"><span class="usercontent">Where
did the idea come from for the book?</span><i> </i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"><i>The book came
into itself because I was living in a specific place and point in time, writing
for, or rather toward, a specific person in a very different but equally specific
place. I wanted to bring both her and the world which kept us distant into reach. The book tries
and fails to do this, over and over, without end.<br />
<br />
</i></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;">
</span><br />
<div align="left" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"><span class="textexposedshow">What
genre does your book fall under?</span><i> </i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"><i>A poem, the book is one long poem.</i><br />
<br />
</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;">
</span><br />
<div align="left" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"><span class="textexposedshow">What
actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie
rendition?<i> </i></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"><span class="textexposedshow"><i>This question is
offensive.</i></span><br />
<br />
</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;">
</span><br />
<div align="left" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"><span class="textexposedshow">What
is the one sentence synopsis of your book?</span><i> </i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"><i>This question is equally offensive.</i></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;">
</span><br />
<div align="left" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"><span class="textexposedshow">How
long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?<i> </i></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"><span class="textexposedshow"><i>Two months, at least
initially, but then it took three years.</i></span><br />
<br />
</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;">
</span><br />
<div align="left" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"><span class="textexposedshow">Who
or what inspired you to write this book?<i> </i></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"><span class="textexposedshow"><i>The desire, which is
human, to listen to and speak of what is (and isn’t) there (“perfectly, in this
material”).</i></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;">
</span><br />
<div align="left" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: left;">
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"><span class="textexposedshow">What
else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?<i> </i></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"><span class="textexposedshow"><i>Justin Boening, whose own work is incredibly remarkable (really, seek it out), helped me edit the <span style="font-size: small;">thing</span> in more way</i></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><i>s than I can ever give him credit for. Really, the book was stuck and he got in there and hauled the thing up out of the mud.</i>
</span><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"><span class="textexposedshow"> </span></span><br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"><span class="textexposedshow">Will
your book be self-published or represented by an agency?<i> </i></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"><span class="textexposedshow"><i>The book will be published this September
by YesYes books, for which I am very, very grateful.</i></span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: left;">
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;">My tagged authors for next week are Melanie <span style="font-size: small;">N<span style="font-size: small;">oel<span style="font-size: small;"> </span>and Nicholas Bu<span style="font-size: small;">tl<span style="font-size: small;">er</span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
</div>
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Nicholas Gulighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05036856540488206943noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7270161184723859079.post-71034785701174171312012-04-04T07:01:00.002-05:002012-04-22T02:12:30.738-05:00Hanoi, a Girl on a Motorbike, Poetry and/or Sentience, a Bridge<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-size: small;">It’s
getting late. At the moment I’m walking on a red bridge with a group of other researchers,
looking for our hotel. Under-lit by spotlights, the trees above us turn into
their shadows, their shadows turn into the sky. We continue walking. Down below, a cast of branches dip into the
water. There, the city lights at midnight blend together into one light, pressed beneath the
surface, strangely glowing. I wonder where I am.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">“It
feels like Christmas,” says Thai, one of the other researchers. “It’s sooooo romantic.” He takes his camera
out and snaps a picture. A young couple, maybe in their twenties, maybe not, stand with their arms
around each other, making out beneath a street light on the corner of an empty
intersection. A dark cat crosses quickly in the distance, disappears. It starts to rain again, but no one seems to care; it feels like Christmas. Compared to the places where we're from (Thailand, Laos, the Philippines) its cold here. The mist plays tricks with the light, acts like snow. Also, Hanoi, the city where we’ve been staying for the last few days, brought here by
our respective countries to present our work at the Southeast Asian Regional Fulbright
conference, is a city surprisingly in love. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">In Thailand couples
keep a certain distance, at least in public, but today I saw at least three
weddings, new brides with big white dresses dragged behind them through the
rain water. Smiling on steps and under fountains and in the shadows of looming
European archways, they posed beside their husbands, black hair put up with pins
and crowned by pink and yellow flowers. Later, beside the lake, I watched the
young couples of the city arrive in pairs to sit on the many benches which look out across
the water. Usually, the men were smoking cigarettes and their breath, visible
in the cool air, mixed evenly with the smoke and mist of a city perpetually
about to rain. Now, with night already fallen, every street lamp wears a halo,
a yellow ring which dissipates in fog and haze. The researcher beside me takes
my arm and leans into my shoulder. Her hair is wet against my neck. She leads
me down the road.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">For the
most part, the last two days have been spent attending presentations, meeting
other Fulbrights, and pretending to be professional, pretending to fit in. I wear
a suit. I dry my hair in the mornings with a blow dryer, wear cologne. As best
I can I try to act composed, intelligent, interested. I am not succeeding.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">“What
do you do in Thailand?” another researcher asks me. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">“I’m
a poet,” I say. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;">“I
wasn’t aware that one could be that,” he says.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;">“Lucky
me,” I say, shrugging. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">As
one of only a handful of artists blessed enough to be given the time and money needed
to work creatively on that which I imagine we’d each be working anyway, without
time and money, I’m out of place. There’s my friend Thai who’s translating the
Ramakien, Thailand’s great epic poem, into English, a girl studying traditional
dance and song who sings her ass off, strums a moon lute, a sculptress from the Philippines, myself.
Mostly, though, the people here are economists, biologists, chemists,
ecologists, architects, historians, urban planners. Arguably their work is infinitely
more applicable, more directly of and for the place in which they operate, of
greater benefit, more helpful. It would be hard to argue this, I think, and so
I don’t. Me, I’m working on a book of poems about a boy with a cat inside his
chest who finds a dead man asleep beneath a tree of light in which there’s
vultures. I’m working with a cartoonist I met in Bangkok, so at least there’s
that, but for the most part my work is small and alienating. I sit in a coffee
shop all day. I write till five or so, work out, eat dinner, and edit what I’ve
written at my kitchen table while listening to music. I read for a while, watch
TV. I sleep. In Hanoi, listening to the other researchers, I feel a pang of guilt,
a little voice which asks me what it is exactly that I do.</span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;">The
great anxiety of the artist, or at least one of the many great anxieties of
most artists, is the extent to which one’s work exists in actual relation to
the world of things around it. This is important, I think, because creation so
often happens in isolation, on one’s own terms, in a space set up apart. The
trick, of course, is to complete the work and give it back, an offering, a
gift. A poet’s work, however, lives primarily in journals read exclusively by
poets whose work also lives primarily in journals read by poets. In many ways
we inhabit an incredibly insular and self-affirming place, removed from the
rest of the world not only by the severity of this insulation, but also by the
nature of the art itself in the context of the culture as whole. Poetry is not
music. Most certainly it is not popular music, which people listen to. You won’t
find it at the movies or the book stands at the airport. It doesn’t live in a
museum. People don’t hang poetry on walls. So what is it that we do? And why?</span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;">When
I was teaching in Iowa, standing before a room of freshman students utterly
uninterested in poetry, I would argue, first and foremost, that it is talk by
which we are alive. For fodder, I’d give them Oppen: </span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><i>“If it is that river, that meaningless
river in which we are, it is nevertheless talk by which we are alive. If we
want to continue to invent life for ourselves and for our children and our
friends it might be worth one’s whole effort to find the alternative, some
alternative, to this art.”</i></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Here,
the “meaningless river in which we are,”and to which poetry (as an act of
clarity) is a
necessary alternative, lives akin to what Oppen refers to earlier in the same letter as the
“art of accident,” the music of un-intention. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">At
this point, the blankness of my student’s faces would almost always deepen. The
idea that it might be abstractions like “language,” or “talk,” by which we live
and not utilitarian commodities like food or shelter was usually lost on them.
My concession, of course, to them and to myself, is that yes, food and shelter
matter in a way that is real, immediate, and tangible. One cannot “live”
without that which the body physically requires. Without these things we die,
which isn’t what we want. What we want is to live and breathe and fuck and make
more life and in the process of doing so it is nice to enjoy these things when
possible, partially because it is in us to do so, but also because life matters
and is important to us. It’s important that we enjoy and participate directly,
even freely, in the lives we live.</span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;">If
I’m lucky, a typical conversation might go something like this:</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">“We
need food to live, not poetry.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;">“But
why is it you want to feed yourself?”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;">“Because
otherwise I’d die.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;">“What
does it matter if you die?”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;">“Because
I don’t want to, I want to live.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;">“Why
do you want to live?”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;">“Because
my life’s important to me?”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;">“Why
is your life important to you?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;">“I
don’t know, it just is?”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;">“Says
who?”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;">“Says
me.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">By
this point, again, if I’m lucky, the students are onto me and can see ahead of them
the kind of conversation into which I’m trying to gently push them. There is a
narrative that exists for us, a story we each make up about our lives and the
lives of others and the world in which we operate, a way of thinking and
talking about experience—and what it may or may not mean to us—which occurs in
the mouth and in the mind where that which finally matters begins to take its shape, articulate its name. Without this conversation we
return to the narrative of nothing and accident, “the inhuman event of humans,”
as Oppen calls it, “the meaningless river which flows with ourselves and with
our talk.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">The
second point I try to make is the extent to which our language is always under
threat, always on the verge of being turned against itself. If it isn’t taken
from us by the forces of politics and commerce, regurgitated back to us and put to uses which do not become us,
that seek to define for us the words which point to and bring us into relation
with the world we live in, it is being used, by us and toward others, without
intention, by accident and habit, which diminishes the act itself,
deprives language of its urgency, causes harm. The examples of this are
everywhere and students are usually pretty good at identifying places where
words no longer live up to their potential, weakened, as it were, by overuse and thereby
limited in their capacity to hold together meaning and complexity. Love, for
instance, is a concept students seem to care about, and it is promising to hear
them think among themselves about the ways the culture puts the word the use. If
it is true what Oppen says, if language is indeed the operation by which we
live, create, and recover value, the speaker, then, what the world is for her,
and thus what she is, diminishes in direct relation to her talk. With a word
like love, the stakes are obvious and high. Without it, we’re fucked. Students
get that. But it happens elsewhere also, at the level of our diction, our syntax,
our grammar. And it is always happening.</span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;">The
final point I make is the idea that poetry takes language, and the world it
points to, seriously. As an art form focused on creation and recovery, its power and capacity exists in the extent
to which it takes as intentional the act of paying attention, not only to
oneself and others and to things, but to the many different ways of saying and
defining those things, and to what happens to the experience of these objects, lives,
and relationships when articulated in one manner or another. My
first real teacher, the poet Joanna Klink, has this to say: </span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><i>“In poems, I am trying to find my
bearings through a world that at times feels remote and inchoate and struck
blank with noise. I would like to place myself in a field of deep attention and
out of that attention come to feel and regard with more acute understanding
what is there."</i></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;">And I
believe her. And believing this has made a difference in my life.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">In
Hanoi, what is here for me, what exists around me at this specific moment at
this specific time and place in the world, is the arm and body of another
person, a stranger really, a girl I barely know. We’re walking through the
night. What I do know is that a day ago we met in a museum in a country I never
thought I’d see. We talked in the rain and danced. We stole a bottle of wine and
slipped our bodies into a pool and laughed and argued and made plans. What I
don’t know, at least not now, not at the moment, is that in just two days I’ll
find myself on the back of a motorbike riding in the bright sun through the slow back-roads
of northern Vietnam. I’ll have my arms around her waist and her hair will keep blowing
back into my face and so I’ll put my face into the space between her shoulder and
her neck. Every now and then she’ll scream and point to something far away. Mountains
in the distance, grey forms, and the paddy fields that sprawl out green forever
to our left. We’ll stop at a graveyard made of crumbled knee high walls and
tiny chipped paint temples, also crumbled, large enough to harbor ghosts. She’ll
stop the bike, get off. She’ll run with her arms up into the center of a group
of cattle who eat dumbly at the grass between the gravestones. They’ll startle when
she nears them, scatter, but they will not scatter far. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">My faith, then, at this
moment with a girl I may never see again, and in others, is that poetry is the product of the specific, temporary field in which I am, of the attempt to struggle with and understand and with any luck make meaningful what is there. Arrived at
through patience, isolation, and attention, poetry, at its best, is the use and effort of a language which brings
us closer to that which is, to people and the spaces we
erect between us, to objects, to ourselves. Thankfully, it is a giving place, one that
teaches us see, to say. I believe in poems because I believe they bear within their strange complexities the capacity to return our words to us, our world. They makes us
sentient, I remember someone saying in a letter once, and help us love. They demand we feel alive.</span></div>
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</div>Nicholas Gulighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05036856540488206943noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7270161184723859079.post-5471910220812506042012-03-27T07:09:00.000-05:002012-03-27T07:09:16.783-05:00The Nomads, Pray / Tell (reading: Bangkok, Thailand)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<br /></div>Nicholas Gulighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05036856540488206943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7270161184723859079.post-44352040359619699282012-01-23T11:36:00.000-06:002012-01-24T07:56:24.318-06:00The Aerial Bridge (a few stray thoughts, related & otherwise, on poetry, subjectivity, and prayer)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrWnqnS0Td8JV0PdGxPYiJvCP3XVlTWCeuCRj7wqCI6E01lRJmzNnO19eMjgKGxnTApnG98hsgboevPL_BhrbcIRqc3FvxVBot3rHeuDlel2YzB0g6wyUKJ4MPVSBlSEUYQ0jDfAWA_4k/s1600/graffitti+prayer.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrWnqnS0Td8JV0PdGxPYiJvCP3XVlTWCeuCRj7wqCI6E01lRJmzNnO19eMjgKGxnTApnG98hsgboevPL_BhrbcIRqc3FvxVBot3rHeuDlel2YzB0g6wyUKJ4MPVSBlSEUYQ0jDfAWA_4k/s400/graffitti+prayer.jpg" width="248" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;"> <span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">On nights it's hard to sleep, I lie
in bed and stare at Bangkok out my window. There are millions of little lights
out there, low stars attached to the sides of buildings, speckling the distance. The closest and the brightest light is that of the peak of
Wat Thammamongkhon, the tallest chedi in all of Thailand. Home to a single
strand of hair belonging to the Buddha, its steeple, terraced and painted yellow,
stands alone as the single near point on the horizon, its huge form under-lit
by yellow spotlights strategically positioned, dotted by a single star, a
beacon in a concrete sea. Eventually, sometime around 6:30, I can trust the sun to rise just slightly
to the temple’s right, turn the east sky red and burn against its surface. On a
good day, its being there reminds me where I am. Bangkok has been good to me. There’s
something reassuring about the temple’s presence and vicinity. Like my work is more
important than it is. Like everything will be ok. On other days, the temple
sulks, mis-positioned and outnumbered. Surrounded by the city’s complicated matrix, dwarfed by the luminous modernity of skyscrapers, glass eyed
condominiums. In the shadow of a culture forever moving forward, this specific place
of worship and others like it seem tokens from a foregone era, antiquated and
out of place. I have yet to go there. One of these days, I tell myself. I never do.</span></span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;"> </span></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;"> For the most part, I am not a religious person, not
really. As a poet, I come close, believing as I’m prone to in the properties of
words, the importance of the imagination. But back in America, on any given
Sunday, say some frozen morning in November, I’m more likely sleeping in till
noon or watching football than kneeling in a house of God. I haven’t stepped
foot in a church for nearly a decade. This, of course, is fine. I’m not that
sure that I belong. When asked if I believe in God, I hesitate. It depends on
who is asking. These kinds of conversations usually and quickly turn to arguments.
When I ask myself, however, the answer, always indeterminate, always abstract, rests
somewhere short of yes, somewhere more than no. I doubt that either hardline
atheists or Christians would consider this enough. To their credit, at times, I
feel it might be better to commit. The middle ground, at least in matters of
the absolute, seems easy, a position which posits nothing, asks nothing, and
thereby offers little in return. Committal, though, at least initially, implies
a certainty I’m certain that I lack. There’s a part of me that does, a part
that doesn’t, and I’ve yet to fully bridge the space inside myself unnerved by
contradictions. If there is a word which means our opposites are compliments,
that says with certitude dichotomies connect instead of cancel, I haven’t found
it yet.</span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;"> </span></span><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;">_________</span></span></div>
</div>
<span style="font-size: small;"></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;"> </span></span><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;"> But I <i>am</i> a
prayerful person, have been so secretly for years. Raised Catholic, albeit
passively, the first time I really knelt down hard and prayed on my own I was
thirteen. My family’s dog was dying. The night before we put her down, I stayed
awake beside her on a pile of piss-soaked blankets making promises, asking God to
make her better. He didn’t. With similar results a few years later, I prayed
for my Grandfather. And two years after that, when my best friend’s mom was
dying from her second and final bout with cancer, the Lord above did nothing
yet again.</span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;"> </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;"> This, I think, is typical. For those of us inclined to do
so, prayer, at least in the beginning, occurs primarily as a matter of
petitioning, asking and not receiving, a specific need met with deafening,
nonspecific silence. Admittedly, this is incredibly discouraging, especially
when one is young and loss is suddenly, for the first time, real. At the time
I’d likely have considered myself a Christian had my dog recovered, had my
Grandfather miraculously gotten younger. But they didn’t and I don’t. What I
can say, though, is that if this relationship appears to flow in only one
direction, if the line from the human mouth to God’s ears seems as disconnected
as it did to me back then, perhaps this is not so much a reason for absolute dismissal,
but a comment on the limits of the imagination. For a mind which makes demands
in terms which belong to it and it alone, there exists little room for an idea
of God which spills beyond the edges of one’s own image. Somewhat selfishly,
somewhat self-concerned, we assume that God is like us, speaks as we speak,
listens in the precise and human way we hear. The image of the Father watching
from the clouds, Jesus bleeding on the cross. These are the Gods that I grew up
with up with. They have affected me and changed me, but they have rarely
worked.</span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;"> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;"> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;"> In grade school my parents sent me to a Bible camp. My friend
Nick, sent by his mother who worried that her son spent too much
time in his bedroom playing D&D, came with me.
I’m not sure what either of our parents thought would come of it, if they
understood exactly the kind of eccentric Christianity the camp adhered to, but
the experience terrified me and I have not forgotten it.</span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;"> </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;"> One afternoon, the head priest sat us down on the front
porch outside the dining hall, told us stories. He and his brother, orphans
since birth, had lived out their early years in various foster homes across
America. Molested, beaten, and raped, his childhood differed vastly from my
own. At some point, locked in an upstairs bedroom, forced to shit and piss not
five feet from the floor on which he slept and ate, Jesus Christ appeared to
him, saved his soul, his sanity, his life. I remember the way his face turned
grave in the bright sun as he spoke, the glaze in his eyes as he turned to each
of us individually, staring through us at something out of focus far away.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;"> A day later, our counselors gathered us together,
informed us we had a guest. A tall, thin man whose name I don’t remember, a
preacher visiting from a distant congregation.</span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;"> </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;"> “Hello,” he said. “Who here has met the Holy Spirit?</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;"> “Hello,” we said.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;"> A couple of the kids I didn’t care for
raised their hands. I doubt, however, any of us at that age really understood
what the Holy Spirit was, not then. What I did know about the Holy Spirit came
from bible study and was strictly and problematically mathematical. The
Doctrine of the Trinity demanded that which made no sense. Cut in
three, God was also singular. Jesus was God (but also flesh), his father, the
Lord, was God, and suspended in the space between them, a Spirit, a formless
Ghost, also God. Every now and then this ghost would reach out with skinny,
see-through fingertips, touch the spirits of the faithful.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;"> That afternoon the preacher led us down a gravel path to
the small wooden, church where we held our daily services, a one room, white-washed
building lined with windows set pleasantly in a field of knee-high summer
grass, surrounded by a thicket. We formed a long and nervous line at the back
of the church. From there, I watched my campmates file one by one, slowly down
the center isle toward the preacher, gaunt and menacing before the altar, his
tall form under-lit by candles. Shafts of sunlight slanted brightly through the
upper windows, pushing through the cracks in the floorboards. A woman played a
rickety piano in the corner. In turn, each child stood before him, terrified
and wide eyed. When the preacher touched their foreheads with his palm, mumbled
something indiscernible in Latin, my campmates, poor things, twitched suddenly and
shook. They fell. With all the force and strange velocity of the Holy Ghost
come down to meet them from the heavens, they lay crumbled and unconscious, the
sun on their faces, their faces on the floor. Nick stood in line ahead of me,
expressionless. When he began to walk the isle toward the preacher I promised
God right then and there that I’d believe if Nick too did as all the others.
They could be faking it, but not him.</span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;"> I held my breath until he started at the shoulders. He
trembled quickly, fell. I let my breath back out and wondered what to do.</span></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;"> </span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;"></span></span><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><br />
<div align="center" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;">__________</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;"> </span></span><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;"> I can count on two hands the people with whom I’ll talk
about religion. Most of them are poets. Those who aren’t tend to have spent
their lives submerged in wilderness so long their hearts and eyes are open in a
way that helps them listen. An indigenous body-builder who ran a sweat lodge on
a farm outside of Iowa City. A biologist from central-west-Wisconsin. A girl I
hoped to, but didn’t, marry.</span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;"> </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;"> For most secularists, faith is a sign of either weakness
or insanity, and while I don’t agree, I don’t blame them either. The
conversation’s been corrupted by extremities, and culture, enamored by the
extent to which polemics stand apart and crash against each other, too often
privileges that which entertains it. What passes for debate on the issue of the
sacred is often relegated to a conversation about whether or not God “exists,”
what the place of religion is in politics, in schools. Abortion. Granted, these
issues are important, especially to those involved, but they are not the heart
and soul of the matter. They are issues not of spirit, but of flesh. The
complexities of belief are far too personal to be presented publicly as a list
of strange demands or taught objectively as fact in the same manner as one
would teach the tenets of biology, chemistry, and math. Faith is too
necessarily subjective, a direct experience occurring, not in the classroom,
but in the open field of one’s own heart and spirit. God is not reducible. In
America, the religion to which we are publicly exposed supposes just the
opposite.</span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;"> </span></span><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;">_________</span></span></div>
</div>
<span style="font-size: small;"></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;"> </span></span><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;"> About a month ago, outside a bar in Thong Lo, I’m
drinking with a friend, talking in the way that people do when the night is
late and alcohol’s involved enough to keep them honest. We are fighting about
religion, Christianity in particular, its problematic history and weight.</span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;"> </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;"> “I can’t forgive them,” my friend reiterates, “too much
has happened.”</span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;"> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;"> “I know,” I said, “I know.”</span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;"> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;"> “And at some point I’ve got to draw the line,” he says. </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;"> A
group of men come up behind us through the alley and we quiet for a moment as they
stumble past. Streetlights drop small halos around their feet. A
cockroach scuttles from a crack.</span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;"> </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;"> “But you’re also looking in a very specific place,” I say
when the men are gone. “There are others.”</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;"> “And you act like history never happened, like all people
do is sit around and pray and help the homeless,” he says, “like religion
doesn’t invite us to hate and kill each other.”</span></span><br />
<br />
I start to say something, stop. I’m flustered. The
night’s too late, too hot. Mosquitos swarm my arms and face. My beer is warm. I’m
uncertain how to speak.<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;"> What I wish I could’ve thought and said is the degree to
which I understand. I sympathize, and even to some extent, agree, but not
totally, not in full. While religious thought does play host to
radicals and cannot, in honest conscience, be separated totally from whatever
bloodshed follows in its wake, the road to exploitation is paved by forces
larger and more intricate than any singular force, even the force of God. Religion is not alone in its
susceptibility to misinterpretation, to energies at work in the world around
it. The cry of Science has similarly been employed to justify atrocities,
oppressive modes of thought and methods of administering value. Thankfully, we hesitate to allow the the
radicalization of Science to speak for Science as a whole, to allow its limits
and misapplications to define for us the extent to which its useful when
applied to places it belongs. With religion, we are less so. </span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;"> </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;"> What draws the pious toward radical and violent
interpretations of their own beliefs is not a problem limited to religion, but
a specific interpretation of a given narrative that is itself subject to the
context in which it lives. Human beings are pushed to slaughter each other by a
myriad of forces and numerous trajectories of thought, a confluence which
includes religion but is not, in any way, limited to it. Let us remember the
Crusades were also and originally a turf war, a fight for land and resources
which only later took on religious significance. We are quick to blame
religious fervor for giving terrorists the justification they need to place
bombs in subways, crash planes through buildings, but are less inclined to turn
the light of scrutiny upon ourselves. The flames of Islamic extremism are
fanned in part by the actions of a country far away, a culture, secular in
nature, whose appetite is endless, whose affluence is arguably offensive, and whose
regard for cultures and systems of belief other than its own exist primarily in
principle and principle alone. I wonder
sometimes where the sense of entitlement upon which Americans subsist actually derives, what narratives we take for granted, what truths we hold to
be self-evident that allow us to believe and act in the ways we do. I make no
pretense to understand in full the energies at work in such matters, but I know
that they are there. Religion, as much as anything, is subject to corruption.</span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;"> </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;"> And yet, at its best, I find within its contradictions a
window of possibility, an open space in which to insert the world not merely as
it is, but as it appears and is interpreted and experienced, a way of thinking which
can perhaps provide a counter point to the forces of instrumental reason gone
awry and return to us a sense of the intangible and the mysterious and the abstract,
aspects of our experience and nature deserving of pensive thought, permanent contemplation. </span></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;">__________</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;"> </span></span><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;"> There were entire years I didn’t pray. For a long time the
idea of God to me seemed antiquated, a product of a place and point in time no
longer relevant, no longer true. Religion was an opiate, a delusion, a disease.
In High School I wrote a paper called “Jesus Christ the Bastard Son of Nazareth”
in which I argued that Faith was the antithesis of freedom, the Church, a place
where anyone with half a backbone went to die. I read and re-read Bertrand
Russell’s “Why I’m not a Christian,” listened to punk rock, carried “the Portable
Nietzsche” in my back pack, and refused to be confirmed. There were more
important things to do then waste my time “hankering after the past…fettering
[my] free intelligence [to] the words uttered long ago by ignorant men.”</span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;"> </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;"> It was during these years, in the fervor of defining
myself against the culture of Christianity which I inherited, in the absence of
a sense of the sacred, that I became a poet. Through failure and error, I
learned to love both language and the world to which it pointed. But I could
never get it right. Every poem, I soon found out, begins exactly where it ends,
in silence and anxiety. The questions which brought me to the page in the first
place remained without resolve and I was left to try again. There, in the
aftermath, in the space where words fell short, where the quiet echoed hard and
hurt, I turned to utterance as though the act of the poem itself could save me.
What mattered was not the poem so much, but the impulse and the decision to
pursue the poetry as a course of action independent of its ends. I spoke for the
sake of speaking and the world rose up for me from there. For a long time, no one listened and nothing came of it. Eventually,
through poetry, I turned again to prayer.</span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;"> </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;"> But it wasn’t then, and it still isn’t, easy. As a
writer, as a human being who at once does and does not believe in God, to reach
for an interpretation of the world that allows for it to matter and make sense
to me, I must do so suspending disbelief and reach beyond the means I have to
know it. Thankfully, reality is a big word and the world is wide enough to
house both the known and the unknown in all their various incarnations, the
mystery in things and in our thinking of them through both subjective and
objective avenues. In time, an open field of vast and numerous ideas appears
and it is the job of the individual to cull the edges, sow the scattered seeds.
</span></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;">_________</span></span><br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;"> “When I say God,” writes Andrew Grace, “I mean
any way of navigating the radiant aftermath of loss. And what I mean by
radiance is what the lake is doing, marbled by the moonlight and shaking like a
lost man.” I like this statement very much for a variety of reasons. As a
definition of that which typically eludes representation, it at once falls
short and expands our expectations of how a definition is supposed to function.
Instead of saying in no uncertain terms what God is and isn’t, limiting the
object of inquiry to a specific form and function, Grace instead gives God a
space in which to move about and breathe. “Any way of navigating” is generous,
not vague. Furthermore, it rings with all the truth and validation of the
experience of suffering, an involvement which makes us similar while setting us
apart. For Grace, and for a lot of us, the existence of God is rooted in an
understanding of loss which includes the possibility of recovery, a lake of light
we imagine marbled at the other end of tragedy.</span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;"> </span></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;"> This, of course, is radically subjective, an
interpretation of events occurring in the world of things. As an attempt to
label and make sense of loss, Grace’s speaker projects himself into the
landscape, across the water, the image of the lost and shaking man who believes
so fully in the experience of his own real suffering he offers it a name.
Unfortunately for Grace, subjectivity, as a means to truth, as a barometer of
the real, is suspect. In a day and age dominated largely by positivistic
realism, it is subject to the fashions of the times, a brand of objective
scrutiny in whose shadow it is generally felt to pale: God does not exist and
prayer is only so much speaking in the dark. So why, then, would a person pray
and what is the role of faith in a world of raw material? Here’s Mislosz: </span></span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span class="f14px"><span style="line-height: 130%;"> <i>On
Prayer</i></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span class="f14px"><span style="line-height: 130%;"> </span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span class="f14px"><span style="line-height: 130%;"> You ask me how to pray to someone
who is not.</span></span><span style="line-height: 130%;"><br />
<span class="f14px"> All I know
is that prayer constructs a velvet bridge</span><br />
<span class="f14px"> And walking
it we are aloft, as on a springboard, </span><br />
<span class="f14px"> Above
landscapes the color of ripe gold</span><br />
<span class="f14px"> Transformed
by a magic stopping of the sun.</span><br />
<span class="f14px"> That bridge
leads to the shore of Reversal</span><br />
<span class="f14px"> Where
everything is just the opposite and the word 'is'</span><br />
<span class="f14px"> Unveils a
meaning we hardly envisioned.</span><br />
<span class="f14px"> Notice: I
say we; there, every one, separately, </span><br />
<span class="f14px"> Feels
compassion for others entangled in the flesh</span><br />
<span class="f14px"> And knows
that if there is no other shore</span><br />
<span class="f14px"> We will walk
that aerial bridge all the same.</span></span>
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;"> For Milosz, the question is not a
matter of actuality, but consequence, of what the world turns into as a
product of poetic/religious utterance. It matters little if God is real, or
un-real. The poet’s scope is larger than semantics. Once prayed to, once spoken into
being, the word ‘is’ expands to include its opposite in ‘isn’t’. Given this fluidity, definition is beside the point. In poetry and
in prayer the terms of the debate are renegotiated and what constitutes the actual,
what reality is and what reality is to us cannot be parted from experience, our
limited, but human interpretations. The bridge of utterance, aerial in nature, there
and not there, spans the empty space between what’s present and what’s absent, brings
them into contact, a deep and immediate connection.</span><span style="line-height: 130%;"> </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;"> In this sense, what’s real includes what is imagined,
experienced, and felt because these spaces interact with and affect the world
of things. In poetry, the turn to metaphor is a way of reaching beyond the real
to a place in the imagination in order to reinvigorate the real. I say this
knowing that the experience of God is not real in the same way that the
experience of a stone is real, or sunlight through the windshield of a car, or
gravity, but neither does a stone exist in the same way that God does, and it
is exactly this, these divergent means of being in the world, adjacent but not
the same, that constitutes in my heart and mind not merely what is actual, but
what’s important. I’m skeptical of positivism because I don’t discover in its
assertions room for the words and ideas which matter most to me. Love, for
instance. Altruism. Creativity. The Imagination. Faith. Or if they are there,
they exist in such a limited capacity they are impossible to recognize. Placing
the entirety of the subjective universe in the service of the verifiable, the
positivistic worldview explains experience away with such mechanical precision
that our lives as we have lived them exist as shadows, a dark spot cast by the
light of the objective across body the actual, but not the actual itself.
Certainly, I don’t find room for meaning as an act “of faith abounding in acts
of words” in this interpretation, a creative movement of the imagination which
exists in the same way that some would argue God does. At its best, I employ
the term as a way to represent but not contain a specific, yet abstract
experience of the unknowable at work in the world made tangible in things through creative interpretation. In this sense, the Creator is spoken into being and we, as
instruments of talk, mirror and then become ourselves the creative force at work
in the beginning of the Bible and in most creation myths. It isn’t easy, and it
isn’t real in the way that forests and lakes are real, but we do it. And our
doing it is real. And it asks a lot of of us, this doing—at times it asks too
much, and we get it wrong—but we do it anyway and start again from the
beginning, into and out of silence, knowing and re-knowing. We take the cold
hard facts of the planet; we breathe some life into their forms.</span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
</div>
<span style="font-size: small;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;">__________ </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;"> The Old Testament starts:</span></span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span>“<i>In the beginning
was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God; all things were made through him, and without him was not
anything made that was made.</i>” </div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="line-height: 130%;"></span></i><span style="line-height: 130%;"> And a little later:</span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;"><i>“And the Word
became flesh and dwelt among us.”</i></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="line-height: 130%;"></span></i></span><span style="font-size: small;"></span><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="line-height: 130%;"></span></i></span><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="line-height: 130%;"></span></i><span style="line-height: 130%;"> </span></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; text-align: justify;">
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;"> As poet, I believe
this.</span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;"></span></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;"> And as a person —</span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;"> </span></span><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
__________ </div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;"> These last five months in Bangkok, writing and reading
poems and watching from the outside a world that in many ways makes little
sense to me—though this is changing—I’ve come to appreciate religion not
as a prescription or theoretic doctrine, but as a description of events in
time, the experience of inner lives externalized through ritual and what the
people living them believe in order to continue doing so. When I watch the men
and women in my neighborhood put food and water in the Spirit Houses which rest
in the corner of almost every yard in Thailand, burning incense every morning
on the doorsteps of these small, sprite-sized temples meant to house the local ghosts displaced by human presence, I don’t see them as the simple and
superstitious people I might have years ago. Rather they appear to me creative
participants in a narrative which asks of them to live and act intentionally,
even, as the case may be, when the act is aimed at that which isn’t there. In
many ways, this is what we do with language. We make a narrative and settle
upon a name in the hopes of knowing how to act in relationship to things. And
although these names are never accurate, never truly the thing itself, we do it
anyway, in good faith. It is increasingly hard for me to separate poetry from
prayer because it is difficult to separate language from the imagination, thus
speech itself, as a creative act, is also, to my mind, a religious one, a
positioning of oneself in relationship to both what is and isn’t present in the
world, a sense of the unknowable emanate in things and through them. “If you
find you no longer believe,” writes W.S. Merwin, “enlarge the temple.” Or, if one prefers, Oppen:</span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;"> </span></span>
</div>
<span style="font-size: small;"></span><br />
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0.5in 5pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><i>Psalm</i></span> </div>
<span style="font-size: small;"></span><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><br />
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0.5in 5pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: small;"> In the small beauty of the forest</span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"> The wild deer bedding down --</span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"> That they are there!</span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"> Their eyes</span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"> Effortless, the soft lips</span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"> Nuzzle and the alien small teeth</span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"> Tear at the grass</span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"> The roots of it</span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"> Dangle from their mouths</span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"> Scattering earth in the strange woods.</span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"> They who are there.</span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"> Their paths</span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"> Nibbled thru the fields, the leaves that shade them</span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"> Hang in the distances</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"> </span><span style="font-size: small;">Of sun</span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"> The small nouns</span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"> Crying faith</span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"> In this in which the wild deer</span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"> Startle, and stare out.</span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"></span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span>
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;"> A highly secular poet, Oppen still sustains
a sense of the sacred, of “faith / in this in which,” accessible and made
possible through language, a world of nouns to which language is capable of
pointing, even celebrating, despite its limitations, perhaps, even, precisely
because of them. In this light, to talk with purpose is to imagine, create, and
occupy a space which parallels the religious, borders it, and occasionally
crosses over. That this is possible amazes me: that we are here.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;"> </span></span></div>
</div>Nicholas Gulighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05036856540488206943noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7270161184723859079.post-62438117128128093582012-01-20T07:14:00.000-06:002012-01-21T10:37:18.491-06:00Zach Borocas on Poetry and Spirit<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container"><tbody>
<tr align="justify"><td class="tr-caption"></td><td class="tr-caption"><span style="font-size: small;">“...[G-d] exists as a primary
& governing presence or force whose intentions and methods are infinitely
and permanently beyond our comprehension; [Spirit] is the sense of that force
which we inherently possess (or inherently possess us), over which we each have
expressive and little other control; one result of this expressive control is
artistic…poetic practice.”</span></td></tr>
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</div>Nicholas Gulighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05036856540488206943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7270161184723859079.post-63117931074845185662012-01-15T12:26:00.000-06:002012-01-20T07:01:45.932-06:00from "Suicide" by Edouard Leve<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;">"When I look at a strawberry, I think of a tongue, when I lick one, of
a kiss. I can see how drops of water could be torture. A burn on my
tongue has a taste. My memories, good or bad, are sad the way dead
things are sad. A friend can let me down but not an enemy. I ask the
price before I buy. I go nowhere with my eyes closed. When I was a child
I had bad taste in music. Playing sports bores me after an hour.
Laughing unarouses me. Often, I wish it were tomorrow. My memory is
structured like a disco ball. I wonder if there are still parents around
to threaten their children with a whipping. The voice, the lyrics, and
the face of Daniel Darc made French rock listenable to me. The best
conversations I ever had date from adolescence, with a friend at whose
place we drank cocktails that we made by mixing up his mother’s liquor
at random, we would talk until sunrise in the salon of that big house
where Mallarmé had once been a guest, in the course of those nights, I
delivered speeches on love, politics, God, and death of which I retain
not one word, even though I came up with some of them doubled over in
laughter, years later, this friend told his wife that he had left
something in the house just as they were leaving to play tennis, he went
down to the basement and put a bullet in his head with the gun he had
left there beforehand. I have memories of comets with powdery tails. I
read the dictionary. I went into a glass labyrinth called the Palace of
Mirrors. I wonder where the dreams go that I don’t remember. I do not
know what to do with my hands when they have nothing to do. Even though
it’s not for me, I turn around when someone whistles in the street.
Dangerous animals do not scare me. I have seen lightning. I wish they
had sleds for grown-ups. I have read more volumes one than volumes two.
The date on my birth certificate is wrong. I am not sure I have any
influence. I talk to my things when they’re sad. I do not know why I
write. I prefer a ruin to a monument. I am calm during reunions. I have
nothing against the alarm clock. Fifteen years old is the middle of my
life, regardless of when I die. I believe there is an afterlife, but not
an afterdeath. I do not ask “do you love me.” Only once can I say “I’m
dying” without telling a lie. The best day of my life may already be
behind me."</span>
</div>
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<div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; text-align: right;">
<span style="font-size: small;"> —<i>Translated from French by Lorin Stein</i></span></div>
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</div>Nicholas Gulighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05036856540488206943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7270161184723859079.post-25432103899495914142012-01-11T20:23:00.001-06:002012-01-13T12:19:16.143-06:00An Autumn of Black Carriages (some thoughts on Brock-Broido's "Periodic Table of Etheral Elements")<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxaZySKMAOzH_zd-Gq-h7aaj7xnDM50Vti9MoXt16blmsA6Ynv07k_IODpbWdzQv9Rcg8HncwfIP2kPp9F2FpReLfWod3ggtSR_4Kej3mAAlluMDRM1VsE5ks593xzaB1G3XHowSVsaLA/s1600/Ether4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxaZySKMAOzH_zd-Gq-h7aaj7xnDM50Vti9MoXt16blmsA6Ynv07k_IODpbWdzQv9Rcg8HncwfIP2kPp9F2FpReLfWod3ggtSR_4Kej3mAAlluMDRM1VsE5ks593xzaB1G3XHowSVsaLA/s320/Ether4.jpg" width="229" /></a></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;">Recently,
a friend of mine again pointed me to the work of Lucie Brock-Broido who I first
read several years ago when she visited the University of Montana. My professor
at the time, the poet Joanna Klink, sat us down with <i>the Master Letters</i>, a collection of poems derived from the trilogy of letters by Emily Dickinson recovered posthumously in a desk drawer and addressed to
a receiver specified simply, eerily, as Master. Still in draft, the letters, in all likelihood, were directed to a God to whom they were never sent. Also, as of late, in secret and in solitude, I’ve
found myself preoccupied with the promise and possibilities of prayer. </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;">When
I re-crossed the <i>Periodic Table of Ethereal
Elements</i> a couple days ago, I was reminded the line dividing elegy from
prayer is not necessarily discernible. As a form of faith, the
assertion of loss changes the experience of suffering to the degree that the
abstract is made tangible in language and can thereby be met and welcomed and
let go in terms familiar to the afflicted. Loss is subject to transformation. And I am grateful for this assertion. In “the
extraordinary elegance / Of calcium and finery / And loss…” an important
mooring between the world of things and the world surrounding things occurs, a
tethering together of the living and the dead, the here and not here, the
actual and after-actual. In this, the speaker creates a middle distance capable
of holding together opposites, uncertainties. When an object leaves the world,
becomes an abstract shadow of its former self, no longer real to any literal or
tangible degree, the elegiac prayer preserves a sense of access to that which
has departed.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;">But
it is not a resurrection. Though the dead transfigure in language, though their
light is kept alive in speech, the tricky breath of utterance, they are not returned
to us through elegy, not completely. We must leave the safety of our own real lives, meet them in the middle space.
Thus, elegy is violence and prayer a handing over of a portion of a life. The poem
as sacrifice, a grey smoke rising, dark sky. We are speaking through a death mask.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Opposed to the typical elegy focused
on the physical death of a lover, a family member, a friend, what strikes me most about this poem in particular is the nature of the object of
the loss itself, its formlessness already given, its already absent character
experienced as such, prior, even, to its vanishing. It is not an object which has
vanished, for “even in life // You did not inhabit, necessarily, a form, // But
a mind of // Rarer liquid element.” An element of ether, water, the heavens, air, both
of the world and out of it, invisible, the object of loss is projected as a ghost, a subjective God known only in the imagination
and accessible primarily through hypothetical meandering and metaphor. “If you had a psyche,” the speaker
posits,</span><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;">"...it was not known to me</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;"> If
you had a figure, it would be heavy irony.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;">If
you were a man, you would be</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;">An
autumn of black carriages filled red with leaves</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;">From
sycamore trees,</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Not
scattering…”</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Loss,
here, is the loss of the unknown, the mysterious, the empty and the abstract,
the invisible and the divine. The ethereal is posited as real, as once-present, as no longer inhabiting the space of things through which the speaker travels earthward through the
aftermath, un-eased. I enjoy this poem
because it expands the notion of loss to include that which is and isn’t,
deepening the horizon of the possible. For Brock-Broido’s speaker, experience is
fullest precisely in the place where is is also empty. And to lose this, this specific
way of seeing and believing in a world where the physical and the ethereal intermingle, where the actual and the imagined exchange identities, this is perhaps the greatest loss of all.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<br />
<i><span style="font-size: small;">*Here
is the poem in its entirety:</span></i></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><b>Periodic
Table of Ethereal Elements</b></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;">I was
not ready for your form to be cold</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Ever.
Even in life</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;">You
did not inhabit, necessarily, a form,</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;">But a
mind of</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Rarer
liquid element. It had not occurred to me</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;">You
would take</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Leave
and it will be winter from now on, not only</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Here,
in the ordinary,</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">But
there too, in the extraordinary elegance</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Of
calcium and finery</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">And
loss. Keep me</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Tethered
here, breathtakingly awkward and alive.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">If
you had a psyche it was not known to me.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">If
you had a figure it would be heavy irony.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">If
you were a man, you would be</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">An
autumn of black carriages filled red with leaves</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">From
sycamore trees,</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Not
scattering. I was not ready for sure</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Earthward
and unease.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Goodbye
to the imperium, the rinsing wind. You, cold</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">As
God and the great</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Glassed
castle in which I’ve lived, simply</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Now a
house.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">A
girl ago, a childhood gone like a phial of ether</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Thrown
on fire—just</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">A
little jump of flame, like grief, or,</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Like
a penicillin that has lost its skill at killing</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Off,
it then is gone.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><i> -Lucie Brock-Broido</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
</div>Nicholas Gulighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05036856540488206943noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7270161184723859079.post-71430133982271545312012-01-10T09:03:00.000-06:002012-01-10T11:04:02.675-06:00In blue light, flitting<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLTyZ9IhyphenhyphenAnMMlGsaQWlOcLHXf4xD3huCdehyphenhyphen52ta1UaABYk7AqDOvZgfJ_twhdHMkDYU3HNZOOdwIO0T2cz8u4uK6a7EJy8bLaRDQGuVxLZAGxxvLIKtXS6-dYruch9ZvN-VWPLY-rP0/s1600/IMG_0772.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="317" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLTyZ9IhyphenhyphenAnMMlGsaQWlOcLHXf4xD3huCdehyphenhyphen52ta1UaABYk7AqDOvZgfJ_twhdHMkDYU3HNZOOdwIO0T2cz8u4uK6a7EJy8bLaRDQGuVxLZAGxxvLIKtXS6-dYruch9ZvN-VWPLY-rP0/s400/IMG_0772.JPG" width="400" /></a></div>
<br /></div>Nicholas Gulighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05036856540488206943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7270161184723859079.post-54723272795256829792011-11-25T11:57:00.001-06:002012-01-11T21:30:43.490-06:00A Bag of Chicken, A Bag of Rice, A Girl in the Back of a Truck<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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</div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1BmKN5W6SJLNxzQgJyQHN53Uz7Za1yjKmhp-A8N-iR_JHE8d7H4gS5edYPdmk6pMM3Z6AgMrYfG9WNpVTS_NeB2LrN_Bc7UFD4IV-Qc8vWvbqSHeIsp1iVlXjLpHUFnobpEpzoCB_ezA/s1600/flood+relief.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1BmKN5W6SJLNxzQgJyQHN53Uz7Za1yjKmhp-A8N-iR_JHE8d7H4gS5edYPdmk6pMM3Z6AgMrYfG9WNpVTS_NeB2LrN_Bc7UFD4IV-Qc8vWvbqSHeIsp1iVlXjLpHUFnobpEpzoCB_ezA/s320/flood+relief.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;">The
chicken bags are dripping blood juice. We’re standing in a line, me, the Fulbright teaching
assistants, and about forty to fifty local volunteers, passing sticky bags of freshly
butchered poultry from one of several delivery trucks to the kitchen tent at
Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, a makeshift flood relief center in the
middle of a city turned to water. It’s been about a month now. Since the end of
the rainy season, the rivers to the north have been slowly moving south, past
the sandbags and retaining walls erected around the Chao Phraya River, filling Thailand’s
capital. Twenty-three of the fifty districts in the city are affected, mostly
the poorer areas, and today about 200 of us will prepare, package, and deliver
meals to roughly 45,000 people displaced by the largest natural disaster to
affect the region in over half a century. Tomorrow we’ll do 60,000. Give or
take, the monks at the monastery down the street prepare food for an additional
15,000 affected residents, and there are other centers also. Small pockets of
volunteers are scattered throughout Bangkok, men and women and students and
children who have put their lives on hold, coming when they can, before and
after work and classes. Beginning at two am in the morning the effort runs until
I don’t know when. I have no idea how many of these centers there are, or how
many people are in need of them, how it works as smoothly as it does. Also, we’re
operating without government assistance. The army’s here, providing tucks and muscle,
but, oddly, the government, elected to operate and protect the country, is not.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;">“We
refuse to work with them,” my adviser informs us, “they can’t be trusted. If we
want to help each other, we have to do it for ourselves.” She laughs when she
says this, like she’s serious but only partially. Oddly, she’s
always laughing. I’m not sure what to think. Back home it seems to me we’d be
in an uproar if the government didn’t rush to save us. Here, on the other
hand, it seems people just dig in and work.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;">The
bags of chicken pass from one set of hands to another. Rubber-banded shut, they
leak. Blood-juice is on my fingers, on my forearms, on my face. There’s no way I’m
not getting salmonella. This, I accept. It reminds me of killing chickens back at the farm in Wisconsin where I worked before I started grad-school,
though here there’s considerably more fowl, over a ton of
butchered birds in plastic bags which the cooks will eventually turn to curry. I
continue moving meat. The girl ahead of me, though, an attractive and skinny
vegetarian from Harvard, has had enough. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;">“Can’t
do it,” she says, putting her hands up, shaking her head, and walking toward the
station where a group of other Fulbrights stand at a line of tables stirring rice. The rest of us laugh—deep down, those that know her knew she wouldn’t
make it—but only for a moment. The line requires a certain amount of regularity,
a fast and steady pace that can’t be broken. If a person slows or pauses or
gets distracted for any real duration they end up with a bag of soggy chicken to
the chest and the line backs up and has to be restarted. Also, the woman on the
mega-phone will yell at us, which isn’t what we want. What we want is to get
the chicken from the truck and to the kitchen as quickly as we can, which takes
about an hour. It’s hot, and the sun is baking down on us between the trees,
and there’s nothing anyone can do about it except to grab what they’re handed
and pass it on. Behind me, a chubby kid with glasses drops a bag between his
fingers and chicken splashes on the floor, a pink and fleshy pile. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Today
is also the first day I’ve met any of the other people in my program. Stationed
in various small towns at schools and universities across the country, the
heart and soul of the Fulbright program are the English Teaching Assistants, of
which there’s roughly twenty. The ETA’s are young and eager and excited to be
here. Most of them have just graduated college and they have that look in their
eyes specifically reserved for the hopeful and the radically un-jaded, those
rare and special souls for whom the world is still full of possibility, openings, doors. The rest of us, researchers with grants to pursue our own agendas and
stationed primarily in Bangkok, are a little older, more weathered maybe, more rough around the edges, though
we’re excited also. The ETA’s rub off on us, make us young again and ready to
be of help in a place and point in time that has no need for anything but faith
and effort. Our faith is that eventually the water will recede and people will
be able to go back to their houses and rebuild them. Our effort is aimed at the
time and place until then, the uncertain space in which so many have so little, and so we
gather together at the University, the Monastery, where ever it is a center has
been set up, and we stand in lines together passing bags of meat.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;">This,
to me, is necessary. I have been in Thailand for approximately three months,
living in a relatively unaffected area, holed up in my apartment. I read and
write and exercise and cook. I go out sometimes, but only sometimes, to parts
of the city reachable by sky train, and I have yet to see, feel, or experience
the flood in any significant way. For me, it isn’t really happening, though
people have died and homes have been destroyed. I have empathy but it isn’t actually
empathy. I want the waters to recede and things to start again and run again,
but it isn’t real, the wanting for these things to happen, because the desire,
at least until today, remained, for the most part, abstract, a reaction relegated
to a place which is not a place at all but an idea of how one is supposed to feel
given the crises of a situation that one has only heard is real, a responsibility to respond but not the
response itself, an obligation. Feeling from afar, unfortunately, is not
enough, not when there is work to be done. And it is nice to have the chance,
finally, to do it.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;">A
couple hours later, after the chicken line is finished, after the vegetables,
too, in a line, are moved into the kitchen where an army of cooks
have already starting chopping and throwing things in oil, the pretty vegetarian
and I are in the back of a gigantic camouflaged truck, ten pound bags of rice
and miscellaneous provisions flying through the air in our direction, thrown at
us by a group of young marines on the ground below. I catch them as best I can
and, in a single motion, keep them flying backwards where every now and then
Rachel takes a bag in the chest before she’s ready and ends up on her back
against the mass of bags already piled in the back. Though I’ve only known her
a day and we are obviously different people from incredibly disparate lives—I have
a sense she’s likely a Republican, incredibly religious and from money—for now she’s my partner, the one person
in the world who’s standing next to me, whose help I need, and I’m grateful.
She’s half my size, doesn’t seem the type of person wired for hard labor, and
yet here she is, working every bit as hard as I am, likely even harder. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;">When
the bags stop coming, I stop for water, catch my breath. Rachel is talking up
the Thai Marines in Thai, which they appreciate. They gather around her. One soldier
in particular, bright eyed and smiling, an incredibly beautiful boy in a tight
green shirt who laughs at everything she says. I don’t understand what they’re
saying and I don’t need to. The sun is out and it will stay out. Any moment now, more rice is on the way. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
</span></span></div>Nicholas Gulighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05036856540488206943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7270161184723859079.post-15479640822668244782011-11-14T07:21:00.001-06:002012-01-11T21:31:04.447-06:00Down by the River<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjihAn_VI4sfvCZLLi6lroDWCLwdy6GmF2QppmD1wqWZkC3uctBv-OaHX4Ork0XF1qXzASSIa9BJ_RHbHrkBahCgDME7Sz4_Q-ycoMmPsjBmWdirP2RtIdWs81uRe0auCiPSPTYIYxRqZI/s1600/IMG_0824.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjihAn_VI4sfvCZLLi6lroDWCLwdy6GmF2QppmD1wqWZkC3uctBv-OaHX4Ork0XF1qXzASSIa9BJ_RHbHrkBahCgDME7Sz4_Q-ycoMmPsjBmWdirP2RtIdWs81uRe0auCiPSPTYIYxRqZI/s320/IMG_0824.JPG" width="320" /></a></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;">There are bodies sprawled in odd directions everywhere, cocooned in shades of multi-colored silk, sleeping on their shoes. Amid the masses at the train station in Varanasi, Kelli and I step out onto an overcrowded platform, smell the air and wish we hadn’t. Back in Kolkata, I almost threw up upon arrival. The bathrooms on the trains, open holes which drip down ugly on the tracks, wreck the air entirely. Also, I was terrified and terror happens, at least for me, in the stomach. If there is anything I’m afraid of, it’s the absolute indifference of chaos, a world without order and without regard for the existence of individuals. India, especially when it comes to public transportation, is exactly that. I’m doomed. Pushing my way to the restrooms, I stood for a moment above the squat toilet with my hands on my knees, which was a mistake. The air wasn’t any better there, much worse in fact, so I got out, found an isolated corner, and started taking breaths. Thankfully, in Varanasi a low breeze moves in off the Ganges, carries some of what is rancid here away. Eventually my stomach calms and in no time at all Kelli finds a driver. We throw our bags in the back of his car and head out into the center of town. Where the river is. Where the Ghats are. And where, in a matter of two short days, I’ll fall in love completely with a city half a world from home.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;">It probably shouldn’t surprise a person that any of India’s seven sacred cities turns the stomach inside out and back again. According to legend, the seven Shakti Peethas were founded in places where various bits and pieces of an immolated bride, Sati, wife of Shiva, are said to have fallen. If the legends are correct, after Sati committed suicide, Shiva took her body over his shoulder and proceeded in a rage specific to a God whose heart is broken and who carries the carcass of his bride across the universe, destroying everything, everyone. Being fond of their creation, the other Gods quickly and violently intervened. Vishnu, in particular, followed Shiva cutting Sati into seven pieces. Varanasi, I believe, is where her left hand fell, the Ganges filling up with blood. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;">These days, the Ganges fills with feces. With fecal coliform levels hundreds of times higher than is safe for a human to encounter in good conscience, the river is one of the filthiest bodies of moving water on the planet. Literally, it should kill you. The fact that it doesn't is perhaps the only argument outside of the experience of faith that there is, in fact, something holy to her. Everything else is waste. For the most part, Kelli and I are scared of Hepatitis C, a disease we’re certain enters the current when Hindus submerge their dead in the waters of salvation and which we accuse each other of having contracted every time we step in a sludge puddle.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;">“Get away from me, you’re infected,” I say.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;">“Whatever,” Kelli says, shaking off her sandals. “What the hell is this anyway?” </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;">The “this” she’s referring to looks, remarkably, regrettably, like diarrhea. Draining slowly from a hole in the bottom of a crumbing staircase, the sludge is half liquid, half solid, pale brown. Bits of things, I don’t know what, partially floating, partially not, but in either case they’re dragged along by gravity toward the hoard of bathers who line Ganges to our right.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Earlier, after the sun crested the pollution line, turned into a bright pink ball on the horizon, the two of us sat together in a wooden rowboat, saying very little and watching from the river the city slowly come to life. First, noises, low and distant sounds. A dog barking. Silence. Then more dogs. From far away, the muffled clank of bells like metal pots, human chanting, clamor. The boat rocks back and forth. Silence. More bells. Silence. For whatever reason, we speak less and less these days, but it isn’t awkward, it’s nice, calming even. And in India, the experience of calm is rare, if ever, and it is best allowed to last. There is nothing to do but cherish it, the two of us side by side and rocking in our little boat, the still and sacred water, body of the Goddess Ganga, dirty as she is. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Every morning the men, women, and children of Varanasi flock to the Ghats to cleanse their sins and start the day from scratch, covered in sewage, Hepatitis C, and the ashes of the dead, a new slate. Watching them, especially with cameras, feels strange, so we take our pictures from far away. Up close, though, is where the magic happens. The men strip down to nearly nothing, which means we see a lot of scrotums. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;">“There we go,” I say to Kelli, “that’s your boyfriend.” Her newest boyfriend, a large and rather unattractive man with a mustache and gangly hair is touching himself without mercy in front of everyone and calling up to her from where he’s standing in the shallows of the Ganges covered in white soap. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;">“Miss, where you from? Hold on. Miss, I take you on my boat!” </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Because she’s white and pretty and looks like she has money, though she doesn't, the men of India all call out to her. For all anyone knows, Kelli could be my girlfriend or my wife, but it doesn’t matter. The men all flock to her, nearly crash their bicycles, their cars. They come up and want their pictures taken. Usually, she obliges, but I can tell it’s beginning to annoy her. We’re constantly accosted. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;"> “Talk to the white girl,” I like to say when the kids come up to me, which Kelly absolutely loves. Recently, though, the kids specifically have ceased with even the slightest pretense of a courtesy and refer to Kelly simply, honestly, as Money.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;">“Hallo, Money,” they call in unison, “Hallo, Money. Hallo, Money.” At times they follow us for blocks.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;"> “I can’t take you anywhere,” I say.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Back on shore, the cars have started in, jockeying for position on the crowded streets and letting their horns go. The holy city is awake. At the moment the locals are preparing for a festival, which we’ll miss. Some 200,000 people are expected to flock to Varanasi tomorrow from all corners of the country to drink and bathe in the water together, to rub it in their gums and spit it out, to bottle it and take it home and use it at their altars and pray to it and cleanse themselves and save themselves from sin. I don’t get it, but I don’t need to. I really like it here. I can't explain it, but I do. For whatever reason, the river is a special place, even to an American who’s not a Hindu and who, furthermore, is utterly dismayed by the way the river has been treated. I could sit by her for hours and I do. Yesterday we watched a body burn, five of them, in fact, stood up in silence and walked away.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; text-align: justify;">
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<span style="font-size: small;">The morning before we leave, Kelli and I get breakfast at our favorite restaurant and walk the ghats together for a final time, stopping every now and then to take it in as best we can and hold it, hoping that it lasts. Down below us, the boatman are cleaning up their boats and painting them. Tonight they’ll fetch about a hundred times their normal prices for a single trip, which seems ridiculous, but Hindus, if anything, are devoted. They will pay to pray here. It doesn't matter how much or how far they have to travel. Come dark, the body of the Goddess Ganga will light for miles with millions of candles lined in perfect rows on the terraced concrete steps. In droves, the devoted will sing and dance and chant together as they’ve done for centuries. As a single entity, they will do these things. They will take the river. They will put the river in them. </span></div>
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</div>Nicholas Gulighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05036856540488206943noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7270161184723859079.post-69815587263667495252011-11-09T09:47:00.005-06:002012-01-11T21:31:32.156-06:00How Much for Your Picture?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-size: small;">In November in Kolkata the ground disintegrates and rises. Without the rains of the last few months to pack the dirt down hard, with only wind and sunlight the air becomes primarily a vehicle for sediment, a pollution made of yellow sand kicked off the road by traffic, particles of concrete, clouds of cattle excrement, exhaust. Breathing is impossible. In fact, little, if anything, is easy here. Far too much is happening. Incessantly in a state of disrepair, India’s third largest city, a population approaching 16 million if you include the suburbs, is perpetually under construction, its matrix of roads and crooked alleys lined by men and women whose hearts and lives belong to weather. Here, the heat and rain turn brick and mortar into rubble, pile it with little mercy at the feet of people who have nothing. We’ve only been here thirty minutes, my friend and I, but in thirty seconds I know immediately Kolkata is a different monster all together. New York, Chicago, Bangkok, of all the major cities I’ve spent time in, Kolkata wins, period. This is Kali country, after all, Hindu’s Goddess of destruction from which the city derives its name, famous for her necklace of demon skulls, drinker of blood, devourer of worlds. Weak people do not live here, they only visit.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">From the open backseat window of our car, Kelli leans out quickly with her camera. To our left, a group of men gather around an open vat of mortar, mixing the water in and staring coldly back at her. It is hard to tell if they are angry with us specifically or if it’s something else. Given the utter poverty of a place and point in time which feels impossibly unforgiving, abject and surreal, the glare that finds the average tourist seems unfortunately appropriate. As a foreigner in a place where one does not naturally belong, it’s hard sometimes, really hard, to know where lines are drawn. When a person sees me watching them, I intuitively turn away, though I wish our eyes could meet and our separate lives could co-exist despite our differences, even if only for a moment. One girl in particular, a sori wrapped around her the electric color of the ocean, the color of the electric sky. Surrounded by taxi cabs, tuk-tuks, she catches me with my camera directly on her. In the shot I get, she turns away from me, which for whatever reason breaks my heart. I want terribly to know her name. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Regrettably, the observation of a people and of a place too often appear in the same fast action as their exploitation, in the click of a camera, for instance, when all the object of the photograph desires is to cross the street in private and in peace, or the drop of the jaw when confronted by a man decapitating chickens on the sidewalk, as the case may be. Either way, the exotic, the subjectively unreal. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">“I can’t believe this,” one of us will say.</span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">“Where the hell are we?” the other one will say. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">And it goes on like this, the two of us, our eyes propped wide as they can get because India both is and isn’t actual. Nothing here makes sense, which “is what it is” as Kelli is fond of saying, though I wish at times there was a way for it to be something else, something, I don’t know, less intrusive.</span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">The problem is our being here changes the place entirely, causes people to see tourists as potential income, which isn't human no matter how you look at it, not on either end. Kelli and I complain a lot about being accosted for money we don't have, but we both know in some sense its our own fault for being here, a context we ourselves and people like us create around ourselves by stepping off the plane. We leave our homes in the west, flee east, and leave a little of ourselves behind us in our wake, a process that in India has been happening en mass since the East Indian Company set up camp in 1612, mining spices for the crown and eventually colonizing the sub-continent entirely, an era of racial oppression and financial exploitation spanning just short of a pair of centuries. The residue of the British Empire is still apparent here, for better and for worse. Even though I’m American and brown and don’t think much of Europeans as a silent rule, I feel implicated, and I am.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">When experiencing for the first time a way of being in the world of which I am completely ignorant, inadvertently, through no fault of my own except that I myself decided to arrive here, I risk the work of Empire, which isn’t what I want. As a tourist “trying to see the world,” there is a way in which one mines the daily lives and actions of the local population for their own abstract and often selfish reasons. Of course, the fact that I’m aware of this softens my guilt, but only to a degree. To the person on the other end of the camera going about their day, who has no knowledge of the extent to which I’m aware of what I’ve doing, I’m still a foreigner, a person from a richer place who wants to take their picture and show his friends back home how poor they really are, how hard it is India, how crazy, how beautiful, how other. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">“You’d never believe it,” I’ll say.</span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">“O my god!” they’ll say. “How do they even live like that?” </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Furthermore, if I’m aware I’m doing it, doesn’t that make it worse? Furthermore, I’m doing it right now. My mouth in my hands, I breathe in and out between my fingers, filtering the dust, but only barely. Sunlight splinters through the spotted windshield, the sound of car horns, cattle. Poor people do things in the street, eating, talking. I look at them. I take their picture. I write about it, them, me. This, for now, is India. I don’t know what else to do.</span><br />
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</div>Nicholas Gulighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05036856540488206943noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7270161184723859079.post-84991907607000317262011-10-27T02:28:00.001-05:002012-01-11T21:32:04.632-06:00Where the Cruel Waters Flow<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-size: small;">From the window of my apartment, the world looks well enough. For now, bright sun on the roofs of houses to my right, a line of clothes strung up on a neighbor’s balcony, a blue sky, clouds. The people from the shanty down below are bathing again, a daily ritual in which water from a yellow bucket pours across their backs and shoulders. An elderly woman in the corner of the lot harvests something green from a patch of weeds and concrete. I wonder what it is, if she can eat it. From here, eight stories above the world and safe in my apartment, I can even hear the street dogs barking back and forth between themselves four blocks down, a distant conversation, constant and somehow reassuring. This is the scene I wake up to everyday in Bangkok, even when it’s flooding. <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhMp8AnhDF4&feature=related">In other places</a>, not more than twenty minutes from here, the streets are rivers filled with garbage, abandoned animals, the rain.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">The problem is my city is about to become an island, and there doesn’t seem to be anything that anyone can do about it. Cutting directly through the heart of Bangkok, the Chao Phraya River, one of the country’s major water ways, is also the river into which the majority of Thailand’s northern rivers empty. Given the incredible flooding in the north this last rainy season, the cresting of the Chao Phraya has now become the problem of the central provinces, mine in particular, home to about 10 million people, many now without their homes. We are pressed between the mountains from which the northern rivers flow and the ocean below us to which they’re drawn, a flat and incredibly populated expanse of land and city which hasn’t seen this kind of water in over fifty years.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">For the last week or so, the messages coming from the news and from the government have been pretty mixed, half assuring us of their control over the situation, half retracting that assurance and telling us to ready for the worst. Currently, especially in districts nearest the river, there are people and places that are thoroughly and utterly in trouble. I think about three hundred or so have died so far, but I can’t be certain. So little is for certain. I do know that evacuation centers have been set up, but, unfortunately, some of these have already had to be evacuated. Similarly, the FORC, the government organization in charge of dealing with the flood, currently operates out of the Don Mueang airport and are quickly being surrounded by water at their headquarters. The international airport, so far, continues to operate, though the majority of flights out of the city have all been booked.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">The worst case scenario is that all three major defensive positions at the city’s northern edge fail and do so utterly. Every day they reinforce these walls with sandbags, but an article I read this morning warned that the country was quickly running out of sand. Kids across the country have even started digging up the fields where they play soccer, bagging up the ground to make a wall of earth that all of us pray to god can hold. If it doesn’t, the water, which has been building slowly for the last few weeks, will over-wash the capital in an estimated 5 feet of water, last for about a month. The flatness of the landscape makes the drainage of water incredibly slow, which is good in a way because it allows a more sustained attempt at holding the water back, but should that attempt fail, it means the water is here to stay. The prime minister said today there is about a 50/50 chance of slowing down the water long enough for people to be prepared. The goal, I think, is to control the amount of water so no single area gets hit all at once. The idea is to disperse the water slowly, spread it out. But if the water does suddenly get through, and if it stays, at that point I don’t know what happens to Bangkok, or to the country for that matter which relies heavily on its capital as the financial epicenter of its economy. If the walls to the north go down, I will probably have to leave. Granted, if they go down, I probably won’t be able to, so, well, I don’t know then. I really don’t.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">What I do know is that now that Riley’s back in Chaing Rai, I’m here alone, for the next week at least. They’re building an impromptu brick and mortar wall around my building, about five feet high and reinforced with sandbags, so hopefully that does the trick. Also, I think we have a generator, so I should be fine. Although the government recently declared an emergency “holiday” so businesses have an excuse to close and people can evacuate, there is a shortage of ways to leave. Planes and buses have all been booked, and I don’t have a car. At the moment, I have enough food and water to last me about two weeks, but I hope it doesn’t come to that. Also, next Wednesday I leave on a flight out of Bangkok to India. There, I will take refuge with Kelli for two weeks traveling. I pray that by the time we return, the world, or at least my portion of it, is still alive, afloat and breathing. I love this city very much. I want her to remain. </span></div>
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</div>Nicholas Gulighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05036856540488206943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7270161184723859079.post-91492136480445109112011-10-13T10:29:00.001-05:002012-01-11T21:32:17.444-06:00A Day in the Life of Hammers, Ants, and Fatness<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-size: small;">Today I woke up early because of hammers. There are men in the rooms around my room, and they are hitting things. Every now and then, they take out drills, buzz saws, and really get to work. I sit at my table wearing ear plugs for a while, drinking instant coffee, looking out my window. Down below me, what passes for a public bath, a big concrete square filled with rain water which people from the shanty shack like to stand around in wearing just their underwear. They take buckets and pour the water over their heads and backs and shoulders. Usually, a little naked brown kid jumps around and giggles as his/her mother tries/fails to bath them. I like watching them, the naked and mostly naked people, though it makes me out to be a creeper. <br />
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When the hammering doesn't stop and I can't take it anymore, I decide to get some groceries. I go to the wrong train stop, get off, and fail to find a store which isn't there. I try again, this time at the right stop, but the store is mostly empty. The city's flooding at the moment, in fact the whole country is, so I guess the delivery trucks aren't bringing us any food. That, or else everyone but me stocked up. Typical. I go for water, but that too, the water, has all been taken. I wonder for a moment what I'm going to do. I buy some rice and a pot. I will boil water. I will then eat rice. Great. I take my rice and metal pot and get back on the train.<br />
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Back at home, hungry, I grab a bag of cashews left over from the week before and I dump them in my mouth. Even though they’re stale because I left the bag open, they still taste pretty good. I chew and chew them. Suddenly they hurt. They hurt again. What the hell? I spit them out into my hand where little half chewed ants squirm around amongst the soggy chewed up cashew bits. I look in the bag. Yep, totally ants in there, little monsters. I take my finger and start to hollow out my mouth. I spit their bodies in the sink, turn the water on and wash them down the drain.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Ear plugs in, headphones over ear plugs, the hammering becomes somewhat manageable. Also, I am naked, which is the best. I sit back down and try to finish the essay I’ve been working on, the one in which I try to turn my first three weeks in Thailand into something clear enough to read. I want it to make sense of things for me, like tell me word for word what the hell it is I’m doing here and how do I stop thinking about a girl I'm pretty sure is over me. I’m supposed to be here writing poetry, but, for whatever reason, it comes out wrong, in sentences, most of which are proper, or at least I think they are. Also, I’ve started reading novels. What the hell? In the essay, I get to a part where I’m trying to remember meeting my old girlfriend for the first time, but I don’t remember it correctly. I don't remember it at all. I remember a different moment, so I lie and use that one. Is this ok? Why don’t I remember right? I’m pretty sure she’ll kill me when she reads it, if she reads it. In all likelihood, by then it won’t matter much to either of us, which is the way it goes sometimes, though I wish there were some other ways it went sometimes.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Now I’m in the gym, staring at my muscles in the mirror the way my friend Jacy taught me back at Gold’s in Wisconsin when we used to go there. “Physical fitness/physical fun?” he’d text me in the mornings, but it isn’t as much fun without him. In fact, it isn't fun at all. Mostly, I just get tired and give up. Now, instead of lifting weights up over my head, I’m sitting by myself in an empty room, slumped over on a padded bench and staring at my sneakers. I’m getting fatter by the minute, I can feel it. I stand up, pull my shirt up around my chest, and push my belly out. Yep, totally getting fatter. I pull my shirt back down. Tomorrow, I tell myself, tomorrow I’ll do better.</span></div>
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</div>Nicholas Gulighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05036856540488206943noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7270161184723859079.post-73063961638394013742011-10-10T05:58:00.007-05:002012-01-11T21:32:46.786-06:00Like What Wall Street Looks to Me Appearing Here that I am Far Away from You and With<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-size: small;">Maybe I’ve been gone too long. No, it’s only been a month. Maybe, then, I left before I left, the spirit leaving long before my body did. Maybe it was years ago. How much time has passed since I actually really cared? </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">When I was young, I used to make believe I was a youthful revolutionary, dress up dark in filthy patchwork clothes and scream in punk bands on the weekends, loud as I could. At the age of sixteen I went to an EarhFirst! rendezvous in Crandon, WI. There, cops chased us onto an Indian reservation. Half terrified, half proud, I called my dad to tell him I'd be in jail. Also, an occupation of a park in Minneapolis. In the middle of the night I hauled cement which we mixed and placed in holes so protesters could physically attach themselves to metal bars cemented in the ground, their wrists chained within the earth they were trying to protect. “Dragon Traps” I think we called them, or something to that effect. The worst, though, and this I still feel sick about, was the way I used to pride myself on a riot I was in and partially started, like being beaten up by cops meant my life was meaningful and more important than the lives of people who hadn't been in riots. At the time, I really felt it, passionate and full of rage, raw love in a world of mediocrity. Sometimes I wish I still did.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">Somewhere, though, maybe in my middle twenties, the spirit kind of faded, puttered out and changed. Focusing instead on pretty girls and poetry, and ultimately on school, I cut my dreadlocks off, put my favorite pair of pants away. Instead of Chomsky, I started reading Beckett. I gave up screaming in a punk band, got good at writing poems, and learned to cook. I’m not sure why this happened, or what it was that I got tired of, what it says about me as a human being, but lately, especially when I read about the people in New York and in other cities across the country expressing solidarity, I’ve been feeling a whole lot like I need to say I’m sorry.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">The problem is: to whom do I apologize? The second problem: what do I do to stop this feeling altogether, kill it quickly where it hurts, right here, right now in Thailand. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">The first person I need to say I’m sorry to is a friend of mine from Iowa, a poet named Adam, whose work, both in and away from poetry, is about as good as work can get. He’s been in the city, at the occupation taking care of protesters, making sure they're warm. I feel bad because he’s done so much. I haven’t. And I don't want to let him down. The other day, in Bangkok, after not hearing from him for very many months, I turned on my computer, an email, and started reading this:</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">#occupywallstreet</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">#happywiththewaythingsaregoing</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">#writingandactivismmerging</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">#inwaysthatareexciting</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">#andnew</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">spending time</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">in the occupation</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">in new york</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">recently</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">was wonderful</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">i joined the comfort working group</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">which helped people get blankets</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">and tarps</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">and warm dry sweaters</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">it's been raining a lot</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">i worked with</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">great people</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">it reminds me</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">of how you like the country</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">and your punk past</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">and how much of an asset</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">you are</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">and will be</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">in the revolution</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">you're always invited</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">to come stay with me</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">wherever</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">we are</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Unlike Adam, I am incredibly uncertain how to be political anymore and continue writing poetry, a problem which Oppen, perhaps the most important and influential poet in my life, solved by abandoning poetry altogether. I am not, at least by most standards, and most certainly not anymore, an overtly political personality. Obviously Adam is, my friend in prison, Ian, was, and of course there’s the mass of bodies huddled in New York. But me, I faked it so I could listen to punk rock and not be called a poser. And now I don’t even listen to punk rock. I live in Thailand where the government my friends are attempting to affect gives me money to be a poet. I’m not even writing poetry. America is far away.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Last year, I was living with my girlfriend in Montana when the men, women, and children of Wisconsin tried to take their state back, my state. My parents were down in Madison. My friends from Minneapolis, from Chicago, from Iowa, they were all in Madison as well. They, and however many thousand others, seventy or more if I remember right, god. Every morning, I’d get on my computer as though it made me closer somehow, more back at home than not home. I’d listen to the news on NPR and shake with excitement in my living room, I was that proud. "Jane!" I'd say, "You'll never guess how many are there right now!" When people in Missoula talked about the protests, I’d make sure they knew where I was from. Those were my people, my friends and family filling up the streets. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Ultimately, I think, I want my life to be a part of the lives of the people and the places I belong to, the men and women standing there together in Wisconsin and in New York, whose beliefs are my beliefs, or at least I hope they are. I can’t be certain, which is a problem. I only think I have beliefs, I know I used to, but these days, given the complexity of trying to make sense of everything, it isn't quite that easy. Again, I can’t be certain. It isn’t clear how much of me authentically responds, and I mean <i>actually</i> authentically responds, to the sentiments expressed on Wall Street. I can <i>say</i> I’m with them, click on links and "like" things, I can put up a lonely blog post, but at the end of the day, I’m here. I write poetry which only occupies the page. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Part of this is that I don’t totally understand the situation. I know there are the less rich people upset with the more rich people, the 1% referred to on the signs raised high against the New York City skyline. That, I get. Our country's in a lot of trouble and it looks like a select few made a big fat killing helping it to be that way. Furthermore, I’ll never be a rich person, so, for me, the extremely rich are easy targets. Plus, it doesn’t seem much like they really give a shit about me either, or about most people for that matter, or about the planet on which the rest of us depend for absolutely everything. But this, the extent that I “get it” and to which I share and hold beliefs, not only am I severely limited in my knowledge of the situation, my faith in what I think and feel is rooted almost totally in abstract, shaky ground, an unclear ethic turning over in the gut that feels a lot like hunger. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">My hope is that maybe hunger is enough. If it really is a kind of hunger, a need for nourishment at the level of the spirit which isn’t full without it, a craving for something bigger and more meaningful than what I am alone, than that is my one demand. I mean this in the biggest, most beautiful sense, passion and companionship, a desire to be numerous, fodder in the form of love. I get it and I demand it because its happening, right here, right now, the process of the feeling rising up and slowly taking over, my nascent solidarity. Maybe, if Adam's right, this, the process of beginning to feel, is what all the fuss is actually about, a demand by people for people to finally be people, a process going on en mass and then, hopefully, in each of us, a way to feel alive in the face of forces, too numerous to name, that tell us we're apart. Lately, the further and further I feel from the people and the places that I care about, the more I read about New York, look back upon Wisconsin, the louder and louder it seems to get, the hunger, screaming from my stomach, no longer abstract. The more I listen, the more it’s there, growing, political and more than politics, the more and more I’m home. </span></div>
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</div>Nicholas Gulighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05036856540488206943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7270161184723859079.post-4884157384263613662011-09-30T05:18:00.006-05:002012-01-11T21:33:04.748-06:00Parting in Lampang<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjo8aPJIoGAbMw81t0PZHIhRJ9KNlOy-S_Ah_haKC9SwB-a0p-hEYLg9yWpIpTD5VLOt5Mmt5uk8xo-ktWzc96gtQ15Ui2owY5fxt-o4PWWerfuae7OTnpq-W8FREpwGpP62OVI2Z3IKhg/s1600/lampang.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjo8aPJIoGAbMw81t0PZHIhRJ9KNlOy-S_Ah_haKC9SwB-a0p-hEYLg9yWpIpTD5VLOt5Mmt5uk8xo-ktWzc96gtQ15Ui2owY5fxt-o4PWWerfuae7OTnpq-W8FREpwGpP62OVI2Z3IKhg/s320/lampang.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: small;">In Lampang, a white fan turns in a slow circle around the ceiling, fluttering the saffron curtains of my room. The walls, a shade of brown so dark they're almost black, so shiny they look plastic, let in skinny slants of light that cut across the floor and lay there isolated against the uneven wooden boards. Outside the door, a coil of incense, used to keep mosquitos out, uncoils in a line of bone white smoke which hovers in the air, pale clouds in the corners of the hallway. I am lying on my bed. Through the curtains, the day outside becomes the day inside, an orange and gentle glow. Thailand. Down on the deck, my companions are drinking instant coffee and eating breakfast. From there, they can see the river, a thick and fluid murk the color of bruised fruit which has swallowed nearly everything. On a different day, in a different part of the year, the men, women, and children of Lampang would be sitting on the other side across from us, transfixed by water on the broken concrete steps that lead steeply down the banks and to the shore. I like to imagine they'd be fishing, pulling snakeheads from the filthy deep, but they’re not. Today, at the end of the rainy season with water pouring steady from the north and more to come, the shore is hardly even visible. Every now and then a tree branch, green with leaves, floats by on the dirty surface and turns into a tiny spot downstream. The river is alone. </span><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: small;"></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: small;">For the most part, the beginning of the trip is over. In a day, Kelli and I fly back to Bangkok, Riley hops a bus to Chiang Rai, Josh and Daow drive east to Isaan. The last few weeks have happened fast, a blur of days and nights and mornings. The four of us, for better and for worse, have lived, eaten, stayed up, slept in, talked, and drank together in various bars, beaches, restaurants, and guest houses littered from the south of Thailand to the north. Recently, though, we’ve all been slowing down. In anticipation of the months to come, each of us, in our own ways, are preparing to be alone. Riley’s showers have gotten longer, though he still sings in there, and he’s been smoking more, a habit which brings him out onto the sidewalks where he likes to stand with a bottle of Coke beneath the awnings and look around. The last few days I’ve gotten up as early as I can, hoping for an hour to myself in which to read, drink coffee, write, though it isn’t easy to leave the comfort of an air conditioned guesthouse in this humidity. And Kelli, Kelli’s been pretty quiet lately, though I’m not sure why. She may be getting sick.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: small;">Yesterday on Josh’s houseboat we floated for a long time down a narrow lake where he hopes someday to open a resort. We stopped at the abandoned caves of former forest dwellers where we sent Kelli squealing through the bat infested dark, a game we dubbed "Squigs goes first," which she didn’t like. Also, big limestone cliffs which lined the shore where Riley jumped off into the water. We sat out on the deck a lot, in the sun and in the shade. We took turns taking naps, eating BBQ fish, chicken wings, and pork ribs, drinking vodka tonics, Singha on the rocks. On the big stereo at the back of the boat, we listened to the Weeknd, Bob Marley, Dengue Fever, and Sade. In a lot of ways, it was a typical day for us, slow and steady and a little drunk, but it was also our last day, which made it a little sad. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: small;">When it started getting late, Kelli and I sat out at the front of the boat together and let out feet hang down into the water. Soon it would be dark out, the whole boat lit by lantern light, and it would get hard to tell the jungle and the mountains from the sky.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: small;">“Look,” she said, pointing to a space in the clouds.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: small;">“I know,” I said, “finally.” </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: small;">Strangely, for the last three weeks, perhaps because the rain's been so persistent, the night sky has remained entirely and stubbornly full of clouds, starless, but last night they really came alive up there, thousands of them, little silver pins, and for as far as the mountains would let me see, they shimmered tiny in the distance. Around my feet, the water of the lake was black and warm, barley moving. Every now and then a twig would stick between my toes and I’d have to reach down and take it out. I'm not sure how we ever made it home, but we did. I remember we turned a bend in the lake, slowly--it is hard to know where one is truly going--and then we turned another.</span><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: small;"></span></div>
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</div>Nicholas Gulighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05036856540488206943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7270161184723859079.post-10648329715815582442011-09-27T13:20:00.001-05:002012-01-11T21:33:20.929-06:00Zombie Hooker Nightmare<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuLmVkG3wAzZ04ZKGmimNCy6jWYBQmK8iGhx1c-RyPhXNHtFhWDRgkSztPkmq6rfldfr-TQocH6RFZ_8mw3YM-EzE3ccaxDAYGzZuW4miL-ewoh0ugX5R37t-voa3G143HP3ZWGQOo8cA/s1600/thumbnail_46003.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuLmVkG3wAzZ04ZKGmimNCy6jWYBQmK8iGhx1c-RyPhXNHtFhWDRgkSztPkmq6rfldfr-TQocH6RFZ_8mw3YM-EzE3ccaxDAYGzZuW4miL-ewoh0ugX5R37t-voa3G143HP3ZWGQOo8cA/s320/thumbnail_46003.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">The streets are dark enough to harbor monsters and/or ghosts. At two in the morning, the storefronts, gated shut, look deceptively the same, which is a problem. Actually, it’s a huge problem. Kelli went to bed about an hour ago, Josh and Riley are busy “playing ping-pong” with a couple bar girls at place called Ying Yang Bar in Hua Hin, which leaves me to myself. So here I am, wandering the pitch black streets and alleys trying and failing to find our guesthouse. Every now and then, a human in a tight dress and three inch heels steps out from the shadows of an awning, asks where I’m going. In the day, it’s hard enough to tell the sex of sex workers, but at night it’s practically impossible. Normally, Kelli would be with me, her presence a greatly appreciated protective bubble against the men and women of the night, but tonight I’m on my own. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">“Mai aow, Mai aow,” I say, hoping the boy/girl understands me well enough to let me be. I don’t want a blowjob, I want my guesthouse. Where the fuck is my guesthouse? I turn left, right. Nothing. I turn right again. Nothing. Where am I? I decide to backtrack, which proves to be the wrong decision. I have forgotten the path I came here by, which unlit ally I turned down first, which street connected to the street I thought I walked just fifteen minutes back. Christ.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">The last time I was this lost and this afraid was in the mountains of Northern California, hiking the PCT with my friend Bill. There it was only cougars and the darkness they infested, the shadows of the trees and the opening between them where I imagined all kinds of angry animals, lurking there with their teeth and claws and hunger. But here in Hua Hin, having walked past the same frail prostitute for the third or fourth time, I’m afraid for a reason real enough to have a body, an actual face, and she/he is now aware that I am lost, which means that I am helpless, prey, which also means I am being followed. I quicken my pace, try to walk with more authority. Why the hell did I leave my phone in Kelli’s purse? Finally I find a street down which I can see the lights of the part of town where there are bars. That’s where Josh and Riley are playing ping pong. I need to find them, start over, try again, which is what I do.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">At the Ying Yang Bar, a very drunk version of my friend Josh is being beaten badly in ping pong by a busty Thai girl in a low cut shirt. Ning has yet to loose, which obligates him to continue drinking, trying, failing. I’ve been gone an hour, looking for a place roughly four minutes from here. He looks at me, he shakes his head. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">“Really?” he asks.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">“Really,” I respond.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Riley gives me directions and I set off again, meandering past the girly bars where the heavy thumping of the clubs blends together with the holler of the girls in dresses lined up on the sidewalks. A half hour later, I’m back at Ying Yang.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">“Really, again?” he asks. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">There is nothing I can say for myself. I sit down on the linoleum floor of the Ying Yang Bar and sulk. I am very very tired. Also, given that Josh and Riley and Ning and Nook are “playing Jenga,” I’m absolutely in the way. Drunk-Josh knocks the tower over. A cockroach scrambles across my foot, disappears into a crack.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">For some reason, my sense of direction is totally retarded. It has always been like this, but here in Hua Hin it matters more than it does, say, in any other place I’ve ever lived or visited. Given the nature of these shadows, the specific hunger of the animals which inhabit them, more is immediately at stake. Thankfully, Riley has pity in his heart and we steal off into the night, the two of us. My hooker friend is exactly where I left her, but now I’m not alone. Everything is going to be ok. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">In Thailand, one of my guilty pleasures is girls in heels on scooters. With them, I don’t stand a chance. They get me every time, their legs gripped tight around the small machine and zipping past me. When one of them passes us, I always look. This time, the girl in the scooter stops ahead of us. Slowly, very very slowly, she gets off. She turns around. Good god, what the hell is that! Riley stops dead in his tracks. He looks at me, and I at him. This time, the question is not of sex, but species. Can a human being look like that and still be human? The face is sunken in and I can hardly see her eyes. The way her shoulders cripple forward at awkward angles make her chest cave in like someone dropped a heavy rock on top of her and crushed it. Her neck is long and crooked. This is either AIDS or meth or both. Now she, whatever she is, is hiking down her skirt and walking towards us making noises. We cross the street immediately. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Back at the guesthouse I’m leaning my head against the door, saying Kelli’s name until it opens. She’s half asleep.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">“Where’d you go?” she asks.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">“Don’t ever leave me,” I say, “ever.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">“Sorry,” she says, “I’m sorry I had your phone.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Safe in my room and behind locked doors, I close my eyes. Next to me, my friend is making sleep noises. It is nice this way, in bed and not in the alleys of Hua Hin being chased by zombies on scooters wearing tiny skirts. If I were to look out the window, right now I’d see Riley zigging and zagging back and forth in the street below me, the zombie with her arms outstretched in slow pursuit. If my ears were better I’d hear the gurgle coming from her throat like something died in there, some kind of plague infest rat, and Riley’s frantic “Mai ao! Mai ao krap!” ringing out in the empty city night. Now, at the edge of a shadow cast across the street, the zombie woman’s arms are wrapped around him, which he doesn't like. The dead thing in her throat lets out a groan and so Riley, in the darkest dark, is running, fast as he can, following the lights of distant bars where he and Josh will last until the sun comes up above ocean. It’ll be two whole days before I see them. Sometimes these things happen, things I can’t repeat. And so it comes, and so, at least in Hua Hin, it also seems to go. </span></div>
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</div>Nicholas Gulighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05036856540488206943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7270161184723859079.post-87517747547035922682011-09-26T06:10:00.005-05:002012-01-11T21:34:02.905-06:00Making Alms for Abbots<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-size: small;">It’s six a.m., Chiang Mai in a thin and early light. Beside the occasional lone monk moving down the street with a plastic bowel in search of alms, the city is an empty shell. None of the tourists of last night’s frantic market bargaining for trinkets, no song-thaews cruising through the damp and filthy alleys. At this hour, there are hardly even dogs. Thais, apparently, are not a morning people, or at least today they’re not. Normally, I’d be fine with this, but this specific morning the four of us are up early in order to make breakfast. Also, Daow, Josh’s girlfriend from Khon Kaen, has joined us. We’re sitting groggy eyed and yawning in the lobby of our hotel, drinking Nescafe and waiting for Riley. We’re always waiting for Riley. As far as Americans go, he’s slow. As far as Thais go, he’s right on schedule, a delay so perpetually reliable that after all these years Josh and I have no choice but to appreciate it at Riley’s expense. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">“How much you wanna bet right now he’s lying in bed, making noises, and thinking of B-ing his T’s,” Josh says, referring to one of Riley’s many short-hand expressions for things he likes to do, one of which is taking way too long to brush his teeth. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">“Twenty Baht says he’s taking a shower first, then B-ing his T’s, then taking another shower,” I say.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Kelli laughs at this, but Daow doesn’t get it. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">“Does he have problem,” she asks in a brand of English so broken it’s cute enough to make you want to hug her. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">“Yes,” I say.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">“Farang," Josh says, "on Thai-time.” T0 this, Daow nods her head, smiles, and then starts soaking her arms and legs in bug repellent, a mist which smells suspiciously like sugar water mixed with powder flavored teenage body spray for girls. A mosquito lands on her thigh and bites her. Eyes half shut, Riley approaches down the hall, wanting coffee in order to want a cigarette. He’s wearing blue jeans, a t-shirt, a blue polyester shirt, socks, and black sneakers. Six a.m. and he’s already mostly sweat. Josh is mostly laughs and head shakes.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">The fact that we’re a half hour late to Co Co.Ok, the restaurant where we’ll spend the next five hours cooking breakfast for twenty five monks at a local temple, doesn’t seem to matter. Josh’s dad is waiting patiently in the parking lot and the owners greet us grinning. They bring us coffee, Oreo Cookies. They bring us water. We eat and drink and talk for about an hour. Sayan, a French ex-patriot living in Chiang Mai, is partners, business and otherwise, with Yupapan, the owner and head cook. Also, he speaks English and is incredibly enthusiastic to have us here. There are pictures of the farm where the food we’ll make was grown, a video he shot of the river which runs through it, dark water moving quickly over mossy rocks and through the jungle.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">In the kitchen, Yupapan, her sister, and a girl with braces who I’m not sure of wrap us tightly up in aprons, give us tasks. Kelli and Riley are pulling shit strings out from the backs of shrimp in a glistening, gigantic shrimp pile. Josh is hacking at an ugly lump of liver. Daow is cutting lemongrass. Me, I’ve got a big bright knife and I’m turning a vegetable, some sort of half-soft tuber I’ve never seen before, into big white cubes. Yupapan takes the knife away from me. Apparently, my cubes are wrong.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">“Like this,” she says.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">“Like this?” I say.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">She nods and I continue cutting. Outside a dog barks back at another dog. It’s hot as hell in here. Our knives go thud thud thud against the wooden cutting-boards.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Hours later, our menu looks something close to this:</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><u>Main Courses</u></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Shrimp and Cashew Stir-fry (shrimp, cashews, peppers, onions, garlic, chilies, sugar, fish sauce, oyster sauce, etc.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Laab (liver, pork fat, pork skin, pork, lime juice, cilantro, chilies, chili paste, sugar, toasted rice powder, fish sauce, etc.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Tom Ka Gai (coconut milk, galangal, lemon grass, weird white tube vegetables, cabbage, tomato, chicken, garlic, tamarind paste, sugar, etc.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Chicken Wings (coriander, sugar, deep fried lemon grass, peanuts)</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><u>Dessert</u></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">We’re proud as hell, especially Riley, who has managed half his life to feed himself by having girlfriends, and Kelli also. She's the kind of girl who keeps an endless schedule of friends to go to dinner with back home so as to keep herself from starving. We pack everything up in the back of a pickup truck and drive in the hot sun to a temple at the edge of town. There, the monks are waiting for us. They’re not allowed to eat after one pm, which gives them about an hour to fill their bellies. We watch them eat, which is hard because I’ve been up since dawn and I’ve only had an Oreo. When they’re full, we take what’s left and put it in our faces, which is a lot. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Here's something, a ceremony which I don’t understand. During it, I walk up slowly to the front of the room where a big fat golden Buddha is frozen serenely in a lotus pose. I light a candle. I use the candle to light some more candles, then some incense, then some more incense which I hold in my hands while kneeling at the altar. I pray for a while, to what and for what I’m not exactly sure, but I’m going through the motions anyway. I put the incense in a pot of sand. My friends all do the same. And now we’re pouring water. We’re supposed to pray a second time while pouring and so I say “I love you, I love you, I love you.” I say this over and over to myself in the direction of a girl I care about who's far away until the water’s gone, and I’m hoping that it counts. By this point, however, given the heat and time at which our day began, I can tell that Kelli is at the end of things, “hitting the wall” as we have come to call it. Usually, Riley hits the wall, but today it’s Kelli in her purple dress and black sweater, entire rivers pouring down her face which is kind of sagging downward from exhaustion. I can tell her eyes are tired because she keeps taking her fingers and stretching them back from the corners, a habit of hers which makes it look like she’s slightly racist, pretending to be Asian. One of her eyes is bad, so the other one works too hard. Usually it takes all day before she starts to pull her eyes back, but today, at two in the afternoon, my friend has nothing left.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">And here's another thing. We’re sitting cross-legged in a half circle around the Abbot, a man whose name I can’t pronounce but which translates loosely into Full Heart. Draped in a deep brown robe, he is lotused at the front of the room. Behind him, an arrangement of flowers and realistic, life-sized plastic statues of monks are sitting eerily and still. I know I’ve seen their faces before in posters and in pictures hanging on the walls of houses, but their names and reputations are alien to me. There being here gives the appearance we’re in a wax museum, and now one of the wax replicas is moving his hands about, talking to us in a language we don’t get, and now, pointing at me, he’s laughing. In fact, he’s almost always laughing. I ask him questions and he responds, through a translator, with long, circular narratives, stories about his life and the lives of others. Usually there is suffering, death, poverty, and starvation in there. Ultimately, laughter. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">From what I can gather, which isn’t much, the Abbot decided to become a monk in his early twenties, a decision sprung from reverence, culture, and a lack of real alternatives. All Thai men are required to spend part of their lives, even if it's only seven days, in saffron. The King, I think, did fifteen days, which doesn’t seem like a lot, but sitting with my legs crossed beside my friends in a half circle around the Abbot, even for only a couple hours, makes me hesitant to take my turn at the temple should I finally gather courage to. Riley and Josh have agreed to join me in a monastery at some point in the ten months I’m here, but to see them now, Josh perpetually shifting and re-shifting, Riley making little noises now and then that mean he’s suffering, glad to be given an audience, but suffering nonetheless, makes me worry. And then there’s Kelli. Right now, Kelli is a puddle in a black and purple dress, pulling back her eyes. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">“What do monks do for fun,” I ask, which is a mistake. The Abbot with the full heart asks me what the nature of fun is and I come up empty, dumb. Unsurprisingly, he tells a story and I struggle vainly to trace it back to what I asked him. In it, a man from Chiang Mai walks for a long time over great distances. He has neither food nor money. Eventually, a woman gives him noodles, which he likes. In fact, these are the best noodles he has ever eaten, will ever eat. When he dies, he will remember those noodles, their greatness.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">“Death is every day,” the Abbot laughs, “like if one day you try to speak, and then another day you stop trying, you’re dead already!” He pauses and his eyes light up, a brighter shade of brightness spilling out from his face onto my face. I look at Josh. His face is red with brightness also, though of a different nature, and his knees are cramped up tight against the marble floor. I can tell that he agrees, which makes me glad we're here, the four of us, deep friends. I look outside. It’s raining. Rain, too, is every day. Death and rain. Rain and death. And sweat. Sweat is every day as well. Riley trying hard to listen, Kelli staring at the ground.</span><br />
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</div>Nicholas Gulighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05036856540488206943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7270161184723859079.post-14366538978008485952011-09-23T12:42:00.001-05:002012-01-12T23:30:11.436-06:00Water and/or Fall<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-size: small;">Right now the three of us are yelling at Kelli to stand still and pointing at her butt. It’s hot out, probably in the humid upper eighties, which is fine. The pool beneath the waterfall is a cool and piercing green, like someone melted down an emerald, cooled and kept it cool, and then they put some fish in there. We’re waiting for a butterfly to get its picture taken, but Kelli keeps wiggling around, shaking it off herself and back into the air. Erawan Falls is filled with butterflies, of all colors, but this one, the one we want a picture of, is a blue I’ve never seen before, half electric, half middle of the ocean. The butterflies flock to Kelli because her swimsuit looks like the biggest flower they’ve ever tried to get at, one that shakes about and speaks and takes their picture when they land. Down at the water’s edge a group of ugly Russians jump into the pool. One of them, a fat man in a small, black speedo starts to squeal when the fish begin to nibble at his legs. He does this like he’s much smaller than he is, and younger, and from somewhere other than from Russia. The fish are gathering in schools around him, sleek black shadows in the clear water, and the butterflies are gathering around the four of us, hovering in the light. His girlfriend laughs and takes his picture. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Six years ago, our friend Jacy almost died in these same pools trying to keep his girlfriend from dying. They had come here with Josh hoping to climb the limestone mountain where Erawan, in seven stages, sends its water down in picturesque cascades. They made it to the second falls, started swimming, and, since Jane couldn’t swim, started drowning. When Jacy tells the story, its mostly to bitch about how Josh didn’t try to help them. When Josh tells it, it’s mostly to laugh in the way that good friends do when someone they know and care about is in a real predicament. Part of the reason we’re here is to recreate the drowning, get it on camera, and send it to Jacy as a joke, something along the lines of, “Look, here’s us making fun of how you almost died in Thailand that one time.” Or at least it's something close to that. Since I’m brown, I play the part of Jane. Riley, because he has dark hair and a scruffy face, plays Jacy. Josh, of course, is Josh. We jump in. I start flailing about and pushing Riley’s head beneath the water. He’s supposed to come up for air and make his face turn red, bulge his eyes out white and wide, but it’s hard to do. He isn’t really drowning, so mostly it looks like we’re two boys splashing at each other in the water, which is what we are. After a while Josh half-assedly throws a tire in our direction. It falls short by about twenty feet and we cut the scene. The fish are biting at our bodies and we don’t like it. I scurry up the rocks and laugh as Riley slips and slides back down into the pool. Apparently, among other things, friends falling down on rocks is funny. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Erawan is the first place on the trip we’ve really come together as a group. The jet lag nearly killed us, kept us up at different hours of the day and night, kept us sleeping when we didn’t want to be. But here, finally, we’re all in time. Riley probably took it hardest, but today, in front of me, he’s scurrying up the path like a chubby monkey with his handheld video camera pointed at the jungle, then at the limestone cliffs, and then the falls themselves. Every now and then he hands the camera to me. In the frame of the camera I can see him in the distance climbing up the rocks. He’s about half way up. Above him, green water comes pouring down the mountain. Below him, a green pool collects the water, holding it in place. He’s a real live kid up there, pulling himself upward with a jungle vine. He gets to the top and sets his ass down in the rushing water. He gives me a thumbs up sign and lets himself go. He goes sliding down the rock face, splashes in the water, disappears and reappears. This time, climbing out, he doesn’t slip. We gather up our things. Soon the Russians will be here in their shitty speedos and yellow thongs. We don’t want that. What we do want are the butterflies in bright circles around our heads, spinning like however many multicolored stars. And they appease us. Together we follow Kelli up the emerald mountain. There are four more falls to go. </span><br />
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</div>Nicholas Gulighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05036856540488206943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7270161184723859079.post-21317462206268834442011-09-18T22:25:00.000-05:002012-01-12T23:30:27.278-06:00More on Monkeys, Temples, Time<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-size: small;">The problem is the monkeys all have ugly faces and I hate them. I am walking up the stairs to a temple on the coast of the Gulf of Thailand, and they are coming down, hundreds of small and furry creatures. Their eyes are beady, lightless stones and their puckered assholes look like they are bleeding from a life of eating garbage. Behind me, I hear Kelli squeal and yelp and giggle. She is hopping from foot to foot and trying to take photographs. The ocean is below us, as are Josh and Riley, a couple flights down, as is Prachuap Khiri Khan, the lazy fishing town where we’ve been staying. Two flights above us, a monk in saffron walks effortlessly among the ugly beasts. The monkeys part before him, a filthy, living sea. It is hard to see his feet between their bodies. This gives the appearance he is floating. Maybe he is floating. From here, the sunlight on the walls of the temple, the gray and blue-gray clouds. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">“Ewww,” I say, pointing. There is shit on the stairs, loose brown coils, as well as ravished plastic bottles punctured with tiny teeth marks. It is hot and I am very very tired. The monkeys all keep food in a pouch in their necks so it looks like testicles dangle back and forth when they scurry forward down the stairs, a pair of furry balls swinging from their throats. Every now and then a camera behind me clicks. My thighs are burning and sweat makes huge dark circles on my shirt. I feel like I’m on drugs, though I’m not. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">“I bet these monkey’s all have aids,” I say. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">“And rabies,” Kelli says. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">“Raidies,” I say. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">The idea of “radies” makes us laugh. At the top of the stairs, where the temple is, we stop and wait for Josh and Riley. “Raidies” makes them laugh also. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">In fact, a lot of Thailand makes us laugh. We’ve been driving in Josh’s car for about a week now. Starting in Bangkok, the four of us have slowly wound our way south on Highway 4 which follows the eastern shore of the Thai peninsula and ends in islands, a thousand kinds of paradise and aging white people, mostly ugly Europeans, on vacation. We are taking three weeks to see the country before parting in October. This translates mostly into stopping in random towns, climbing cool shit, drinking beer, eating a lot of food, and taking naps. The best nap I had was yesterday in which I had a dream I was dating one girl, and then another, both of whom I had crushes on at one point or another and who, in real life, would never date me. Thailand is like that, somewhere other than what is actually the world, or at least for now it feels that way, completely alien, strange. Part of the plan, I think, is to get past this feeling, to quiet the America in me enough to see the Thai in me, the country happening on its own terms, in its own words, around me and regardless of my intentions, though I am doubtful I can do that in just ten months, foreign as I am.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">From the top of the mountain, the ocean, surprisingly, doesn’t look any smaller, though the shrimp boats which dot the blue horizon look incredibly much more so, pale white dots which float on the far off water and begin to disappear. The four of us are looking out, caught between the graying heavens and the graying earth, and we are sweating our asses off. For now, all but one of the monkeys has descended to the base of the mountain where they are pelted with bananas by tourists in khaki cargo shorts, bright sarongs. They like to rip the fruit apart. Too human after all, they like to fight and shit and fuck each other, right in front of everyone. The monkey on the temple though, he simply follows us around, perches on on the railing and looks out as we do at the ocean, the sky which meets the ocean, the big rocks jutting up from waves which break apart around them. The monk in saffron is sweeping now, moving leaves across the concrete temple floor. He does this slowly, a single motion at a time, like he’s always done this, like he will continue doing so for as long as it takes to make the surface clean again, though the wind will always be here, the leaves will always fall. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">An hour later, we are back on the ground again, walking to our car. A policeman approaches us holding a shard of mirror in his hands. "Monkey," he says, pointing at our car, "monkey." Minus a mirror, our car is as we left it, baking in the sun. We laugh, and Josh tries to put the mirror back. "Mother fucker," he says, looking closer. We laugh again, harder. The monkeys have pissed on the car as well. Their urine dries in a dark pool in the sand at our feet, as it should. The sun is close to going down. I'm hungry, but first I need a nap. Josh gets the mirror back in place. We begin again to drive.</span></div>
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</div>Nicholas Gulighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05036856540488206943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7270161184723859079.post-11123136634726862062011-09-16T22:11:00.000-05:002012-01-12T23:34:06.593-06:00A Week in and Little Left to Say<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/fEl66ddcA8s?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Have been at it for just over a week now, traveling. A friend from High School, Josh, who has been living in Thailand for the last six years or so, picked us up from Bangkok in his car, and we've been driving ever since. Right now we're at the ocean, a relatively slow and lazy fishing town called Prachuap Khiri Khan, located on the coast of the Gulf of Thailand. It's ten in the morning. Josh and Riley are still asleep. The cars across the street, flash after flash of wave crest off the ocean, a cat. Kelli is doing crossword puzzles, like she does, and I am drinking coffee, like I do. My legs are sore from climbing the stairs of a temple a top a mountain at the edge of town where monkeys congregate in ugly packs. From there, we sat and stared at the point in the distance where the mountains became the sea. A thousand shades of clouds in the sky. The sky in the waves. The waves upon each other. No one said much. Lately, its been like that, looking and not saying. Which is good enough, I think, and honest enough as well.</span></span></div>
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</div>Nicholas Gulighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05036856540488206943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7270161184723859079.post-44521260467608471272011-09-10T21:52:00.005-05:002012-01-12T23:34:20.531-06:00The Happy City<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-size: small;">Also known as the city of angels, the great city, the eternal jewel city, the impregnable city of God Indra, the grand capital of the world endowed with nine precious gems, the happy city abounding in an enormous Royal Palace that resembles the heavenly abode where reigns the reincarnated god, a city given by Indra and built by Vishnukarma, Bangkok is unlike anywhere I’ve ever been. Here, the wind is made of rain and dank pollution. Red cab after green cab after pink cab. Dodging drips of water off the awnings, I walk with Kelli down a side street following the crack and pop of oil meeting chicken meat that spits from off the food carts, fills the air. Back at the hotel, Riley is trying and failing miserably to rest. We haven’t slept in days, but Kelli and I are hungry. Also, we are curious. Before arriving here, I had thought the city would confuse me. Its complicated labyrinth of streets and little alleys would, I imagined, wholly overwhelm me, but they don’t. My friend is with me and she is pointing to a puddle of deep sludge she stepped in while distracted by a white flower sprouting from a gaping crack in the sidewalk. “Look out,” she says. I look. The flower, singular and beautiful, is under lit by the neon lights reflecting off the puddle surface. The sludge is garbage juice and rain.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">About every other block or so, girls on the stoops of Seven- Elevens remind me of my age. I continue past them wounded. Would that I was young enough. That, or I could speak the language right. Undecipherable, the wind is made of voices. We stop at a cart, any cart, and point. Kelli to one pot bubbling with chicken feet and fish balls, I, to another. The middle-aged woman with her hair pulled loosely back says something fast in Thai and the both of us agree. Bending low above a plastic table, for the first time, we eat, though we’re not sure exactly what. Kelli pulls a lime leaf from her teeth and spits it on the sidewalk. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">However foreign, this, I think, will quickly become a familiar occurrence. That, and the lights of the traffic flowing past in consistent, rhythmic undulations, coming and going, while the sidewalk also undulates. The burn of curry on the tongue like being bitten there, and the air which carries it in our direction as though the wind had pulled it from a patch of dirt where flowers grow. Above all, however, the persistent dampness of our bodies will remain, this damn humidity, the abundant dirty rain. And it goes on like this, the city, and in all directions, and for as far as one can see, the three of us inside it, here, wherever we are, whatever this place is, however many names. </span><br />
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</div>Nicholas Gulighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05036856540488206943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7270161184723859079.post-49433470999405678332011-09-06T16:21:00.010-05:002012-01-12T23:34:38.767-06:00Last Day in Seattle / in these United States, the Sky that is the Ocean<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-size: small;">A day before I leave the country. Finally. In Seattle on 15<sup>th</sup>, the sun is out. In the wrong places, in the right ones. Cars moving quickly down the street, like they know exactly where they're going, where they've been. I believe them only maybe. The wind in the trees says "summer," and then it stops. For reasons that seem to happen at the end of seasons, and in cities one is leaving, I find myself in need of Oppen, very much so. This, at the moment, means I also need the internet. Victrolas, a coffee shop like almost every other coffee shop, is full of little noises. Klink after klink of dishes in the sink, the grind of some machine that cuts the coffee into bits. And there are people here as well, a small cacophony of voices which swirl around the room, young and pretty people, better dressed than I am, and they are doing things, talking amongst themselves and/or staring at their computers. I too am staring at my computer, where Oppen is... </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i>Of This All Things</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">There are the feminine aspects,</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">The mode in which one lives</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">As tho the color of the air</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Indoors</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">And not indoors</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Only—. What distinction</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">I have is that I have lived</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">My adult life</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">With a beautiful woman, I have turned on the light</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Sometimes, to see her</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Sleeping—The girl who walked</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Indian style—straight-toed—</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">With her blond hair</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">thru the forests</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Of Oregon</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Has changed the aspect</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Of things, everything is pierced</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">By her presence tho we have wanted</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Not comforts</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">But vision</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">To the earth, whatever terrors—</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;">I need his work because for him, the self is only almost singular, which feels true at times, more so than it’s not true. Distinction, it seems, and even solitude, is made possible by other people. In this poem in particular, I like very much that there is another person there, or at least the promise of a person, the memory of Oregon and of forests where the woman walks, or used to, and the space that opens up and closes between two people. Though I wish she wasn’t blonde. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 130%;">In Victrolas, the voices that wrap around themselves are the voices of a city I doubt I'll soon come back to. We are walking in the wake of things, all of us together, all of us apart. When I take off tomorrow, I want to watch from the window of my plane the city of Seattle as she slowly and finally disappears. I want to see the ocean, and the sky as it becomes the ocean, adjacent shades of blue becoming singular, becoming nothing. I am trying to remember, trying to forget. How long will it take before I am incapable of seeing anything but clouds? The plane will feel like every plane. I'll close my eyes. My friends will be with me. And there, for a long long time, sleeping. </span></span></div>
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</div>Nicholas Gulighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05036856540488206943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7270161184723859079.post-2053771636212207742011-09-02T19:04:00.014-05:002012-01-12T23:34:51.395-06:00Portland, OR / of Clocks and Cities / a Drawing<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUQa_9ORCpYoWzMZSSeQ6zoMzrKq7ddy8-OG3yK47usImhleWdFUJCVAWYPgu6tpqzHCopgmSCNTRwup_D_-0ZNuSYFGiqMmkcLr2ZmyYl0Kc4pyDBV3uO97TQ5hdqs7EB739gvN7ZHN8/s1600/theo.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUQa_9ORCpYoWzMZSSeQ6zoMzrKq7ddy8-OG3yK47usImhleWdFUJCVAWYPgu6tpqzHCopgmSCNTRwup_D_-0ZNuSYFGiqMmkcLr2ZmyYl0Kc4pyDBV3uO97TQ5hdqs7EB739gvN7ZHN8/s1600/theo.jpg" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">At the moment I’m in the empty kitchen of my friend Heather and her husband Theo. The walls are covered <a href="http://thoughtcloudfactory.com/factory/index.html">in pictures Theo made</a>, strange drawings of little creatures, ornate and complicated worlds. Five years ago, in Montana, the two of us set up a makeshift screen printing studio in the basement of my house. He was making art-books then, animated narratives, and I was making poems. We shake our heads a little when we realize it’s been as long as it has. Somehow these things happen. If this trip to Thailand hadn’t fallen in my lap the way it did, suddenly and from nowhere, I don’t know how long it would’ve carried on like this, not seeing them. But here I am. Its five years later and we are drinking beer and talking. They are married and about to have a baby. Somehow these things happen too. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Having left Seattle on a slow train south to Portland, yesterday I spent the afternoon staring out the window, pretending the evergreens of central Washington were something else. For three and half hours, the river to my left was a stretch of distant water winding south through India; the forest, a jungle made of elephants and big cats. I, too, I was something else, a different person in a vastly different place, free of being known and, therefore, able to be anyone. Every now and then, in long bright slants the sun cut through the heavy trees and lasted, turned the river into something almost glass. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Perhaps predictably, given the place in which I find myself, I have been thinking lately, as well as talking quite a bit with Riley and Kelli, about how and why it’s like this, what the reason is for the little clock in us that won’t be quiet. Buried somewhere in the stomach, it’s ticking around in there; and we can heart it; and it’s telling us to run. A prevailing train of thought says the desire to travel is as much a need to experience new things as it is a desire to reinvent the old. Another train of thought argues that we leave our homes because they’re broken and they don’t fit right anymore. That, or we are. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">I was with Riley at a party in the Cities earlier this summer. A little tired and a little drunk, we were sitting on a flight of stairs that led to a loft above the room in which the people below us moved about and talked above the music. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">“I can’t live here anymore,” he said. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">“I never could,” I said.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">In Minneapolis, and in the Middle-West in general, the people who matter most to me, whose lives I want in my life, are not enough to keep me stationary, rooted as I am in a place I love and understand. Maybe someday I'll come back here. Who knows. When Kelli talks about Eau Claire, it’s usually late at night and we'll be sitting on a bench. She says how much she loves it, that she's happy in Wisconsin, and yet she wants to get away. There is guilt in her voice and sometimes she gets sad and excited all at once. I'm not sure that any of us really know exactly what the feeling is except to say that it is there. And yet, we understand it. At this point I can’t speak for anyone except myself, but I tell myself over and over that I believe in it. I like the way it keeps me moving, helps me love. I trust the feeling very very much.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">In one of the pictures on the wall in the kitchen, a toy train on a toy train-track is leaving the open mouth of a creature best described as a woodland astronaut with tiny wings and antlers. On the train, a tiny version of the creature leaves the interior of the larger creature when it speaks. Now the train drops down across the creature’s chest and enters a city through a tunnel. The city is alive with hundreds of little doors and windows. Also, the city is a clock. It waves its hands in the air and a bird escapes the city because it’s time. As the creature approaches the city, then enters it, and then comes out the other side, it changes. Coming and going, it is no longer simply a smaller version of itself. It is something else entirely, more bird like, more at home in air then in the ocean. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">In Thailand, I imagine Bangkok too is a living mechanism, the tiny version of myself I am right now approaching one of many doors. I am trying to remember the places that I've been, the people who defined them. I bend down low and look through all the keyholes. In one room, Riley is smoking by an open window. There are birds in the sky, clouds, and in the space between the clouds, the half-dead reds and dirty yellows of a low sun lasting in the night's pollution. The birds are soundless. Kelli on the grass.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">Now, in the picture, the new creature enters a heart shaped opening in the chest of another larger one. The larger creature has a forest on its head, evergreens. An animal, a small brown wolf, is leaping out from the top of the forest, and it is speaking in a language at once familiar and strange. The creature with the forest in its head is connected to the astronaut because the train, and the tracks the train is on, and the little creatures going through a thousand transformations make it possible. They understand each other. The city connects them and contains them, makes them slightly altered versions of each other. When the wolf in the forest on the head of the creature speaks, the fact of having traveled from one place to another makes it’s speaking audible, somewhere in the stomach, buried there and wanting to let out.</span><br />
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</div>Nicholas Gulighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05036856540488206943noreply@blogger.com0