thee istsfor manity reader

In This Hole

“I liked my little hole, / Its window facing a brick wall.” 

— Charles Simic, “Hotel Insomnia”

I live in a parallel universe of my own devising.  I live most of my days in a dank cell, in the bowels of a vast complex of cells.  I am allowed to write for fifteen minutes every afternoon, on the refuse recycled from the land beyond the barrens.  The pipes on the ceiling here drip at all hours, and the walls are covered in sweat.

On occasion I hear others moaning from distant cells, but never a sound from the cells immediately adjacent to mine.  I’ve never seen any of the other inmates here, only the gloved hands and truncheons of my captors. They allow me out for a day once a month.  On these occasions I visit my childhood home, which is now a pile of muddy detritus and gnarled rebar.  I also visit the site of my former school, which is now a massive dung heap.  Really, a dung heap.  A heap of dung one hundred feet long and thirty feet high now.  Cattle wander about freely since they were infected with the plague and deemed holy beings.  The inhabitants of this neighborhood have been tasked with building the dung heap into a 100 by 100 foot totem to our shantytown — the last refuge before one enters the barrens.

When I tire I sleep on a patch of rocks where our library once stood. Early the next day I walk back to the complex — to my cell smelling of urine and fear.  I love my little hole.

In this parallel world which I inhabit only the objects that become the subject of my consciousness truly exist, everything else is a ghostly simulacrum that plays on unseen film screens in theaters I don’t attend.  And that I wouldn’t attend had I the capacity… 

And I am a capacious man, even in these lean times.

Imagine that I move through the world inside an untethered bathysphere.  My bathysphere is diving bell yellow, something jaunty from an ancient memory, like the Beatles “yellow submarine” if you will.  You see, “jaunty” is not a natural predisposition for me, but I try. It’s the “power of positive thinking,” I remember a charlatan repeating.  I believe that charlatan was my father — and so I delude myself with repeating this moment after moment.  In any case, there is a wheeled hatch in my bathysphere.  It’s at my feet, and I choose what and who to allow to inside.  And in this manner the things I allow inside become the subject of my consciousness, and only at this point — once inside — does something truly exist.

And don’t fret, stranger.  It’s not as if you’ll get flattened or knocked cold by a large metallic orb as I float into a room or walk by you on these desolate streets — no, in this physical dimension we actually inhabit the bathysphere allows for immateriality and transparency — you can walk right by me completely unaware of my universe in the bathysphere.  But you might feel a slight tug in or near your heart and you’ll surely inhale a few molecules of sadness.  Otherwise you’d have no idea of my strangeness.  I am as innocuous as any other person from the outskirts of the barrens.

Oh my, I don’t like to mix my metaphors, friend.  May I call you friend?  Just for these few minutes we’ll spend together.

Thank you.

Yes, frightful really, the oceans and deserts appearing in the same place — the same sentence —  they should be kept in an altogether separate figurative language universe.  No, those allusions do not conform at all… 

Conformity…

Think of your third grade teacher telling you exactly how it all should be — the world.  Conformity: this is good, this is bad.  This is the correct way to hold your pencil and this is the correct way to make a cursive “A…”   

Oh, goodness me, reader — may I call you reader for these now fewer minutes we have left together?

Thank you, most kind.

No.  You can’t imagine your teacher.  You must imagine mine.  For I don’t know if you were born in the 1940’s or in 2001, and those born before the 1940’s are fewer by the day, and those born after 2000 are still such inchoate bores, in my piteous estimation.  They’ve never used a pencil or pen.  And now, in this reduced state, all there is is charcoal to scrawl out the stories of our lives.  They’ll never know the wonder that is a writing blister.

No, you must imagine my third grade teacher.  And I must render her in all her Procrustean splendor, because I don’t want you to claim I’ve given you an undeveloped character, lacking dimensionality and real human traits.  Ok, if you don’t remember or never knew, maybe now is the moment to look up “Procrustes…”  but as the dictionaries have disappeared and your cell mates next door are silent, ask the guards if you dare.  No?  I didn’t think so.

No, I am so omniscient a narrator that I will detail her down to the mole on her mons pubis that she is happy — is quite happy — is covered by a wild thicket of hair (she’ll never shave — well, it wasn’t fashionable then anyway… {but I never told you that, because I never told you I was born in 1963 and the story I’m relating to you is actually happening in… [let’s see, what age is one in the third grade?… if in 1981 I was a senior… uh… if I subtract 9 years I’d say it’s ’72, but it might have happened in ’71 at the beginning of the school year, or did I start the third grade in the fall of ’72 and go through the spring of ’73… well, Fall and Spring aren’t really relevant in the barrens.  Never have been.  There’s barely a distinction now.  It’s really 9 months of a summer’s cauldron and 3 months of embers — something of that sort of heat.  I think I’ll just write 1972, no one would actually put this story down and start doing math, would they?]  No.}  No, reader.)  No, friend, please don’t put it down I’ll get on with it. Where was I?  Yes, yes…

It’s 1972 and Ms. Paula is teaching us penmanship at a school that was once considered “glorious” during Cuba’s pre-Revolutionary days.  It shall remain nameless here —  let’s admit it, it means nothing to you and it might only mean trouble for me.  “Naming” is the  sort of trouble that impinges violently upon us, and DOES make itself the object of one’s consciousness — no matter the make and model of your bathysphere, or the guard’s truncheon.

This school was a mere specter of its former self, and while it was a private school with a parochial past — St. Ignatius’s name was invoked, for the sake of gravitas, you see…  oh my goodness, I’ve actually said too much here.  Let’s move on.  The school wasn’t any good, you see?  They hired people like Ms. Paula who measured our arms and our penmanship.  Your “A’s need to be taller,” she’d say to Marieta.  She’d then pull her up by the ponytail, place her foot on Marieta’s rib cage and stretch the her arm out for a protracted period of time, and tell Marieta to repeat her “A.”  If the letter was just the proper length, dimensional, and conforming to regulation, she was allowed to proceed to “B.”  If not, the stretching process would be repeated until the little wretch gave Ms. Paula a proper and artful letter.  The next day Marieta came to school with a regulation Marine buzz haircut.  Ms. Paula was implacable.

For the others, like myself, if we didn’t produce regulation approved letters in penmanship Ms. Paula would chop off our arms.  I always had mine stretched until I got to the “F” — but at that point I’d freeze and produce the worst sort of “garabate” (oh I’m sorry, chum.  Do you mind if I call you chum?  K.  Thanks!) — the worst sort of scrawl.  And there we’d sit one armed for a while tapping time with the clock above the chalkboard until the end of the period when our arms would grow back in time for physical education.  But we didn’t really need them for P.E. as in the third grade as we played kickball all year.  But we were glad to have our arms back nonetheless, no worse for the humiliation.

You know I didn’t really start out to tell you the story of my third grade year, Ms. Paula, or St. Ignatius’s embarrassment at the invocation of his name for my school —  which I’m certain by now you’ve deduced was Loyola.  Loyola School.  Oh, you are a sharp reader.

No, I wanted to tell you the story of how I’ve erased myself completely.  About how I create and live in the midst of the desert (oceanic and bathysphere metaphors notwithstanding).  And apropos of nothing, but a trampled memory, here is a found poem about walls.  Because it’s all about “Walls” this time around:

You believe…

Calypso…

In rising seas,

In openings, closings,

In walls to protect him;

The journey no longer as important 

As the destination.

We build trust,

We fall apart, Inside this temporary

Housing.  Odysseus, heavy as stone,

Maintains his sad sway — An island

Without bridge-makers in

This migrant disorder.

Why is it a “found poem”?  I found it in an article “most foul” about the new fangled fascists that populated the world in the late “20-teens.”  I tore the thing up in a frenzy, in those  waning days, as the marching vanguard approached my home.  And it fell into place in that most ancient and propitious Brion Gysin / William S. Burroughs sort of way.  The tatters were adhering on the page just as the first truncheon blow smashed my temple — and it quickly put me in the mind of my childhood. 

It was sometime in May of 1966, soon after my mother’s fifth miscarriage, during a blood moon eclipse.  In the window the engorged orange moon waxed, and rising up before it the untethered, darkened planet of my mother’s head — her hair, backlit, ghastly lunar flares — a corona of post-post-post-post-post-partum dread:  I am the thing that must be extinguished.  I am the unruly satellite careening out of orbit into her ecliptic.  Then hands. Hands.  My neck constricted.  The air.  Where is the air now?  The bathysphere’s air hose is crimped somewhere along its path to the depths below.

“Out, out, damned spot,” she cries.  She cries.  She cries.

The air.  Where is the air?  

My head now its own detached bathysphere.  I am the detached bathysphere.  I float, alight in this rarified air.  And I fall.  I fall.  I fall.  How I remember our granito floor.  I remember.  I remember the impact.  Time and time again.  The impacts.

And now this blackguard truncheons me again, and puts me in the mind of the days when I smoked opium with the governor under the thorny burrs of the honey locust tree.

“I don’t have a very clear idea of who the characters are until they start talking.”

— Joan Didion

You Can’t Fool the Fleas of the Revolution 

by Dr. Clodomira Garcia-Borges Cienfuegos, PhD

“The absentminded conservator left the bestiary door open on his desk… and now the cavorting beasties escape one by one.” 

– J. Ignatius, “The Revolt of the Bestiary”

Horacio Sobrenada was the owner of an absurd flea circus.  

He inherited the circus from his father, the formerly esteemed phrenologist, Dr. Cresencio Sobrenada.  It was a bequest rich in penury.  On a wretched August afternoon in 1956, under the light of the diabolic sun, Horacio renamed the flea circus “El Espectacular Circo y Orquesta Sinfónica de Las Pulgas Absurdas de La Habana.”  

This piqued a number of fleas whom did not agree with the name change.  True, the fleas had a thirty-eight piece chamber orchestra that favored the Russian Romantic composers — it wasn’t a true symphonic orchestra — but that was not their cavil.  A number of fleas claimed they had not been consulted on the name of the circus, and were anathema to the premise upon which Horacio had based the name.  

Many other fleas thought it was a perfectly good name in a post-war world where life was bereft of meaning.

The fleas in opposition objected — they were neither from Havana, nor were they Absurdists.  In fact they despised Camus and the mid-century strain of existentialism.  These fleas were Jesuits and staunch Augustinian Neoplatonists.  

Whereas the Absurdist fleas were chiefly existentialists, and some of them nihilists; and furthermore, they thought it was a most appropriate name for the enterprise.  

And this is where the troubles began.

Two weeks into the 1956 tour of the southern provinces the unhappy fleas, most of them strict Posttribulationists, went on strike and naturally the Postmillennialists followed.  After a unanimous vote among the strikers, they demanded a name change to “Las Pulgas del Opus Dei Cubano.”  And despite the support of the Jesuit priests in Oriente province, the home office of the Opus Dei in Spain disagreed.  The devout fleas compromised among themselves and settled on “St. Augustine’s Eschatological Jumping Circus and Chamber Orchestra.”  

This new demand vexed the souls of three Kierkegaardian fleas and they went scab.  They took the leap of faith, switched allegiance, and joined the strike. The Phenomenologist fleas were flummoxed and remained on the job. 

Without the strikers playing in the critically acclaimed and newly minted “Siphonaptera Symphony” — or performing on the high wire and flea trapeze — the Absurdist fleas resorted to playing Schoenberg’s latter day twelve tone compositions, and on occasion some improvisational jazz in the vein of Thelonious Monk.  

The show now had to increase the frequency of  the daredevil fleas fired out of the canon routine.  The public demanded it, but the routine soon tired, and was noted as  “one of the top ten ‘vapidities’ of 1956,” in the year end issue of Vanidades.

The public, as all “publics” are inclined to, favored popular music and entertainments that were easy to understand. They stayed away and attendance dropped precipitously.  Two months after the strike began Horacio was forced to lay off the dancing cats.  One week later the circus was bankrupt and disbanded near Santiago de Cuba.  

The fleas were scattered in their wingless diaspora to all corners of the island that now convulsed in revolutionary fervor and had no time for confectionary entertainments.

Then in midyear of 1957, as the guerrillas gained a foothold in the Sierra Maestra mountains, the Marxist-Leninist contingent of the Absurdist fleas decamped and joined the rebel forces.  This cadre eventually made their heroic way to Havana in Fidel Castro’s and Che Guevara’s beards one year later.  To this day some those fleas remain as party functionaries and leaders in the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution — although naturally,  at this date, most of those fleas have retired.  Two of these aforementioned fleas reportedly coined the most iconic revolutionary slogans: “¡En cada barrio, Revolución!” and “¡Socialismo o Muerte!”  (Research is currently underway as to the veracity of these claims.  The provenance, at this time, seems promising.)

Meanwhile, Horacio became the chief propagandist for Radio Rebelde in 1960, and led a privileged life, but during the 1970 “Ten Million Ton Sugar Harvest” fiasco, he met with an untimely death at the sharp end of a comrade’s machete after a falling out with the party.

The Neoplatonist fleas did not fare well.  They were last seen fleeing to Miami on New Years Day 1959, in the thick coat of Fulgencio Batista’s German Shepherd.  A rumor emerged that some of these fleas were part of the expeditionary forces at the Bay of Pigs invasion, and that after their defeat on the beaches they went in search of said pigs for a blood meal or two.  But upon not finding pigs, anywhere in or near the bay, in opprobrium, they set sail into the Florida Straits.  They have not been seen or heard from again.

_________________________________________________________________________

Dr. Clodomira Garcia-Borges Cienfuegos, PhD, was Chair Emeritus of History at the Public University of Angola in Luanda.  She was born in Kuala Lumpur, into a family of diplomats; her father was the Cuban Ambassador to Malaysia.  She was the author of numerous history books and hagiographies of renowned despots, insects and philosophers.  Her book The Polemics of Ammianus Marcellinus, His Parasites, and the Cuban Revolution won the Pan Caribbean Book of the Year award in 1982.  She died in May 2017, in Kankakee, Illinois.  Her posthumous work, Che Guevara’s Cyrenaics and His Congolese Chiggers, will be published by Raw Manifold Press in the summer of 2018.

“People ask me if I write even when I’m on vacation. And I say, Man, do you take a shit on vacation?”

— Walter Mosley

Coda (an homage): An Indian Summer Evening

The dying day teethes

On the tinny taste of bus exhaust.

Eight O’ Eight roars away.

Bayside shadows cast and reel back nothing.

And now the toothy breeze

Seizes the silver weeds 

With a violent shake,

And rasps the bayside clear.

Distant machines whir.

The muted stars reappear,

Briefly, in refracted waterlight.

Then, bared, the incisors of the night.

“The only thing that makes one an artist is making art.  And that requires the precise opposite of hanging out; a deeply lonely and unglamorous task of tolerating oneself long enough to push something out.”

— David Rakoff

The Dry Descent

She hears a cry – the lamentation of a dying woman.  She turns, strains, to see.  

No one.  

She staggers on scree and falls heavy on her back; her poles bent useless after two thousand miles.  

The sky is a moribund blue.  The cry of a loon, disparate and distant, rises from the lake below.  Her eyes affix on a turkey vulture above, gliding lazy, on a current of air.  

Her tongue cramps.  Her eyes rack out of focus.  Every dehydrated move pops into a paralyzed pose.  She knows it’s doubtful someone will hike through before morning.

She waits unblinking.  Unmoved. 

“The most regretful people on earth, are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”

— Mary Oliver

(hit the play button and watch my film aposiopesis above)

beyond salvation

electra 

paid

bathed in green light

straddles arms akimbo

the fat man

working furiously 

on himself

no closer to heaven 

or beyond salvation

than he was this morning in

the confessional

what price redemption?

electra

bored

thinks of johnny

his name indelible on her

pendulous breast —

the      y      truncated by

stretch marks

in the dank corner

among the roaches

electra’s son

eats leaded paint flakes

tethered 

beyond salvation

“Forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable.  Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not.  Habit will help you finish and polish your stories.  Inspiration won’t.  Habit is persistence in practice.”  

— Octavia Butler

Abstract no. 5

I studied the core sediment samples from your heart

The records show prehistorically your heart was malice

Microscopic fossils mark displacements and loss

I found demarcations of hopes dashed — and untimely deaths —

Near the bottom — a striation — an icy section where nothing thrived

How could something come of this?

How could anything grow?

I have abandoned this study

I leave the abstract to you

“I liked my little hole, / Its window facing a brick wall.”

— Charles Simic / Hotel Insomnia

Under The Power Of Sixteen Electroshocks

Under the stingy shadow of the fruta bomba tree Belkys sat trying to pluck the sun from the sky.  She used her thumb and index finger like a forceps but she failed.  She failed again, and failed better.  She squinted hard, saw that the sun easily fit between her fingers, but try as much as she could the sun remained in the sky.

Then the moon, in its casual and soporific manner, drifted in and made easy work of it.  It did the job Belkys could not, and blanketed the sun in its infinite darkness.  

Belkys’ father stepped before her causing a secondary eclipse — the eclipse she so often dreaded.  But as the sun moved on its ecliptic, free of the smothering moon, her father was momentarily limned in a blinding fire.  He was the devilhead in a fire aureole.  

As he moved toward Belkys his wife called from the kitchen, “¡Natalio, ven acá coño, necesito tu ayuda!” 

Excuse me, dear reader, this seems to be developing in a manner that will not appeal to most, probably including you.  You see this all too baroque — and has become bilingual.  The author needs to stop and reconsider her style here.  For under the power of sixteen electroshocks everything she writes is in a fantastical style, and this… well, while this tale has heretofore failed to manifest in a didactic style, I can surely sense where she will go.  

You see, She, the author, is projecting from her own life, but she didn’t wish to write a memoir or creative non-fiction story, and then this poor bastard style is the result.  But the author’s own parents, you see, thought she was too unruly for a fifteen year-old, much too precocious with the drugs and men, mostly amphetamines she filched from her perpetually dieting grandmother — and this fixation on thirty year-old men was truly disturbing to them.  So she creates a Belkys in this fashion.  So just as her father had long given up on her, Belkys’ father gives up on her.  And just as the author’s father threw her out of the house, she throws Belkys out of her house, but adds:

after he spied Belkys with another thirty year-old man in flagrante delicto in a new 1963 red Corvair.  My goodness, he despised Corvairs — so louche, so unsafe at any speed.  

Anyway, dear reader, the father pulled Belkys out of the car and threw her onto the newly seeded lawn, and threatened the man with bodily harm and the police.  It was there, on those  riotously green seedlings in the front yard, that he gave her two choices: the despoiling streets of Miami or the Convent of the Sisters of Merciful Stigmata. 

Belkys was reeling in that disrupted coital bewilderment…

Wait.  Stop.  I apologize for the previous editorial interloper.  I, a second disembodied voice and editorial interloper, have taken control of this story.  I stopped the attempted hijacking of the original story.  I am an editor of few words and here I must present you with choices so we may create a story by committee, so that it will appeal to all concerned.  

Please circle one answer below:

Shall I combine both stories above into one well developed story:

A. Yes     B. No     C. Maybe   D. This is tiresome.  I already stopped reading…

“I think we’re creative all day long.  We have to have an appointment to have that work out on the page.  Because the creative part of us gets tired of waiting, or just gets tired.”

— Mary Oliver 

Distortion Poetics

Distortion principle no. 1: avoid distortion.

Distortion principle no. 2: defenestrate (often).

Distortion principle no. 3: degauss after every visit to either of the poles.

Distortion principle no. 4: cleanse fold and manipulate.

Distortion principle no. 5: literature is overrrated; read only pulp.

Distortion principle no. 6: there only 5 distortion principles.

“It’s not where you take things from – it’s where you take them to.”

— Jean Luc Godard

Fourteen Word Summit With Yesterday

She needed fourteen words to complete her writing block.  She recapped her day thusly:

A day of sickness. Here comes sickness… baby, baby, won’t you hear my plea.  A stomach unhinged.  A head stuffed with fog.  A need for something different and not sure how to think about it or how to effectuate it.  A drone of television buzz.  Bah, it does no good!  Read, read, read all day long in delirium.  Eat a can of beans, that’ll put you right.  Blah blah and hiss…  and such is the recounting of a day not too far into a new year…

“Use your head, can’t you, use your head, you’re on earth, there’s no cure for that!”

— Samuel Beckett / Endgame

Parenthetically

A god lost in his bathroom finds a door…

(to the outside? No)

He finds the door to the next life.

He burns: “get back, get back to that nebula!”

Not The Steerage Type

Steerage is so queer.  The smells of others assault my tender sensibilities.  Why can’t they recognize the class of person that I am?  My hope is to make them all see how I belong at the top of the pyramid of being.  This may be steerage, but really I am not the least bit the steerage type.  Oh, you may spot me in the Stieglitz picture in the future and say to yourself — well, surely that’s the captain or some other important crew member out of uniform who happened to walk into the frame, but no, rest assured it is me — my qualities obvious to the naked eye.  See me and know you are not looking at a steerage personage it is me transubstantiated through time showing you the qualities of a truly refined man…

“Don’t get it right, get it written.”

— Lee Child