Van Helsing on America

This totally hurt my dang feelings until I realized it wasn't directed at me. It's from Bram Stoker (a filthy Mick, and therefore in self-loathing flight from the colonizing British whoremother even as he ran towards the fetid hum of her foul breath)'s 1897 novel Dracula. A novel about a sort of highly cultivated savage making his way from a world of primal aristocracy to a world of manners and money. And this, for Van Helsing (whose small below-sea-level country is colonially post-coital, now given over to the harnessing of wind power and the cultivation of tulips, and who can almost think straight about savages again as a consequence) is how to understand such an untamed human creature--not with scholarship or, strictly speaking, reason, but with big bangs of instinctive insight, with intuitive leaps that threaten violence to the mind of a sane and cultivated queenservant. Even to think about such a creature requires the civilized mind to transgress itself--to enter a new sort of death, an old kind of chaos.

What does this tell us? Not much? no! The Count's child-thought see nothing; therefore he speak so free. Your man-thought see nothing; my manthought see nothing, till just now. No! But there comes another word from some one who speak without thought because she, too, know not what it mean—what it might mean. Just as there are elements which rest, yet when in nature's course they move on their way and they touch, then pouf! and there comes a flash of light, heaven wide, that blind and kill and destroy some; but that show up all earth below for leagues and leagues. Is it not so?

Shoot boy, don't nothing but steers and pouf!'s come out of Dublin, and I don't see no horns on you. This is Stoker looking at England looking at Ireland, even as Ireland is beginning to lose interest in this game, seeking new forms of poverty and servitude in the next parish West. And not just that, of course--also seeking freedom and possibility. That, too. We reinvent ourselves as a form of address. Some of us seeking terms of rapprochement with the departed, some of us speaking the outline of something that still forms on the Western horizon.

Build your own America, boy. I backed over the old one in my hearse.

BYOAK Catalyzing Quote

"...at that coastal brink of American self-invention, were branded as permanently expedient and on the run, piratically bold, and driven by a geographically renewable innocence, like the nation itself." -Jonathan Lethem

A Shot Accross the Bow of My Distractors

This is where I escape into from what is so bugging my attentions out there. You cannot say one whole complete sentence out there without but some bugger comes around and does his or her thing that is like the world's thickest penny on the track of my mind in which my thoughts are the train which is about to do a backflip into some field. Nobody benefits from this except my enemies. Not saying that I am paranoid or what have you but it is conceivable that they do not want me to get anything done because believe you me I make no small plans and heads will roll if ever I can really uninterruptedly say what's on my mind and speak this truth to power. So all I have to do is close the door and get all ensconced or whatever and put pen to paper and write my own personal Kublai Khan in Xanadu so to speak and some metaphorical salesman is banging at the door and there I am poemless and I can taste the adrenaline and after I've mollified him or her and got back to my desk there it is: gone. Forever. This is why I have put that pile of concrete blocks in front of my door around which this afternoon you yelled in to me some muffled questions about why was I stockpiling building materials of such unsightly nature and don't you know I was about to crystallize after weeks of factfinding the crucial theoretical underpinning of what would have been my magnum opus, but those will have to wait for some future person to formulate them, maybe in, as I imagine it, his remote cave or treetop perch or completely soundproof underground hermitage. I envy him in his hermetic enclosure free from sudden sounds and disruptions such as disease, friends, family, excellent aromas, and the media. I am not one to get all hypothetical by any means but I do imagine that with a sufficiently thick soundproof barrier I could generate many great works of intense beauty and unimaginable revolutionary aptness. I say hypothetical because I do not currently possess the funds sufficient to this project and have thus far been able to acquire only approximately 90 concrete blocks, though even with these few I see some benefit and have enjoyed the mind game of: picturing what the IRS will do when they come and try to extricate me as the requisite bulldozer would be such a bad p.r. move on their part that surely the media exposure would make donations come out of the woodwork and one of my major distractions from my life's work would be solved, pronto. This is indeed a pleasant thought to entertain while I burn my phone bills and type this, my last epistle before they cut the power and the mortar dries.

No Amount of Evidence Can Make Me Believe

You have to start the water early if you want your clothes dry by dark. Say sunup, maybe 6:30, when the water you siphoned off the roof the night before is frozen halfway down the tub. You pile mesquite branches into the 50-gallon drum marked "Union Carbide Not For Re-Use", stuff in a balled copy of the Partido Comunista de Bavispe broadside, which has very flammable ink, and drop in a match. Not too soon, because you are cold. Very cold. Your house is a shack of corrugated steel, without heat, and your bed is a wool blanket on a tarp on the floor. There is ice on the steel wall where you breathed all night trying to stay on the warm spot you made. So when the flames catch and the bark ignites and the thick diesel smoke of the mesquite starts straight up to the medium-blue sky, you lean in its path and begin to thaw. In a few minutes you stop shaking and you can feel your face soften, and the ice begins to separate from the tub. You stay there, almost immobile, until the ice is half gone and steam grays the smoke. Then you get your dust-red shirts and shiny pants and secret underwear and pile them into the tub, stirring with a stick until they're under. Water explodes when it sloshes onto the barrelhead. And now you are warm.



You move out of the jacal and into the sun, which now angles into the courtyard. The chickens are out and looking for crumbs. The sun comes over the wall through broken bottles, and the rim of the wall's shadow is toothed with green and brown, eating away the frost inch by inch, quickly now. Several other plumes of black and white rise over the houses, and you hear Spanish and Tarahumara, and you smell coffee.



The senora's house has a blanket for a back door, and she pushes it aside to come out with two mugs of canela. She is already made up, but her hair is still in curlers and she is in her nightgown, over which she has draped two threadbare cardigans.



"Good morning."

"Good morning. Did you sleep well?"

She winces as she hands you the tea. "My back is not so good in this cold." She always starts her day with tea and a complaint, though she is by nature sunny and agreeable. You sip your tea, remembering how you mistrusted its redness when you first came here, sure it contained food colorings long-since banned in the States. Now you like it, though she's added too much sugar.

"I had a dream about you." She has dreams, and is known with some suspicion and much reverence as something of a bruja. You don't want to encourage her, but you can't say nothing.

"Tell me."

"Well, OK, but maybe this is not what you want to hear on laundry day. Maybe you want a break from God and all this Spanish you must be tired of."

"No, it's OK. You dreamt, then, of God?" This is how you say it in Spanish. I was long since comfortable with these Baroque constructions, no longer American, really. Converted to grand gestures, gentlemanly suavity, chivalrous deference, and eloquent solicitousness.

"Yes. Of course. I dreamt that you brought me a book, very fine, of gold, with the finest engravings in a mysterious script. You told me to read it, and I was very moved by your trust in leaving it here in my poor house. I read the book for three days and nights, not stopping except to light the lamp when it was dark, and put it out when it was light. At the end of the book, a great curandero wrote that I should ask God if it was true, so I went to the church and did many rezas and then asked Baby Jesus and the Sacred Heart and Mother of God if the book was true. They told me to ask you, that you would speak for them. So I am disturbing your laundry day to ask you if it is true, this book of gold."

My heart was beating so hard I couldn't take a deep breath. My hands were shaking. I felt something like fire start inside me and my heart surged. "Yes, sister. It is true. All of it. Every word."

She smiled, hugely, her teeth and gums the color of cinnamon. "I knew it!" she said. It was such a beautiful book, and I knew it was true!" Then she told me she would have eggs ready in a minute and went inside.



I stirred my clothes some more, and began to fish them out of the now boiling water and onto the concrete washboard. I soaped the collars and did a rather cursory job of it as my hands began to chill. Then I lifted the tub off the drum and rinsed everything, and refilled the tub for my companion, who would wake up soon to wash his own clothes.

A Sort of Reunion

Salt Lake City is the world's biggest small town. Everyone, at least on the wealthy Mormon East Bench, knows everyone else. Parties are all sugar and polite affable chatter on safe topics and astonishment at the accomplishments of the other young couples: Christmas shopping completed the first Saturday of December, children looking so handsome, decorations just so, the appearance of effortless managment of very busy schedules. Everyone leaves early. The men are tired, the women have dealt with demanding children all day. The boiled-wool sweater sets, the blandly maculine uniforms of acceptably professional employment, the neat hair and the practiced smiles belie a deep exhaustion that must not be mentioned, but is visible around the eyes. To an outsider, the main impression is of conformity to a very strict code, in which men are emphatically masculine and clueless, women are pretty and wear seasonal outfits and are always agreeable, and children are cutely overdressed, and strangely clean. Houses at Christmastime are decorated with great care and control, with apparent reference to design magazines and catalogs: trees are allowed one color of light, one color of glass ornament, and a few pewter figurines with the engraved names of the family members. These East Bench houses tend to look like hotel lobbies, in their starchy regularity, their matched sets of chairs, their cleanliness. There are few signs of individual taste, and one front room can look much like another.

This time of year I am a ragged eccentric, trailing shreds of strangeness where I go, causing disruption, arousing exclamations of astonishment, drawing attention to my self, though what I want most is to be invisible, or absent. I forget that my silver bracelet is a small transgression in these homes. My hair, normally so unremarkably short and brown, appears almost radical in its slight disorder. And I always forget that politics is taboo. I silenced a room today when I volunteered that Mit Romney had swung Southern in his positions during the '08 campaign. Recognizing my faux pas as soon as the chatter stalled, I glanced up, and saw many weatherman smiles above plates of Vienna Wieners and cheese balls. All the teeth were straight and white. All of them. It was uncanny, and I felt so alone I almost cried. I could just barely hold it together.

An old friend, from my grad-school days in Boston, dropped in. She was so warm, and such an able smalltalker, that I started jabbering about myself, my divorce, my flailings at single fatherhood, even my creative ambitions. A few people joined us and listened, murmuring their polite interest, apparently hanging on every word, until I suddenly felt that I was irritating them, making a fool of myself, showing my failed history, looking maybe exotic or delusional or at least ineffectual.

I was the only one there who'd left the church. I was the only one divorced. I have the unfinished house, the dented truck, the old boots. I forgot to shave. I can't stomach the sugar. I feel superior and I feel humiliated and I feel free and I feel alone. I think maybe I have missed something important.

Magdalen thinks Voldemort wrote Harry Potter

Wouldn't that, like, change everything?

But here's really my point, here in this song by My Morning Jacket about "What a Wonderful Man He Was." Here at Christmas time we all need to take time to reflect and give the Devil his due, because we owe it to This Great Land of Ours (America) and to our monotheism of our own choice. His dew. And grow, for godsakes, out our hair, greasy-sweet and long like the Baby Jesus meant it to be, especially at this blessed time of year.

Stefana's Native Earth Comes to Find Her

Erþe toc of erþe, erþe wyþ woh

Odd to come around a corner and be confronted by the face of Andrei Codrescu peering up at you with intense and game skepticism. And, more often than not, met with the VOICE. Codrescu has been at the school where I teach for two days, speaking and wandering the halls, waiting for his speaking sessions to begin. He was lovely, patient, and studiously sane-- only occasionally reminding us that he retains the prerogative to make wild pronouncements and to answer the questions we ought to have asked rather than the ones we did ask. He was great.

He made the case in a number of ways that language has as much to do with how you hold your body as it does with the words that you say. You can understand every word that someone is saying and fail to answer the real question, or conversely understand very little and come right to the nub by watching as they speak. I went to my doctor this week to have a neck injury checked out. She called back the next day to reassure me that my MRI showed no evidence of a stroke. A stroke? says I. Um, nice--what about my neck? Somehow we weren't talking. And yet the oscillating rhythms inside the MRI tube made me euphoric even through waves of claustrophobia. Made me feel cared for, grokked. Dr. Ghafoor, competent as she is, not at all. I prefer the great womb of the Machine Mother.

Codrescu lives with ghosts speaking several languages from the wreckage of several cities, including Baltimore. Lots of talk of speaking across borders of language and culture and history, always darkness and light in his tone. We ate Afghan food on Wednesday night, the day after the announcement that the U.S. will be sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan to make more ghosts. The wine was Portuguese and pleasantly viscous, Turkish coffee. We started talking about Jim Carroll's song, "People Who Died," and then about that poetic form of listing the dead, invented by whom? Ginsberg? the prophet Isaiah, maybe? perhaps Death Itself? And then about Alice Notley's wonderful haunted book, The Descent of Alette, in which a woman is trapped beneath the surface of a desolate city and beset by ghosts and demons as she attempts to find and confront the source of the evil. It is a book about ghosts, Codrescu, says. First her husband Ted Berrigan died and then, quickly, a new young husband whom she married a year later. His talk is a tower of Babel of names, gifted people who appeared, who appear, for an incandescent moment and then were gone, are gone.

Thursday morning he spoke to a group of students, ostensibility on The Writing Life, but somehow none of us could let go of the topic of immigration and seeking refuge, the odds parts of the self that are lost and replaced in flight. He is, as it turns out, Jewish; his passage out of Romania in 1966(?) was bought from the Soviet government by the state of Israel for around $2000 U.S. The school where I teach is full of these stories, full of the children of the Jewish diaspora, and of the half-remembered places and languages they carry with them.

He mostly found his way through the morning by taking questions. When did he start to dream in English? Is thought prior to language? A very quiet, dark girl asked him from near the front, when you return to Romania, do you feel alien? Dark hair across half her face, her eyes moving tentatively between Codrescu's eyes and her own folded hands. He tilted his head at her, took a half-step forward, and began to answer to her in Romanian. And she spoke back in Romanian.

I hadn't known that Stefana was adopted from a Romanian orphanage at the age of six, and Andrei had no way of knowing besides whatever it was that he saw in her face or heard in her voice. It was her mouth when she talked, he said.

The needs of our divided and immigrant nation require us to understate how deeply and permanently we are formed place and ethnicity. But our mouths keep the shape in which they were first held--keep this shape across oceans, continents, decades, even generations. The shape can even survive the death of hope and love. I walked past Stefana in the hall yesterday and wondered what that moment meant to her. Was it a moment of being found by something that she thought she had lost? Like losing your glasses and finding them, after an infuriating search, on your nose. Or yet another moment of her strangeness confirmed? Or did the ghost of that moment just enter the room where her other ghosts mill around speaking in tongues? I don't think I have words to ask her.