A Language At War With Itself

The Vanishing Point That Whistles: An Anthology of Contemporary Romanian Poetry, edited by Doru Mugur with Adam J. Sorkin and Claudia Serea
Talisman House, 2011

A question plagued me throughout reading this anthology: how much of the poetry has to do with Romania and how much nothing at all to do with Romania? To what extent is poetry the product of a place and time and to what extent is poetry autonomous and outside history?

What I know of Romania would not fill a one ounce tin of Black Sea caviar. My mind is filled with all the usual stereotypes gleaned from years of watching late night movies. Transylvanian vampires, high sinister castles brooding like dyspeptic aristocrats over villages populated with colorfully dressed gypsies, sheepherders ancient as earth, and dazzling young women with raven-black hair and fire in their eyes. How could a place of such romance and weirdness not fail to produce a robust body of fabulous poetry? But this is the trouble with stereotypes: they diminish reality with the arithmetic of assumption.

Which isn’t to say stereotypes don’t often prove true. It’s just a really nice trick to be able to go through one’s day suspending judgment. It’s surprising what can happen. Life slops in a bucket of assumption. And a country called Romania fires my imagination in a forge of time and space. A Romania of fury and passion. A Romania of woody sounds and bones crackling, shot glasses of cognac tossed over the head, hungry mouths, blood from abortion, condors and bats, fanatical looks in a dark barouche, slender winds fluttering through the fingers, night shaking its bells.

There is also the political Romania, a country choked by totalitarianism and severe poverty until, on Christmas Day, 1989, Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu were given a short trial, led behind the building with their hands tied behind their backs, placed against a wall and executed by firing squad. The execution is available on YouTube, testament to the powers of the Internet. The nation-state has become something of a fiction. We are all Romanian. We are all Occupiers. We are all besieged by a global oligarchy of sociopathic bankers and a ruthless capitalism stomping around the world like Goya’s Saturn Eating His Children.

The Vanishing Point That Whistles is the second collection of modern Romanian poetry from Talisman House. Born In Utopia: An Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Romanian Poetry appeared in 2006 and included the work of many prominent authors, including Tristan Tzara, Gherasim Luca, Paul Celan and Andrei Codrescu. Codrescu, who provided the introduction for Born In Utopia, wrote that “One of the most worn native clichés is ‘Every Romanian is born a poet.’ It would be a noble declaration, if it weren’t so pathetic. Being a poet is bad enough, being born one is hopeless. The only redeeming feature of that old saw is that it isn’t true. Romanians, hopefully, were born to be many other things: computer engineers (and hackers), doctors, researchers, world-class criminals, and gymnasts. But what about the poetry? It gets tricky.”

“The Romanian language,” he continues, “is mostly a Latin language, like Russian or Bulgarian. Throw into that mix a few hundred words of Turkish with power way beyond their meager numbers, and you have a language at war with itself.” I have since listened to some Romanian poets read their work on YouTube. I know absolutely no Romanian whatever, and didn’t have a clue as to what was being said. All I heard was the sound. To my ears, Romanian sounds a little Italian. Roberta said it sounded like Italian spiked with Hungarian. She’s right: there is a definite Slavic plangency surging through the metallic ring of Latinate syllables, churning consonants and vowels like a Hungarian tug on the Danube.

There are 40 poets represented in The Vanishing Point That Whistles. If there is a common quality or style apparent running through these poems, it is what editor Paul Doru Mugur calls hyper-realism, an obsession for the real and for authenticity, “the rejection of any form of compromise and the contamination of esthetic by ethic.”

He refers to a movement called Fracturism: “In September 1998, two Romanian poets, Dumitru Crudu and Marius Ianus, wrote ‘The Fracturist Manifesto’ declaring that ‘fracturism is the first model of a radical break from postmodernism’ and that ‘fracturism is a movement developed by writers who live as they write, excluding social lies from their poetry; the writers who adhere to this movement have no career expectations and ambitions, they do not perceive art as a form of business from which one can draw any profit… The fracturist proposal was to move the accent from the object to the one who writes. Only the reactions of the one who writes are important and not the object he/she describes… Only thus can we reinvent emotion, only thus can we reinvent the primary thrill of the Real.”

Each night I’ve had this book within reach on the coffee table, I’ve looked forward to reading it. The poetry is different. It has an energy missing from a lot of the recent work I’ve seen in England and the U.S., a rawness and candor coupled with an earthy wit and humor that reminds me a little of Frank O’Hara’s work. O’Hara’s personism is echoed in the nerve and audacity of these poems, a keen, puckish emphasis on putting the poem “squarely between the poet and the person.” The poems rise on words that have the unmistakable feeling of flesh and blood about them, the aura of a woman’s skin, a man’s grip, a mouth full of water in a furnished room.

40 poets is far too many to provide commentary for individually, nor do I want to pick and choose and be left with that nagging frustration of having left out some real brilliance. I thought it would be fun and significantly easier to provide a small sampling, a line or two, for each poet. Think of each as a canapé spread with caviar.

CristianPopescu:

At night, if you drop a seashell into the telephone at the corner instead of a coin, a small, white, unchipped seashell gathered from the beach in summer, instead of a dial tone you’ll hear the wondrous sound of the waves. Then you can dial any number and the liquid voice of a siren will answer, summoning you by name.

Ioan Es. Pop:

with you, even your shirt can’t stay
happy. its silk is ruined
by the mouse gnawing at your bones.

but your shoes continue to be properly black. they will
mourn your toes. they will mourn you
a toenail will be priest, the knees the band of musicians,
the shoulders godfathers, the hands wedding guests,

and the phosphorus in your fingernails the candle leading the cortege.

Mihail Galatanu:

My lips were, oh ho, bleeding
like a cirrhotic’s,
cracked,
my mouth red as a raw wound
through which the world suffered once more.

Daniel Banulescu:

I lie in a bed piled with soft pillows
A bed piled with soft pillows
Having the air the contours the shape of Romania

Floarea Tutuianu:

Everything I touch turns to poetry
I have a hand of gold
That could bury me alive

Radu Andriescu:

Beauty is skin-deep, Ike and Tina would sing. Did you know a full 90% of the dust in a house is made up of human skin? Can you imagine the sheer quantity of exfoliated beauty tossed in the garbage every day?

Simona Popescu:

You twisted like a pretzel
and in the rotating dark
inside the womb of your bedchamber you’re
a seed.
An embryo swaddled in shadows.
Waiting.

Emilian Galaicu-Paun:

(a word so commodious that if you press your ear to it, you can hear a heart beating, and round, deep inside, two pregnancies).

Ruxandra Cesereanu:

vultures and ravens may devour me
lest I ax to bits the burden of my lust
kiss me until my teeth fall out
scratch me down to the bare bone
pull my hair light my fire take me to make a sinner of
because my poor inside-out heart has dried up like a glove.

O. Nimigean:

let your brain have a tumble let it explode
like the sun in a universe of femininities

Constantin Acosmei:

(I grabbed a handful of bones
from under the mattress and
made a pinwheel
while the pinwheel
turned
I wrapped my head
in paper)

Nicolae Coande:

I - a poet -
still alive
without a philosophy
absent any aura
confronted by a wine bottle
now empty -
this could well be it
the Biggie.

Mihai Ignat:

I don’t believe in ghosts.
I hate the country where I was born.
A stranger’s kiss would electrify
my tonsils.
My dream is to wake up someday.

Marius Ianus:

Suddenly I’m old
but I cannot pray ceaselessly
so I write this poem.

Dumitru Crudu:

I’ve glued
my forehead
to your forehead
with shells

Adina Dabija:

Henry Miller’s books are the most important poems
I wrote one night.

Stefan Balan:

Night. Rain.
In the dark moving, I find my body
At my fingertips - the mahogany of the table.

Teodor Duna:

the black days of death have passed
it was in fact a crucial year
when out of a rusty piece of tin I made myself a huge sun

Ruxandra Novac:

the ambulances are full of the rescued
amidst the silence, someone’s howl as he recognizes himself
in a glass splinter
when days have no end

Mugur Grosu:

not you, loveliness,
it wasn’t your fault
you let yourself be chased by your nostril
to the dark circles under the bride’s eyes

George Vasilievici:

I get up from watching TV
look through the peephole
and see my mother coming
pregnant with nobody,
munching on hair
seeds.

Ioana Nicolaie:

and she laughed
at her cellophane life
at questions rotting with the rags in the attic

Radu Vancu:

when you watch the rain through the window at the faculty office
and memories and raindrops make your flat soul tremble,
so your mind spreads outward in wider and wider circles.

Andrei Peniuc:

what are you doing here with me
the leash is a torment to me I’m a small animal
now I know my gums can catch fire and glow
I’m a small animal.

Dan Sociu:

No emotion exists
for what I feel right now
it’s as if we’re walking
our drunk child to school.

Adrian Urmanov:

right now
your finger is gently caressing the tablecloth and
that drawing is the wondrous face
of the soul

Razvan Tupa:

each time you alone
that stupid sidewalk crack looks ready
to be filled with your disregard

Claudiu Komartin:

today I woke up knowing everything
although I’d have preferred anything else instead:
to breathe a deep gulp of air
to be able to bounce a good thought between the walls of my skull

Elena Vladareanu:

my wealth: a few hundred books
a red plastic basin
an old iron
a radio
a tea set
the color of earth
a proud and ruthless soul
a damned termagant skin
a bored God
lust like a lethal guilt

Dan Coman:

my face passes through the chair and takes root in the floor
I move my cheeks like the legs of a mad horse
now I haven’t any doubt
no word can put a stop to the uproar in my head

Miruna Vlada:

there are kilometers of artlessness between us
memories full of slobber whirl about the room
if I cut this film with scissors
God will glue it back with his golden saliva

V. Leac:

even if we stir our bodies like instant coffee
the point is that life gets born in sweat
your love’s only a plastic suction cup
from which firefly Joe will get out.

Svetlana Carstean:

I’m a woman
for a long time my body’s been floating
above an expanse of water, white as moonlight,
indecent and silent.

T.S. Khasis:

it’s too late to call a friend
I take my clothes off and walk around in the dark
I feel my veins a little swollen
I study my genitals balancing in semidarkness -
and as always
(the same sensation must have sent some stone-age guy
right back to his cave)
I wonder why the skin on my upper arms feels thinner

Gabi Eftimie:

the air splits in two
and slides gently into me
/I WANT to look behind/

saliva dripping out of my mouth/saliva flowing back in my mouth/saliva oozing
back into my mouth

Marius Conkan:

what sort of brother is that for death
if he won’t let himself be buried in either woman or man
if he fails to produce fear walking with his hair in his mouth
and doesn’t drink coca-cola but only strong tuica
distilled out of plums brought from his grandmother’s village

Andrei Gamart:

It’s the time when you go to a bar to get drunk because in this bar where you come sometimes to sit by yourself the waitress already knows you she knows what to bring you and this makes you sad and self-disgusted. when you sit at the table she’s already bringing the drinks. sadness. disgust.

Michel Martin:

white fish salmon couscous coffee rye mushrooms I’ve quit smoking
oh so sad if I were to begin again I’d become half geisha half
Edith Piaf I’d be the painter of everything I’ve lost

Aida Hancer:

I leave home with the thought that my blood
will gradually fill
other emotions

Anonymous:

I read on the internet:
in secret, between shadow and soul
and it bored a hole in my brain and birds like watermelons landed there
then I did a wikipedia search for my love

The Mathematics Of Snow

Time folds into place like a jackknife. A slab of meat sizzles in a frying pan. I can hear the pages of eternity crackle with the physics of black.

I am deeply antisocial. Can I get a witness? I can’t. I’m too antisocial.

I love books. Books were invented for the antisocial. Books make it possible to be with people without actually having to be with people.

My eyes scrape against the page. Reflection is an engine of supposition. I can hear the ghost of my personality walking on the moon. I can hear the snake of the universe crash through arctic ice.

I have forged a sword from the pure steel of history. Every story begins with a fire. A skeleton escapes from the museum. It is chased down and riddled with bullets in Pittsburgh. The skeleton laughs. The sound of the laughter is hollow. It is the laughter of a skeleton. It sounds like absolute zero. It sounds like winter ice feeding the glory of summer.

Drugs replace reality with sweet illusion. I paint a feeling with a camel-hair brush, two shades of red, a little green, and a dollop of black. My head mutates into an engine of blood and cabbage. A ghost walks through the Laundromat smoking hashish. The wind blows the sea into vivid life. My feeling grows too complex to handle and falls out of my mouth. It creates a fiction to inhabit. A cocoon of words and sounds held together by syntax. One hundred years later it breaks from the cocoon and takes wing over a desolate earth. Its wings are scarlet and yellow and its eyes are blisters of black.

I am sitting on a hippopotamus. A robin hops in the snow. I open a box to discover another hippopotamus and a robin hopping in the snow. It is signed Joseph Cornell and includes a map of purple.

I put words on paper, one by one, until they form a chain. There is no limit to what we can create. The larynx hammers syllables in the darkness of the throat. The rain attracts whispers. I smell smoke. There is a whisper of eternity in the woods.

I develop a poem in the shape of a crustacean. The ocean sparkles and an old man shucks oysters. It is raining. A boat bobs on the horizon. The sky is stippled with birds. The poem resembles a lobster. Its antennas are raised. Its claws hold a jukebox, which it begins to eat. A song bursts into rhubarb. The lobster eats the rhubarb. Max Jacob talks to his parrot on the telephone. Metal groans in the hold of a sunken ship. Words crackle with the fire of ancient caverns. The white gate of eternity creaks open on the ocean floor.

What is the smell of revolution? A loaf of pumpernickel barking at a snowman.

There are five gallons of blood in the human body. The world is a constant struggle. Bach furnishes music. Mysterious phone calls penetrate the dark. The luggage of heaven puzzles the hills. Space dances on the roof of a restaurant. My emotions are made of ink. I drop a pebble into a well to hear it echo at the bottom. Click click click on rock kerplunk.

You cannot live in the U.S. without drugs.

We live in a world of twisted perceptions. Illusions, delusions, dreams and exonerations. It is a pleasure to walk in the snow. It seems like it will never stop falling. And then it stops. There has been a momentary retreat. The city is quiet. If you sit in a car that has been covered with snow the effect is enchanting. It is like being in a cocoon. There is nowhere to go. Nowhere to be. It is just you and the quiet. And the snow makes three.

Robert Creeley Rides A Camel Across Egypt

I live in a wilderness of pain. These very words exemplify the calypso. Sounds emerging from a spinning record. A 45. From a dusty garage. The air is folded into thunder. Four rocks by the window, like four bald heads. George Orwell swatting mosquitoes in the Irawaddy Delta. Poetry. Emeralds. Claws.

I am frequently amazed at the ingenuity with which cloth restaurant napkins are folded. Once I saw an albatross far out at sea. Then it was just cloth. And my soup arrived.

Where there is pain there is pleasure. The two are intertwined. Though it may not always seem that way.

Opacity engenders ice. It’s a good distraction. T.S. Eliot is sculpting an opinion from a slab of granite. I play the accordion with a Technicolor hope. I strain to put the wind in a jar. The idea of paradise makes life infinitely more palatable. Though it helps to believe it’s true.

Poetry broods in description. Excuse me. I have to sneeze.

What was I saying? The other day, just as I was curling my fingers under the handle of the car door, I saw a handful of poetry mutate into a war. The outcome was marvelous. It rained in Paris. The tanks rolled north. A woman gave birth to a metaphor. A metaphor gave birth to a woman. And a man named Funk sermonized on the terrors of liberty.

The fork multiplies the punctuation of eating. The spoon reflects an overhead fan as it spins and spins. The knife imitates consciousness, soliciting scale. The poem doesn’t know what to do. It idles in reverie. And resembles an ear.

I fold my day at the ocean and pack it in a suitcase. The head benefits from its position on the body. The cemetery murmurs of earth. The pumpkins glow. The hollows howl.

Hatred is more easily understood than love. The highest accomplishment in life is acceptance. Most people live in a zone of denial. Illusions offer refuge. Revelations are cruel.

I float around on a planet writing everything down. The moon twists the sky into a spoon. A stand of birch informs the air with correlations of black and white. I would like to buy a nice cool monotone to go with my shirt. What is the best way to present reality? Words ooze from the pen. Sentences form. Paragraphs grow into legs. They get up and walk away.

When I write about experiences I feel so many myriad sensations all competing for attention that it’s hard to focus on any one thing. I’m open to anything, even hay. Cinnamon and denim. Stepladders and constancy.

Robert Creeley rides a camel across Egypt. It is a story of thirst and cohesion. And under and over. And in back and in front of. Or up or down. Or in or in place of. Of this and this. Of all that is. And of all that isn’t.

I have the face of an old man. I stand amazed before the dawn. I never expected to be this old. I want to bake a tattoo into a loaf of narrative. I want to conjure a winter of dazzling crystal. I want to surge forward like a wave and crash on the shore of another world.

The cord fell behind the computer while I was on the phone with a woman in New Brunswick helping me to solve the problem with our modem. I couldn’t find it. It was hidden among the tangle of cords on the floor. She suggested I follow the cord from where it comes out of the wall. It worked. I found it. Such is life. A proverb behind every corner.

Sometimes I yearn for a taste of Mexico. Especially when it snows and truth dribbles from a spark of temerity. Jukebox songs make an astronomy of time. The past and present fuse. The future appears slippery. My desires are more luxurious than I can afford. I feel bronze. I feel red. I feel blue. The colors of my drugs match the colors of my life. Someone coughs in the next room. Fireworks squirt from my pen. The old brown road is constellated with puddles. The hills are alive with the sound of frogs. I get up and go to the bank and deposit a bicycle wheel and a handful of rain.

Do people like me? My Maori buckle, my calliope pants? My magpie hat, my pullulating shoes?

The medicine initiates a vague comprehension. The propeller is a miracle. The colors are so rich they startle you into attention. All you need is mouthwash.

The largest snowflake in the world fell from the sky of Montana on January 28th, 1887. It landed near Fort Keogh, and was 15 miles in diameter, and was shaped like a muscle cramp.

When I awoke this morning there was an angel sitting at the end of the bed who said “the skin is an organ.” I had no reason to disagree. I got up and made some coffee. I went to the bathroom to brush my hair. I could see the ghost of my youth swimming in the mirror. They say the geography of truth glimmers with craters of volcanic gold. I say the bomb of poetry explodes into paradise. I say codeine feels like God whispering soothing thoughts to your bones. I say the larynx corresponds to the stamen of a flower. And that syllables hang like petals from the stem of a thought.

Some days later Robert Creeley is sitting at the Gare du Nord, waiting for a train to Brussels. How far in the universe to get home, he wonders. What do you do when you’re still alone. What do you say when no one asks. What do you want you don’t take. When the train finally comes in, there’s nothing you’re leaving, nothing you can.

Veho Comitatus

The surface of my right hand is constellated with tiny specks and lacerations, the remnants of play with my cat. He likes to bite. I know it’s wrong to encourage a cat to bite, but my hand is his favorite toy and the both of us often get carried away in rough-housing. The wounds heal quickly. Cells reproduce and patch the cuts by making new skin. I have nothing to do with it. I have no idea how my cells accomplish this, even though they’re my cells. Which makes me wonder: to what extent might I think of those cells as my cells? Is my own body truly my own body? I don’t know how my stomach digests food, transforms it to energy and muscle, or channels the proper vitamins to the proper glands. When it comes to my body, I feel like someone along for the ride. And when the ride ends, I end. I am, after all, no more nor less than my body. I do not believe in a soul that is separate from the body, but if this proves to be the case, no one will be more surprised than me to find it floating around when my body is gone. My body and its actions are a mystery to me, a factory where I have a high level position, and bear some responsibility for the burden I inhabit, but haven’t the faintest idea what the engineers and supply managers in their respective offices are doing. I feel like a CEO looking out from the top of my head, enjoying the benefits of my body’s labors and ingenious devices, but clueless as to how anything is done on the ground level. So who am I? Who are you? Who is anyone? Are we ghosts haunting our own skin? What makes an identity? What are its components? Right now my cat is sleeping, and dreaming. His limbs twitch and he makes little whimpering sounds. Who is this little guy? He doesn’t know either. He just likes to bite my hand. And eat. And sleep. And stare out the window.

Laughing Gas For Breakfast

Yesterday morning the office of my oral surgeon called and told me there had been a cancellation, would I like to come in early, at 10:50 a.m. My first reaction was an emphatic “are you frigging kidding me?” But that’s not what I said. I asked the receptionist how she had arrived at work. She said she had driven. Really? I was astounded. She said she lived at the bottom of Queen Anne hill and that the main arterials were slippery, but negotiable. I asked if she’d seen any buses. Yes, she had. The teapot began whistling. I excused myself, removed the pot from the burner, and returned. Yeah, ok, I said, I’ll give it a shot.

I gulped my coffee and put the rest in a thermos. There would be no time for my usual breakfast of cherry pie and slices of orange. I grabbed my coat, wool scarf, black fedora, backpack and a pair of strap-on ice grips. I sat on the steps in the hallway and worked at getting the ice grips on. Their framework is rubber. I was required to use a suprising amount of strength to stretch the grip over the toe of my left shoe, then extend it back to the heel where, after a sufficient amount of grunting and straining, I managed to secure it. I repeated the process with the other grip, stood up, and walked gingerly on my heels to the entry door so as not to damage the carpet or shale tile with the metal cleats on the toe of the grips.

The walk to the bottom of the hill went fine. There was more powder than ice. I like that sound of boots crunching into snow. I rarely get to hear that in Seattle. It’s a sound I more commonly associate with North Dakota and Minnesota.

There was an old woman sitting at the bus stop. She looked European, German or Russian, a colorful scarf tied around her head, worn Levi jacket, raggedy dress and a huge grocery sack stuffed with personal belongings at her side, from which she fished a Styrofoam cup of soup. She had a short, squat body and a gruff but gregarious manner. She told me she was going to her doctor. Me, too, I said. She revealed that she had taken some spills lately and hit her head. Her arms were partially paralyzed due to myalgia and so when she fell her arms were useless to catch her and she fell directly on her head. That sounded awful. I asked if she had suffered a concussion. She didn’t know. That’s why she wanted to see a doctor. She was able to get an appointment, which hadn’t been easy, since the doctor was closing early, on account of the snow. The snow was no deterrent for her. She had grown up on a farm in Pennsylvania near Lake Erie and was no stranger to snow. I tried to alleviate her anxiety over a possible head injury by telling her that she sounded lucid. That’s a stupid thing to say, she responded angrily. I told her that lucidity meant that she had not suffered a brain injury. If she had injured her brain, she would be slurring her words and feeling disoriented. This seemed to reassure her. I appeased her even further by going down and buying her a newspaper, an item she had complained of missing.

After a series of buses, several of which were heading back to the terminal, the 18 finally appeared. I got out my bus card, but the driver motioned me in, you pay as you leave. I found a seat and watched the world go by, white and crunchy and treacherous and cold. Everything had a sad, raw, refractory look of artless abandon. I was able to look up into the greenbelt on Queen Anne’s western slope, a greenbelt whose dense, summer foliage hides it from visual penetration, and looked for any paths that led to the top that I might be able to use in the future. I saw nothing. Just a tangle of black trunks and limbs, skeletal and foreboding.

A woman wearing an enormous fur hat got on the bus and reached to the coin deposit box to pay her fare. The driver told her, gruffly, that you pay when you leave. She moved gingerly down the aisle mouthing the words “I’m sorry.”

The bus turned left on Leary, which I had not expected. I got off at 20th NW and Leary and I swept my bus card through the slot on the coin box, but it made a funny electronic sound. The driver waved me off without further adieu, and I walked to the office, where I received a warm welcome. A pretty young woman in in gray hospital togs and hairnet ushered me into the room where my operation would take place, offered a place to hang up my coat and hat and backpack behind the door, then led me to the bathroom where she had me swish a blue, antibiotic mouthwash. I swished the minty liquid, spit it out, and returned to the room, where I was given a hair net, and invited to sit in the operating chair just as the doctor entered the room, an affable, athletic man in his 40s. The chair went way back and my head lowered to toward the floor. I gazed up the light fixtures, one of which had dimmed, a little ripple of light flickering in luminous play.

Then came the Novocaine, prick of a needle into my gum followed by immediate numbness. That’s when you know you have truly arrived at the office of a dentist, or oral surgeon. When your face goes numb, objects are inserted in your mouth, and speech is no longer possible, just grunts and squeaks and inarticulate murmurs.

When the words ‘nitrous oxide’ were uttered, my spirits lifted, and realized I had come to the right place at the right time. A rubber nasal breathing apparatus was fixed gently to my nose and I was asked to begin breathing deeply, a task which I performed with such unabashed eagerness, I was a little surprised that I didn’t suck the entire room into my lungs. In seconds, I began to feel tingly, light, and giddy. I liked this feeling. I craved hearing the Beatles. This was a perfect state in which to hear “Penny Lane” or “I Am The Walrus.” I felt like offering to pay not just for the day’s operation, but for the college education of anyone’s children. This, I felt sure, must be what Santa Claus feels. A giddiness of such unparalleled magnitude you want to fly a sleigh through the heavens with a team of reindeer bringing gifts to all of suffering humanity.

At first, there was some serious drilling. I felt like a block of wood on which someone was working into a birdhouse. My head vibrated. The vibrations conflicted with my giddiness, but no so much to put me out of it. This was followed by what the doctor warned me would be some tapping. I’d say it was more like unabashed hammering, but the task was performed swiftly, and with alacrity, and I did not feel any pain. Just minor irritation. I returned to studying the little flickering ribbon of light, which served as a delightful visual analogue to my lightheaded tingly silliness.

When the procedure ended, I heard the disappointing words “stop the nitrous.” It was like the end of an amusement park ride. The breathing apparatus was removed from my head and I arose from the dental chair back into the world of gravity, angst, Feodor Dostoevski, and uninsured medical bills. Our insurance does not cover this type of procedure, ostensibly because it is perceived as being cosmetic.

I paid my bill and exited the office. It seemed much colder, and it was still snowing. I walked to the corner of NW Market and 15th Street to find a bus stop, but it was merely for the 15, which was an express downtown. I trudged through slush and ice another half mile, until I found a bus stop for the 18, at the base of the Ballard Bridge. There was a couple, a man and a woman in late middle age, who seemed to be encamped under the bridge, and I had to wonder how they managed to endure such cold with no respite.

I enjoyed a conversation with a middle-aged man who had once worked at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena and was now employed as a mechanical engineer at a local shipbuilding facility. We watched in bewildered fascination as trucks and leviathan four-by-fours gunned their engines and went planing up the ramp to Ballard Bridge, slush and ice squirting venomously out from the tread of their tires, all done, no doubt, in defiance of the weather gods, and hoped that this intense cold was an omen of an equally hot summer.

The 18 finally came and I swept my bus card through the slot on the coin box again. It made the same electronic bleeping. The driver said “I don’t know what that is” and invited me to go ahead and take a seat anyway. How could he not know what an Orca card is, I wondered. And then I realized. It wasn’t my Orca card. It was the Metro card from the Manhattan subway I had saved because it had a quote by Saint Augustine on it: Too late I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient and ever new! Too late I loved you! And, behold, you were within me, and I out of myself, and there I searched for you.

Snow

My arms feel weak. I’ve just been shoveling snow. Shoveling snow is a novelty. It reminds me of growing up in Minneapolis, Minnesota. But this is Seattle snow. Seattle snow differs from Minneapolis snow in the way that the Taj Mahal differs from the Space Needle, or Istanbul differs from Fargo, North Dakota.

The snow in Minnesota is dry and powdery, like the dandruff of angels. The snow in Seattle is wet, like cement. Like the dandruff of Godzilla.

And Seattle has hills. Steep hills. Upon which the snow melts a little during the day, as temperatures rarely drop below 32 degrees Fahrenheit during the day, but then plunge to the lower 20s during the night. So the slush turns to ice. Which is treacherous and invisible.

Driving after a snowfall in Seattle is not impossible, but it is difficult. It is not uncommon to see a Metro bus, an articulated leviathan, immobile and abandoned in a ditch, or jutting out over a retaining wall overlooking I-5.

Everything takes on that enchanted, Doctor Zhivago look. Omar Shariff and Julie Christie in a mansion full of ice crystals. Otherworldly, romantic, but doomed. Ominous, sinister, weirdly baroque.

Luxuries such as walking are suddenly awkward, effortful enterprises, like speech therapy after a stroke. Until enough cars and people mash the snow into a hardpack of ice and slush, running assumes the heroic dimensions of space walking, or competing in the Iditerod with a team of feral cats.

I begin checking the temperature obsessively about once every 30 minutes. A rise in temperature by one or two degrees means the snow will beginning dripping from the shrubbery and falling in chunks from eaves and gutters. Means that the main arterials will be free of ice and easy of traction and the side streets will still by dicey in places, but negotiable if one drives with caution. A drop in temperature means another day trapped in ice. Means broken arms, broken legs, people unable to make it to work, additional stress for the people who can make it to work, and car accidents and canceled medical appointments.

Roberta lost one of her ice grips on her way to work this morning. Her store is sold out. She will have to walk home with one ice grip. I went to look for it on Roy and 5th Avenue North but didn’t find it.

I have an appointment tomorrow of oral surgery, a bone graft, in preparation for a tooth implant. The office didn’t call to cancel, so the onus is on me to find a way to get there tomorrow. I tried shoveling as much snow as I could from our car, regretting not buying chains. Sometimes if I can get the right start on our easement I can make it to the bottom without crashing into any trees or people. If the snow doesn’t melt by tomorrow afternoon, I will have to board one of Seattle’s many petri dishes. Roberta tells me the number 18 and 28 go to Ballard.

It’s 3:25 p.m. KOMO News says it’s 30 degrees with 92% humidity. They’re predicting a low of 36 degrees tonight, a high of 46 degrees tomorrow. If they’re right, which I hope they are, the world will be released from its jail of snow and ice, I can skip a ride on the petri dish and drive to my surgery in style, listening to Bob Dylan croon “Beyond Here Lies Nothing.”

The Wound Of Existence

Doppelgänger, poetry by Brian Henry
Talisman House, 2011

Doppelgänger would be a good book to read when one is down with the flu and running a high temperature and the body is under assault and has a foreign feeling to it. The intensity is weirdly delicious and the feeling inside is strange. It is a feeling of shadows, of things lurking in us that aren’t exactly human. Monstrosities of our interior subterranean life. An inner life that we know is a dimension of our own being, but is also foreign, uncanny, phantasmal and dark.

I know this feeling. I have felt it most keenly on those occasions of misery when my bones ached and I was stuffed with antihistamine and codeine. I hate being sick, but there is, admittedly, a side to it that resembles the dance of hallucinogens in the blood stream. There is a poetry to it. An alluring blur of hectic umbra.

Not that I’m suggesting that Doppelgänger is a book suited to illness, or that one should run a high temperature to gain entry into its imaginary realm. The writing is strong and will induce that sensation without a viral invasion and a runny nose.

Doppelgänger is a German word meaning “double walker,” and refers to a supernatural double typically representing evil or misfortune. The word is also used to describe the sensation of having glimpsed oneself in peripheral vision, as if one were witnessing one’s own ghost, a portent of illness or danger or possibly even death arrayed in the ghostly raiment of dream.

The Doppelgänger is our shadow self and as such has connections with the underworld. In this circumstance, there is no afterlife. The “upper and lower worlds are the same,” observed James Hillman, “only the perspectives differ.” “There is only one and the same universe, coexistent and synchronous, but one brother’s view sees it from above and through the light, the other from below and into its darkness. Hades’ realm is contiguous with life, touching it at all points, just below it, its shadow brother (Doppelgänger) giving to life its depth and its psyche.”

Doppelgänger, at a glance, could be taken to be a series of poems, or one long poem. Which it is. But it has an evident narrative structure and unfolds like a fable of mortal longing.

The central character is an old man who appears to have had a history of cardiac problems. In the first poem, his discomfiture during the night panics his wife and she takes him to the emergency room where it is discovered that he is ok, “Though his heart bleeds and bleeds / Unless his shadow self has left / And crept to where it waits / For an other’s actions / to draw it back.”

Henry’s lines are short, studied fragments of information, searching, probing, and fraught with anguish, yet curiously neutral in tone, a sort of plainsong tinged with an undercurrent of worldweary resignation. A cantus firmus for self and shadow self and a host of apparitions, the kind of nightly presences that might haunt an old man’s memory, including the road not taken.

“What is it that dwells / On the surface of the eye,” asks a poem a few pages in,

And moves with the eye

When it moves

Not a windbrought speck

Not a discernible scratch

Not a hair calcified and stuck

Not sleep or matter or gunk

The eye carries some thing

With it when it opens

And cannot distill its self

From what its surface allows

To intrude on the surface

The conscious self glances

To one side and sees its shadows

Until the eye draws down

On the image affixed

And no there was no one there

The attentive reader will discover what is almost an unheard thwack, thwack, thwack of a shuttle making the warp and woof on a loom. Line by line a gestalt forms, hazy around the edges, informed by darkness the same way a room will come to life when a candle is burning. We form something soft and reflective to hold ourselves, but then a sudden shudder thrills through our being and we realize we are sitting in a void. There is no actual floor beneath us, no actual walls to separate us from the universe. We discover before we are dead that we have an existence in that other realm before we die.

We do not know precisely who this old man is, but religion appears to have failed him. It is suggested that his religion of choice is of a Protestant, southern Baptist ilk. Jimmy Swaggert makes an appearance:

The old man is so tired

He nods through every meal

Like a suckfist sermon

Jimmy Swaggert sweating

All over a woman’s bosom

The old man wants a holy man

To draw the shadow out

And hurl it into a pit

Of fire there to burn

But no man is holy

The old man learns

His search gone cold

Barren sermon dissolve

Outside of some Native American and New Age practices, there is no shamanistic tradition to help us die and guide our spirits into the next dimension. Happily assuming, of course, that there is a further dimension after we slough off our mortal coil. Christianity is all starch and no meat. The lifeblood has been sucked out of it by years of vain, pietistic ceremony and stultifying dogma. Christ would have to return to put the zip back into it. But the Christian fundamentalists would either ignore or crucify him again for conflicting with their get-rich-quick and magical thinking schemes. And the pope would no doubt vilify him for consorting with thieves and whores.

“The invisible swells inside” proclaims the first line of the adjacent poem. There is richness in this line. I feel what Henry means. I feel it more strongly with each passing year. As the body ages, the spirit grows. The air is charmed with numina.

The word ‘swell,’ however, evokes more than growth. It also suggests pain and inflammation. What Nietzsche, in The Birth Of Tragedy, calls the “wound of existence”:

It’s an eternal phenomenon: the voracious will always find a way to keep its creatures alive and force them on to further living by an illusion spread over things. One man is fascinated by the Socratic desire for knowledge and the delusion that with it he’ll be able to cure the eternal wound of existence. Another is caught up by the seductively beautiful veil of art fluttering before his eyes; yet another by the metaphysical consolation that underneath the hurly-burly of appearances eternal life flows on indestructibly, to say nothing of the more common and almost more powerful illusions which the will holds at all times. In general, these three stages of illusion are only for the nobly endowed natures, those who feel the weight and difficulty of existence with more profound reluctance and who need to be deceived out of this reluctance by these exquisite stimulants. Everything we call culture emerges from these stimulants: depending on the proportions of the mixture we have a predominantly Socratic or artistic or tragic culture - or if you’ll permit historical examples - there is either an Alexandrian or Hellenic or a Buddhist culture.

“Getting old,” Ted Enslin used to tell me, “is not for sissies.” The body becomes a burden. Health care, if it is affordable and available, is either a blessing or a curse. Doctors are intent on one thing and one thing only: keeping the patient alive. Death does not exist. There is no such thing as dying. Consequently, I have seen people suffer needlessly. As soon as modern western medicine recognizes death as a reality and a part of nature, and ceases prolonging a painful terminal illness with drugs and surgery, they can focus on ways to alleviate suffering when the inevitable time has come to let go of the body.

Henry has chosen a fascinating and compelling topic and approached it with a graceful simplicity. Even the space between the lines has a mute presence, the presence of absence, the song of the Doppelgänger, the shaman within. “Medicine fails words,” Henry proclaims. Illusions are fat with words. Belief, which some insist has the power to cure, ameliorates suffering for those who find in its words a more powerful medicine than what science offers. Practical medicine provides instruments and chemicals. Its words are throttled by frequent, accurate, controlled observation. Prayer and poetry, however cherished or scorned, extend beyond the pale of mortal life and overflow the lumpish ground of our heavy world with the shadows of elsewhere.