14 December 2023

 

Is it form or format, door or door mat, car or automat? You can’t open a door mat, or drive an automat, but you can put your sonnet inside an appropriate format. Sonnet is to format as door is to door mat, the thing itself beside the plan of it. Scrape your boots before you enter the National Park to prevent the spread of pests; Russian boots placed in the shape of a star; children’s shoes at Auschwitz. It always comes back to shoes, not as evil doers but as boundary breakers, slipped over murderous ankles. That was what made me think the wax woman was my mother; not just her 1960s skirt and cream-colored blouse, but her thin ankles. Ankles aren't usually used to identify us, but hers broke the wall of (her) death and (the museum’s) work of art. When realist sculpture proves more real than life, it brings the dead back to sit quietly near a guard, surprised to hear me say he was guarding my mother. If I stared into her eyes, would she or I be Marina Abramovic? Would one or the other of us elicit a tear in the other?

To be a stranger’s witness, using you as hers across a museum table. Please refrain from cynicism, I say to a fellow academic; allow that the word “wisdom” carries the merit of impermanence, along with an aspiration to sculpture-hood. When asked to draw a clock, I got the circle and the numbers down, but couldn’t find 11:10 on my first three tries. The digital world has ruined me for this kind of arithmetic, that of measuring time in the last century. That it was not 11:10 in any case didn’t confuse me so much as the two hands, one shorter than the other, lost in magic marker on a white board.

Don’t play everything; just let some things go by. Monk dances like he plays piano, a staccato grace to his feet across the board. His music is not staged, like play or a conspiracy theory, but emerges from planks like commandments. You can tell musicians what to do, because they will not do it exactly. But there is fascism in my fascia.

One refers to history, the other to emotion. Untethered, even as they are made. Written either by the victors or the victims; both narratives compelling, and each could be a novel of manners, not in the sense of politeness but of grammar well caged. The question of his identifications came up in the comment stream, after a piece of his graphic memoir appeared on Facebook. He felt more for the girl his daughter's age from Gaza than he did for young men who might have been himself. To whom do we owe our identifications, our empathy? Its grammar is hard to diagram.

I flee so many arguments with which I agree. Word-bound, I quarrel with the sutta’s translation, the tone of logic, appeals to history that is another's history bombed. A leaflet about flooding Hamas's tunnels was couched in the language of God to Noah (or am I misremembering?). Watch the side of the sentence you fall into, subject or direct object, agent or acted upon. Combine one part memoir to two parts history to another logic, stir up controversy. Our sentences dislodged, we look to an underpass as comfort. On the questionnaire I noted that I have housing and food, that I’m not depressed, and that I don’t need the assistance of strangers. When asked for my quality of life, I filled in the circle 8. 

 

Note: language taken from Thelonious Monk's 25 tips for musicians, 1960.