Pause

 

Some silences spin worlds.

My husband and I agree it may have been the most communicative pause in a talk that we'd ever heard.  At the meeting a 30-something year old professional man, handsome--healthy-looking, dressed in a snappy shirt and tie--had recounted how, several years ago, he, after over a year of the surprising grace of sobriety, decided that drinking his In-law's vodka was a good idea. He then woke up the next morning (we can guess that morning's sensations from the look on his face) and took his daughter fishing.  He paused.  Looked down,; Looked inward. Paused...some...more...breathed.  Paused, again.

In that pause, we sat in a little boat with him and his daughter.  Our heads throbbed, our hearts twisted tight like old fishing line, it was hard to swallow. Dawn's damp hung in the air  along with the desultory chatter of a content girl.  A crow called out from shoreline brush, oars bumped wood in small lappings of water. The sight of bright bobbers upon dark water, the small fingers of a girl cradling a fat, red worm... reminded us of the tiny, ineffable delights of this world.  The knife edge of despair glints in our vision of this moment.  Pause....

pause.....








When he speaks we are not sure we are ready. We are afraid to lose sight of that knife edge and of the tiny delights.  We are grateful that he let us sit there, in that pause, in the boat.

Then he said, "And that probably saved my life."
Ah.
We knew that. 
 
I write poetry, not because I like to be obtuse, not because of some tradition of intellect, not because it's beautiful. It's because it's the only way for me to say certain things.  There are silences in poetry.  Spaces.  Pauses.  That's why it looks that way on a page (one of the many queries from the poetry-daunted, "Why does it look like that?").  My husband is in an even less enviable postion as an abtract painter: invariably several visitors to an opening will squint, turn to him and say "What does it mean?"

What did that silence mean in this man's story?  It means a fishing trip.  It means worms, water, hangover, prayer. It means despair. It means a child and her father.  It means the impossible.  It means rowing.

It is the silence the artist Galindo keeps as she trails bloody footprints from court to jailhouse, to police station to town square (see first post). It is the pause I feel each time I drive by the departed Rosie's forlorn gas pumps at the entrance of my street.  It is the pause of  Borges before he turns blindly towards us, to recite another verse. 

When I drop a pebble through a water's surface, there is a silence as it drifts down--visible and then not. The pause that emerges within me at that moment means everything. I cannot tell you what it means to you, though.

I do know that in that pause--not more than a couple of minutes--more than that one man's life was saved.

You can learn as much - or more - from one glance at a private space as you can from hours of exposure to a public face.
 (Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, 2005)

Painting: Point of Departure--by Mark Beebe
Royal Art Lodge; Little Sweets Series
Photography: Mark Beebe

Me and Borges

When I was 21, I did not go to Majorca.



photo: Ronald Shakepear



Memory

Eduardo invited me to go with him to Majorca
the night we ate paella with Borges.

 

"You have to 'front load that'," opined my husband Mark when reading my recent aside that Borges had once confided a love of the English language to me.  "You can't just casually say that Borges--Borges-- told you this and have it be the last sentence in the paragraph!"  "Listen," I soothed, "that's an important insight the man had, it fit there. It's his insight, it means something extra coming from him and I'll explain it in the next chapter." So I'm explaining.  Or, at least, I'm telling you the story.

I was a drop out undergraduate at Indiana University.  But I'd stayed long enough to be a work-study aide at a preschool where I befriended a teacher who was (then) married to an Argentinian scholar.  Later, when they divorced, he and I met at a poetry reading and he invited me and a girlfriend to dinner with, yes, Jorge Luis Borges. Eduardo (a psuedonym) was enough older than me that I was both flattered and wary of his attentions.  But he really understood my writing--something rare and precious for a poet--and he invited me to dinner with Borges.

We had drunk brandy late into the night, him telling
me stories of the Tango while the music itself played, the music

that allowed men to dance with each other in a lonely
land, lonelier now that torture played the music.


He quoted my own poetry to me—“o window light of next to next”
Even then
I couldn’t land in love with him.

Borges was amazing.  Like Funes the Memorious, he seemed to remember every word, every lilt and story.  He recited his own poetry for what seemd forever. I could have listened that long.  It took searching through files, not my own mind, to find my own poem about this extraordinary evening.  Borges stored his library in his mind, shared it gently and generously. He was a librarian, he said--a blind librarian.   I was nonplussed when he asked for me to recite my own poetry.  I simply could not.  Not only was the sangria blurring my memory, but to recite to Borges?  My own writing?  Even now it would astound me.  Even now, I would be hard pressed to call up a complete work from memory.  

Self-Portrait by Borges

He had no eyesight left, leaned upon the beautiful
woman’s arm. She wore fur even in the spring warmth.
Shadowed across this--my own mother’s slow movement into
blindness, her mind racing the darkness 
--memorizing our faces, her favorite scripture, the strategic
outlines of furniture, mapping memory
before apeture betrayed her.

It was a sweet and confusing night and I was in way over my head. Like an echo of a meloncholic song, the incredible potency of the two men's shared homeland--Argentina-- shadowed the evening. Eduardo had fled because of the repressive political climate. People were disappearing simply for being in the academy.* But Borges was unhappy with both sides of the divide. I knew enough to know that I couldn't fathom the poignancy of their histories, their losses, their loves, their interests.

Earlier in the evening Borges recited stanza upon
stanza of his own, extolled his favorites, the lineage of thought
and beauty. He inclined his head gently to me, asked me to recite
my poems; I stammered, finding no handhold
in my shadows. He chuckled
and noted that he often did not remember his own, as well,
and kindly turned away.

I had never heard of, much less eaten, paella before. I got a bit tipsy on sangria and, late that night, long after everyone had left and the tango music had quieted, Eduardo did indeed invite me to go to Majorca. It seemed an exotic temptation--Mai-YOURrr-ka;  even the name is spoken with unfamiliar accents and lilting phonemes not found English. However, I was shy about the implied relationship such a journey might encourage. I guess I liked Eduardo and myself enough to be honest about that; in what seemed a clearer morning light, I decided not to go.

Oddly enough, my mother encouraged me to go.  At the time I thought she was naive.  Now I consider her strange openess to me travelling overseas with a man she'd never even met a sign of her own sense of adventure.  A girl born to Bostonian wealth, she eschewed that and most acceptable feminine roles to become a minister and a leader nationally in a Christian denomination.  She obtained her ordination with failing vision, travelled around the world teaching--even while unable to decipher airport postings or read her own itinerary--and completed her career as a Pastor in a small church in London, nearly blind.  (I joke with her, now, "I'm going to use the 'B' word, Mom" as we negotiate her current needs and ventures.)  I watched my mother--chased by loss--memorize her moments, our faces, writing and speaking into an increasingly invisible world. In the pause that grows as vision and mind distance from one another, a kind of raw ululation sounds in the heart.  

I didn’t go to Spain and only a few bones of my own lyric
tent into the noise. Yesterday's landscape turns to grainy
fade—like the end of an old travelogue. Blind or not, in remembering,
it is the resolute throat of loss that gropes through,
leaning on slender arms.


Now, decades and husbands and lovers gone by, I wonder what might have come of such an adventure.  We never really know how to apprehend a moment.  Hindsight is not, I think, 20/20. In fact sight itself is a sense I have learned to examine a bit more critically.  The scholar Phil Carspecken writes eloquently on "occularcentrism and phonocentrism" pointing out how the metaphors of sight and speech permeate our language and thought about knowledge He says this belieis a some assumptions about the foundations of knowledge that cannot be logically supported.  One might say he is suggesting that our sight obscures our visions, our speech confuses our understandings. 

Nadie rebaje a lágrima o reproche
esta declaración de la maestría
de Dios, que con magnífica ironía
me dio a la vez los libros y la noche.

No one should read self-pity or reproach
Into this statement of the majesty
Of God; who with such splendid irony,
Granted me books and blindness at one touch.

Jorge Luis Borges

I had forgotten about Majorca...but not Borges.  As a poet, I began with his poetry and as a mother, a divorcee, a worker, a ctizen, a lover, a teacher and a scholar, I gained a new love of his prose.  I am now married to a surrealist/abstract painter and graphic narrative writer who deeply loves Borges fiction:  Of course he felt my evening with Borges bore more attention.  I think Borges himself, though, would have liked that he--great man, great mind--was an aside in an meditation on belonging and the many "languages"--including that of place--that are involved in such a notion. 

My mother lost her own vision so slowly that her brain compensated in heroic ways to fill in the missing pieces. For years, she "saw" mostly with her mind, her mind's memory and inventive logic. Now that all "sight" has left, she sometimes sees text swooping across her "vision;" sometimes even in French--a language she once spoke and read with some skill.  "I see the strangest things, now," she marvels, "It's a bit tiring."I am more than sympathetic to Phil Carspeken's questioning of our senorsy "centrisms"; in fact, my own orientation to knowlege argues for a better sense of embodiment--of the whole body being acknowledged when we consider knowledge, wisdom and life. But it is a tall order, I think.  In some ways, Borges forged a unique way through this dilemma with his fantastical, labyrinthian, origami puzzles of storying.  He told stories that turned the idea of story, or narrtive and memory, on it's head.  Perhaps it was no coincidence that he began this approach after a traumatic head injury and infection.  I wonder what new facet of mind he experienced?  And then, with the ocular faded to black, what is left? 

Perhaps what is left are the traces of what we call memory--the sight of a smile, the sound of laughter, the taste of paella,  the smell of the ocean, the feel of sun-warmed wind upon our skin. Or in lieu of that...the idea of it, the dream of the memory.

In the late 1960s and the early 1970s, Marxist-Leninist militias such as People's Revolutionary Army utilized aggressive tactics that sometimes resulted in violence.[36] Later the military government used these acts as justification for their even more brutal measures. The "ideological war" doctrine of the Argentine military focused on eliminating the social base of insurgency. In practice that meant assassinating many middle class students, intellectuals and labor organizers, most of whom had few ties to the guerrillas.




The costs of what the armed forces called the "Dirty War" were high in terms of lives lost and basic human rights violated. Thousands of deaths may be attributed to various guerrilla attacks and assassinations. The 1984 Commission on the Disappeared documented the disappearance and probable death at the hands of the military regime of about 11,000 people, relatively few of whom were likely Montonero or ERP cadres. Human rights groups estimate that over 30,000 persons were "disappeared" (e.g. arrested, tortured, and secretly executed without trial) during the 1976–1983 period; many more went into exile.[citation needed] The People's Revolutionary Army alone admitted it lost 5,000 militants.[41]


Serious economic problems, mounting charges of corruption, public discontent and, finally, the country's 1982 defeat by the United Kingdom in the Falklands War following Argentina's unsuccessful attempt to seize the Falkland Islands all combined to discredit the Argentine military regime. Under strong public pressure, the junta lifted bans on political parties and gradually restored basic political liberties.


His work embraces the "character of unreality in all literature."[2] His most famous books, Ficciones (1944) and The Aleph (1949), are compilations of short stories interconnected by common themes such as dreams, labyrinths, libraries, fictional writers, religion and God. His works have contributed to the genre of magical realism, a genre that reacted against the realism/naturalism of the nineteenth century.[3][4][5] In fact, critic Angel Flores, the first to use the term, set the beginning of this movement with Borges's Historia universal de la infamia (1935).[6] Scholars also have suggested that Borges's progressive blindness helped him to create innovative literary symbols through imagination.[7] His late poems dialogue with such cultural figures as Spinoza, Camões, and Virgil.

His international fame was consolidated in the 1960s, aided by the "Latin American Boom" and the success of Gabriel García Márquez's Cien Años de Soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude).[3] Writer and essayist J. M. Coetzee said of him: "He, more than anyone, renovated the language of fiction and thus opened the way to a remarkable generation of Spanish American novelists."[8]


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorge_Luis_Borges

Jorge Luis BORGES (Argentinian, 1899 - 1986) Self-portrait. ink on paper; 8 3/4 x 6 inches (225 x 150 mm) From the collection of Burt Britton. Borges was nearly blind when he drew this for Britton.


Jorge Luis Borges, Seven Nights, A New Directions Book, 1984. Page 110.

Plat Map of Our Mind(s)

I have an unpacking problem.  Every time I return from travel, the suitcase sits for weeks, half unpacked.  Thus it has always been for me; like an army kid I cannot say clearly where I am “from.” 

Upwardly mobile ministerial parents, having to go where the church made a good match for them, packed and unpacked me through a peripatetic childhood.  I suppose this and the resultant bridging to new communities and their cultures have given direction to my musings on the shades, shadows and illuminations of belonging.

"Here in the tentacles of April night
as I round the last bend towards home,
reflected headlamp beams scurry up a pole
glistening in the drench  and for a moment
I see something alive
making away...."

I don't know where I belong. I don't know if I belong here, here in a semi-rural area that I moved to with great effort, finally seeming to choose my home.  I don't manage the land well, it manages me.  And the natives, generationally embedded here, eye me as the one likely to report them to animal control, however untrue that is. In a natural disaster, we'd shelter together; in a civil war, we might not. But I know I love this place still, unreasonably, like an asylum-seeker loves her new land. I study the soil and the greenery, bemusedly learning from their intractability, loving them anyway for being real after so long a dwelling in the mirage of urban wasteland dreaming. But I know I'm an immigrant, translating always.  Will I always be partially unpacked/packed?   

I know that you believe that you understood what you think I said, but I am not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant. (attributed to Robert McCloskey, State Department spokesman)

Perhaps I am about done here--in the only community I chose for myself and my family. Certainly the “terminal” degree I am pursuing suggests that.  As well, the community and I have our mutual disenchantments; like a frayed marriage, the accumulated stutterings of dark projections, fatigued efforts may be too trapped a dance. Is the best next step for me a bowing back from the music, a walk away from the dance hall?  I don’t know. My ancestors moved on from here to there, making bold moves from homeland to "frontier" to escape old patterns, new oppressions. How do we know it's time to move on?

"...Pulling in, the illumined shapes of Redbud,
hillside, chipped doorway are all the same, but I
--having turned,  having seen—
am not..."

I've written in past postings of several borderlines and their crossings--city and country, "racial" demarcations, the borderlands of life and death, daily life and grievous sorrow.  Borderlands are special places:  The academics I enjoy talk about the "liminal"--people, places, perspectives that are unsettled, outside, hybrid.  Like my son's multi-racial girlfriend identified as such simply because her skin is a darker hue and her hair kinked and yet who grew up rural, home-schooled--a confluence of "types" that just can't hold their boundaries in the face of her lived reality. 

My sons are probably multi-racial, too.  I've dug enough through the geneological dirt to find not only the relationships to Mayflower ancestors, but also the Eastern European ancestors with suspiciously Judaic names and dusky skin, the fuzzy spots in the matrilineal heritage where "founder" settlers and the aboriginal already-settled may have quietly settled together.  The human genome project's exploration of our inner sequencing points to how we all carry the synchopations of a myriad of "races," histories, cultures.  The lines of race, of belonging, are not very straight.  Indeed, the DNA molecule itself is a twisty spiral of interlocking and over-lapping.  There's a reason it's a family "tree" not a family grid--as we trace back further and further, there are entwinements that confound, crossings that complicate, often obscured by name-change erasures, the blurring of migrations. 

When colonization marched across the U.S., land, even rugged land, was claimed by the newcomers and etched onto plat maps in irregular rectangles and trapezoids. Even so, many places--like here where our little squares of 1-acre plots trace the sinuous curve of Ramp Creek and its steep ravine--mountains, flood plains, rivers and lakes sometimes shoulder aside such artifice. 

Were we to follow the land (and how we actually use it, walk it, draw from it and dwell on it) rather than claim it, our plat maps would swirl and whirl like cloud formations.  Instead, we've place a grid upon the planet pretending that we can override the tidal flows of land and water.  The ongoing peril New Orleans faces from the river, the oceans and the flow of weather is just one example that gives lie to this posturing.  

I am unsure of what is a healthy approach to making a home: When is it time to migrate, when to settle?  Bruce Chatwin, explorer and writer, was convinced that humans were really meant to be nomadic and Pilosophers Gilles Deleuze and Guattari used the term nomadic along with de- and re-territorialization as keys to a philosophy that eschewed straightlines--through space, time, even thought. *  They say "A path is always between two points, but the in-between has taken on all the consistency and enjoys both an autonomy and a direction of its own."

Perhaps I am not so much interested in the borderlands as I am in gaining this nomadic "be here now" sensibility?  I've become such a student of transition spaces and margins that I advise my transitioning friends to.."consider change a 'worm hole'--a warp speed place where the usual "natural laws" don't apply." As well, though, I consider the borderlands and transition spaces incredibly poignant. The edge of them points to endings and endings call for elegies. This is the sad music that is so beautiful one cannot stop listening, quiet tears welling.  Sometimes such a moment is very still--an elongation of time even to the point of time stopping. 

To not belong is a belonging, too--to not belonging.  Fanon, writing insightfully of the psychology and sociology of the colonized,  describes of this odd layering of identity into a non-identity that is an identity. This complication of identity is important to understand in an atmostphere of increasingly subtle and pervasive corporate colonizations. Economic and social globalization bring along their nasty henchman of physical and psychic colonization with every encroaching step.  In Haiti, babies die of malnutrition because formula is marketed to mothers unable to afford it. In Chicago, having the name-brand jacket may trump having the rent.  The talismans of colonial "belonging" are insidious, clutched in the hope we will not be seen as "other."

To think like an "other," to find that other in us and know that the right-angled plat lines are just a kind of pretending, to know that, even as we yearn for a homeland, nature will altering the contours of our dwelling...these are all nomadic acts of reclaiming our minds. 

I wrote earlier about the death of some neighbors, untimely and tragic, who's familial roots sink deeply here, locally.  If we move on, the folks across the street will note it mostly with worry about what kind of difference will move into our place.   

 

"...Closing one door, I move to the next--

open and return."

My suitcase remains half-unpacked (or half-packed?), like my mind.  Am I coming or going?  A settler?  An emmigrant? An immigrant? A native?  Am I all of these, instantiated only in moments, moving across the landscape of belonging? This is the way a creek moves; changing course across time, following the sinuous contours of where it may flow the swiftest--always the creek, but never the same waters.

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deterritorialization

Poem: Returning to a Place Called Home by Julia Heimer Dadds

Photos:  Katie Thompson original chair found at:

http://interiordesignsense.com/tag/chairs/page/6/
Mark Beebe  "Wall Flower in London"

Mississsippi River meanderings U.S. Geological Survey

 

*"The nomad has a territory; he follows customary paths; he goes from one point to another; he is not ignorant of points (water points, dwelling points, assembly points, etc.). But the question is what in nomad life is a principle and what is only a consequence. To begin with, although the points determine paths, they are strictly subordinated to the paths they determine, the reverse happens with the sedentary. The water point is reached only in order to be left behind; every point is a relay and exists only as a relay. A path is always between two points, but the in-between has taken on all the consistency and enjoys both an autonomy and a direction of its own. The life of the nomad is the intermezzo." ( Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. A Thousand Plateaus; Capitalism and Schizonphrenia. Massumi, B. trans. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, Minnesota, p.380)