Talking of Michelangelo.

The Rising

“Fever is the dream of death in daylight
that hits one ear and then the next,”
then is exiled to the skies, reminder of the hell to come.

And if one be in labor
all the house locks must be opened, windows opened,
doors ajar, no knots in clothing.
Now heart is playing the bone harp’s monotonous rhythms;
no one is asking to dance.
What with the house shingled like feathers, like scales,
we should have known,
the sky coughing black clouds and crow virus.

When I visited Pompeii, they had not yet found the bodies.
Water was marked potabile
though strained centuries through their ribs and ash.
I have that feeling around me,
dread right in the closet with a snakeskin suit, pupae
waiting in the earth to split open,
dig out, fly and suck flowers into dry wads.
Fever rises, blood in glass veins,
crumpled as if to be thrown away. Then the nurse of aspirin
in her white dress, willow,
cools the fluids, calms the death mask, plaster, into sleep.

Bobby and Me

We were always in the story where they’d say “it’s fate”, I guess, Bobby and me. Me in my rose prim-dress, we always spit-spat and pressing down the road, that old Dodge ramming along. The one he’d park onside “Cross Creek”, right under the tree where the trunks climbed down, curled where his lips grinned the kind that make a girl green. But Bobby always tucked himself away you see, them eyes staring something you don’t know. With his Who Shot John that he’d rock below my chin, below my cigarette butt, but that rotgut burned when it crept down, and I’d barely known him at all. Barely known him when he hissed, hands half-pressed slinking up my thigh.

            With that body pressed and reeking rye, bottle by the hand we got along, ticked tobacco stares and tuned the radio host right up, our ears going numb to the twine. Our eyes gone blurred to light, light’s old sun setting down the bay, right down on Crossing Creek, that rusted Ram, and me and Bobby both.

Mundane for mundane sake

                The late Frank O’Hara once proclaimed, “I want the poem to be the subject, and not about it.” One may see this very aesthetic revealed through his poem “The Day Lady Died,” as well as within Gordon Jackson’s flash fiction piece, “Billy’s Girl.” Using abstract form to syntactically infuse colloquial diction, simplistic habit, and sensory imagery, both texts capture the vitality of pre reflective experience, stylistically arranging words in the participation and evocation of the extraordinary. Both pieces are unique in their banal expression of remembrance in the face of great tragedy. Their mourning is cubical, an underlying process carrying characters, objects, and places through time in the transcendence of death. Their grievance multi-dimensional, an immediate authentic force is textualized in both works through the vein of dailiness. Death interjects through both recounts as one of the many random and mundane occurrences working to punctuate seemingly unconnected activities of an otherwise typical day. Through their depictions of a-day-in-the-life, both texts effectively capture the beat in a rush of life. The time, the place, the moment, all work in sync to embody the process of recurrent death, while engaging the reality of life’s humbling continuance.

            Both O’Hara and Jackson utilize the stylistic genre of abstract expressionism to subtly refine and doctrine their pieces. Roland Barthes speaks of style, claiming, “Language and style are blind forces. Writing is an act of historical solidarity. Language and style are objects. Writing is a function.” In contemporary logic, abstraction is interpreted as the name of an operation upon a variable which produces a function. The literary style relies on spontaneity through an author’s automatic or subconscious creation. Such style’s intention relays focus not in distinctive representation of reality, but in the enactment of speakers to certain attitudes of choices within reality. Both authors refine language through their diction, words fitting mundane things and attitudes, composing the substance of matter and form through daily recollections and occurrences. The description of the mundane is used as a literary force relied upon to build an authentic setting for exploration of the characters. O’Hara carries readers step by step through his day, “it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine/because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner…”. By forcing paces into his world he pre-reflectively drags the reader’s understanding of experience into a moment when all fail to understand the weight of time around them. In “Billy’s Girl,” Jackson uses similar means to create a pragmatic setting surrounding great tragedy. The subtly of descriptions highlighting the thread of reality when he states, “But after a while they called the sheriff and two guys came into the bathhouse behind me and went into the storeroom where they keep the drag lines, these hooks as big as your head. By then it was late afternoon the sheriff’s guys were out there in their little boat putt-putting around the raft, lines hanging over the stern, when Billy’s girlfriend came down that evening for a swim.” The entrance and continuing preoccupation with Billy’s girl reveals the honesty intrinsic of Jackson’s piece, an understanding brought through experience. Using simplistic language and imagery, both texts simulate a world which transports readers through their own senses. Within this style the stories become real; the profanity of every day is highlighted, effortlessly expunging both texts through a moment of authenticity.

             The voice in each piece reflects the numbing of grief and quieting of nostalgia, its movement clutching toward the intimate and self-revealing nature of each figure. The texts, through all their looseness, mimic a distinct improvisational quality, shifting uneasily beneath a cover of stylish gesture. “The Day Lady Died” reveals this mood in lines like, “and casually ask”, while in “Billy’s Girl” through lines such as, “but I hadn’t seen him either.” Their colloquial diction, heavily dependent on ordinariness, feeds from life’s everyday untailored mannerisms. Such precise deliverance dignifies the statements, while aiding to avoid the bathos so often inherent from many countering allegorical structures. They are assembled piece by piece in the approach “I do this,” and “She does that,” while finely interposing a general configuration of details. The “and” as well as “but” rhetoric so pronounced in each composition, collaborate in enhancing one’s sense of the tangential and problematic links between particulars. The paratactic structure (and…and…and/but…but…but…), stitches short declarative statements sequentially resulting in the focus on what seems to be the meaningless flux of time.

             The extreme vividness intrinsic of each piece sprouts not from the visualization of objects and occurrences, but rather the evocation experienced in their retelling; the sensory recollection of a moment, the smell, the texture, the creeping rhythm of sound. Jackson luminously captures this, writing, “The towels gave off a sour odor. Her suit was still damp around the edges I noticed. Out on the lake the motor died down again.” There is a shock of recognition in these lines, the moments more precious, made vulnerable through their honesty. In “The Day Lady Died,” O’Hara achieves a similar state of consciousness speaking of “the muggy street beginning to sun /and have a hamburger and a malted and buy/ an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING”. O’Hara conceptualizes a world in context of sufficient objects. His details are not selected to enhance a specific lyric point or attitude; rather, they embody the multiple facets of experience, only some of which may be essential to the feeling, but all of which are equally real and present. “The Day Lady Died” additionally contains a plethora of aesthetic objects like books of poems, but they are simultaneously coupled with hamburgers and Gautois cigarettes as mere commodities. All three accounts are similar in their gesture of “lifting” descriptions of a moment, and using them as a kind of cathexis for otherwise un-formable recognitions.

            The recurrence and transmutation of a time, place, and objects, plays a tangible role in the divisibility of both plots. “Billy’s Girl” reads, “First Billy was on the raft and then he was not,” “Sun shone on the blue water,” “By then it was late afternoon,” “Carmine looked for him at the bathhouse, at the popcorn stand,” “She was perched on the edge of my counter swinging her legs, looking real good and knowing it.” Each statement makes a point to reiterate and mentally graph the means of experience, an experience framing the mundane in an effort to map the extraordinary contours in life and death. In a similar regard, one may easily dissemble the very title of O’Hara’s “The Day Lady Died.” Applying an objective interpretation, “The Day” is a title, similar to O’Hara’s “PARK LANE” and “GOLDEN GRIFFIN,” a place in which “Lady,” a representation of an era in time, “Dies,” an object and part of life. The unison in such references emerges in the unique interchanging ability of each role, the poem’s space camouflaging, and reemerging through each new configuration. O’Hara symbolically divulges this function again through his speaker’s arrival into the poem by train. Powered by the fuel of expression, it is the jump start of the piece. Carried by a train (an object), named “4:15” (a time), he disembarks through a junction (place), where the anticipation of life and profound loss in death collide head on, disbursing a transcending moment of experience, the poem itself.

            “The Day Lady Died” and “Billy’s Boy” are brilliant in their abilities to remain honest and de-mystified without succumbing to self-pitying nostalgia, or refining away content in the self-conscious acrobatics of literary exhaustion. They may claim, for at least a moment, to transcend the contingent multiplicities of daily experience, allowing a brief space where readers all stop that rushing breath and through a sour kiss realize the bare bone art of memory’s truth consoling within the particulars of life.

The Gainesville Ripper

           They were all brunettes that Summer—youthfully poised they lined below the sun—each one the Summer before he got them. The Summer before blonde hair-dye sailed off shelves in waves, when young girls packed pistols by their compacts, and women wore wigs like hats. The Summer before the neighbors floated by, never lifting up their chins, their faces cloaked like ghosts. Before the Baptist Preacher, armed for fate, stood tall and wept, the fear unloosed from his eyes. The Summer before the Ripper knocked on the door; that Fall when the tiny city shut down.

            Florida Falls then were fair-filled days that rock; the sleeping stadiums shot awake. Ben Hill Griffin could pack 90,000 tight: Cracker Jacks, hog skin, and cheerleaders stacked like acrobats. The stadium all caught in a roar, shoulders shaking the sound heavy growl, each shout swamping into one drum as ears pounded. The pounding on the bathroom stall where the young girls wait in line, ready blooming they pressed petals on their lips and smacked the boys to shades of red. Those boys, thinking men with their high collars, their business toned physique and baseball caps. That youth who’s biggest fear a 9-5, their grades that flopped or bills the barman flashed. Each one a bud, bodies painted orange and blue, their late night cramming till the clock—strikes—and not one of them knew.        

            When the Ripper took their time; cut their legs too short to tick. When awoken he snatched them, lingering lavender their scent where he hissed between their sheets. Carrying a loaded blade on hand with quick ease he gut them, held their hearts—pulsing, and squeezed. The hearts he sniffed, each drip-dropping on his thigh. That—poor—girl. There—where he stuffed them in his pocket till they dried—their expressions stunt—rubbing between his fingertips. His fingers in their hair, twisted their faces into acrobatic pose—he laid out mirrors till silent they fell and he reached the city’s throat.

            Sonya Larson, 18. Christina Powell, 17. Christa Hoyt, 18. Manuel Tobada, 23. Tracy Paules, 23. Stretched 35 days, long fallen below the sun—the Florida fall. Sonya, they say almost got away, Christina Powell once crowned Prom Queen. Christa—they whispered smelled of rosehips in cream, while Manny, once heard, called his mother twice a day. And Tracy, she had the tiniest hands.

            Tucked back the rest threw spray paint on the walls, each their index fingers pressing down while in cement they wrote names. Names never to be erased but driven by each day: another snap on the yard, lines of cheer arranged, time rising for the Wave, the one that moves and breaks; bubbles blown into the sky. Sonya, Christina, Christa, Manuel, Tracy and the acrobat silently mouthing to the crowd.

The Disruption of Idealism by way of Chivalry through James Joyce’s “Araby”

            Filtering canonical motifs of chivalry through the blinding infatuation of a young boy, James Joyce meticulously structures his short story “Araby” upon a paradigm of medieval romance, reflecting by form, the agonized actions and manners of courtly love. Utilizing the well-defined traditions of the literary genre, the story’s action is informed by the classical structure of the chivalric quest. Congruent with the style is a set of regulatory functions enabling characterization into the preconceived “hero” motif. First, an enfance defines the hero’s youth prior to his exploration of manhood. Second, the tale seeks the introduction of a lady to be centralized in the hero’s vision and journey. The third event involves the commitment to quest, while the fourth relies upon the hero’s performance and completion of task. Encouraging a false quest for meaning, the model establishes the clear incongruity of a struggling Dublin with the idealism of youthful imagination. This jarring juxtaposition ironically undermines the story, ultimately evoking the painful epiphany of a young boy enchanted by a world of knightly fantasies.             

            The beginning paragraphs of “Araby” robustly establish the narrator’s enfance, a matter of location and upbringing ascertaining the hero’s youth. Personifying the streets of Dublin, Joyce inflicts consequence into their inscription. For the boy of “Araby” shakes of the prison-house are already closing. Living on a blind street in a “musty” house formerly tenanted by a dead priest, reading dull books inherited from him, wandering amidst the commercialism of the markets, he drifts through an environment hostile to his illusions. The waste-room, useless papers, wild garden, and rusty bicycle pump symbolically establish the terms in which we understand the youth of the hero, defining the world in which he lives.

            Such detailed description ends with the introduction of the tale’s heroine. As a romance heroine, she must be above the boy in station and likewise taboo. Joyce cleverly modernizes this idea, relaying the boy’s infatuation to his good friend Mangan’s elder sister. The boy’s response of affection is mirrored to that of a courtly lover, whose characteristic action is to look, and adore from afar. “Her brother always teased her before he obeyed and I stood by the railings looking at her.” His voyeurism, his peeping beneath the blinds, reveals both the lover’s yearning to guard his beloved and the emotional imperative which insists the courtly knight long always for sight of his lady. Axiomatic to the medieval romance are the social boundaries of the knight and his lady, for the boy had “never spoken to her,” his bouts adorned by growing weal, blanching or blushing in her presence, “her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood” and “when she came out of the doorstep my heart leaped.” Shielding a dream of romantic love, he bears his “chalice safely through a throng of foes,” his world a demon to romance and he God’s chosen guide. As the boy continues in execution of duties he retains the attitude and rejoinder of the courtly lover. Possessed by love, he moves out of time, and all worldly, civic, and temporal considerations pass him. “I thought little of the future.” Overcome by love’s disarming authority his “eyes were often full of tears (I could not tell why)” as he was rendered inarticulate.

            In proper alignment of the paradigm the next passage works to found and define the boy’s quest. His lady’s desire and inability to frequent the bazaar functions as a catalyst; prompting the boy in task and fulfillment to love’s fueled adventure. The symbolism of the two “alone at the railings” implying both marriage and communion, is supplemented by the further suggestion from medieval romance that he bestows his lance to her, “she held one of the spikes,” and she accepts his consecration to her service, “bowing her head toward me.” Her curious final line, “It’s well for you,” is tantamount to an admission of his quest, contextually synthesized by medieval terms to mean “it is well for you- that is, you are better off than I am.” The narrator’s inexorable loyalty to the journey echoes his fidelity to the lady; subverting his public position to the world, his doting conflicts with “the serious work of life.” Just as Arcite becomes a servant in Theseus’ house in order to be close to Emily; so Lancelot disgraces himself publicly by mounting the cart and, intentionally losing tournaments; the boy in “Araby” is chafed against the labor of school. Surrounding characters resist his pursuits through the master’s change in attitude from amiable to firm, and the aunt who “hoped it was not some Freemason affair”, as they both unreservedly inquiry to the validity of the quest. Nature, too objects; the boy describes his travel to Araby recounting the air to be “pitilessly raw.”     

            Such oppositions endured from nature and society to his quest exists merely as the first of multiple hindrances the hero must overcome. The inherent battles, stony passages, sieges, fuming dragons, ambushes, and bitter giants which impede the hero in medieval romance are transmuted by Joyce into “time,” “an old garrulous woman,” forcing the boy to bypass obstacles like drunken and forgetful uncles, mindless clichés (“All work and no play”), impractical romantic songs, and money. Unfortunately the boy exhibits no heroic characteristics: time remains crucial, the old woman vanishes without aid, the uncle easily acquiesces, while the aunt retrieves the money.

            Infringing the structural pattern of the genre is essential in synthesizing the meaning of “Araby”, as well as Dubliners. Joyce ironically inverts the ending, allowing the boy’s chivalric quest to disband in a double failure. Disillusioned, he encounters the malfunction of a world that had been “a splendid bazaar,” an “Eastern enchantment” of imagination consumed by the gaudy realities of this world. Its emptiness, dark, hollow, churchlike silence made real by the fall of a coin. A failure of will, he is caste a paralytic shadow entwining him into the echoes of Joyce’s portrait of Dublin. Stripped of chivalry’s disguising influence, the materialistic “civilization” of Dublin faces the emasculating power of its own unfulfilled desires. The fall from idealism directly connected to the specificity of a place stuck in the past. The Irish etymology of “east” signifying “in front of,” is never reached for the youth in “Araby” who appears constrained within this “past,” or literal “west.” The shortcomings of this west are the shortcomings of Dublin, a culture struggling for transcendence against the ascendancy of street market values. Using tensions between the local and the universal as a backdrop, the story illustrates the critique of a culture falling unaware into empty profanity. Through his knightly quest for love, the boy is bludgeoned into epiphany. Finally unmasking the darkness of reality he reaches a halting conclusion that he is surrounded by and is “a creature driven and derided by vanity.”

            The story is the disillusioned understanding of oneself, some painful human truth; that we are not as good as we thought ourselves to be, we are not as perfect or as pure. We are not as brave or just or wise or compassionate. To be alive, to be human, is to be less than what we think we are. Not simply the conception that the Arabys for which we seek may be worldly and impure, but rather we ourselves are less than we imagine. The boy’s anguish deriving from his realization of mankind; his anger with himself that he should be merely human after all, that he should allow himself to fall victim to prideful illusion, his vanity resurrected through the painful futility of chivalric love.

The Organ

The ice is a haze that would
invade thin hearts. She settles
in a comer to look for reason
with a spoon. her fingers becoming
red leaf greetings fanning the cafe tea,
making birds out of steam.
 
Seeing a friend. her music rises
high above the morning, as inside her
the organ of promise rings like the face
of the moon to the other side of the room,
with the grey hymn thoughtfully
turned to pleasure.
 
Theirs is almost a winter insight
with another woman, the very old
unknown woman. who makes a living
only walking by the window of the cafe
as she just did, looking in; while
the two friends talk about ancestors
at Big Bend, Hanging Rock, The Hearing Creek,
and other places;
 
and interiors sing in their faces
about how to live long and medieval,
and the organ of promise is playing again:
“be infinite. and bless the four humors
of blood and water, bile and phlegm,
now, this awful winter.”

As You Like It

“A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool.” It is through such masterstrokes of incongruity displayed in plays such as “Twelfth Night” and films such as “Some Like it Hot” that the “fools” of life represent the “truths” of reality. Their aims of comedy an elusive blend of sense and nonsense, their joyous acceptance of life and love, their social satire, their low comedy characters who are always more than mere clowns, their poignant songs that are always more than mere embellishments, and their breathless cascades of wit. Coating truth with humor, society allows them to ask the radical questions. What are you? What would you? And its radical metaphor, natural perspective that is and is not, “What you will.” Comedies represent the cultural anxieties of a time played out on stage or film, the existence of conformism always imposing so much strain, fissures, paradoxes, and subversions. By Laws of Nature, by the rules of Religion, and the Customs of all civility, it is necessary that there be a distinct and special difference between Man and Women. Through their stories Shakespeare and Wilder disrupt this sexual difference with an almost peevish insistence, their humor pervading the tales’ meaning. The Playhouse enjoyed comedies in which boys played girls who pretend to be boys because they secretly love other boys and want, quite desperately in some cases to be loved as girls. The 1950s suspended between two polarities, on the brink of a sexual revolution. These “masquerades” derived not from the imperatives of biology, but instead from the demands of society. Rigidity would provoke recoil, and the excess of homogeneity and authority would elicit irrepressible yearnings for pleasure and freedom. We see this in Daphne’s dance with the millionaire, as by the end she is swept up by freedom into the pleasure of taking on the identity of a woman. After allowing her self to give in to desire Daphne’s character falls into the identity of a woman, still speaking with a woman’s voice to Joseph in private, still running in heels. Similarly Viola in the end of the “Twelfth Night” is still androgynous. Referred to by the Duke as “boy” she is left with an ambiguous gender and identity, just as Daphne is with the last line “nobody’s perfect.”