Richard Siken TUCSON, AZ Siken confesses to a few lies, and claims that he stubbed his toe on a hamburger. Friday: 05.05.06 | Permalink | Comments (1)

I stubbed my toe on a hamburger because I am a liar and you want to be entertained. I say because and you wonder if I’m talking cause and effect, as if being a liar makes me prone to stubbing my toe, but that’s not what I mean. I mean I wrote on a hamburger because I am a liar. I do this a lot, and Stacey doesn’t like it. I did stub my toe, but on a different noun, a boring noun: chair. I stubbed my toe on the chrome leg of a poorly upholstered chair. The seat is upholstered, brown and poorly, and the chrome legs just stick out of the bottom until they hit the floor. Four legs, wooden floor. I stubbed my toe because I am a drunk. Right foot, the little piggy that gets no roast beef. I have been working on this paragraph for two hours.

Stacey is a female and she is tired of me lying to her and everyone else. When she calls, I say I am writing a poem about a chair, which is two lies, because this isn’t a poem and it isn’t about a chair, it’s about a hamburger. She, because she knows me, says “Are you lying to me?” and I say “Yes, I am lying to you. I am watching television, but later I am going to write a thing about a thing for that website thing that I said I would do.” And she hangs up. I keep promising that I will stop lying to her but I can’t help it, my life is boring and it bores me to talk about it. I’m not even a drunk. I just said that for effect.

Hamburger, because if you can put it in your mouth, it’s interesting. And some things are simply more fun to say. Waffles taste better but pancakes says better. Say it with me: pancakes. When the New Jerusalem descends from the sky and we all get to live in the City of God forever world without end I would like to have a little house on Pancakes Road. Now that is a good sentence. Sure, most words are better in the singular—plurals make a cheap music, all those esses rhyming with each other—but pancake is a dead word; too short, too severe. Somehow that last letter makes all the difference.

One time I was driving through the Broadway underpass—speed limit 15—and a car zoomed past me—doing at least 28—which made me mad because (notice the suspicious word) when I am law-abiding I am also self-righteous, and I glared at the driver, who was wearing a very nice blouse, and I thought What a fancy lady! and the lady waved at me and it was Stacey. So, of course, later, Stacey calls and asks what I was doing driving through the Broadway underpass. For those of you who do not live in Tucson, you need to know that there are only a few ways to drive out of downtown, as it is ringed by railroad tracks. Broadway goes East. Fourth, Sixth, and Stone go North. So, basically, what Stacey was saying was: I saw you driving East. Explain yourself. Or, seen another way: I saw you. Tell me a story about it. Yes, I saw you, too. You were wearing a very nice top, blue and green swirls, and you were speeding. I was going to Target to get three AA batteries for a fancy pencil sharpener that Chris bought for me. I had to buy four batteries. Now I have one left over. It was almost impossibly boring to live through. How can you expect me to spend any time putting language around it?

I am a liar because life is short and the days are long. I am a liar because the world is full of nouns and some of them do not bear repeating. In my head now is the image of a brown bear walking East on Pancakes Road saying noun, noun, noun . . . as he waves to me and Stacey, now holding hands because she is done being mad at me for being a liar. I would rather tell her about the bear. She thinks if I don’t tell her about the batteries I am hiding something.

There is another reason I am a liar. I hesitate to mention it. (The writer pauses for effect.) I am a liar because the world is full of nouns and sometimes I get confused, even when I am not drunk, which is most of the time. Sometimes I forget the word and people are looking at me, waiting for it. I have been known to say Restaurant Nurse instead of Waitress. I am not being funny, I’m just slow sometimes. I aim to get close to the meaning. I don’t expect precision, not in real life. I say sometimes because I don’t remember the exact times and places. I say because as if the world makes sense. Conversation is so fast. Who has the time to parse it all out while everything is in motion? It took me ten years to write sixty pages of poetry. If you want to know about my day, you should probably lower your expectations.

There are so many things I’m not allowed to tell you. That’s another reason I’m a liar. And a poet. And very good at my job. I just finished a 20-hour shift. I do this twice a week. I’d tell you about it, if I could. You see I am, when on the clock—and often even other times—responsible for other people’s secrets. Other times. Other people. I’m not allowed to be specific. I work 20-hour shifts and when I’m done I cannot tell my friends what happened because it isn’t my story, even though I was there. I work in mental health, in a group home with developmentally disabled adults. My bio says I’m a social worker, which isn’t exactly true. I’m a Residential Counselor, or a Direct Care Provider, or a Psych Tech, if you prefer. I don’t have a Master’s degree in the Social Work.

We don’t say retarded or insane anymore. That’s old school. We say behavior treatment plan, seizure meds, teaching strategies, sleep chart, and even That is not how you get things offered. We usually say that last one when someone is trying to hit us. We also say Try to use language instead. We say that a lot. And it works, for the most part. No one likes to feel trapped, no one, but if you can’t see the options you can’t make a choice. And language helps. Sometimes people go to a place where few others go, places most people can’t get to, and then they get stuck there. For whatever reason, I can go to those places and guide the peeps back, if they want to come back. Sometimes they want to, sometimes they don’t. I use language to do it, to get them back. (How I get there I’ll address in another post.) Direct, clinical language, as well as the figurative. God bless figurative language; it’s a foothold, a ladder. So, my day: I spend hours helping people put language around it, whatever it is at the time, and then, even when it’s good work, useful work, even when it’s good language, I’m forbidden from talking about it to anyone else, which is a shame.

I have been asked if my job affects my poetry. I’m not allowed to answer that, not directly. Everything affects my poetry, every day something happens that changes me forever. I’m susceptible and plastic, thin-skinned and moody. Does my job affect me more than anything else? Probably not. Certainly I get no subject matter from my job, that would be inappropriate, but I do get ideas about language and illness and how they might be related. I would like to give you an example. It’s a betrayal if I do. There are, however, loopholes.

My mother is a therapist and my father is a lawyer. At the dinner table, no one would dare ask What did you do today, Darling? The subject was off limits. Confidentiality. Doctor/Patient. Attorney/Client. In one way, it made me feel like we were a family of secret agents, all on top secret missions, saving the world. In another way it just felt cold and shut-down. But we did what we could to get around it, we did what so many others have done: we used the hypothetical. Wouldn’t it be interesting if . . . What would you think about a woman who . . . Imagine you have just been arrested for . . .. A default language. The language of law and medicine, of judgment and mercy, of philosophy. Ordnance from the arsenal of poetry.

I’ve used the word taxonomy in the titles of today’s and yesterday’s posts. I could have said lexicon, or vocabulary, but there’s a connotation to taxonomy that seems important. I don’t think of nouns as an inventory of the world, I think of them as categories of things in relation to each other. Using the hypothetical, the figurative, the poetic, you get to retain the relations between the things while still keeping the secrets safe. I get to.

Suppose for a moment that you are folding laundry. Emma is crying because she always cries when anyone on television cries, even though she’s in her fifties, and Dora the Explorer is screaming “The superbabies are supercrying!” because they are, and Map is singing his stupid song about how he’s the map, he’s the map, and they have to get over Strawberry Mountain to get to the ice cream. Emma’s crying wakes Rosie, who is now angry and doesn’t have the language to express it. In fact, Rosie only has one verb. She doesn’t dance or sing or swim or cook. She wants. Yep, that’s all she does, wants, all day, every day. And she’s saying Rick, hey Rick, guess what, it’s my birthday, I want a hamburger, a cheeseburger, ketchup on my cheeseburger, small french fries, medium french fries, large french fries, ketchup on my french fries, a coke with ice, to the sky, a big one, frosty the snowman t-shirt, pork and beans, purple shoebox. What she means is, I want relief. Oh Rick, I want relief from this bad feeling and I only have this short list of nouns that may or may not help me, divert me. Emma has stopped crying, now she is laughing because the chocolate pop tarts have landed on the moon—which is actually kind of funny, if you’ve seen it—but Rosie thinks Emma is laughing at her, and Rosie’s starting to talk about herself in the third person What is she doing? What is Rosie doing? She’s cooing, she’s crying, she’s hitting staff . . . True, she hasn’t hit you yet, but she’s started to cry, and she’s coming towards you, and it isn’t her birthday, and she’s making fists, and this isn’t an unusual morning, and you’re getting ready to weave and dodge and help her practice using language to express herself, figure it out, fix it.

This might be your day, might be something like part of your day, if you were me.

My favorite kind of pie is cake. I have a giant umbrella that protects no one. My father is a sadist and I am my father’s son. These statements are not lies but perhaps they lack a certain clarity. When one lies, one undermines trust in society—which is not my intention—but if there is a Truth out there, to be had clearly and definitively, I’m not sure I’m the kind that can get to it; and if I can get to it I’m not sure I should be the one entrusted with it. I’m a doubter. I’m suspicious of context. I have enough trouble figuring out where to put the punctuation and I type like a hundred monkeys stuck in taffy, putting the commas where I breathe and the periods where I breathe more. Most of the time I feel like I’m barking and pointing, but one of the tricks to making decent art is to address your weaknesses. If I bark, I might as well bark pretty. If I point, I might as well point whole-heartedly.

In my town some people use the f-word. In public. As an adjective. Which is wrong. Not just because it’s a verb but because it’s boring, it shows a weakness not being addressed. It’s worse than lying, much much worse, this muddy self-erasing noise. Jorie Graham came to Tucson a few years ago. She gave a reading and a Q&A where she was quite brilliant. No matter what stupid questions we asked, she took 20 minutes to answer each one, swerving from literary theory to art history to pop culture and tying it all up with connections we had always felt but only now could see. In one of her answers she told a story about her daughter. I want to share it here, even though it’s not my story twice removed.

The daughter is sad. I’m so sad says the daughter. Why are you sad? asks the mother. The daughter doesn’t know. The days go by. The daughter isn’t getting better and the mother worries, frets, paces. The mother isn’t a doctor, she’s a poet, so she brings home a book. I’m too sad to read says the daughter but it’s not for reading, it’s for figuring: it’s a thesaurus. You can be as sad as you need to be says the mother but you must know what kind of sad you are. Are you sad-lonely, sad-desperate, sad-lacking-in-faith? The daughter sits at her desk and looks at the words she has written on the sheet of paper. It’s not that the words are any less true than she imagined, it’s not that they’re smaller than she thought, but they’re limited, they have boundaries, they’re finite, and she’s bigger than they are, surprisingly bigger and more vast than these words on the page, written in her own hand. Go figure. She starts to feel better.

What I love about this story is the idea that truth is something you can creep up on, one word at a time; that there’s some sort of alchemical math you can perform to ratchet the lens into focus. I’m not saying I do it well—and I’m certainly not claiming I’m doing it here—but that I might be able to do it eventually, practice my weak hand, mean what I mean instead of barking into the void . . . well . . . it’s encouraging. Of course, there’s the other camp, the one that insists that naming a thing invokes it, gives it power. I don’t just mean the superstitious among us; I mean, even more inclusively, the socially smooth, the polite. Kafka (or was it Rilke) said that poetry was the axe that breaks the frozen river of the soul, but we walk on the ice as we go through out day, thin ice more often than not, and no one no one no one wants to see the rushing icy river of your soul when you’re standing in line at the bank.

How are you? Fine, and you? It’s not that we don’t care, it’s that we’re terrified that someone will actually break down and tell us. Everyone I know is in some kind of pain. Everyone. How do you like them apples? And so, another reason to lie, because we’ve all agreed not to tell the truth to each other, not about that. Someone put their hand in my heart and they didn’t take it back out. If I died tonight, no one would notice for weeks. My father is a sadist and I am my father’s son. I learned it well. Do I have the stomach for it? Do you really want to know?

I am also my mother’s son, which means I have a chemical imbalance and The Gift, which may or may not be related, and this is where it gets sticky. It doesn’t help that my parents are coy. Dad says he means no harm and Mom says she just gets a strong gut feeling sometimes. We’re a family of liars, but psychic and sadist are slanderous words and I don’t have the kind of proof that would hold up in a court of law. They’ve also asked me to not talk about them while they’re still alive, which they are. We’ve all revised our histories so many times I wonder what true things will be left to say when I’m finally allowed to say them.

I have awkward conversations with my psychopharmacologist, Dr. Jones. In the middle realms of relativism—like an eye doctor’s questions of better or worse—we can manage to understand each other somewhat. We both have difficulty stating things we believe to be true, and this fascinates me. He doesn’t really know what the pills do, or why. He says Try this combination and then three weeks later I say Better or Worse. I say /i>I see birds and he says /i>Hmmm and asks Do you see ghosts? and I say No, but I talk to the dead and he asks if I mean poetry and I say I’m not sure. I say Hey, I’m taking anti-psychotics, and they make me feel better. Does that mean I’m psychotic? and he says Not necessarily. He asks Do you have delusions of grandeur? and I say I used to think I was pretty great, but now I read reviews that say I’m really great and he says Hmmm and I say Hmmm and we sit there. I say There’s a noise in my head and he asks Are you hearing voices? and I say It’s more like music but I can’t say for sure and he can’t say for sure, so we sit there until it’s time for me to get up and give his secretary my $40 co-pay.

From my notebook:

Here is a brick with blood on it. (Fact)
I am speaking from my heart. (Fact)

I first met Dr. Jones after a ten day bout of not eating, not sleeping. I was doing the suicide checklist, again, with Dr. Fox (psychiatrist, fan of the “talking cure”) and he wasn’t liking my answers. I told him that God wanted me to enjoy my life—not just endure it, but be filled with gratitude and joy—and that I wasn’t feeling grateful. No, not at all. And I was trying to hide from God, and it wasn’t working. So, down the hall, Dr. Jones. He shook my hand and asked what did for a living. I said Poetry and he said Oh great, you’re going to be hard to treat. Yes, I liked him from the start. It turns out he doesn’t see me as a poet at all, he sees me as a sack of chemicals.

It turns out that I am both psychic and delusional, which is an unfortunate mix but makes for a rich inner life. In practice, this means I tell stories and sometimes they come true and sometimes they don’t. You don’t have to believe me. Even more liberating: I don’t have to believe me. I just say a buncha stuff and sometimes it sticks. Why am I a poet? It’s the only language I’m allowed. Given the long list of restrictions I’ve mentioned over the last few days, it’s a wonder I can make any noise at all. I see things that aren’t there, believe in things I can’t see, empathize with strangers with an unnatural strength, make connections between things where none exist, can’t talk about my job or my family, and dislike being bored. What would you do?

It’s hard to talk about God or Soul. The concepts seem too big for any words to hold them. And everyone wants to be right, in general always but about these things particularly. And we use these words to punish. And we use these words to control. I believe strongly, disbelieve just as strongly. I have something important to say about this, eventually. For now, I like the questions better than the answers. What if I told you a lie? What if I told you a lie that gave you not just relief but a strategy? What if I armed you with tools, gave you the heads-up on a room you’re about to enter? What if I told you about the thing that I don’t see, the thing that is necessary to make it better? Would you be angry?

I’ve been reading books about math—The Men of Mathematics (sexist, yes, but published in 1937), The History of Mathematics, Classics of Mathematics, and The Universal History of Numbers among others—because, in spite of what you may believe about me, I would like to know the truth. I type my lies on the keyboard and I notice that upper row, the other part of the alphanumerical set, the buttons that I don’t push, and I wonder what kind of things I could say with those symbols. X equals X. Not-X doesn’t equal X. Poems have possibilities but math has answers. A discovery in math is of a different order than a discovery in literature. The history of math is the history of peoples from every culture and every period in time all assaying the same set of question. Literature doesn’t do this, right? And math doesn’t lie, it spools it all out honestly, by the book, showing its work as it goes, right?

Four hundred sixty-one years ago, in 1545, fairly early in the history of algebra, a man named Girolamo Cardano, messing around squares and square roots, found himself faced with insoluble equations. The problem was the square root of negative one. It didn’t fall on the number line. It wasn’t a “real” number but it made certain kinds of problems easier to solve. By 1777, 232 years later, Leonhard Euler was referring to this number with the symbol i—from the German word for imaginary—indicating its difference from the supposedly “real” positive and negative numbers. Only 20 years later, 1797, Caspar Wessel found a place to put i and its multiples: he invented a new number line. It crossed the traditional number line vertically. He took the “real” number line and his “imaginary” number line and turned the whole tangle into a number plane.

Can you do that? Can you just plug in some made up thing and end up with solutions? Can you simply draw some imaginary lines and end up with a better map? You don’t expect to be acclaimed as a great scientist until you discover something, something big and useful, but shouldn’t this something have to be real? Let’s jump ahead 125 years. It’s 1922 and Ludwig Wittgenstein has just published his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus which insists, among other things, that the limits of my language mean the limits of my world. Or, put another way: how you say it is how you think it. And, more dramatically: if you can’t say it, you can’t think it. And, if you can’t think it, how can you solve it?

To imagine a language means to imagine a form of life. That’s Wittgenstein again. So, go ahead: imagine a form of life. Imagine your life. Think about what you say and ask yourself if you want to be the kind of person who says those kinds of things. Change your language and you change your thoughts. Change your thoughts and you change yourself. Imagine your possible selves and decide which ones you want to inhabit. The history of math is the history of peoples from every culture and every period in time all assaying the same set of question. Literature doesn’t do this, right? Or does it?

Doesn’t it? Isn’t there some kind of emotional math, spiritual math, that develops in literature? Can’t we, don’t we already, take specific literary inventions and manipulate them—isolate and solve for X—to count and measure, define a space, build a bridge, a house? Consider Gertrude Stein’s rose or Wallace Stevens’ blackbird or even Isaac Asimov’s robot—they solve something, don’t they? Wittgenstein compared philosophy to a ladder, said it was useful until you got to the top rung but then you had arrived at a place where philosophy could take you no further, and it was time to throw the ladder away. He has a ladder. And thanks to him, I do too. And a rose. And a blackbird. And a robot. And that’s what I do with my day, my good days; I try to make useful things. I like the intent and I like the tradition. I like the materials and I like the sound. I’m a liar, I realize that. And I’m in it for the long haul.