W.S. Di Piero SAN FRANCISCO, CA W.S. Di Piero’s Chinese Apples: New and Selected Poems has just been published by Alfred A. Knopf. Friday: 02.02.07 | Permalink | Comments (2)

Faces attached to erotic episodes from the past have a glassy visionary cast marbled by matter and its corruptions. Where and how are they now? How many gone? How many puffed or gaunt? Eyes pouched, hair gray, teeth going-to-yellow like mine? I’ve just gotten an e-mail from someone I was in love with 20 years ago. I remember walking her to a train station when we were breaking up. This ghostly touch zizzing through fiber optic networks suddenly crosses with the memory of a late night in a bar, washed by acidic reds and greens, when we’d drunk too much, shot pool, watched a fight break out (one guy in a cowboy hat was trying to bite the other guy’s ear), ate peanuts from the shell and—it was Antonio’s Nut House’s fame to encourage this—dumped the shells on the floor while over our heads Marvin Gaye swooned about sexual healing.

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Love restores?
Yes.

Dreams of love drain life?
Yes.

For two weeks I have my own version of the common dream of someone who loves us with a great attentive passion. In mine, passion is self-possessed, plain, overpowering, and I wake to the pleasure and desolation of being deprived of that absolutely convincing non-existent presence. But I recognize initiators out of life. Yesterday at lunch with a friend, a woman with a small child sits next to us. I recognize her vaguely from another time, but what time exactly? In another café where our eyes caught? So plain she is, yet striking—there’s a completeness of presence, she fills space and time, then becomes space and time. Last night her apparition, a stylized “her,” came to me in sleep and I got lost there.

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The chunky stew of bar violence becomes in retrospect shockingly organized and clear. Of a shoving match that erupted in a sports bar during an NBA final, I remember the pool stick wagged between two beefy bodies, one of them attached to a beer bottle, and restraining hands on chests. When I was young I was best friends with a Marine stationed at the Philadelphia Naval Base who played drums in the band that performed in the officers’ club. One Saturday night, things felt off. After the first set, the lead guitar, a baby-faced lance corporal, was fuming. An officer had dressed him down and threatened harm if he didn’t stop ogling the wife, which the guitarist swore he didn’t do, no sir. We tried to calm him. He got into trouble without much trouble. “I don’t care if he hits me,” he said, showing us one side of his face. “This is all plastic. I can’t feel a thing.” He’d had reconstructive surgery after a previous fight. He quieted down, the band played on, everybody drank more, couples danced and laughed. The band takes five, the guitarist, a smile on his re-modeled face, puts down his instrument and steps off the dais toward officers and wives seated at a table, picking up between here and there a wooden folding chair which, without a word, he axes down on an officer’s head. Then there’s disorder, women screaming, and the strip runs out there.

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How ongoing time sometimes flows backwards the way water running through rocks turns back on itself, flowing both ways at once. Here’s a screen-saver face on my laptop. It’s a daguerreotype plate. If I tilt or look askance at the powerbook screen, the vitreous face drains and retreats into its support. The thrilling presence 19th century people found of their faces, fastened on the silver plate, if tilted or turned spilled off into the void of its surround. Digital imagery, and images light bites into acidic metal, they slide into a mineral sludge, become silvered shades.

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A disturbing moment of desire in Steven Soderbergh’s The Limey. The thuggish ex-con played by Terence Stamp visits L.A. to find out how his daughter died and who was responsible. Classic tough guy, Stamp moves forward, always forward, like a force of nature, shooting people, throwing not-as-tough guys off bridges, insisting on answers. The desire strikes when moments from his earlier life, with his wife and daughter, spike into his consciousness. But they aren’t traditionally framed flashbacks: the scenes he recalls are those he actually lived, since the flashbacks are from Poor Cow, the ‘60s movie where a young, angelic Terence Stamp plays a petty thief. The immediacy of the recall is sick-making, so rich in what-if possibility is the vision of a life lived before choices were made, choices that would lead to the death of the grown-up flashback child that the old man is now trying to solve. Replay-life: words represent the deliberative process of recovery and its affects. Movie imagery lives it out for us, a proxy for consciousness, with all the sensuous immediacy of hurt and loss. Movies make such sluts of us, sluts for the recovery of earlier selves, of a forked road we’ve already put behind. And we reflect on our earlier moments as if they were film stills, not motion pictures. We live the continuity but reflect on the stilled container of experience.

1. On revelation and the willed oracle-ism of certain kinds of poetry, as against the recognition of the given, the electric arc of moment-to-moment existence, see William James’ “Pragmatism:” “The whole notion of truth, which naturally and without reflection we assume to mean the simple duplication by the mind of a ready-made and given reality, proves hard to understand clearly. All our thoughts are instrumental, and mental modes of adaptation to reality, rather than revelation or gnostic answers to some divinely instituted world-enigma.”
2. Prophecy in poetry isn’t divination or wooga-wooga nostrums. It’s the quiet restless scrutiny of the inner life as it’s lived in public actuality and history. Interiority pressured constantly by the ordinary pains of circumstance—physical and otherwise—put in language fresh enough to be real yet not so vociferously fresh as to sound “achieved” or worked up for the mere occasion of writing a poem.
3. What it’s sometimes like: Writing back into the cave, deeper now. You hear rushing water overhead somewhere, you’re losing time faster. Enthusiasm means being rushed and flooded by a river god. Flooded being, though, doesn’t guarantee poetry that’s really real.
4. A poet writes essays to respond to life with life, to counter-pressure reality’s press and communicate what it feels like to have thoughts, to look at images, to worry over words and their truths. An essay is life’s fluidity momentarily shaped into a provisional, free-standing solid. It’s always ad hoc or on the wing, because the inner life keeps changing, troping along with whatever reality deals us, with (in William James’s phrase) “the strungalong sort of life we actually lead.”
5. Ongoing transformations, multiple manifestations, gods and goddesses with many arms and avatars who themselves change into yet other avatars. Hindu consciousness, as it flows through the major texts, is fluid, labile, horrendously violent. Many rivers with infinite tributaries and branches. In KA Roberto Calasso describes the figure of Prajâpati—Lord of the Creatures, Progenitor, antecedent of Brahmâ: “Prajâpati was mind as power to transform. And to transform itself. Nothing else can so precisely be described as overflowing, boundless, inexpressible.” All’s change. Change itself is a changing entity, assuming different processes, mechanics, evidence. Readers maddened by Whitman are maddened by his Hindoo self-ness. One state changes to another without explanation. He’s himself, Walt, one of the roughs, among us, yet also among the dead who lie beneath the leaves of grass, whose hair is those leaves, and Walt’s there, too, in the leaves a-growing. Look for him on a ferry, eyeing a young bargeman, and under the soles of your feet. Now you see him, now you don’t.

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More movies:
Is the characterization in Monster of Aileen Wournos, the truck-stop prostitute who killed several of her johns, accurate? Who knows? (Charlize Theron’s performance is the kind of Ratso Rizzo stunt-role actors love.) But the moviemakers get her milieu right: smoky honky-tonks, trailer parks, truckers’ cafes, and hooker motels. It’s the only world she knows how to inhabit—her interview for a straight, skirt-and-heels office job is catastrophic—because she more or less understands the rules, but the rules are really the misrule of instinct, unreason, action without thought of consequence. Combine heavy boozing, crummy job, sexual appetite, and the hope of not having to think about tomorrow (because it induces despair or revs up delusional hopes) and you end up with bar scuffles, quick rough-and-tumble sex, and drunken proclamations of keen ambitions and fresh starts—independence, travel, fat city. I knew a man (both of us in our 20s), clever but feckless and without prospects, who drank. He conceived an ambition to become a stand-up comedian, since he could, when sober, make people laugh. He’d hit the clubs and wait to be called to the stage but drank so hard so fast that when he finally made it to the mike, he was incoherent and tanked every time. I was at the time freeloading off a family in a bucolic suburb kind enough to let me sleep on their sofa, where the would-be comic and his wife, one of three daughters in the house, also lived. I was tossing in my own disorder. I’d had a rheumatic illness that put me in the hospital for months and left me slow and gimpy. I had no “prospects.” Pain kept me awake most nights, so I was usually there to catch my friend when he came home from the clubs, very stiff, in the deep A.M., and sat heavily on the kitchen floor, begging me to stay up with him because he had great new jokes to try out. “I pick up my best gags in bars,” he said. Then he passed out. At a birthday party for his wife (where I was drunk and quite cunningly, I thought, wooing the two other sisters at once without either one knowing) they got into a hissy spat. She threw champagne in his face and ran from the house. He gave chase down a country lane, shouting so loudly that we all could hear. Come home. I’ll be good. I’ll change.

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Ingmar Bergman, whose movies are like graphs of his psyche, said that he aspired to be like the anonymous craftsmen and guildsmen who built medieval cathedrals. This from an artist who made an art so idiosyncratic that his black and white movies are like scratch marks on glass. If you want anonymity, consult the Maya brick-makers of those grand cities in Guatemala and the Yucatan. Clay bricks found on digs bear playful, delicately incised drawings the brick-makers knew would be forever covered by stucco, literally bound into the monuments of their culture. They drew buildings, faces, animals, parasols.

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Ruins are structures of loss, evidence of cultural forgetting, and haunt the (apparent) wholeness of the presence. We’ve become so self-conscious of what’s left behind, what our mark might be. Albert Speer contrived his architectural philosophy of ruins, that new buildings constructed to the glory of the Reich would be designed so that, if they fell, they would make a beautiful, memorable heap of stone and glass and steel. In the 1970s I spent several weeks visiting ruins of indigenous populations of the Southwest. No timed tickets necessary then, though the more exotic sites, like the Anasazi cliff dwellings, were already drawing tourists. Chaco Canyon was different. The Pueblo Bonito complex had neither guards nor guides. Anybody willing to drive the miserable thirty mile dirt and gravel road to get there could crawl through the main free-standing terraced apartment complex, five stories high at its rear wall, or the Grand Kiva (the largest underground ceremonial chamber in North America) and walk away with whatever shards and beads they could find. One day a small TV crew showed up to film an interview with an Anglo raised by Navajos. I asked him what sort of plumbing tool the Pueblo Bonito builders used to build such a high, smooth-planed, perfectly perpendicular walled structure. “How they plumbed it? With their eyes.” On one trip I ended up on the Hopi Reservation, in Tewa Village, up on one of the three mesas in Arizona. This was before tourist routes were marked and only shortly after an alternate snake dance—the most private and significant of Hopi ceremonies—was “performed” for visitors in addition to the religious one closed to non-Indians. (How the snake figures in so many religious cultures: Athenians traced their ancestry to a snake god; in India a stone is laid in a building’s foundation to stake down the head of an underworld snake that would otherwise upset civilization; Eve and the snake in the tree; St. George pinning to earth the youth-devouring worm.) Snake dancers took delight in finding the fattest, worst-dressed white lady in the front row then dropping a rattler or two at her feet. I bought a bowl from a woman who had a small table outside her house. I still have it. The dyes have faded a little, I think because it wasn’t fired long enough in the manure-fired kiln, but for forty years now it has been a small constant pleasure. Fifteen years ago, I found myself in Phoenix and decided to make my way home via Hopiland, as they call it, with the notion of finding “Beth” the potter. Once I found Tewa Village again I suffered the usual Hopi amusement of dealing with an Anglo. “How do I get to Beth’s house?” “Go that way a little, then go that other way, you’ll see it.” “I’m trying to find Beth’s house.” “See that house down there, she lives right there somewhere.” I finally found her screen door, knocked, and she invited me in. I stepped inside the door, greeted her and the others in the small room (the TV was on, some youngish guy was passed out on the bed, a couple of female elders were sitting around talking), and told her the story of the bowl. “I’ve had your bowl for 40 years and wanted to thank you for making a beautiful thing.” What a stupid thing to say! But that’s the best I could do. Come sit down, she says, patting the chair next to her. I sit. “My nephew’s not so good. You know him? He has to go get dialysis now all the way in Flagstaff. I’m not too good. I don’t make many bowls now, only a few for the Craft Fair in Santa Fe.” No curiosity about me—why should she be curious? —or my beautiful bowl. Consider bad kidneys.

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During the 2004 Presidential campaign I was living in a Chicago hotel for a few months where the staff are mostly islanders, except for the boss housekeeper, who is African-American. Jamaican maintenance man, Trinidadian chamber-maid, Haitian desk clerk. When I lingered in the lobby or walked down hallways, the different musicalities of their voices sweetened the air. Then I’d go to my room and turn on the TV—I don’t have one at home so on the road I’m a junkie. Talking heads snap and whine and growl in homogenized tones and nowhere accents. They’re just and righteous; anybody who disagrees is ignorant and un-American. Popular political discourse in America has never been pretty, but now it’s relentlessly, deliriously anti-grace, anti-lightness. Its vocal style is American Tough. It hates, because it fears, finer tones and critical nuance, so it ridicules them. The herd bleat happily and follow. And the news media, those fools, bark alongside their masters.

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We’re a country dragging a Jungian shadow, ostensibly hating in others what’s most deeply our own. We insist we’re a humane, charitable people, yet as a body politic we hate and fear the poor (as the historical Jesus of blue-in-the-face fundamentalists did not). We embed our cherished individualism in inane cultural conformity. We value force over learning, thickhead “resolve” over critical deliberation, uniformity over contrarianism, the monstrous over the exquisite, poetry-as-anodyne to poetry-as-provocation. After the 2005 tsunami the President reminded the world that it’s not the $300 million the USA was contributing to the relief effort that matters, it’s the generosity and goodness of the American people. Why must we work so hard and talk so much to remind the world and ourselves that we are good? Our compassion, when it exists at all, is usually opportunistic and self-exalting. At a public meeting with Laura Bush during the 2004 re-election campaign, a woman who had lost a son in Iraq interrupted the First Lady’s talk and asked why her daughters weren’t fighting in Iraq as her dead son had? The woman was swarmed by other women in the audience who screamed at her: “Four more years! Four more years!”

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Taos, Christmas Eve, 2005. Ferociously beautiful. A half-mile from the Pueblo you see black smoke running up the nighttime sky, bright flecks chipping the firmament, stars so wild and primeval that they seem the gods the Greeks and other tribes believed them to be. Inside the Pueblo walls, pinyõn pine bonfires blaze, sparks fly into children’s hair and parkas, flakes of flame pulse off the core of the fires and rise to the stars like propitiation. The Christian and the aboriginal do their odd-couple dance: while bonfires burn in a total darkness where you expect sacrifice to happen, inside the small church an evening service for children takes place, then a procession exits the church bearing a statue of Christ and Mary and makes a long slow circuit of the pueblo. It’s not just the darkness and the firestorm-feeling of hot winds in cold December air, not just this, but the elemental physical presence of belief and propitiation, the transcendent and the animist, that makes you feel you could get lost there, you could go up in smoke and only later will friends realize you’re missing.

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If you live with whatever you call depression—melancholia, the black dog, the noontide demon—you smell it in other poets like a rotten-petals perfume. William Cowper in a 1790 letter: “I number the nights as they pass, and in the morning bless myself that another night is gone, and no harm has happened.” He knows how vulnerable we are to be stricken at any moment: this order of depression isn’t the “Doctor, everything seems to be in a gray mist” variety. You live in terror of the momentary. Awareness of vulnerability doesn’t help: “We are not always the wiser for our knowledge, and I can no more avail myself of mine, than if it were in the head of another man, and not in my own.” We each have our worst moments of the day and year. For Cowper, January, the beginning of the cycle: “I now see a long winter before me and am to get through it as I can. I know the ground before I tread upon it; it is hollow, it is agitated, it suffers shocks in every direction; it is like the soil of Calabria, all whirlpool and undulation; but I must reel through it—at least if I am not to be swallowed up along the way.” (Sept., 1783) For me, it was April: flowering and restoration induced spiritual paralysis; fresh green and growing items of the world saddened and terrified me. The heart cannot stand so much blessedness, and the hatefulness and fear burn inward. (In 1759 Cowper tried suicide by laudanum, knife, and hanging.) And the unremittingness is as rude and tedious as what I’m now writing. You want to leave the room, but the room is your skull, the terracotta planetarium where there’s no light and the darkness of the great firmament is an oafish gravity. Cowper was “reduced to an almost childish imbecility from my wonted rate of understanding.” He could answer rational questions but only if they were asked. Otherwise he remained speechless. To speak, if you’re in an episode, is to risk nonsense, an exciting of incoherence, so you shut your mouth and your head feels about to crack. Depression alienates you: you know that others see you as “other,” though at the same time that’s not what you want, but you’re speechless to say so. (“[I] believed that every body hated me.”) In a poem he says he’s “in a fleshly tomb, buried above ground.” Once you emerge from melancholy, all time becomes only and always “for the time being.”

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Find true American eloquence, i.e., anti-eloquence, our vernacular, on the streets and in the fields.

Item: A Mexican migrant laborer picking lettuce in Texas, when asked if he owned any land: “I don’t even own the dirt under my fingernails.”

Item: Next to me at a San Francisco bus stop, a broken-down guy wearing headphones:
“Hey, man, this bus go all the way to the Marina?”
         —All the way to the other side of town.
“These busses, goddamn, go all over the place.”
         —They do that.
“But there should be a subway takes you from one end of town to another.”
         —I grew up in a subway city; I like subways.
“Yeah, let me tell you, those subways are really something, I mean in big cities like New York and New Jersey.”