What the Hoarders Left Behind
29 April 2022
Old joy stick, wreathed in webs. Two pink
elephants, laughing in theirs. Premium oil, Value Power car battery. Old rubber
ball, once red, now flecked, beside the yellow tool. Old string of white
Christmas lights on the chain link fence. On the porch, a crumpled up American
flag to go with a sticker on the moldy truck window. Stacks of flat cardboard,
boxes of old spray cans, cleaners, squirt bottles. No one’s been here for
weeks. This is not quite narrative, not quite not narrative. Diary of objects,
the dirty carport its frame. Hard to decide which to take, which to
leave.
She puts a photograph of herself and her mother in
her war diary. They are ordinary, but so is the war. I can’t write a proper
one, as I don’t look at TikTok, or read the articles about rape as a military
strategy. After you listen to a trauma story, you double up, breathe in, fold
back into seated position. Later, you drive down Haunani, where an old woman
trudges, looking lost, carrying her Target bag. You don’t stop to ask if she
needs a ride. Your ticket got punched this morning.
She was her father’s “experiment,” left in a room
alone to see how she reacted. My friend says there was no kindness in her house
growing up. She found kindness in her 50s. Avoidance of story was my self-care.
So many of the abandoned objects have to do with
cleaning, lubing, fixing, making stuff work. Yellow oil bottles sit like
trophies on the carport frame. The only vehicle is pinned in place by junk, by
mold, by disuse. I love the old trucks whose beds have ginger growing in them.
Mass graves left by the hoarders of war. Loss is
accumulation. We have more than you, so we lose. You have more than we do, so
you lose. The man down the street screamed obscenities when he played video
games. His dead joy stick half smashed in the carport. Easier to name the joy
stick than the flowers across the road, purple prods melting in the rain.
Heidegger as a Cure for Anxiety
2 May 2022
“Anxiety could be experienced as a kind of calm by
holding yourself out, into that experience”: moments when you’re past worry,
adrenaline-surfing, full of everything you can’t name except it moves quickly,
curling like a leaf around itself on asphalt, mottled brown and darker brown,
and I wondered why friends thought about colors in poetry, as it was the
thoughts that seemed most to count, and count they did, by 25s or 100s, in math
that was not yet critical race theory, or anything except raw numbers. The four
on a telephone pole sits upside down, making the shape of an “I” with a handle,
as if we could hold our first person up to our lips and drink. If we take
“calm” to mean stillness, not a steady being in yourself, then calm it is.
Renovate your words and they will mean what you need them to mean.
Dissolving vignettes, each a single take, holding
itself out until stopping in mid-air, which is mid-time, which is the space of
an absent narrative, or at least of one that cannot find its ending. What we think
is true—a woman captured by a psychopath in a metal container—ends. When next
we see her, she’s ironing. The psychopath wants her to show her “true face,”
not the one she assumes. The torturer always looks for truth, because the means
justify whatever ends. Body, story, the tweets of Russian torture victims you
can’t see because they’re “disturbing." Scroll past to see the latest
trades, the low batting averages, the poetry gossip. That tweet is a trap-door,
but you leap over it the way your dog does a puddle when a car comes. The water
breaks into shadow pieces; her tongue sticks out, offering a hint of color in
the drab overcast light.
Those still trapped in Mariupol’s steel factory
have moved past anxiety, because where they exist is true. Anxiety assumes, but
when it’s proven, it dissolves into an after-calm, horrifying and yet certain.
This is not how you imagine relieving your anxiety; mostly, you think of
yourself lying comfortably on a beach, once again able to breathe in, out. But
the steel mill is the labyrinth that promises to hide you long enough to become
accustomed. To hunger, to terror, to fingers that push on walls, but cannot
feel them. Hongly described his body as it starved, his arms eating themselves.
New Yorkers, we read, are now terrified.
We haven’t lost our sense of proportion, though
that is our ambition. It’s our stage, where the player in a slump gets sent to
Mariupol and the soldier in the tank gets to attend his own bobble head day at
the park. Four men in a tank dream of meadows full of flowers. The tank dreams
of its origins apart from war. And the war dreams it’s trapped inside a music
room without a key. I’ll turn the house inside out to look for it. In the
meantime, lock it all out as she did the mean lover who shot faces on the
subway. Piles of books lie on the curb, each bearing the title, ETHICS.
Note: quote by Simon Critchley, in “A Philosopher
Laughs at Death...” by Mark Dery. The
Chronicle of Higher Education, April 28, 2022. Thanks to Jon Morse, who
sent me the link. Some details come from Code
Unknown, a film by Michael Haneke.
Susan M. Schultz is author of several books of
poetic prose, mostly recently
I Want to Write an Honest Sentence from
Talisman. Forthcoming from that press is
Meditations. She founded
Tinfish Press in 1995 and was editor until 2019. Susan is a lifelong fan of the
St. Louis Cardinals baseball team for whom she cheers from her home in Hawai`i.
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
