Lines Across Cities (story of a tv show told in a poem)

Istanbul. 2018.

The woman in the hijab

And long, button down

Blue gray coat

Exits her house

On the outskirts of the city

Walking through fields

Copses, crossing bridges

She takes the bus

To the modern apartment

Lit by natural light

That she cleans each Monday

She puts several containers of

Homemade baked goods

On the kitchen counter

Before she leaves

Next, she’s facing

An uncovered, pretty

Intense-to-the-point-of-vibrating

Forty-something psychiatrist

For her first appointment

The conversation is found

In their eyes

The gaps and ellipses

The verbal references

That require

Steps to link them

To an emotion

Or an experience

Next, we see the psychiatrist

Talking to her own therapist

Who is also uncovered

And poised in the way

A volcanic mountain

Appears to be still

From a distance

The psychiatrist

Is deeply upset

By her meeting

With her new patient

Who she is treating

For fainting spells

Covered women from the provinces

Traditional Muslim women

Come to work in the city

Rattle, even enrage her

She lets slip that she is estranged

From her sister who is religious

Now the second therapist

Is at the apartment

Cleaned by the patient

In the hijab and long coat

She, the therapist, is the lover

Of the handsome, red-bearded

Man who lives there

The woman in the hijab

Returns home on buses and on foot

To a falling-down house on a hill

Her brother is a tall

Brooding fellow with a mustache

His wife is ravaged by depression

She looks out the window

Perhaps remembering something

She can speak only

Quietly to her son and daughter

The brother works late nights

As a bouncer at a club

He asks his wife questions

Which she struggles to answer

This provokes frustration

And reeling tantrums from him

He only relaxes when speaking to

The imam who leads reading groups

And collects charity donations

And who maintains a flower garden

Down the road

Lines across cities

Roads and streets

Cell phone towers swaying

Bus routes into the past

Zones of stillness

Only occasionally

People who see

Speak to each other

Now we see Concert footage

From the 1970s,

The echoing singing

Of a man who enters

a trance of longing

He seems to hover Above the stage

Dreams/Life

Dreams are the other zone of consciousness. They are the world of swaying weeds and skirting minnows navigating the bottle-green, particle-filigreed world beneath the surface of a pond. Or dreams are the reflection of the sky beaming forth from the surface of the pond, toward the convex lenses of your eyes. Clouds vaguely shifting, resonant blue hues hovering about. To live without dreams or the memory of dreams is like trying to play soccer without a ball. We run about, making all the moves and gestures, but can't properly play the game. I should know. I lived without dreams or without the memory of them for over three years. I would lay down on my mattress at night, quickly sink into unconsciousness, and the next thing I knew, I was waking up and getting ready to make coffee. The hours between the fall into sleep and awakening were as lost or removed - time eaten up by some force and vanished.

My partner has a rich dream life. Morning after morning, she tells me about the fantastical and often unsettling adventures she experiences while asleep. Her dreams can sound like scenes from a Tim Burton film and quite often they appear to be a series of visual representations of powerful emotions from her waking, conscious life. The dreams she shares with me also seem to be depictions of long-term projects of transformation she is pursuing. Invariably, when she recounts her dreams to me I am struck by their vividness and importance of message. It is as if her unconscious is saying, "Hey. You know that stuff that feels confusing and overwhelming while you are awake? Well, this is what's going on. But you will have to take it in with the wacky and jarring dream language that we employ. Once you fall asleep, it's our house and this is how we communicate here."

Somewhere along the way, I seem to have developed a decent capacity for interpreting the language of dreams - probably the result of years of therapy, of studying poetry and of just talking to people about their dreams. While exploring the metaphors and visual reveries of poetry and song lyrics has helped with understanding the symbolism of dreams, something I learned from a great therapist who practices in the Uptown neighborhood of Chicago was to always ask myself: “How did you feel while that was happening in the dream?” The imagery and the emotion felt – taken together - can offer information essential to us as we navigate life and seek to persevere, to grow, to love and to create.

Until 2017, I too, had benefited from a somewhat active dream life. Though I did not remember dreams as frequently as my partner, I received certain dreams that depicted knotty emotional struggles I was waging with such striking and eloquent visual language that I consider them crucial to the person I am today. However, in September 2017, a pharmaceutical and herbal medication SNAFU provoked two horrific episodes of serotonin syndrome which, in turn, set into motion my abrupt cessation of the SSRI Lexapro which I had been taking for 12 years for (occasionally crippling) OCD. The two bouts of serotonin syndrome were more physically and psychically violent than anything I’d experienced in 50 years of living. The abrupt cessation of the SSRI was done in an attempt to avoid another serotonin syndrome, but the consequences of that cessation were devastating. In addition to the major depressive disorder that was activated, I ceased having any dreams that I could I remember. The major depressive order persisted for a year and required hospitalization to resolve. But as I came back to wellness and even thriving, my dreams did not return. The blank journey through no-time continued each night... until the last week or two.

The recovery capacities of the mind and of our bodies, more generally, should not be underestimated. This has been made clear to me in multiple ways. Among these are my ability to return to some guitar and some songwriting after more than twenty years sidelined with chronic tendinitis and my regaining the ability to smile and laugh after those seemed to be permanently extinguished while I was depressed. And now, I feel my old friend, the dream, coming back to keep me company as I sleep. And what is playing at the dream cinema as the projector flickers back to life? Well, a couple of dreams which are right up to date - current - so to speak. These are anxiety dreams wherein I find myself among a crowd of friends laughing, having a good time and suddenly I realize that neither I nor any of my friends are wearing a mask. I am filled with panic, regret and dread. This dream is the replaying of a similar experience I had in real life a couple of months ago. It was one of the very few times I’ve spent with a group of friends in the last year. We were enjoying each other’s company and what we were working on and we forgot ourselves a couple of times. I white knuckled it through ten days after that hang out, hoping desperately not to experience any Covid symptoms. Mercifully, I did not.

Another dream I’ve had since that particular cinema has apparently reopened is one from the sublime/transcendent dream category. My friend Sean, who I haven’t seen in 27 years, was strumming chords on something that looked like the combination of a guitar and an autoharp and that was played upright. The music was very beautiful. The harmonies ringing from the chords had an ineffable quality. They sounded the way honey tastes or the way a row of candles appears: multivalent, familiar but not completely so. That music I heard and who was playing it and where he was playing it – in a small room with supportive friends half-circled around him – have provided me with fuel, strength and energy in the days since. And for that I am very grateful!

Meditation on Morris Berman's "Why America Failed: The Roots of Imperial Decline"

"In the end, what was America really all about?" asks Morris Berman in his 2012 book, Why America Failed: The Roots of Imperial Decline. He concludes that the founding idea of America was: the hustle. Since its colonial days and escalating after the War of Independence, US America has billed itself and has built itself as the place where the role of a good, "patriotic" US American citizen is to make a buck and "get ahead" and if you need to bullshit, swindle, and chisel people along the way and if you need to sell them things that are bad for their health, bad for their community, bad for their land base and bad for their soul… well then, so be it. In fact, that just means you were more ruthless and clever than the other guy – laudable characteristics in US America. This is what passes for values in mainstream US American culture, according to Berman.

Agreed. And I would add that it is bewildering, strange to be born into this culture that defines itself by its commerce. We stagger about, seeking always to adjust to this artificial landscape. But we cannot.

Bury the daily blows in a shot of heroin, immerse them in whiskey, douse them with sugar, deep fry them, try to sleep them off, "work them to the bone" -- work them to oblivion, throw money at them, package them up and tie a bow around them, stick a fork in them - they're done.

There is no adjusting to them without sacrificing too much of what you hold dear as a human, as a mammal, as an organism pulsing with the blood-life force, billions of years after the universe condensed into a point of immeasurable primal energy and finally exploded, sending its ideas, its love, its stories across the constantly unfolding heaven-ocean - the periodic table of elements tumbling into the black, coalescing, forming landscapes bubbling forth with question marks that formed into bacteria, pulsing cells, life forms, we among them and we remember all of it.

A Successful Art Career

Was the time you built

A tower from sticks

You found on the beach

Eight years old

A tyke in the sun

The indestructible things

Of the earth-mind

Found there

A successful art career

Is you wrote a song

In your bedroom

That nobody heard

Except the mice in the walls

Or that you wrote

Walking down the street

And later forgot

And later remembered

When you heard that

Pause and tone interval

Rise out of Monk’s piano

Like a magician’s white dove

A successful art career

Is being unable to focus

On your dumb money job

Because something about

That late Beethoven string quartet

From the old vinyl box set

With the blue cover

Grabbed you and did not

Release you

A successful art career

Was three sugar packets

Dumped into coffee

Some of it scattered

Across the formica table top

Between you at

Brady Street Pharmacy

Where it was always the 1970s

A successful art career

Is to live

To not die

In the face of it all

Against all that was built 

To stop you

Report from Brazil – 23 January, 2021 by Leo Gonçalves, tr. DH

Regarding the optimism surrounding what lays ahead for Brazil, I would ask you to consider the following:

If today Brazil is the country with the highest number of daily new cases in the world, that is a victory - the result of great effort on the part of the federal government.

If the country has more than 212,000 dead since the start of the pandemic, it is because President Bolsonaro has worked very hard to make it so.

If the vaccine is taking a long time to become available, this is the result of a great battle the president has waged to ensure that the vaccine never arrives – full of fighting, much advocacy for chloroquin and very little for the vaccine. Sabotage behind the scenes. Zero investment in research. Politicization of the vaccine. Arguments with governors.

The government does not care if we die. The truth is, it wants the maximum number possible of us to die. Given that, don’t think that things are going to get better anytime soon.

The policy they’ve adopted is the following: ensuring that the maximum number of infections occur and maintaining that illness in the population, occupying us, stressing us, as they ram through a wish list of neo-Liberal legislation.

***

(Sobre o otimismo relativo ao que está por vir no Brasil, peço para que vocês considerem o seguinte:

Se o Brasil é hoje o país com o maior número de casos diários no mundo, isso é uma conquista, resultado de muito esforço do governo federal.

Se o país tem mais de 212 mil mortos desde que a pandemia começou, é porque o presidente trabalhou muito para isso.

Se a vacina está demorando a chegar, isso é resultado de uma grande peleja do despresidente para que a vacina não chegue nunca, muita briga contra, muito esforço pela cloroquina e pouco esforço pela vacina. Sabotagem nos bastidores. Zero investimento em pesquisa. Politização da vacina. Briga com governadores.

O governo não se importa se mais gente vai morrer. Na verdade, ele quer que o máximo possível de pessoas morra no Brasil. Sendo assim, não pense que as coisas estão prestes a melhorar.

A política adotada aqui é esta: a de fazer com que haja o máximo de contaminações e manter a doença entre nós, nos ocupando, nos preocupando, enquanto ele passa a boiada).

Catholic Death Trip: Parts 1, 2 & 3

Part 1

I grew up Catholic but have always disliked the central artifact of its iconography: the crucifix. Specifically, I am repelled by the one that features a three-dimensional replica of the the lifeless body of Jesus of Nazareth hanging. I've long been been a person fascinated by symbols and deeply appreciative of metaphor and of signs laden with meaning. And yet, I find the crucifix to be over-the-top, gratuitous and even juvenile in its shock value. I have the same reaction to the crucifix that I have to Marilyn Manson -- that they are trying too hard and do not need to hit me over the head with the message. I was reminded of this tonight walking past a church rectory on Oak Park Avenue. There, hanging on the cream-colored walls just beyond the foyer was a 2' x 1' crucifix, with good ole Jesus lingering there in three dimensions, murdered and not yet delivered. I had the same reaction I've always had to that thing, since I was a little boy: it looks macabre, lurid and lacks any subtlety. I don't know if I exactly put it in those terms when I was eight years old – but I think that was what was behind my antipathy toward the crucifix. Compared to the powerful and mysterious Star of David; compared to depictions of Hindu deities like the radiantly blue Krishna, the multi-armed and bejeweled elephant god Ganesh or the teal-toned, proud and compassionate monkey deity Hanuman, the crucifix feels like a 1970s B-movie horror film, with the fun taken out.

Part 2

Even after being raised Catholic and having attended a Jesuit high school and 2 1/2 years of Catholic grade school, I still enjoy some Catholic iconography. The Jesus-hanging crucifix is just not one such piece. In the context of the Catholic doctrine I was force-fed, that particular icon reads as a tortured body hung from a noose or dragged through the street. One crucifix-related experience I had actually resulted in lasting trauma: The Stations of the Cross ritual. Hung at 12 spots across the church walls are depictions of different stages of the Nazarene's "passion" (the name of the Church gives to the extended torture the Romans gave Jesus of Nazareth). More than once as a young child, I was led by a priest or nun through each station as they detailed the relentless, bloody mutilation of the savior we were taught to love. And if there was one thing the Roman Empire was good at, it was concocting ways to physically aggrieve and finally kill a person. I never really recovered entirely from those delightful little tours. I continue trying to do so.

Part 3

The closest I have seen elsewhere those grisly, pain-fetishizing aspects of Catholicism are certain scenes from the films of Quentin Tarantino. And Quentin is as simultaneously dismal and sensationalist in his frequent scenes of torture, as is the Catholic Church. It does not speak well of Tarantino and Hollywood bad boy cinema, more broadly, that a recurrent trope in his movies is as unimaginatively repulsive as what the Church fathers were coming up with 1500 years ago.

West Rogers Park, 1/16/21

Bubblegum blue sky

Snow tracking the street

A young man in a parka

Walks beside the parked cars

Black brimmed hat

Prayer shawl peaking out

Beneath the hem of the jacket

And a book held open

In his right hand -

Prayers on the way

To the store