Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/arts-cultural-critique/poetry__fiction/page/6/)
As I walked home I felt as if my feet weren’t touching the ground. The bright faces of the handicapped children were imprinted in my memory, and now I thought of each one of them, walking and singing, the nuns looking after them. I retained the light of the convent within me: its grace touched me, expanding an inner space, cheering unknown corners.
I.
Phil had Sheila on the mind when he walked into one of the BOYS bathrooms at Our Lady of Peace Elementary in West Russelsburg. He’d started his shift as Second Security Officer at 6:00am, about an hour before most teachers get there, and about an hour and a half before the earliest kids get dropped off for the Before School Fitness Club, which was really just thirty minutes of kids running in circles on the field while one of the coaches watched, thirty minutes of free daycare and an earlier arrival at the office for the parents who didn’t care if they made their poor kids show up sweaty for the 8:00am Daily General Assembly. Phil had Sheila on the mind when, at about 9:00am, the school was quiet except in the classrooms and he’d walked down the quiet hallway in the main classroom building and walked into one of the BOYS bathrooms. He’d been thinking about her all morning, as usual, and he’d been thinking about their seventh date—set to happen that night—and the fact that he was now going by Phil instead of Phillip, all because on their first date, three weeks ago, she said in a nervous fast-talking first-date kind of jitters voice, Phillip? Phil? Is that you?
I sit in one of the greasy truck stops on Interstate 5, near Red Bluff, dizzy and scared.
Decades of hope seem suddenly to turn to bullshit.
Dread and rage swirl around the country, but the lunch counter is quiet with snoozing baseball caps tipping into coffee cups.
The river was a bog of red mud and had a light waft of refuse, of spoil.
Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize in Literature for songwriting. He is a poet, but his medium is not the page. So yes his lines read different when you take away the music. But by reintroducing poetry to an existing popular musical genre, Dylan opened up possibilities for all poets. What Dylan understood very early is that in an electric age, poetry cannot survive without song.
Jacob Bloch, the grandson of Isaac, a survivor of the camps, and Julia, an architect who has never had her designs built, have three sons: Sam, Max, and Benjy, wise and lovely kids. Jacob’s father Irv is an outspoken enemy of Arab states and his opinions lean on the rest of the family: his blog manifestos are pretty much the opposite of what you would find in Tikkun. They all live in Washington, DC. Sam, the eldest of the Bloch children, is studying for his bar mitzvah, but has been caught writing a list of vile racial epithets, quite out of his character, but perhaps under the influence of his grandfather. The rabbi brings Julia and Jacob in to discuss their son’s sin, and threatens to disallow Sam’s bar mitzvah, a much anticipated event that arguably keeps great-grandfather Isaac alive. Sam claims he did not do it, though the words are in his handwriting.
When I opened the mail back in 2000 and read the poem she had sent me, “The Displaced of Capital,” I knew I was holding in my hands a signature poem. But of course there was no way to know that, following publication in Tikkun, “The Displaced of Capital” would announce the title of her second book, one of the most important and impressive books of poetry in the last 12 years.
The Master of the Good Name who only lived for prayer, trembled by the holy ark because a Name so pure was more than a body could bear.
The gravestones rose at the top of the hill. They were black or gray, clumped together geometric and precise as if for protection from the outside world. He was mindful of how in the old country, people broke the things of the living and the dead when they vandalized cemeteries.
“Winter Noon” by Umberto Saba with a translation by Paula Bohince.
“An Arrow”
Too often I’d like some direction
but am ashamed of this fact, still I ask for it,
men are supposed be bad at admitting
they’re lost though why men agree
to fulfill this is lost on me. Who cares what men are. Can’t we
scrap this whole enterprise, seriously
top down management
small talk, normative dating. A little box
I fill in over and over, like feeding pennies into a slot
it leads somewhere I think
I’m saving them. For when?
Jacobs knew he was different: after his bar mitzvah he left all that mishigas behind. He looked at himself now simply as an American. He even thought about changing his name, but he knew it would kill his father.
Sixty-seven is not young, after all, though it is a ridiculous age at which to undergo a divorce; he simply refused.
It was one of Majda’s don’t-know-how-many attempts to land a job. After an entire week of visiting cafés and all the other glassed-in spaces, and hoping that two young foreigners who didn’t possess the language or any special skills wouldn’t fall into prostitution, but into decent manual labor instead, the girls decided to split up. They grabbed the addresses from the yellow pages stolen from a phone booth at the railroad station. Heads meant east, tails meant west, and so Majda took the bus number three-three-seven all the way to Stockholm’s suburbs. The name of the restaurant was Galjonen.
I was in Berlin last October by design. The original plan was to turn up the heat studying German, work on some translations, reconnect with friends, and move deeper into the city’s jagged, darker spaces. By August it was clear the Syrian crisis was changing Germany, Europe, and the rest of the world. Having the opportunity to be there would, I felt, require diverting attention to the Syrians and others entering Germany to escape the horrors of violence at home. After a particularly cold and rainy day interviewing refugees in the compound of Lageso (the Landesamt für Geshundheit und Soziales), I decided at the last minute to see Mutter Courage und Ihre Kinder, Bertolt Brecht’s play about an opportunist canteen operator who sells her wares over the course of 17 years during the Thirty Years War (1618-1648). Mother Courage plays in Berlin like the musical Cats in New York — seemingly interminably. But the situation in Germany now, with so many refugees running from sectarian violence and civil war, creates a new urgent context for the play. The Berliner Ensemble, Brecht’s theater house, was only a twenty-minute walk from my flat in Mitte, straight down Friedrichstrasse. The theater lobby was packed, definitely a sold-out show, but I got in line, or what kind of looked like a line in front of the ticket booth inside the lobby. Stereotypes about German order break down when it comes to waiting lines, as Germans often push forward or make end runs to jump on trains or, apparently, get tickets to see a Brecht play. It looked hopeless. A guy standing to the side of the line holding a ticket in his hand like a kind of sign catches my eye – he’s selling. Twenty euros later, I’m in my seat. The only other production I’ve seen of Mother Courage is the David Hare adaptation that starred Kathleen Turner in the title role (at Washington D.C.’s Arena Stage in 2014). Turner used her aging yet still robust and big-boned physique to good effect; but Carmen-Maja Antoni, who plays Mother Courage in this new Berlin production, is a tough dumpling. The tension between her short physical stature (her stature in Germany as an actor is legendary), her age (she’s ten years older than Turner), and conniving swagger make an immediate impression — her character is fully evident in her first movements, as she hops off the canteen wagon to confront the recruiting officers, one of whom will sign up her son while she tries to close a sale with the other. This is the internal tension in the character of Mother Courage — the maternal instinct for her children constantly plays against her instincts for economic survival and the low-grade opportunity of selling cheap goods to desperate people. Opportunity always takes the upper hand, and one by one she loses her children to the war. Brecht’s intention was for the audience to see this clearly — how necessity distorts the personality; but to his great frustration, the audience always over-identified with Mother Courage. He couldn’t create his desired alienation effect — his technique of disturbing the theatrical illusion by displaying its artifice —strongly enough to counteract the audience’s sympathetic response to Mother Courage’s situation. The character he created was larger than his idea about Epic Theater itself, the scale of singular suffering greater than the apprehension of the social and political structures metaphorically evident in the machinery of the stage. The audience, watching an old woman try to bear up under such terrible circumstances, always felt more sorry for her than critical of her, the implications of her compromise, and the implied assertion about the loss of sovereignty in a system driven by an ideology of God and death. Why? Maybe because the spectacle of seeing an aging human body strain in real space and in real time evokes a sympathy that cannot be intellectually redirected. Consider: Mother Courage is an anti-Mary without a Christ or pietá. When she holds her dead, mute daughter in her arms, it is only for a moment before she pays some farmers to carry her off and bury her. But what’s left for Mother Courage? To put on the harness and put her shoulder to the wagon yoke, and with real effort literally pull the cart off the stage herself — the physical theater of that grim spectacle has an independent power. Even the teenagers sitting next to me, who spent much of the performance bent over their cell phones, were rapt by the play’s final scenes (which they all knew well, they tell me at the intermission, having studied the play in school). Mother Courage is deluded by the specter of opportunity; her children are seduced by false narratives about heroic adventure (her sons) and sexual adventure (her daughter). There is no enlightenment, no epiphany, no coming into understanding (‘Courage has learnt nothing,’ writes Brecht in a production note) — that is left to the audience; but too often it chooses the sympathy it can safely contain, with asses in seats, rather than an awareness that leads to action once the show is over. (There is no significant conversation or argument in the play about religious or political ideology, the conflict between Protestant and Catholic in the seventeenth century as opaque and seemingly over-nuanced, it often appears to many in the West, as the murderous conflicts now raging between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. By changing the flag on her canteen wagon as needed, Mother Courage saves her skin and lives to make another paltry sale and move on. The two flags are nearly identical: a black cross on white / a white cross on black). A play, in other words, that takes place adjacent to the crisis in Syria. And as much about the internal workings of the audience as they watch the play as the fate of its characters. Well, that is what a play is. But what Brecht wanted it to be was a spur to action in the world – against capitalism, against imperialism, both forces also at work today in Syria and the larger Middle East. His was an ideal, but not a utopian ideal. Poetry may make nothing happen, as Auden maintains; events are, almost by definition, verifiable; but the effects of art are real however they cannot be measured. And it is not a question of eloquence. In the theater, where the bodies of the audience age in real time with the bodies of the actors, the ultimate pathos is in the fate of the body itself. The theater is never, as is film, a spectacle of shadows (and therefore it is never, as is film, quite a projection of our dreams). Watching the real old body of Antoni, the actor, pull the canteen wagon strikes a pathetic chord, no question.