“The great events of world history are, at bottom,
profoundly unimportant. In the last analysis, the essential thing is the life
of the individual.
This alone makes history, here alone do the great
transformations first take place, and the whole future, the whole history of the
world, ultimately spring as a gigantic summation from these hidden sources.
In our most private and most subjective lives we are not
only the passive witnesses of our age, and its sufferers, but also its makers.
We make our own epoch.
C.G. Jung, 1934"
________
We climb the old-fashioned narrow wooden staircase to the humble apartment where my grandfather was born in Lower East Side Manhattan, 1915, into a family of Greek immigrants. The colors of the neglected wood panes and creaking floorboards radiate with a rustic golden aura. The internal structures are mostly charcoal etched, as a black and white drawing, pockmarked with rough patches of oblique pitch darkness. I am accompanied by my Iranian friend who peeks in abandoned night table drawers. Searchingly, he endeavors to reach through a pile of handwritten pages and small books. He begins talking to me about Eduardo Galeano, all the while correcting my Spanish pronunciation in conversing over the dense terminology. At that, he leaves with a few leaves in his coat jacket. I stand amid the bare walls, as the airless womb of my ancestral birth in this country is revealed. I sit at a gothic typewriter. Copious thoughts string in a massive upheaval of soundless striving through the mind of a creational writing that ceases only with pure death, and at once, below me are the distracted lives of my parents. Their televisions blare mindlessly with brainwashed floundering. I empty a nearby drawer, seeking madly for a worthy object, a true talisman, to invigorate my standards of inspiration before this all-consuming pyre of human intentionality, transmogrified by the immense distance of a screen and its subjects never felt by palm or breath. Does their lower meandering mirror my own creative origins on lettered key before the abstract maw of my own typographic lore?
________
Typewriter
"To see a typewriter in your dream indicates that you need to open the lines of communication with someone in your life." (iDream)
________
“from the mountains' worshippd gaze
I am estranged as a foodbank flourishing madly
in a churlish booth-fountain
spurning liminal trespassers in a just tirade
isolating occupied human vats”
- excerpt from "Spare my Spit"
Ah, the veil put between us and our world by everything having to be translated across realms -how the distance may not, as you suggest, be so much the distance between word and word, word and thing, thought and thing, etc. as the abyssal effects of the "all-consuming pyre of human intentionality." It reminds me of one of my favorite ever lines, from Paul de Man: “If we strip knowledge of all its sumptuous trappings, of the entire apparatus in which it decks itself out in order to present itself as an absolute, we find at its heart only a human appetite, frail and arbitrary...”
ReplyDeleteThat we both, in our recent work, drank from that strange cup despite such different experiential wine is a moment of gnosis for me where I realize the transcendent needs to now leave the form I have poured it in for now.
I can't tell you how much I appreciated your recent comment in particular, that you "saw through" a private event to identify how the "liminal trespasser" I was spurning (another wonderful phrase) was really myself. You allowed the translation (of mine) to step beyond its original to resolve all distances. I can only trust you understand what I mean here, as when I say that you (my translated understanding of you) was a huge and positive inspiration for this poem, in particular in understanding that what looked after the blaze of inspiration like anger and negativity (in my poem) was actually kindness and self-affirmation. More specifically, your life experience allowed you to reach beyond the personal dogma control and touch that veil of true friendship that is lacking (and needed) in the person of that poem.