“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"