Monday, July 14, 2008
1 Down, 2 to Go
of Signet #3 (found
floating in the lull water, stomach ripped open with
maggots spilling out) I found
a rat in the trashcan, huge by the look of
him and heaving, drunk-sick on filth or dying.
Kenny removed him with the trash forceps.
This means something, I think, this
haze, the death, its heft. The slow seep of
the senses coalescing. Duck weed
is thick, though, it pushes back what I've
cleared and I can see nothing but the tiny things that
coat everything.
Captain Dan let me drive the Independence out
to the lake for its nightly mooring. I thought my
usual thoughts of becoming something new:
a boat pilot, a diver. Someone who wears white.
I haven't seen a cormorant all summer (bird like
an oil slick on the water) or the coots with their
forward-jerking swim. Geese and shit everywhere.
Months of summer thunderheads to go.
Two signets left and counting.
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
For Bruce
They were manmade; I could see their scaffolds,
their ladders, veils of water so thin they looked
more delicate than nature would have cared to attempt.
Nature knows better.
On Governor's Island, hula hoops were prevalent.
And I thought, Oh. Here's where they've gone, those
people with an agenda of interactive art installations.
A happy machine played Simon Says with me
shouting its rainbow notes of agree! and dissent!
And a warehouse attached to an old organ sang
like a big empty whale when I pressed its keys.
Look: I tried to be funny for you, to make this a
light endeavor.
You nurse your chemical drip and somehow
survive with wit while I stare at the hole in my wall
and wish I had put it there.
All day I sit and think about the endless variations
and try not to touch the deadly bottle.
The White Whale
My grandmother hit her head on the ceiling designed to look like stars
winking out of night.
Leopard print, a mini bar, and laser lights.
Hebrew, I'll say it here, enables you to forget your grief
it tries to be so meaningful
it means nothing to anyone.
The casket was heavy, there were too many pall-bearers.
Someone kept kicking my shoes. Your time. Your time. Your time.
Not yet. Slow the fuck down. Don't drop Grandpa.
Do drop dirt and roses. There was a shovel, a custom. Upside down
you dig the dirt and toss it down.
I grabbed a handful, to feel it under my nails.
It was one hundred ten degrees all week, and winds from Hell.
I went to the house of my birth, picked an orange from my father's tree.
The fifteen year old girl said she'd lived in my house
her whhhhhhhole life.
My grandmother hasn't been alone since 1947.
I was the last to leave her. I left, by accident, the orange too.
Friday, April 4, 2008
Reasoning Away The Ghost
Sigmund Freud lies awake late one night, sweaty, thinking about the Sand-Man.
He throws handfuls of sand in their eyes, so that they jump out of their heads all bloody;
His little ones sit there in the nest and have hooked beaks like owls, and they pick naughty little boys’ and girls’ eyes out with them. [1]
hooked beaks, bloody eyes
Freud turns over sighing heavily. This is not acceptable, this fear, this “uncanny” feeling. It must be controlled. He rolls out of bed and staggers to his desk, lights a candle. Head in hands, he steadies his worried breathing. He jots down a two and a half page summary of Hoffmann’s masterful short story “The Sand-Man.” His hand wobbles slightly when he comes to Spin round, fire-wheel! but does not stop moving swiftly across the page. Finally he places his pen down calmly and analyzes his summary. There. There lies his fear, leaking darkly into the paper’s fibers. His irrepressible feelings of disgust and horror. His uncontrollable astonishment.
The Sublime and the Uncanny
Freud misuses the term “sublime” when he states that it is the opposite of the uncanny: “[aesthetics] in general prefer to concern themselves with what is beautiful, attractive and sublime—that is, with feelings of a positive nature…rather than with the opposite feelings of
repulsion and distress.” [2] In fact, Edmund Burke solidified the definition of sublime regarding aesthetics in his treatise “On the Sublime and Beautiful” in 1757 as “Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime;” [3] The sublime, then, is deeply connected to fear and horror, not to feelings of a “positive nature.” Burke further adds “It [the sublime] is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.” The uncanny and the sublime both produce an overpowering emotion, frustrating any reasonable thought process. Freud lies awake late one night, sweating.
Astonishment
The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it.[4]
We are near the
Freud turns over, sighing heavily.
Aha! aha! aha! Fire-wheel—fire-wheel!
Spin round, fire-wheel! merrily, merrily! Aha! wooden doll! spin round, pretty wooden doll![7]
Nathanael is driven mad by his sense of the uncanny. He becomes astonished, witless. When he sees
Categories and Reason
After some thought and a cup of coffee, Freud figures something out.
Freud cannot leave the eyes alone. Birds pick at them in his dreams, and he rubs them in his sleep. His wife has long since left his bed for a more silent chamber. His mutterings fill the house. The eyes, the eyes. What is it about the eyes?
There is rifling through old papers, heavy books. The smells of tobacco and ash fill the house. Here! The fear of damaging or losing one’s eyes is a terrible one in children. Bloody. Handfuls of sand. Many adults retain their apprehensiveness in this respect, and no physical injury is so much dreaded by them as an injury to the eye.[11] Fear of losing our eyes, and dolls coming to life. I feel I am grasping at the answer to these “uncanny” feelings. Categories and reason. But…why still can’t I sleep?
The Undead
Many people experience the feeling [the uncanny] in the highest degree in relation to death and dead bodies, to the return of the dead, and to spirits and ghosts.[12]
We watch, crouching together on the edge of a massive windowsill, as Jonathan Harker pries open a coffin in the Count’s chambers. Inside lies the form of a man, eyes wide but empty, sleeping without breathing. We share Jonathan’s disgust at this undead thing, and cheer when he raises a shovel over the Count’s face to smash it in. But something uncanny happens. As Jonathan strikes, the Count’s head turns and stares at him, those eyes with “all their blaze of basilisk horror.” The shovel glances of the Count’s forehead and forces closed the lid of the coffin. And Jonathan: “The last glimpse I had was of the bloated face, blood-stained and fixed with a grin of malice which would have held its own in the nethermost hell. I thought and thought what should be my next move, but my brain seemed on fire, and I waited with a despairing feeling growing over me.”[13] All motions are suspended.
Learning to Die
The premeditation of death is the premeditation of liberty; he who has learned to die, has unlearned to serve…To know how to die, delivers us from all subjection and constraint.[14]
Montaigne is right; overcoming the fear of death would lift a great burden from most of us, who store death at the edges of our brains like a rusty silver ring. When a friend or relative dies, we take it out and polish it briefly, but we rarely ever look closely enough to see our own reflections gleaming dangerously within the shine. But even if we did become comfortable with our own deaths… even then…what about the dead coming back to life?
In Tim Burton’s “Batman Returns,” Selina Kyle falls from a high window and dies, sprawled out in crooked angles, on the wet concrete below. Cats appear from all dark corners of the city and begin, as it first appeared to me at that young age, to eat her. When my mother informed me that the cats were not eating her, but in fact licking her back to life,[15] I was even more terrified. Was she not then one of the undead?
Or again: Beloved, a ghost, pregnant and smiling, in the doorway.[16] The dead reproducing, coming to life. Uncontrollable astonishment.
Psychological Truth
Clara. Clara is the smart one. She is Hoffmann’s scientist. Yes, for she writes to her steadily slipping lover Nathanael, “I will frankly confess, it seems to me that all the horrors of which you speak, existed only in your own self, and that the real true outer world had but little to do with it.”[17]
There, there is the truth. His madness comes from within, like all psychoses. Freud’s pen flies across the page.
Oedipus and Castration………… Love….
Father-imago……. Feminine attitude. Infancy……….
Complex . . . Narcissism… Psychological Truth! [18]
Ghosts
Freud’s science arrives to explain away everything that is important… Freud gets so close to dealing with the social reality of haunting only to give up the ghost…[19]
In Clara, Freud must have found reason for his horror. If he could quarter it off, draw lines with science, somehow explain his uneasiness, then he could sleep without dreaming of the Sand Man. He would not have to slip away into madness with Nathanael. Yet his analysis is almost too tidy:
The father and Coppelius are the two opposite sides of the father-imago, and later the Professor and Coppola fill this role.
Look: Sigmund Freud lies awake late one night, sweaty, thinking about the Sand-Man. He writes a two and a half page summary of the story, and includes it in an essay on the Uncanny. His main point is that, as Jentsch said, the doll
[1] Hoffmann 185.
[2] Freud 219.
[3] Burke 1.7
[4] Burke 2.1
[5] See attached image
[6] Wollstonecraft Shelley 959
[7] Hoffmann 211
[8] Hoffmann 210
[9] Hoffmann 208
[10] Freud 233
[11] Freud 231
[12] Freud 241
[13] Stoker ch. 4
[14] Montaigne
[15] See attached photo
[16] Morrison 261
[17] Hoffmann 191
[18] Freud 232, footnote 1
[19] Gordon 57
[20] Freud 232, footnote 1
Modern Antiquity: The Corner Bistro
On weekends Corner B. turns into a zoo of college kids crowding into the narrow front room and lining up along the side wall waiting for tables in the back. The best time for a Bistro Burger is weekday afternoons, around
Saturday, Sunday and Monday nights, Jeffrey Sheehan paces behind the wood-warm bar like a bear. His long black hair, ear-tucked, curls around his shoulders, and silver strands creep their way up his thick beard. His hazel eyes spark. He has been pacing behind this bar these ten years.
“There’s an aspect of being on stage,” says Jeff of bartending. “You’re constantly under demand. The place is really loud. And bartenders are blank screens to people. They can project whatever they want onto you.” And they do. When I first met Jeff at the Corner Bistro, I thought his stony face and brusque bar manner revealed a jaded New Yorker, someone who hated his job and hated the people drinking at his bar, and wished he were anywhere else. In reality, he is a sweet, intelligent man prone to cheek-kissing and hugs, a true conversationalist who cares deeply about his regular customers, people who show him a respect unusual in the service industry. He, like another Bistro bartender Tom (a white-haired old saint with a bouncy step, who expertly slides your mug of McSorley’s down the bar at you with a wink), sings along to the surprisingly modern Jukebox at the top of his lungs as he paces: At every occasion I’ll be ready for a funeral,/ at every occasion once more is called a funeral. Or: And I was standing on the side of the road/ rain fallin’ on my shoes/ Heading out for the East Coast/ Lord knows I’ve paid some dues gettin’ through. Most of the bartenders keep a pencil behind their ears, because at the Bistro your tab is marked out on receipt paper, by hand, and then punched into old-style cash registers which might “look older than they actually are.” Most times, a third or forth beer is placed before you without your asking and free of charge. The Bistro is the kind of bar that builds a loyal following by staying the same, decade after decade after decade.
It’s early on a Saturday night, and the Bistro is busy. Burgers come flying out of the kitchen, and all along the bar sit paper plates piled high with fries and the little Belgian-style forks that accompany them. Stool hawks pack tightly behind the row of patrons drinking at the counter, ready to throw a hand down to claim a stool when someone stands to leave. A man pushes up to the bar and orders three McSorley’s, one dark and two light. He sticks a credit card between two men’s shoulders. “We don’t take cards,” gruffs Harold, who works the afternoon shift on Saturdays. “You don’t take cards?” The tone of bewilderment is familiar to Harold, who points the man at the ATM located near the Jukebox. Another woman stands on her tiptoes to get a better look at the back room, jam-packed with diners. “Is this the line?” she whines. “I can’t tell if this is the line.” Somebody has put Miles Davis on the jukebox, “ Kind of Blue,” and its soothing riffs help to mute the increasing frenzy of a weekend night’s commencement. Three different football games glow on separate television screens.
Harold stands solid in front of the requisite rows of bottles and mirrored back wall behind the bar, larger than life with a well-defined paunch and a wide, easy grin. His laugh is rocky and quick to bubble out from his kind face. He started working in the Bistro in 1967, and left it in 1975 to “pursue other careers,” optometry among them. He came back to the Bistro in 1991 because, he says, “it seemed like a more honest transaction.” It was he who hired Jeff. Harold himself started working at the Bistro under Jeff’s father and alongside Jeff’s uncle. (Jeff’s grandfather used to go to the Bistro to drink, and before that, his great grandfather did too. For good or ill, the Bistro is in Jeff’s blood.)
Saturday’s pace quickens. The energy inside the Bistro, as more and more people shove their way in, trips toward chaos. I’m outside with Jeff, who is taking a cigarette break, when a woman is hauled outside by her friends and placed on the sidewalk. She immediately falls face-forward into the street. “That’s what I call a mess in a dress,” Jeff jokes. Eventually her friends manage to hail a cab and stuff her inside before returning to the Bistro. Sheehan’s eyes glint as he puts out his cigarette. “At any other place, it would have cost her one hundred and fifty dollars to get that drunk. We did it for twenty-three.”
Jeff may not consider himself an artist, or a photographer (“I have an aversion to titles, or roles, and I’m not good at self-promoting”) but his most recent show, called “Refuge: Portraits of the Corner Bistro,” which was on view at 2/20 Gallery in Chelsea in late October, effectively evoked the atmosphere of the Corner B.
He started the project in 2001, pointing his converted Polaroid land camera at patrons who seemed steeped in old-world bar mystique. He was looking for people who “didn’t give away the time.” Shot in black and white and filled with a ghostly graininess, all the images reveal the prospective of a bartender: in the foreground one can see the bar corners, bottles and glasses half-emptied, dollar bills filling the photo edges. Most of the photos were taken before the city’s smoking ban, and the carnage of ashtrays, the smoky haze surrounding the subjects’ faces, gives an even more antiquated feel to the images. A black man sits in a suit and hat, smiling faintly into the camera. One of his eyes looks rather busted. It could be a photo from 1943. In another, a young blonde woman stares fiercely into the lens, looking trapped. In some of the images, the subjects are caught in movement: they seem to be laughing, lunging away from the camera, and their inclusion in the show gave gallery goers on opening night the distinct feeling of actually being in the Corner Bistro (a feeling exponentially increased by the number of free McSorley’s one drank). The mix of viewers was admittedly more female-heavy than most nights at the Bistro but, like the bar, the gallery was filled with laughter and easy mingling. A general buzz of goodwill and camaraderie flowed through the room. Jeff’s father smoked cigars outside under the doorframe, where a crowd of people had spilled out onto the sidewalk into the glow of a streetlamp.
Monday night, around
From the best seat in the house you look straight down the back of the bar and into the tiny square kitchen beyond, where two men in paper hats work back to back grilling burgers and frying fries. Above them on a wire rack are stacked hundreds of hamburger buns. Jeff paces towards you, then away, then back again as he works the bar. Tonight he wears his hair twisted up and held with pencils, and chews constantly on a red stirring stick. Someone he knows comes up to the bar. As they chat Jeff reaches his foot up to rest on an ice bucket at thigh level, his boot toeing a chilling Heineken bottle. His grey long-sleeved shirt is pushed back to the elbows, revealing a lotus flower tattoo on the wrist of his right arm. Every now and again, when someone tips him with coins, Jeff stands at the end of the bar and chucks each one into a metal can near the register. Those sitting at the bar collectively groan or smile when his coins miss or clink into place loudly.
The only other woman in the bar (there are twenty-plus men in the room) sits with two men at the plate glass window. “Oh bloody hell,” she quips in her British accent. The two men lean in closer. Immediately next to me Dave hunches over his ginger ale. Jeff ambles over. “Bistro Burger?” Dave shakes his head no. This comes as a shock. Dave, a robust fellow with a round face and buzzed hair who hails from New Jersey and speaks gruffly, once ate five and a half Bistro Burgers (eight ounces of beef, plus bacon and cheese in each) in one sitting. He says that Jeff taught him the trick of a “slider,” a Bistro Burger wrapped in lettuce and slid down the throat for easy consumption.
“Not today, Jeff,” says Dave. “Have to avoid the beef.” He eyes the menu hanging above the kitchen door. “Chili sounds good, though. Fuck, a bowl of chili sounds good. No. Wait. No, just give me the damn B.L.T.” Dave works in photography as well, although he calls himself the paparazzi. He shoots promos, and deals with celebrities on a regular basis. He had been at Jeff’s opening. “It was real nice, Jeff. There were real people there. It was real art. Not like the shit I have to deal with daily.” Dave efficiently works on his sandwich as he explains his past. He got his photography start in
His sandwich gone, Dave returns his gaze to the menu. Jeff refills his ginger ale. “On the 19th, I find out if I’m gonna die, or if I have a hemorrhoid. If it’s a hemorrhoid, I’ll be back for my Bistro Burger.” The bar back wanders over to the sink to wash dishes, and gives Dave a weird look.
“Whatsa matter?” he asks Dave, because Dave did not order a burger.
“Ah, you’re just mad I didn’t beat the record—” says Dave. (The record is six Bistro Burgers in one sitting.) Dave pauses in mid-sentence, then makes a large circle with his arms. “Hey. I saw the world’s largest burger on the Internet the other day. Thing musta been this big. Cost $125, gotta be eight, nine pounds of beef. Hey Jeff. You guys make chili cheese fries? Gimmie an order of those.”
A younger man named Junior sits down next to Dave, kitty-corner to the best seat in the house. A would-be screenwriter, he works shifts at the Trader Joe’s wine shop. A conversation about cheese fries ensues, followed by a conversation about famous people, Mailer, Dylan, Vonnegut. “Bruce Willis is kinda my hero,” Junior says at one point.
“Bruce Willis is a notorious dick,” retorts Dave. Junior points out Kristen Johnston, an actress from the television show “3rd Rock from the Sun.” She is a huge woman with a huge mouth and a pile of blonde hair. Kristen puts her hands to her eyes, making a pair of binoculars, and peers out of the window at her friends, snorting and bending over.
“She’s totally trashed,” says Junior. Later, after Dave is gone and the clock pushes toward
I want to know what it is about the Bistro that keeps Jeff and his family coming back, that keeps all of us coming back. “What do you mean?” asks
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
nightmare
late last night, I
cried out, dashed from dreams
so suddenly I forgot them
your touch ice.
I lay curled away
watching your shoulders heave,
your grunting efforts under sheets
at sanity.
I hoped the kick a sign
of triumph over those clutching fingers,
those deep dragging demons.
I hoped you'd wake and turn,
and your eyes would be yours
again, and I could touch
you without the shiver of god.
I hoped, and then I heard it that
train from my childhood
pulsing across dark waters
bearing down like screaming
its whistle a nightmare.
Then I was eight, and you were
not yet crazy, not yet you.
Monday, February 11, 2008
my room
Copper wires hang from the high ceiling of my room; I stick my index-card thoughts to them with wax. I create an internal hanging garden of essays in development-- my room is an essay garden!
Ten typewriters sit expectantly in ten corners of my room. There is a mint green one for when I feel like a girl, and a black one with spider buttons for when I feel like a boy. The broken one's for dreams, the electric one for wit, one to learn Hebrew, one to learn Dutch, one for gathering dust, one for the dispensing of cobwebs, one for tossing dramatically out windows. One has no ink and makes no noise but writes all day long all by itself and sometimes keeps me awake at night.
Music is constantly pipped into my room from invisible sources. I can hear whatever I want when I want it for free, no, even before I want it, before I think it, it plays. There is a special channel that only plays Danny Elfman, Rachmaninoff, and Saint-Saens. There is no music in my room, only the songs of birds, and the crashing of beach break. In my room I can hear the music made by the heavenly spheres as they move about.
Children run freely through my room; they pull my hair and dance through my hanging garden. I am a child with them. Sometimes I am their teacher. Sometimes I cry in my room, but not often. There is no sex, in my room.
Wrought-iron candelabras hang from my ceiling, spraying mysterious shadows into every corner. I like my corners dark and mysterious. My room supplies me with endless coffee (French-pressed Kenya, triple ristretto espresso), endless beer (oatmeal stout in winter, Highland Gaelic Ale in summer), endless cancer-free cigarettes, endless clarity of thought.
I have a closet in my room. I fold up my friends and put them in the closet, only to shake them out and wear them from time to time. In my room, I can consume those I admire. In my room, you see, I don't miss him or want her. The spaces between people are not allowed entry into my room. Do not enter! Do not exist! Here, in my darkness, I am everyone, everyone is me and I am a god, and only I exist. Here, I talk in my sleep.