Louis David Saugy, Montée à l’Alpage Fleurie, 1928
I feel like a Nabokov character increasingly refined according to the aesthetic criteria of ‘making it strange.’ Not Humbert Humbert! Get your mind out of the gutter.
My beautiful young friend calls to recite Faiz Ahmad Faiz poems in Urdu:
“Do not strike the chord of sorrow tonight!
Days burning with pain turn to ashes.
Who knows if there will be another dawn?
Life is nothing, it’s only tonight.
Tonight we can be what the gods are.”
“In the wasteland of solitude, from the dusts of parting
Sprout jasmines and roses of your presence”
“The dread dark spell of countless centuries
Woven with silk and satin and gold brocade,
Bodies sold everywhere, in streets and markets
Besmeared with dirt, bathed in blood,
Crawling from infested ovens,
My gaze returns to these: what can I do?
Your beauty still haunts me: what can I do?
The world is burdened by sorrows beyond love.”
I fall back on my bed in wet and stinking clothes, transported by his voice and the cadence of the poems. What is this but the moment I live for? Who cares that I have $23 left after rent? My fingernails are peeling off. I eat stolen oranges for dinner, biting into the bitter rinds to spare my nails. The oranges remind me of Bruno Schulz’s transcendent summer fruits:
“Dizzy with light, we dipped into that enormous book of holidays, its pages blazing with sunshine and scented with the sweet melting pulp of golden pears.
On those luminous mornings Adela returned from the market, like Pomona emerging from the flames of day, spilling from her basket the colorful beauty of the sun—the shiny pink cherries full of juice under their transparent skins...apricots in whose golden pulp lay the core of long afternoons.”
The fundamental, first and most important action is to acknowledge everything as material. If you’re waking from a nightmare into another nightmare—congratulations!—you’ve been gifted a wellspring of images, impressions, and ideas from which to craft your real work, the work of your imagination. If carrying a notebook, sketchbook, or recording device focuses your attention, by all means, but I’m not selling props; I’m selling detachment. Each filthy scene of late stage capitalist life is a jewel on a string of jewels—not in a museum or photograph, but in your hot little hand.
Does memory serve me, was he wearing a thick gold chain like a pimp? This tender young man with bright eyes and the brittle ambition to work in a bank?
I’m listening to Henry’s prison stories between lunch and dinner service; he recommends 60 Days In. It’s a perfect crystallization of American culture: a reality show filmed in prison. Innocent civilians are sent undercover to county jail. Some “go full inmate,” as it were, eating whippit (melted candy mixed with prescription pills), falling in love, fighting with other inmates or correction officers. Others lay low: reading, playing cards, working out. In the season I watched, all the participants in the first category tapped out. All the participants in the second category persisted till the end. Don’t worry, I won’t give you a trending lecture on stoicism. But I very much take to heart this lesson: if you once had some modicum of power via a stable income, support network, basic human rights, etc., you may entertain the mistaken notion that this leverage persists in jail. It does not. You still have the ability to develop alliances, purchase and trade commissary items, collect observations and material. But beyond that you need to fully retreat. Bide your time until a voice over the intercom tells you to pack it out or roll it up.
And so while I wish you whole truckloads of oranges, remember the narrative arc! The minor key! Kafka, Flaubert, Hrabal, El Saadawi, Hamsun, Abé, McCarthy, Jackson, Karr, Bernhard! Everything is material; stay alive long enough to use it.
Adrian Shirk, fair author of Heaven is a Place on Earth, has begun a catalog of resources!
And I received a kind note from Becca; here is one of her stunning poems, with more on the way.
˚ · . ig: mjbuffett
˚ · . my favorite books: bookshop
˚ · . digital letters to the editor: thelaboringheart@gmail.com
˚ · . analog letters: 459 Boiceville Rd., Brooktondale, NY 14817