Passage from Camus' The Plague

Last night I got stuck on this brief passage describing desperate funerals in The Plague. I was thinking that if someone made a movie of the book, about a town in Algeria stricken with an unstoppable outbreak of plague, this would be a great and compelling scene to open with. (Turns out there is a 1992 film, set in South Africa, and featuring William Hurt and Robert Duvall; it went straight to video. I'll have to look into it.)

Cat prefers Kierkegaard.

This converted school had an exit at the back of the main building. A large storeroom giving on the corridor contained the coffins. On arrival, the family found a coffin already nailed up in the corridor. Then came the most important part of the business: the signing of official forms by the head of the family. Next the coffin was loaded on a motor-vehicle -- a real hearse or a large, converted ambulance. The mourners stepped into one of the few taxis still allowed to ply and the vehicles drove hell-for-leather to the cemetery by a route avoiding the center of town. There was a halt at the gate, where police officers applied a rubber stamp to the official exit permit, without which it was impossible for our citizens to have what they called a last resting-place. The policemen stood back and the cars drew up near a plot of ground where a number of graves stood open, waiting for inmates. A priest came to meet the mourners, since church services at funerals were now prohibited. To an accompaniment of prayers the coffin was dragged from the hearse, roped up, and carried to the graveside, the ropes were slipped and it came heavily to rest at the bottom of the grave. No sooner had the priest begun to sprinkle holy water than the first sod rebounded from the lid. The ambulance had already left and was being sprayed with disinfectant, and while spadefuls of clay thudded more and more dully on the rising layer of earth, the family were bundling into the taxi. A quarter of an hour later they were back at home. - Camus, from The Plague

Nativity poem by George Mackay Brown

George Mackay Brown was a 20th Century Scottish poet who lived in the Orkney Islands. He could make the myth and lore of the Orkneys suddenly gritty and real with one line or image. Here he does that with the birth of Christ. I love the filling-in of the Nativity story, the attentiveness to this unremarkable moment in the lives of the Roman soldier and the innkeeper, and the immense irony of the last line. A 'byre" is a cow shed. The shepherds the innkeeper grumbles at are not drunk, but have gotten word from angels that a savior is born. So they are just excited.

The Lodging

The stones of the desert town
Flush; and, a star-filled wave,
Night steeples down.

From a pub door here and there
A random ribald song
Leaks on the air.

The Roman in a strange land
Broods, wearily leaning
His lance in the sand.

The innkeeper over the fire
Counting his haul, hears not
The cry from the byre;

But rummaging in the till
Grumbles at the drunken shepherds
Dancing on the hill;

And wonders, pale and grudging,
If the strange pair below
Will pay their lodging.
                       -George Mackay Brown

Stanza from Roethke's "The Pure Fury"

This is stanza # 3 of 4 numbered stanzas, I was struck, real struck, by the line, A man's a beast prowling in his own house...


How terrible the need for solitude:
That appetite for life so ravenous
A man's a beast prowling in his own house,
A beast with fangs, and out for his own blood
Until he finds the thing he almost was
When the pure fury first raged in his head
And trees came closer with a denser shade.
                                    - From "The Pure Fury" by Theodore Roethke
                                                           

Insight from Joseph Brodsky

From an interview at the end of my copy of Nativity Poems:

But at some point I realized that I am the sum of my actions, my acts, and not the sum of my intentions.

The Horny Pilgrim: a true story of the Plymouth Plantation

Totally by accident and having nothing to do with the holiday, I happen to be reading books by and about the Mayflower Pilgrims and their early descendants. This morning I ran across this passage in Of Plymouth Plantation, by the primary leader, second governor and Mayflower passenger William Bradford. It is part of a chapter called "Wickedness Breaks Forth." 

See my numbered annotations following, please:


After a time of the writing of these things befell a very sad accident of the like foul nature in this government, this very year, which I shall now relate. There was a youth whose name was Thomas Granger. He was servant to an honest man of Duxbury, being about 16 or 17 years of age. He was this year detected of buggery and indicted for the same, with a mare, a cow, two goats, five sheep, two calves and a turkey.[1] Horrible it is to mention, but the truth of the history requires it. He was first discovered by one that accidentally [2] saw his lewd practices towards the mare. (I forebear particulars. [3]) Being upon it examined and committed, in the end he not only confessed the fact with that beast at that time, but sundry times before and at several times with all the rest of the forenamed in his indictment. And this his free confession was not only in private to the magistrates (though first he strived to deny it) but to sundry, both ministers and others, and afterwards, upon his indictment, to the whole Court and jury; [4] and confirmed at his execution. And whereas some of the sheep could not so well be known by his description of them, [5] others with them were brought before him and he declared which were they and which were not. [6] And accordingly he was cast by the jury and condemned, and after executed about the 8th of September, 1642. A very sad spectacle it was. For first the mare and then the cow and the rest of the lesser cattle [7] were killed before his face [8], according to the law, Leviticus xx.15; and then he himself was executed. The cattle were all cast into a great large pit that was digged of purpose for them, and no use made of any part of them.
 
Upon the examination of this person and also of a former that had made more sodomitical attempts upon another... [9]
 

1. Is this what we should be doing with our turkeys today, if we really want to be like the Pilgrims?
2. Yeah, right, "accidentally." 
3. Bummer. Puritans are so frustrating!
4. Bestial and proud. I bet they tortured him, though.
5. Where's that one sheep with the perty mouth?
6. Did that one, yeah. That one, too, Oh yeah! No, not that one. C'mon, I do have standards.
7. Lesser cattle? Oh, right, that one goat really wasn't very attractive.
8. Okay, this is getting brutal.
9. Further Pilgrim wickedness I shall spare you. But there was some..

Happy Thanksgiving, Everybody.

8 poems supposedly

Our Memoir

I was very young

at the time

of the anschluss

and only later

after a lost war

wielding hindsight

purged of memory

did I discuss our history.

   
Read the other 7 on this page here.
 

Heaney's journey to Aarhus

August 30, 2013 - Heaney died today. This is an excerpt, with some lines from the poet, from an unpublished essay I wrote about, among other things, my encounter with Ötzi the Iceman:

I’ve always loved old bones. I love their mystery, the tactile connection they represent to personal histories, so close yet so obscure. For me there has been no bigger thrill than peering into a gaping, ruined grave in Enniskillen to spy in the shadows an old browned skull and to imagine, just for a moment, just a sound the brain it held might have produced, just one emotion, one sensation. And if old bones were thrilling, then old faces, old noses, old fingernails and old whiskers were even better. Although I’d found they could disappoint, too. Once I had walked the long, grim, subterranean corridors of a monastery in Palermo where hundreds of dried mummies of all ages, dressed in their burial clothes, gazed back at me. Their poses bordered on clownishness and their display amounted to a violation, like a deprivation of promised sleep. They should have delivered me to a morbid nirvana. Instead they left me unmoved.

The Bog People by P.V. Glob

Then I read P.V. Glob’s classic, The Bog People (from the miraculous New York Review of Books imprint), about the fully-preserved Iron Age corpses found in bogs in Denmark and Ireland, men who were criminals, young women who were adulterers or in some cases sacrifices to the gods. I could spend an entire afternoon staring at photographs of the tormented, peat-stained, human face of the Tollund Man, his impressively aquiline nose, the vertical crease of mortal anguish in his forehead, the hangman’s noose around his neck still. I had read and re-read the poems the bog mummies had inspired in Seamus Heaney. For the poet, the Tollund Man, the Grauballe Man, the Bog Queen, and the brutality and cruel, ignorant sacrifice to which they bore witness, became useful symbols for the violent, religion-fueled predicament of the Irish of the 1970s. Here he would leave behind snipes and drowned farm cats as symbols and turn to something more ambiguous and better. “Opening The Bog People,” he told Dennis O’Driscoll, “was like opening a gate."

Through them Heaney could exercise his gift for ruthless identification and self-reflection. It’s all there in a bog poem called “Punishment,” with passages like these:

I who have stood dumb
when your betraying sisters,
cauled in tar,
wept by the railings,

who would connive
in civilized outrage
yet understand the exact
and tribal, intimate revenge.

This desire I feel and draw I find in Ötzi Heaney describes precisely in these stanzas from “Tollund Man:"

Some day I will go to Aarhus
To see his peat-brown head,
The mild pods of his eyelids,
His pointed skin cap,

In the flat country nearby
Where they dug him out,
His last gruel of winter seeds,
Caked in his stomach...

Heaney dreamed of a journey to Denmark to see the Tollund Man, like mine to Italy to see the Iceman; I happen to know he made it. I could think of few better fates for a corpse than to become the inspiration for a poem, or a journey to Aarhus, by Seamus Heaney. And all Ötzi gets is me.
                                                                                     
                                                                                              -from "The Find"

Farewell, my friend, farewell: poem by Esenin

Farewell, my friend, farewell.
Dear friend, you're in my heart.
The predetermined parting
Promises reunion ahead.

Farewell, my friend, without handshake or word,
Don't grieve and knit your brow -- 
In life death's nothing new,
But life's, of course, no greater novelty.
                                                  Sergei Esenin
                                                   1925

Esenin, sometimes spelled Yesenin, dead and mourned.

A vessel on the sea, at midnight, in a storm - Poe's "Alone"

Combine the names "Booth" & "Poe" - and you get..."Both"

It started with the idle late night plucking from my bookshelves Paul Metcalf's Both, one of his many strange, imaginative, hybrid works. In this one, he documents the unexpected, ostensible parallels between Edgar Allan Poe and John Wilkes Booth, and not just in their appearances, signatures, and melodramatic personalities. Metcalf's list of sources for Both was so interesting that I began tracking them down, at least the one's I could afford. Some were so obscure that, even if I could find them on abebooks, I could never have afforded them. I really wanted to pull the trigger on The Mad Booths of Maryland, but at over $400, it'll just have to wait.

However, I could afford The Raven and the Whale, Perry Miller's dissection of the mid-19th Century American literary scene, especially in New York, its cattiness, its brawling, its factionalism, the births and deaths of its many journals, their great achievements and great failures, all their explicit scheming for an American Literature independent of English influence. How in service to this elusive American ideal -- the country was only 60 years old, technically -- the editors, writers and intellectuals, especially in New York, searched and begged and hedged and compromised, how they boosted any old tripe if it seemed American and new. And how, when what Duyckink and Matthews and their colleagues were looking for came, in the works of Melville, Whitman and Poe, they just didn't see. To be sure, they published and honored particularly Poe and Melville, and welcomed all three of them into their factions when they could be useful. 

This book will make you read Herman and Edgar anew

But they were blind to the fact that in their own time and city, the pillars of American literature had finally appeared. (Similarly, a couple of decades later, Col. Wigginson was incredibly supportive of that fourth pillar, Emily Dickinson, was a friend to Emily, but couldn't see the monumental achievement right before his eyes.)

Another Metcalf source I could find and afford was Frances Winwar's life of Poe, The Haunted Palace. And so I spent a few days in stunned contemplation of the abject sadness of Poe's existence. For years I have been known to mutter, seemingly out of nowhere, "Poor Herman," when suddenly comes to mind how poorly things ended up for Melville. But Poe's life, the constant death and early loss, the bitter avarice of his guardian, then the late death and loss, the addiction and the final, deep mental illness, trump Herman's own unsatisfying fate. Amazing how much Poe produced. How many magazines he catapulted to success. But always in the end something would break. I guess it is ironic, that his towering ambition was warranted, but often it was what caused him to crash, to have so start again from literary, financial and emotional scratch.

Metcalf, Winwar, Zagajewski, Poe (ed., Wilbur), Miller

And so I opened again the poems of Poe, including a volume edited, and with a helpful introduction by the great American poet Richard Wilbur. One particular poem, "Alone," stayed with me for awhile.

And then, just as I was moving on to other things, while reading Adam Zagajewski's poem, "The Generation," I came across these lines, which reminded me again of Poe's "Alone":

Two kinds of death circle about us.

One puts our whole group to sleep,

takes all of us, the whole herd...

...the other one is wild, illiterate,

it catches us alone, strayed,

we animals, we bodies, we the pain,

we careless and uneducated...

We worship both of them in two religions

broken by schism...

                -Adam Zagajewski

                  "The Generation"

Here is the Poe poem, also about two kinds of death. In its final image, it seems like Poe is characterizing his entire life, his haunted mind, the warp of his works. It's interesting about the warp of his stories and characters; it lurked always in their depths, only slowly to be revealed by the storyteller, often slowly to destroy him, as it did Poe.

Winwar ends her biography with a dream Walt Whitman described to a group of friends after a memorial for Poe at his re-burial in 1875. Whitman had met Poe a couple of times. Poe had been one the earliest publishers of Whitman's poetry, pre-Leaves of Grass. In Whitman's vision, he sees a "vessel on the sea, at midnight, in a storm... On the deck was a slender, slight, beautiful figure, a dim man, apparently enjoying all the terror, the murk and the dislocation of which he was the center and the victim. The figure of my lurid dream might stand for Edgar Poe, his spirit, his fortunes, and his poems..."

To Winwar, writing in 1959, the figure was Poe, but also Poe as Modern Man, "conscious of a new dimension: the world within, whose storms, terrible in their revealing flashes, throw light, now more than ever, on the black, hidden regions of the soul."

Makes sense to me. Okay, here's Poe's poem, finally (note the italicized second "I" in line 8):

Alone

From childhood's hour I have not been

As others were -- I have not seen

As others saw -- I could not bring

My passions from a common spring --

From thw same source I have not taken

My sorrow -- I could not awaken

My heart to joy at the same tone --

And all I lov'd -- I loved alone --

Then -- in my childhood -- in the dawn

Of a most stormy life -- was drawn

From ev'ry depth of good and ill

The mystery which binds me still--

From the torrent, or the fountain --

From the red cliff of the mountain --

From the sun that 'round me roll'd

In its autumn tint of gold --

From the lightning in the sky

As it pass'd me flying by --

From the thunder and the storm--

And the cloud that took the form

(When the rest of Heaven was blue)

Of a demon in my view--

Another poem by R.S. Thomas

Tell me, what did Shelly dream? And how did love deceive him?

1963 edition, dedicated to the great James Hanley

Song at the Year's Turning
Shelley dreamed it. Now the dream decays.
The props crumble. The familiar ways
Are stale with tears trodden underfoot.
The heart's flower withers at the root.
Bury it, then, in history's sterile dust.
The slow years shall tame your tawny lust.

Love deceived him; what is there to say
The mind brought you by a better way 
To this despair? Lost in the world's wood
You cannot stanch the bright menstrual blood.
The earth sickens; under naked boughs
The frost comes to barb your broken vows.

Is there blessing? Light's peculiar grace
In cold splendour robes this tortured place
For strange marriage. Voices in the wind
Weave a garland where a mortal sinned.
                                                                                  Winter rots you; who is there to blame?
                                                                                  The new grass shall purge you in its flame.

R.S. elsewhere on the blog: "Somewhere"

Lines from an Eddy Current Suppression Ring song

Watch the video for "Which Way to Go."

Well I weigh up my pros
And I weigh up my cons
And I weigh up my evens
And I even out the odds
And I still don't know which way to go

Well I weigh up my wills
And I weigh up my wont's
And I weigh up the negatives
And compare them to the positives
And I still don't know which way to go


Well I looked up north
And I looked down south
And I looked to the east
And the west was the best
And I still don't know which way to go

  - from "Which Way to Go" on Primary Colours (from the great Goner Records, Memphis)
      

Burning History: a letter from El Carmen, Peru

Peruvian singer Susana Baca making dinner. Pic by me.

In 1999, GQ sent me to Lima to do a story about the great Afro-Peruvian singer, Susana Baca. She was making a record with the producer Craig Street, for David Byrne's label, Luaka Bop. And she was recording the entire thing in her house. I got to stay at the house for a few days during the recording. I had never had such an assignment before, had only published one magazine story by then, and pretty much had no idea what I was doing. But I was fortunate because 1) GQ gave me a chance (Thanks, Jim Nelson! -- way back then a senior editor, now GQ Editor-in-Chief.); and 2) because everyone there at the house in Lima, including Susana, her band, her husband, Ricardo, and Craig Street, was incredibly kind and open. It turned out to be one of the greatest experiences of my life.

After I was done with my reporting, I flew to Ayacucho, the birthplace of the Shining Path, where I was struck down first with altitude sickness, and then with a voracious intestinal parasite. I spent much of my time in my hotel room eating Chips Ahoy cookies (the only thing that didn't seem to go through my digestive system in less than 2 minutes; I wonder, and worry about, why), drinking water, and watching the John Sayles movie Lone Star over and over again on the only English-language station I could find on the TV. 

But before heading to Ayacucho, I'd taken a road trip south to the village of El Carmen, Peru, to what is thought to be the birthplace of the glorious Afro-Peruvian culture that Baca had done so much to preserve and proliferate. At that time, I had never been to South America, and never before to a city that raged and burned quite like Lima, and it had been mind-bending for me in good and bad ways. 

The Susana Baca story turned out really nicely and appeared in GQ in the spring of 2000 (Estella Warren cover), but I don't think it is available anywhere online, so can't link to it. However, I remember the lede by heart: "Most of the time when an artist says "I recorded it at home," it means in a studio in the barn or on a 12-track in the basement. In Peruvian singer Susana Baca's case, it means in the kitchen, the hallway, the bedroom, the stairwell." 

Cotito on the gourd. Pic: me.

 
But this is the story of my trip to El Carmen.

Burning History: a letter from El Carmen

Too many days and nights amid the churning chaos of Lima had left me in a state of melancholy bordering on mourning. Accompanying me everywhere was an almost constant awareness of the ephemeral nature of what the city’s raw energy burned: gas fumes, garbage, people, peoples, history.

And so when my work was done in Lima, I left its pandemonium behind and headed down the Pan American highway, south through the brown coastal deserts of Peru. My destination was a bucolic, historic region in the state of Chincha said to be the cradle of Afro Peruvian culture. There I would hear the music of Peru’s slaves and their descendants, in its element and at its root. This music was what I’d come to Peru to write about. The hope now was that in Chinca I could witness the culture and tell everyone that I’d been to the source, to the watershed, and found it flowing.

Sounds good. But as we careen down the highway on a bright, beige summer day, there’s no denying my ulterior motive, my urge to flee Lima, my need to shed the amorphous fear and guilt the city engenders, before they morph into something unshedable. But no matter how far or how fast we drive the highway, death-haunted images of the hunger-smitten city refuse to abate: the breadth of its hillside poverty, the black darkness of its outlying streets at night, broken only by the occasional garbage fire, the heaping garbage on the beaches near Chorillos, the thick, brown, meringue-like foam floating on the ocean waves. The countless street urchins offering meaningless services for small tribute.

My guide is a fair-skinned, blondish Limeño named Xavier who is in nothing so Peruvian as in the recklessness of his driving. All along the wide road I see many small, white, wooden crosses dedicated to this highway’s dead and spend much of the three-hour drive sweating, clinging, saying many Acts of Contrition. At least a half dozen times I find myself wondering, as Xavier uses the soft, deeply grooved shoulder, and beyond, to pass sluggishly moving trucks or to avoid oncoming traffic, if tomorrow there might be one of those little white crosses dedicated to my memory.

Our first stop along the highway is in Cañente, where we sit on the town square and try vainly to blend in among the locals. The grounds (and some of the people) within the busy square are coifed near perfection: fenced off rose gardens, healthy fichus trees, blue-uniformed school children giggling on benches, a dapper old black man with silver hair, dozing. There’s a smartly dressed old lady with a sunken-in mouth wearing a thick sweater and wool stockings, soaking in the morning sun; a mud-caked, sun-baked lunatic insisting we give him something, anything; a beefy man selling lottery tickets; a red-skirted woman of the highlands with a small child; more Andean children on the make, wanting desperately to shine my boots or clean the clean windows on our car. The pressure of the beggar and the persistence of the enterprising children soon overwhelm us and so we push off south again along the scary highway to our destination: northern Chincha.

El Carmen
This part of Chincha is a three-hearted beast: there’s the quiet, low-slung Peruvian village of El Carmen with its deserted town square; there are the surrounding cotton and banana fields of what was once a colonial plantation ruled by the residents of the nearby hacienda, now the "Hacienda San Jose," a hotel, where we’ll be staying; and behind the walls of the hacienda lies the dun, sun-washed shanty town where live the mostly black, partly indigenous community who farm the small plots into which the hacienda’s vast acreage has been divided.

After turning off the paved road on our approach to El Carmen, we pass a crumbling adobe wall with a fading message stenciled on it, which translates roughly: El Carmen, noble district of a valorous race of color. Glorious land of sport. Always welcoming, happy, and courteous, receives you with open arms. Shortly we’re forced to stop for a herd of burros chasing after a herd of goats munching in the bush. Another 100 meters down the dirt and gravel road we encounter a group of three little boys, the fifth, sixth, and seventh black people I’ve encountered in Peru, playing on the sandy berm above the road. One, holding a toy gun made of pieces of colored two-by-fours, smiles, waves, then shoots us, somehow congenially.

We drive along the estate wall and come to a gate and near death in a friendly near collision with an exiting truck. The truck driver smiles, waves, and evacuates as we drive into the square of the grand old Hacienda San Jose, while Xavier mutters something in Spanish that sounds like “moron” or else “mort.”

The Hacienda San Jose
With some time to myself at midafternoon at this elegant, Colonial-period residence with its sprawling, red-tiled veranda, I wander. Attached to the big house is an 18th Century baroque chapel the size of one of California’s missions. I stand in the courtyard and admire its old bone-white facade, wither a little in the reflected heat and light.

I enter the darkness of the ancient church, kneel down to pray for forgiveness, but am first distracted by the spectacular intricacies of the towering altar carved from dark Colombian oak. Then by the intrepid altar-dusting of a member of the staff. Three Our Fathers. Feel only a tiny bit better. I’ve never seen bloodier Christs than those in Peru. The tension of Lima is still roiling within me, but I find things I like in this quiet: the constant moaning of invisible mourning doves; the musty mission smell a charming mix of dust and Endust, for this seems to be a lovingly kept place where the battle can only be lost.

Walking about the grounds, I hear children on an out-of-tune piano playing “Que Sera Sera,” see a lonely burro in the field, anthropomorphize a burro in a field by calling it lonely, go into the main building in search of agua mineral.

Evening. A quiet dusk except for one rooster crowing. Footsteps echoing on the tiles of the veranda, where I sit facing west ,watching fields of tall grass with a stray dog swimming laps.

The Hacienda San Jose began life in 1650 as a Jesuit monastery. In the 18th Century, it was ceded to the Salazars, relatives of a prominent Jesuit, who moved in, and the monastery became a hacienda, or what we would call a plantation. The 17th Century monastics had built catacombs to bury their dead. The ranchers later used the two kilometers of catacomb tunnel beneath the house to hide from pirates who’d landed at the port at Pisco about twenty kilometers west of here. Later owners of the hacienda built a tunnel leading from Pisco directly to their slave quarters, which the catacombs had eventually become. Tunnel transport was said to be a good way to keep the slaves disoriented: arrive squinting at San Jose, birds flapping wings in the trees. Esta noche a caged parrot in the courtyard screeching like one of Salazar’s men is whipping a recalcitrant slave. A horse and more burros in the field, one baby mule stiffly running in circles, kicking up dust. Darkness falling fast. If not a timeless scene, then one with very little of our time to it.

Dinner at the hacienda is much like other restaurant meals I’ve had in Peru, hearty but bland. We have a good bottle of Argentinean wine, though, and I try to let the alcohol, the night sounds and the night quiet and the distance from Lima settle over me so that I will sleep.

The ceiling in my room is at least 20 feet high. There’s an opening up there, like a kind of vent, and I’m fairly certain I’m sharing the room with at least one bat, who keeps to himself, as do I.

Over the Wall
Much as I knew I’d want to take pictures, I failed to grab my camera when Xavier came to my room the next morning and said, “Let’s take a walk and meet some people.” It’s regrettable because immediately outside the wall three women stand around a portable, glass-encased statue of the Virgin surrounded by yellow and red roses, while one of the women – according to Xavier – preaches to the other two. I only understand her when she begins repeatedly proclaiming the name of God, as in, “Dios, Dios, Dios, Dios.” We don’t stay to listen and instead walk on into the village past one sheep and three stray dogs with flapping nipples. We stop momentarily for Xavier to answer a question of mine and when I look back toward the women I see they have hoisted the statue onto their shoulders and are making a kind of procession – either impromptu or just unattended – through the main street of the village. One of the buildings they pass, the most colorful little one-story shack on the street, is the Pentecostal church. In 1999, the Pentecostals are a relatively recent presence in Latin America. They’re working hard to usurp the centuries-long hold the Catholic Church has had on the souls of this part of the world, and are having great success here and in Mexico.

Ignoring the procession are two well-dressed women who stand outside the door to one home in a posture and at a precise distance from the occupant that would indicate to me the passive-aggressive methods of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. The women are holding little magazines for the household to see.

In the bright morning air, Xavier and I continue our walk beyond the hacienda’s back wall and into the one-road, mud bricked village of perhaps twenty families. This village of San Jose has a school, a day care center, an unpaved main street that is dusty except where it’s made muddy by urine: human, dog, sheep, goat urine. Quickly, a three-year old boy pops out of a dark doorway, his little piss-shooting dick in his hand. As we make our way along a well-worn footpath, immediately beyond the last of the finished houses, among the half-built abandoned ones, and between the adobe-walled fields of cotton of poor quality lined with a few banana trees, the garbage begins to mount. The flies thicken. The unmistakable scent of the feces of your own kind greets you aggressively. Along the road and on the edges of the cotton fields are disposed-of diapers bursting with runny baby crap, other, adult-like turds gathered into half-open pieces of paper. You keep thinking the stink will go away but it doesn’t. It stays exactly the same, no stronger or weaker than before, just persistent. Xavier, who admits to being a member of the wealthiest 5% of Peru, and who is an enthusiastic apologist for his lamented Fujimori, says this squalor is the direct result of the agrarian reform policies of the mid 1970’s. He utters what strikes me as the classic noblesse oblige argument: “When all of this land was owned by a benevolent rancher, he took care of these people. Then the land was taken away from its longtime owners, and a small piece given to each family of plantation workers, to make their own living off the land. And now look at them. For some reason, they don’t know how to take care of themselves. They have electricity and antennas so that they can watch television and listen to football games on the radio, but no sewers. Look at the poor quality of their cotton. But, it is easy to make them laugh.”

Later we go into a shack with a Coca Cola sign out front. It is intensely hot and I want a bottle of water. Xavier says they may not have any water for sale, but that the tap water at the hacienda, which is maybe 100 yards from the tienda, is safe to drink because it is well water. This might be true, but everything I’ve read about Peru says, above all, don’t drink the water. And anyway, I say, I want to buy something in there. Inside, the room is unlit. There is one glass case with bottles of Sprite and beer and Inca Kola. Xavier was right. There is no water. Off to the side of the room is a 10-year old girl doing her homework. We buy two bottles of yellow, syrupy Inca Kola and drink them standing there while the storekeeper goes in and out of the room and into the street trying to find change for the 10 sole bill I’ve paid with. As we wait, Xavier tells me the proud story of Inca Kola, how it was the only pop in the world that Coca Cola has been unable to usurp in local popularity, how it was the only yellow cola, and how it had a patent on its particular shade of piss yellow. Finally Coke came in and bought Inca.

While we are drinking and talking and waiting, the storekeeper’s second daughter, a beautiful and sweet six-year old called Genesis shows us I think every piece of homework she’s done all school year. A whole page of the letter L. A page of colored-in animals like dogs and pigs and sheep. A perfectly traced cat. Pages from a coloring book on the folklore tradition of Chincha. She keeps disappearing behind a curtain and returning with more sheets of paper. I suspect Genesis of being a Pentecostal.

Later, back again in the shanty town, in this San Jose -- that is, the urine-soaked, shit-strewn garbage dump behind the high walls of the gleaming Hacienda San Jose -- walking in the late afternoon, we stop so that Xavier may chat with the family of our El Carmen guide for tomorrow, Juan. I’m not privy to their conversation in Spanish and so am left to lean awkwardly against the front of their shack and look at them: one woman with a brown and broken tooth in the front of her mouth; a boy maybe 15, handsome, skinny, chest almost concave, shirtless in pleated wool trousers and gray sneakers. He is scratching the happy head of an energetic puppy who barks at everyone else but who wags his tail at the youngster. Otherwise the puppy seems to be freely ranging into any house he chooses in this little stretch of five or six earth-colored houses before which we stand or lean, as the case my be. Finally, there is a fat old woman in the group who when she is preparing to laugh first shifts her great breasts and her general bulk up and down several times prior to smiling, prior to sounding her giggle.

The next morning, again in the village behind the walls of the Hacienda San Jose, drinking Coca Cola with ice and talking to Xavier’s father’s driver who is here visiting the house of his sister (the broken-toothed woman from yesterday) and her husband, Roberto, I recall that I had come to El Carmen and San Jose not to educate myself on what’s happening here now, but only to witness the quaintness of it’s history. I think as I sit and listen to Xavier’s mysteriously stingy translation that the only music I’ve heard is some schmaltzy Latin pop by the son of Julio Iglesias (that latter day Spanish colonialist, type: cultural) playing over a tinny transistor radio. No guitars, no chekos, no quijadas de burros, no slave songs or dances.

Instead we sit in the cool, unlit living room and talk more of agrarian reform. Roberto owns five hectares of land one kilometer from this house. He grows only cotton. This year the price of cotton, which tends to fluctuate dramatically, is up. Turns out that a monument in the center of the main street honors Roberto’s father. He and one of his sons, not Roberto, are said to have been great goalkeepers. I photograph the whole group around the monument.

On our fourth day in San Jose we hear rumors of another white journalist in the area in search of a story similar to mine. That afternoon on the road to El Carmen we overtake a lanky, fair skinned young man walking. He turns out to be a journalist from Holland who’s been traveling Latin America and sending back the occasional dispatch. We pick him up and the three of us ride into El Carmen and sit smoking in the mostly empty Plaza de Armas. He tells us he is hot on the trail of some legendary Afro Peruvian musician I’ve never heard of. I feel ashamed of my own journalistic ineptitude, and try to cover this by giving him some of my contacts in Lima.

At night we head back to that burning city and everything feels like a bust except I’m still alive. For the ride back I’ve purchased a rosary which I do not show to Xavier but keep handy in my breast pocket. The slaves are out of Africa, the slaveholders long dead. The land barons have surrendered the land to the slave’s descendents. I recall a morning spent at the National Museum in Lima, following the emergence and decline and emergence and decline of progressively more accomplished civilizations, the final destruction of which is foreshadowed by the fact that all the writing on all the exhibits is in, and everyone around you is speaking, Spanish. The whole history of this nation, of this continent, is one of bloody metamorphosis. Soon I’ll be back in Lima amid fumes and poverty, music and traffic and chaos, amid all this passing human beauty of Peru.

Seen, circa 1992, West Sacramento

A public bus rolls haltingly through the low-slung hopelessness of West Sacramento, California. A family of four stands at a bus stop, two children with fudgesicles, their dark-haired father in a black tank top and bushy mustache, the lanky, harrowed-looking mother gazing toward nothing in the distance. Physically, she could be his sister. He may be out of work, they on the road with him. The summer afternoon in the wide open valley is hot. Sunlight off the white sidewalk hurts their eyes. Later, in the evening, the children are soothed with the noise of American television in motel rooms. McDonald's dinners. Dad with a six-pack on the little round table by the window. The blinds are down, the children on the edge of the bed, the mother lying face down in a stagnant, drying creek two blocks away, drunkenly taking in bits of what water remains. She is a high school graduate. He has been trained to drive big trucks. It is summer and the children have finished school, said goodbye to one or two other children, to a teacher who thought the boy was a poor student, who didn't know he'd had a sister in the lower grades. The father watches the television from the table, wonders where his wife could be.

Three Unforeseen Masterpieces

 

3 unforeseen masterpieces, multiple copies

A couple of years back, I had two unpublished essays in hand: this one here, about three great works of American nonfiction by three authors famous for things other than writing; and another, more personal one, that I thought was the best thing I'd ever written. The latter one, the personal one, wasn't quite done, but I thought that when it was I might submit it to The Believer. While I was finishing it, I submitted this literary one below. I expected them to reject it; while I had published many articles in GQ and some other local magazines, everything I had ever submitted to a literary publication had been rejected. Still, I figured that by the time they read and rejected this one, I'd have the other one finished, it would be the best thing I ever wrote, I would immediately follow up with it, and they would like it. But before that could happen, to my great surprise and even greater delight, they accepted this one here. There followed a long silence. A couple of times in the following months, I emailed asking for an update, but got little information in return. In the meantime, I finished the personal essay, submitted it, and it got rejected. It took another year and a half for edits on the accepted, literary essay to come, and several months more after my re-write, but eventually The Believer changed their minds about the piece and told me they wouldn't be publishing it after all. Neither would anyone else, I suspect. So, here it is, because I think it is interesting and that it might inspire a few people to read these three books, which will bring them pleasure. The Sarah Palin opening is slightly dated, but the point of it is clear enough, so I won't revise it with a more relevant name. (I'm so glad she's no longer relevant.)

To read the essay, please go here: 
Three Unforeseen Masterpieces: 
Grant's Personal Memoirs; Thomas Hart Benton's An Artist in America; Whittaker Chambers' Witness.*

* I know there's a typo in the introduction to the full essay, but blogspot won't let me correct it, for now...


From the essay:

There are examples, though admittedly moving ever deeper into America’s past, of great works of literature being produced by public figures whom we might not have thought capable of writing an undeniable literary gem. And in three particularly controversial cases, neither their bitterest enemies nor their harshest critics could naysay the literary force at work in narratives by three men each of whom had found fame without words: one as a zealot and informer, one as an iconoclastic muralist, one as a master of the art of war and a drunk who kept falling off his horse. What Whittaker Chambers, Thomas Hart Benton, and Ulysses S. Grant have in common is this: each at a critical point in his life wrote a brilliant autobiography evocative of his times, his country, and his soul. All three wrote books that betrayed an intimacy and skill with words unforeseen in an otherwise complex life. Each author achieved a singular, unmistakable tone. Each work is an invitation into the distinct and fertile mind of its creator.

Faulkner's Pants

Box of William Faulkner's pants, Oxford, Mississippi, Spring, 2010.

Photo: Jim O'Brien

Poem by Desmond O'Grady

This is one of those poems, like R.S. Thomas' "Song at the Year's Turning," that I can't really figure out but love very much anyway. I love "fisted flex of heart." Also how "staring staring silence" is revisited later with the "Unwinking eyes of saints" and "I felt the Churcheyed, fidget fear." I love the structure of the three long sentences that make up the three stanzas, and the tone of frustration, perhaps tinged with surrender. Perhaps not tinged with surrender. I'm not really sure. I like the outraged shock in the question of the title. Is it outraged shock? Is it a sort of mocking of teenage petulance? There's some kind of returning going on, but is it to an emotion? Or a place? And if it's to a place, is it a physical place or a spiritual one? Maybe it's all of these things. Or none of them. I can't really figure it out. But still I love this poem by the Irishman, Desmond O'Grady, which I found in his 1967 collection called The Dark Edge of Europe.

Was I Supposed to Know?

When,

In a blue-sharp, fallow sky,

With wind in hair

And grey of rock, angled by ages, sharpening the eye,

I

Stamped down that cut stone stair

Towards sand and sea

And clawed, nails scratching, down from the deaf-mute cliffs to where

Were track and trees below --

Was I supposed to know?

When,

With senses quick as compass

And tightened skin,

In breaking clearing, fell on Church and Churchyard moss

I,

Helpless, toeheeled in

To Christ and Cross

And staring staring silence, felt small as a pin,

Felt schoolboy years ago --

Was I supposed to know?

Was I supposed to know

That each fisted flex of heart

And wide of eye,

Each pitch of thought in bone-sprung skull; each stutter start

Of unravelled blood in my

Knit flesh and bone;

And every studied part I cast me as a boy;

That all my rebel scorn

And mock at prayer,

My every bedded bitch and spilled out kids unborn,

Were

All marked mine with care --

By some high Law

Or some high guiding Plan -- to lead me back to where,

Again,

With coffin smell of pew

And chris of Cross,

Unwinking eyes of saints and hushed confession queue --

For one loud nervous boot

Of frightened heart,

I felt the Churcheyed, fidget fear of schooltied youth?