Publishers’ Note Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl, written in San Francisco in 1955-56, was the real news behind the newspaper headlines of the 1950s in Cold Warring America. The cover of this issue of Psychic Swamp pays homage to San Francisco’s City Lights Bookstore Pocket Poets chap book edition of Howl. A critic called it “verbal vomit,” maybe the appropriate thing for Ginsberg to have done considering the state of things in that era. Erin Lierl’s prose poem is a homage to New Orleans, a sister city to San Francisco. She writes:
Allen Ginsberg “Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky! Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs! They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us! Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river! Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!” --Howl, San Francisco 1955-56
I looked at the river and saw a real river. Walking along the bayou: white birds, fishermen, shells, the glint keeping up with me as I walked along the levee, grass bifurcating, sprawling up out of the cement. Louisiana. I said it out loud: Louisiana. I was proud-not truly proud, but pretending to be proud, watching myself wear the color of proud—or imagining a teacher-lady about my age, though taller than me, American and proud of being of a place that no one will ever understand. Perhaps it is the most mysterious place of all. More alive than it needs to be, its aliveness is like a drunkenness, a speedy alive-ness, an intoxication with life.
Psychic Swamp 2 The Surregional Review John P. Clark + Stephen Duplantier + Max Cafard Individual copyrights may apply. Center for Gulf South History and Culture, Inc. D. Eric Bookhardt, Director www.psychicswamp.info Published in New Orleans, November 2013
Prowl by Erin Lierl
Wind
chimes prowl, roam in packs. Sonya: “It would be so
much less stressful to work in a coffee shop.” Oreana: “Maybe I can get paid for some writing while I’m away.” Me: “If I can make enough money…”
Place has given way. I wake up poisoned. I do things
automatically. This pull between my ribs-- the ribs of an alien being. Thoughts make waves in my mind. Flesh hangs from bones. “Writing” opens its belly-drawers, full of nightmares and wisps of debris. Erin Lierl is a much-traveled correspondent of Psychic Swamp. Erin studied at Loyola in New Orleans, and also in India. She later spent several years doing volunteer work in India, Thailand, and Burma. When she is in New Orleans she is a street poet. She sells poems for her walk-up poetry customers while they wait, typing them on an old manual typewriter. It's the freshest poetry available anywhere. Psychic Swamp 3
“You’re creating this yourself,” Sandiman would say. “You’re
making things bad.”
But there is no sweetness, no laughter-- only defeated people
with their bar tabs. Winter stretches out bleakly.
Wind chimes knock together. Stages sag under heavy fruits.
Will I work again in the temple of forgetfulness? Birds are singing. I have forgotten my mind. Forgotten my mind, I have forgotten my mind.
The Quarter is far away. A young man wanders in it. He un-
screwed the bars of my window and hopped in.
“You can’t do anything,” he noticed.
For a long time, I have haunted.
“I love myself,” Oreana’s mother says, “when I read what I
wrote in my journal in my twenties. I was going to start an orphanage, create a community…I didn’t do any of it, but that’s ok because I did other great things. I wanted to be an accumulator of experience…I think all three of us at this table can relate to that.” But be wary of any kind of accumulation.
Sandiman: “We were in the car a minute ago. Now we’re under
the tree. That moment is gone. It’s dead.” Lucita says the past never dies. They are both right.
Bikes rattle by. New Orleans, infected with development. I
want to go up high, but there is no up-high. There is only the river-the river of death and the tree of life.
What can I find, what can I find. The end of things, the be-
ginning of things. The moaning of the wind-chimes. The guts of civilization-- find them everywhere. What did I learn on the roadside? The hollowness of words-- India with indecipherable eyes, India with an ancient hunger. She looked past me as if I weren’t even there.
This is me, vibrating like a bell. This is me, rippling like Psychic Swamp 4
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water. A woman who is no longer young, watching the lines fold on her face. Windows open and close their throats. Hypnotic, uncleaned. I am at home with the wind-chimes and the space-heaters.
Perhaps there is only one story. The moan of the train,
drained of all romance. The wheeze of the space-heater, laden with regret. This body, hung from these bones. Clapboard and hopes. The wind tears through our hairs.
“What if money had an expiration date?” I will go out into the streets full of fog and uncoil my long
yarn. The story of what? Of the city that disappeared. Police cars with their zipper sounds, their whines, their complaints. Cypresses drip orange-brown needles. Hear the train: mountainous sound, gorgeous gift of sound. Like a moaning beast, like memory and the sea. Leaves quiver in the white sky. Wind chimes give their warning.
Sandiman bleeds out, becomes a myth, two-dimensional. I for-
get the exact face of his face. The end, in the hair of the willows. The truth in little rivulets.
A dream of being stalked by a bounty killer and sleeping in
a different house each night. In a cavern there were native Americans with masks, with horns, floating on the shores of a river. I’ve dreamt them before, under dark trees, in water.
I woke from a deep sleep, before the alarm. Lucita sat up. I
fatefully started coffee. I put on black work pants, looked at myself in the mirror. We are all prisoners.
“For what is a nation-state but a prison with a flag on it?”
I drove to work skating, spewing in every direction. Black-
haired students pry into themselves, try to bring something out—something of value. Human life is a series of losses. I sit perched above Psychic Swamp 6
Psychic Swamp 7
this room full of people, feeling acutely the things I’m not. Any way one goes, something is lost.
The lake laps waves on the steps. They break and ripple,
forming little wire cages, then smoothen out. A plastic net holds the ground. Puddles in the muddy matted grass blow in the wind, tremble in the wind. A pelican floats turning in circles, flies up onto the levee. A Doritos bag somersaults down the steps. A seagull walks through a puddle. The sun comes out and touches my skin. The lake turns green.
There is still some meaning to grasp. Our wants are ciphers
written in a forgotten language. We see them for their meaning, their implication. But they are no more than their form, a random shape. We are what has been forgotten.
Patrick passes by, looking healthy. A waltz ends. A home-
less man is rousted from his slumber on the sidewalk. The weather is warmer. Something has changed. TisArt blows into my mind: a warm gust from the West. The Iranian mask-shop man leans picturesquely on a pole, smoking, his legs crossed. Pineapple lights dance. Harmonicas…the mask-shop lady smiles and waves. A red-eyed black man lifts boxes into the new trash truck. He smiles at me—gold teeth—and waves a gloved hand. I remember: I was happy once.
Conditioned since beginningless time…Rain has come. The twi-
light brightens as the streets begin to shine. The clouds are sails. Pink hangs behind the blue in a clot. Steven, the steel guitar player from Tennessee, straightens his tie. My eyes blister with tears of unknown origin. Steven’s strings have clogged noses, as I do. They sing about mountains, and redheads by the road, of umbrellas and memories that become shapeless, hiding under time. Beginningless time.
The sky has gone lavender—the most confusing place between Psychic Swamp 8
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blue and purple. Last night’s fog made the world larger, artful in the branches of the trees.
Zorba: “Your leash is longer than the leashes of most men.
But the mind is like a grocer. It always keeps the leash intact. It takes folly to snap the leash.”
A man dressed as a tree eats his food off the newspaper
box. Another man leans on the Rouse’s building with a sign: “Homeless. Thanks.”
I hurried to finish the story—but it was written in me al-
ready. They all are. No more questions: I know in a place beyond words.
Doreen plays “Hot time in the Old Town Tonight.” I can see
her family getting older. A cloud passes over things. Raven kisses me lewdly. Rain coming. Caged within my city, I seek things-- as if I would find them in the streets, by looking.
Two train kids have with one another a gentle, dumb-eyed ro-
mance. “I looked everywhere for a single person I could relate to, but I drank all by myself and I still can’t forget.” His eyes are streaked red. He has dreadlocks, orange over-alls.
Doreen’s music comes in and out like the tide.
“I’m not like Zorba,” says my mind.
The strange warmth brings back memories… Watching the balconies with my cells purring years ago, walking here with Patrick, his new eyes hungry for glittering balconies in the twilight.
A musician looks for a parking spot. The evening slips into
itself. The old city is in the plants, who remember. I wade through myself. The fog, with death in it. Rain. The evening blue in that piece of sky. A sadness that has no shape.
Walking across the train tracks, the sounds of trains, of Psychic Swamp 10
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boats, of insects, converged and ticked and sounded as I hoped they would. I was full of people. There are no words for these things. We can say “longing”, but it is not enough. I miss people I don’t know. Death closes in on the innocent things and the good things.
The pain is not real pain; it is the illusion of pain. The
greyness, thick and slow. The world doesn’t look like me. I can’t find myself in it. Reality is full of stories, things opening like flowers, like seeds opening. Little orgasms at the edges of things. Chills down my legs, wind chimes knocking together.
When was the last time I was in my skin? When did I begin
believing in time? The wall grows darker: a winter evening wanes at my back. I hear the purring of cars over the wet street, the hissing of air pushing leaves over one another, the squeaking of a gate, and wind chimes. My eyes hunger for light. Pangs, sudden anguish. There is always a withholding, there is always an elaboration, there is always a bit of truth sliding down the cracks.
We will be safe from ourselves someday. Chaos fires in lit-
tle chains. Memories crackle in my brain. I love everything. I wake up homeless and cool. A flock of long-necked birds, beautiful and strange, reflecting in puddles. Strange weights lying on my spirit. What can be done? I am standing on nothing, floating in space. I grasp at filaments. I am falling, bumping against other falling objects. January hisses outside.
Frozen fingers hauling home the typewriter, thinking. Ali
played the Santur: the delicate hammers, the gas fire dancing. Oreana with swinging earrings, the sunlight creeping away. Doreen with her head back, singing. Wisdom has receded, curling down around my feet.
An emptiness is before me. It’s Friday. Sonya is sleeping. I
feel a color in my chest. Boiling water, boiling city, seething, crumPsychic Swamp 12
Psychic Swamp 13
bling, falling apart. An ocean of time, the slow melting of me into nothing. Raven clean-shaven kissing my hair. Sandiman’s man’s smell, his jacket cold after being outside. His room full of sky and rocks.
The cold in my fingertips, the hum of my mind. The mind, stor-
ing memories, making decisions. The illusion of continuity, of self. The brain is tricky and a little stupid. It doesn’t seem to want to be free. A dream: tea-cups of peyote on the stairs that lead to the autonomous zone. It was a custom. I just took a sip.
Another dream: Mexico, a literary festival, the rolling
planes, a baby. It was like India in its deliriousness, in its opulent decay. I was reading Allan’s chronicle aloud, but the letters were strange. There was an abandoned city. We stood at its heels.
My heart stirs like a lady sleeping. The trees are like ster-
ile old men. The dreams in us are proof-- of what, I can’t remember. Perhaps there is nothing more beautiful than this spare moment with the door open to January sunlight and toothless old-man trees—the yard laden with Mardi Gras beads and Christmas lights and shadows that soften and harden, a jar filled partially with coffee which I am drinking, and planes purring through the sky. In the mirror my face grows hollow in places so I look old and bald and sick. I miss people I don’t know.
Sitting by the lake, I knew. I sketched the river bend at dusk.
My dreams are close to me, bubbling up, nearly at the surface of the waking, riding alongside me. Sonya with her doe-eyes talking of escaping. Am I she? Or is she I? Bank envelopes, Virgin Mary candles, a hanging dress in the window. Broken bikes and working bikes, the clank of bikes over potholes. I am hurt by my leaving, and that is as it should be.
It’s easy for people who have moved to the center to talk of Psychic Swamp 14
Psychic Swamp 15
pain that bears lessons. They should not forget about the people who live on the edge, where nothing is real, where pain is just pain-- meaningless, futile pain. I saw Patrick in the sun, taking air into himself, preparing to expel it in song. His t-shirt fell smooth over his ribs, and the sun was white and blinding on the edges of his face. His features were hazed, butl I could see his two grey alien eyes looking into mine. He smiled with song in his mouth.
I looked at the river and saw a real river. Walking along the
bayou: white birds, fishermen, shells, the glint keeping up with me as I walked along the levee, grass bifurcating, sprawling up out of the cement. Louisiana. I said it out loud: Louisiana. I was proud-- not truly proud, but pretending to be proud, watching myself wear the color of proud—or imagining a teacher-lady about my age, though taller than me, American and proud of being of a place that no one will ever understand. Perhaps it is the most mysterious place of all. More alive than it needs to be, its aliveness is like a drunkenness, a speedy alive-ness, an intoxication with life.
Ladies sit in a row on the curb, their hair clipped and dyed,
like a bunch of eunuchs, with sunglasses and newly-manufactured “tops”. Edna is with me, getting tired in the water. Mardi Gras for a moment abates. The drunken fly in my red wine... Patrick’s cowboy shirt with the design down the back—the peacock manner of the cowboy singers.
The street repeats scenes of other days. I see the shreds of
things that have ended, the beginnings of things to come. Mardi Gras masks leer from balconies as the sun goes down. I remember that it is January—time of darkness, of shrill intoxication. The death that is in Mardi Gras, the swarming abyss of the beyond—then we wake up to Psychic Swamp 16
Psychic Swamp 17
spring, having survived.
I feel the beauty welling up. Something mysterious lays down
at sunset. People walk away with their instruments cased. I lean after them, searching for a face-- but whose?
A river runs under the days, under my mind. I pluck away at
my little strings, but no one can hear me. I dreamed again of that city with its petals fallen off, that purple-skied city after everyone had gone.
Full moon night. Parades in the neighborhood, spring warmth.
Cypresses like arteries shooting up out of the sidewalks. Palms waver their blades on the twisty streets of the Marigny where for a moment I am alive. My body feels coarse and sore to the touch. I miss people being people. The people in the streets are not people but a crowd, weighted by what they’re suffering through.
The lake water is dark. I woke with a wordless question—
I go back into myself. The week is lodged in the eternity of the semester. The days take off their hats. The lamps burn, the temperature changes. Leaves wag and cars scar across the city, pass through it like a knife. Pierced by this movement, we change together.
I lay down my swords. They turn to groggy women, rub their
eyes, lie on the pavement like worms, become shining puddles that reflect a sky full of power-lines. Music has left me. Words don’t penetrate. The moon sometimes hides behind itself. Is that possible? I wander through emptiness: an empty classroom where I feel like an accountant, a city where I feel like a ghost. It doesn’t hurt. It’s what’s coming that hurts.
I put all my poems and all my notes in a paper bag and burn
them beside the canal. Each of us knows the truth, as we know the moon Psychic Swamp 18
Psychic Swamp 19
is there even when it’s hidden. Each of us knows, though our knowing be eclipsed. The stories are all in me.
The floors are strewn with glitter, feathers. My old friends
look at me out of wells. Their faces waver greyly, their eyes are hopeful and not hopeful at the same time. They want, but know better than to expect. They plead but know the answer is not coming. They are and aren’t. One world leads into another.
Wisdom, come down. There is a young man I know with a big,
golden heart that goes on its way to be ruined, to be ruined by this country and its foul stinking patterns. Patterns of thought and patterns of pain. The train complains. Things go on becoming. I have broken the evening like a twig over my knee. Where are all my stories?
Ali in the wind with living eyes. Pictures of flying birds
in a glass cabinet. Fog on the river. St. Louis Cathedral lit with pink spotlights, news crews set up on the railroad tracks. Black heavy undulations shining.
Saturday with its lamps on, with its shoes off, the sky rum-
bling. The pain is a show, a reproduction of pain. There is chaos in me, and there are good things. The streets gurgle.
“I’m not ready!” someone cries.
Musicians are out, some with nice eyes and some with mean
eyes. A brass band peppers the night. Horns discordant from three directions. Bounce music blasting from a passing truck. A sudden whiff of freedom: night people strolling, somewhere a tambourine. A couple passes me, the man with a cane clinking. Voices in the steps of Cafe Rose Nicaud. Another year sings for its supper. I can see the singer’s bare back moving catlike, slowly, rocking back and forth before the microphone. She lifts her chin and her voice rolls out like red velvet. Psychic Swamp 20
Psychic Swamp 21
Dizzy brass sounds from DBA: the sounds of years past. A tuba and cymbal and a drum: the sound of Mardi Gras and forgetting.
Above the river there were the same stars as always. A rock
was nearly covered by the opaque waters, the water full of death and unimaginable filth. Close to the mystery, I watch it where I’m perched. It’s a gift to sit close to the mystery.
“It was a lovely and difficult time.”
The strings of three guitars, moon-curves in the cheeks of
brave young men—one like a mermaid on the bow of a ship, one like the moss that grows on a stone, and one like a steel rail, smelling of burning and reflecting the sky. The eyes of musicians—how they turn inward, how they meet one another and speak—their secret laughter—the elation that comes only after its source has passed.
Memories open like jewelry boxes with pop-up spinning bal-
lerinas—the sounds of roosters in the soft morning light, a tapestry undulating over a window, wind chimes in a tree, beads and stones, the smell of wire...I watch these ballerinas spin in circles. It is complete. And I am completion, with nothing to prove, nothing to expect from any man or woman.
Dryness in the garden. Nothing growing inside. All the old
people are somewhere else. All the new people are somewhere else. I have put down some tools and not picked up others. I’m in the empty square, even before square one. I watch my wanting swell, then go away. I have gone deep into something, gone under something, somewhere without words, without cheeks or eyebrows, without clothes or pencils. I contract into a single point, an impossible entity—without size, without contour. It is malice. It is malice with no outlet, an implosion.
Crickets, laughter, engines. The city is seized by festival Psychic Swamp 22
Psychic Swamp 23
like a fever spasm. Its face is sinister. The revelers are large and brutish, their eyes strange, their attention fleeting. They wear shining plastic and colored wigs, and some of them smile like children.
The pain is like a dream, or a photograph of pain. You argue
in your sleep, Sonya says. A wet sludge on Frenchmen Street. Glittering people drift by like riverboats. Even if he came, the noise would not stop. Night has fallen. Insects are singing. It’s warm.
Heaviness is the root of lightness. The novella perhaps will
fall off like a deformed fruit. I will go somewhere. I am afraid of it. Beautiful young musicians in Flora’s playing cards, playing piano, talking about getting out of town. The sky has a frightening Kentucky cold in it and the bare branches scrape at the swirl of pale light. I will use what I can. The sky is diffused with melon pink. I rise too. White pelicans float down the canal. When a fish jumps, the pelican paddles toward it. A fish jumps somewhere else, and the pelican follows it.
A chance rises out of me, like a soul leaving its body, steam-
like, a scythe skating across the river. I am pushing leaves around with my toes in a whirlpool round a gutter.
I know with tremendous knowing about dark corners and pa-
thetic truths. I avoid coarse edges. My heart is broken not for myself but for the others, for Steven and Ali and the streets we stand on, for the hurt that rips through the flesh of people, through their dignity, through the pieces of sidewalk, through the young and old.
I have been wanting the wrong way. My wanting has been a
weapon, a vent for old resentments. I wanted what “they” couldn’t give me, so fiercely I forgot to really need it, to move toward it and to love it as a wanter should. I wanted as a substitute for the huge and namePsychic Swamp 24
Psychic Swamp 25
less terror of being myself. All those passageways, all that fear. An island-man cut adrift in the flow of the economy, doing his own photosynthesis, smiling on the flood of moments... Perhaps he is not there-- only this stone lodged in the current, and I come to crash upon his apartness, his foreignness, finding there richness, like wind and sun together in a tree... but those days sink under the horizon of December, and these days are raw, pull apart the curtains, show the abyss gaping all around...
In the rain by the river, I run clear of entanglements. May-
flies are dying in the houses and schools. The river is not deep. Not deep with the depth of the work to be done. I touched the lamppost blistering with age and stood under the wreathed sky. I am the only one who has made this exact prison of her fantasy. No other touches this lamppost under this sky, in a prison just like this that I have delicately carved out of sea. I am not Edna, nor am I a chambermaid or chestnut seller, nor a dark-eyed death-cry streaking through her hatred, with her fingers against the jaws of a dead city. I am only my mother’s daughter: a good woman that no one wants.
I can scarcely hold the pen. The light refracts on my eyes. I
hold myself carefully together, like a wire dancer with a leg en attitude. I’ve lost my keys, but they will find me-- my steel keys like train-tracks smelling of loss. Wherever this city is climbing, I don’t want to go.
Time flows over a cliff. Its long fingers lift dust and peb-
bles like a tongue. I don’t bring anything out, just put things in. Growing big and swollen. Others leave the womb and I stay inside, not ready. Time is canceling everything. Soon, there will be no more inside. Reality fills up with time, now taking over the cliff, so there isn’t any cliff, just the sea floor. I am not in touch with the deep of death, Psychic Swamp 26
Psychic Swamp 27
where my corpse will find me, where I will part ways with the face with which I have fought.
New Orleans keeps me in her lap, then sometimes gets bored
and stands up. The cold gets inside me. Time goes on whipping. There is nothing to write. A skeleton in the sunset, the older people inside the young people-- I see them coming out.
I wake with a sadness for things happening far away. The
weather is wet. It thunders. There is no feeling of time. What am I guilty of? Rain-drops tick. I think about my plan. I lay it to rest. I am tied to it through the belly.
Wind chimes tell stories in their language. Mexico comes
flocking back to me. The neighborhood clunks and purrs with weekend. A radio talks through a wall, someone throws things from a height. There is a murmur now and then as of someone sleeping.
I sang my ranchera and we listened to the rain. I felt my
love die-- a little feeling in my heart like an eyelid going down. The world becomes real while I watch. There was always a world-- a bike strung with beads, a black chair, an easel. Now I get back into my body, like someone coming through the window. I become real, and the space and objects around me crystallize. They exist in the world with me. We are real together.
Louisiana yesterday looked so much like herself, minty
spring green the same color in the oaks and in the cypresses and in the palms. Young green. Caverns in me, sleeping fears, the birds wild in the trees and a dead love I drag around. I will take it apart and put it in the river. Time wanders on, childlike, playing games. I hear Olive. A deep and soft love in me, a mint-green light.
I keep myself in days that are almost unreal, that barb and
sift and leave everything unopened, repeat themselves. I listen for Psychic Swamp 28
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something that lives overtop the highway, overtop the CBD, something magenta and connected to the old days.
The fortress of the present decomposes, disintegrates. I
search and find nothing. The inner world is barren, jammed. I have lost my balance.
Moonlight behind clouds. My heart is sweet, giving off sweet-
ness. I come out to meet the street like an expectant lover, stomach jumping. The disc of the moon is swept-across by clouds. After days without without a break in the clouds, it is a miracle. Tonight my angel returns to port. The moon is free. A whole swath of sky is cleared, is blue. A woman passes. Her face is good.
The temperature drops. Then, something reptilian sneaks into
the moment. I am all knuckles, my kindness out of tune, the sky naked, my self down around my ankles. Open, open.
My naked writing: half-made, lame, awkward, twisted in on it-
self. My whole being is this way-- not quite put-together, inverted and inept, ingrown, shadowy, redundant.
Now the whole sky is washed clear, and in my heart a sadness
sits like a sleeping bird—it sleeps with its eyes open. Or is it simply the despair that comes with being-- a by-product of nonbeing as it is shed? Old rancors rise. Booze evaporates under the moon. Fierce hope drags misery behind it like a twist of vine.
The year rolls around in its bed-- black shoulders shine in
the window of the Spotted Cat. Puddles shake. I have been here all year, participating in its sleep, roaming around the edges of its glory, eyes turned always on an inner question.
I sat in the glowing front room of Lucita’s house with a gui-
tar-player whose tuning pegs were broken, and the silent deep trails leading there were heavy. The only answer to such weight is eclipse, aversion, closing, waiting. Psychic Swamp 30
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My throat catches as I think about what might have been--
the beauty of it overwhelms; how big things are, how gentle they have been. Most of the story can’t be seen. It happened in a shadow-realm beyond time, memory, accounting—it is lost. It was a fight in the dark with adversaries who have vanished, who may have only existed as props, hypothetically.
Magicians ruffle scarves for a crowd. Then, the crowd dissi-
pates. The world rumbles. Time closes in, but lets me resting in it, eternal. One glove on, the pen in my right hand, leaning on my typewriter table, filling with words this notebook like a well with fish swimming in it, some nearer and others further from the surface.
Then sidles in an amazing discomfort with dimension itself.
People walking seem to be upside-down, their faces turned backwards, their features rearranged—eyes where their mouths should be. They crowd together, all walking backward, talking out of their foreheads. They walk without walking, carrying images in their brains of themselves in other places, with other faces. Each one murders the moment with a frightening will. They walk toward death with glum expressions, in boots, with shopping bags, the blood just a gesture of blood in their veins. They drag behind them parachutes filled with terrors, long dark hallways in their eyes. Their feet massage the street. Their shadows move under them like souls stuck in a purgatory. They decay from the inside out.
There is a sound under everything. I am whole, but little
flags mark the longing, as if I were a landscape that nowhere, failing to be itself, assumed. Failures fall like fruit from trees. Looking through me-holes, a tunnel of me wraps around the emptiness, and little plumes of me-sadness stroke the emptiness, and me gets in the way of seeing the truth. I plan, hook myself to contingencies. I hope, I don’t Psychic Swamp 32
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remember that I am already finished.
The world spreads its feathers, parades. I have fears, and
use my grocer’s scales to think. Shadows claw in, reproaches of people once known but now only extrapolated. Freed of my old self, I feel like a baby moose, wobbly in its knees, not sure what so much of me can do. Bells that don’t ring are pinned to the window-frame. I hear bells that ring.
Over a plain of myself; a river of me lies under my path,
while my small self scrabbles around on the surface, hauling things with her: a broken guitar, a net full of receipts, monkey-skulls, nicked marbles, rocks with eyes. Sandiman haunts my mornings.
The trees look like what they really are. Death is every-
where, grotesque and beautiful, commonplace. The days pass like a silent parade, nothing happening.
Watching two men cross Orleans, each with his own way of
knowing the world, each with his way of making money, the things he can do, the concerns he addresses and the satisfaction with which he addresses them.
The paint on the sidewalks speaks to me, is art. I walk with
real being. Everything whines under the weight of this “me”, this monstrosity, this broken record, this disaster-being, her invisible chains. Can I face the people; shouldn’t I hide? The train yard, the wharf, the river walk, the bridge, the French Quarter roofs slanting, the sun coming through an old window. I see myself in the city, and curled up underneath it.
The sky has its logic, its maddening perspective, annoying in
its completeness, the way it’s thought of everything. One mind has already swallowed everything. Nothing matters to that mind. It is ready, always has been ready, isn’t interested in the birdcage. Another mind Psychic Swamp 34
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can’t stop looking under stones, opening doors where it knows it will find things that hurt. It likes to cry, can’t wait till it gets to cry again, holding a shard of broken mirror in its hand. Is there another mind in there? There is the jackal that rarely gets to come out.
Raven ushers me into my chair, jostling it open, kissing me,
striding off with his strange walk. A violin pulses, stuffed-up. a magician heads home for the night. My face is old and parched. Children in strollers like severed heads. Girls in dresses and boots-- blue-eyed traveller girls with violins, banjos, sweet, clear yodels. People I knew wheel by, old now, delivering food. This little box contains terror.
“There’s nothing wrong with you,” I tell myself. “You are ex-
actly what you are.”
The river was intricate with ripples. The lights spilled
down like paint off the ferry: is it a dream? Red, white, yellow, spilling like a fire in streaks down the black river. A voice on a speaker—I couldn’t understand the words. The paddle left a broad wake, and beyond it the rest of the river rose to the horizon like a wall.
I squatted, staring, for once merely obeying, free of will,
magnetized, watching the sun run down to the shore. A boat went by: “Crystal Island”. I looked at the windows, the angle of the lines. There was a lot of world to look at. The buildings on the West Bank were lit gold. My suffering had its shoes off, waiting gently on the road. I am tangled in myself. The world swirls around pain, like the curve of space, whereon ride tourists with high white socks and bulky camera cases, balding men with backpacks, pedicabs, taxi drivers like sculptures of stone, white people from other states with colored drinks in plastic cups. Women melted and swollen by time, Americans like monkeys with shopping bags. Everyone looks sallow and deathly ill. I’m done, ring the bells. I’m done. Psychic Swamp 36
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I am in love with love; I have more than what I had before.
Beside the river I knelt and a pain was in me perhaps unlike other pains—the pain had grown to match my growth—it threatened to blow me over.
“This is you,” I explained to myself. “This is the other side
of joy.”
An entire continent of pain, an ocean of it breaking and
breaking and breaking and breaking. Opening, moving from inside to out, like a fountain fueled by an ocean, eating me steadily away—perhaps into some shape that later I will recognize, perhaps the shape of a fountain that a young mother will sit upon in the midst of her own desolation.
I get on. The ride sweeps under me. The ride turns to ash. I
am dreaming. The beautiful, beautiful clouds of smoke they blow. My love is a dimple in space-time, and big people roll around it, and redeyed perfect people roll around it, and staccato stylish people swing around it, and Americans roll around it.
A basic sadness, my illness gently unfolding— this sea of
walls that love me, these old hands, a rising in my heart—desolate people. The evening has a mystical face, a rock face. I’m walking through a wet, foggy landscape, picking knots out of my hair, shaking my head. I’m looking for the good thing I left here. I know I left it here, but nothing can be seen. I go over my own tracks...
The trombonist is a virtuoso—how did I never notice it? The
streets have in them the shadows of terror, the terrible mundane, the ceasing of struggles in the static emulsion of eternity. See how we are prisoners—the money we earn, just to pay for the things we need, just to pay it back. We imagine it will give us freedom, but we are always its slaves. The mythical freedom that is supposed to define America. Psychic Swamp 38
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The immaculate depression of the servers, their suspicious emphasis on their sanity. I feel I am underneath something, trapped.
Patrick looked beautiful passing, waving in the sun—good,
like blood, like home. I am lost—everything vague, abortive, leading nowhere. The incredible brown eyes, wet in the evening light, of the mask shop man’s older brother. A precise, kind harmonica down the block. A great loss lying over things, like a dusting of snow that reflecting the sky makes things brighter.
The sidewalks were lavender and blue, broken in the patterns
of veins, speckled with oblong oak leaves in the sunshine. I spoke with Raven: “What time do you get here?” “I sleep in the street, darling.” I walked on, finding nothing I didn’t already know. Ali comes crossing the street and sits with his eyes from an ancient world, his eyes that aren’t reflected in this city.
The center of me is tied to my death like an umbilical cord.
It will not be surprised. Its job is to pull me there. Sighing walking on Esplanade, I felt it happen: New Orleans became home.
Is every work of art an atonement for a breach with reality?
Along the city my eyes drag. Other people cannot know, cannot know what I know... but what then matters? There’s no one in here—just a racket, things knocking together. People form relationships, making-believe that they are real. At moments, perhaps we all see ourselves clearly: a void filled with incidental objects, a random assemblage of parts, making a clatter—a gaping hole sparsely ornamented with squiggles and dots— because of the presence of another sentient being, we have to keep up the walls, continue with the charade, be “ourselves”. The abyss is hardly a home, but the lie is perhaps more terrifying.
It’s a cage made of fiction. Sometimes I suspect I don’t even
want to go outside. It’s predictable in here; it lets me keep my dignity. Psychic Swamp 40
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“But she is oldish, and she’s alone? But she is ugly, and she has no family? Maybe she’s a whore, maybe she’s crazy...” I don’t trust the darkness in me, this goat-eye of mine.
Listless sun-soaked jug band, red blood-face I can’t help
looking into in the miracle sun. Loss, in her blue jeans, with her gymsculpted legs. The wrong man does the wrong dance and pulls a bottle of Evan Williams from his hip pocket. A woman claps hopelessly at her strollered infant. The hurt bursts and slides down like ink through heavy water. Nothing in me works. Everything is slow, sleeping. Patrick speaks to me, more tattooed, more brittle than before, a stranger. But when he sings, it’s familiar. Even though I knew him briefly, long ago, I’ve missed him, miss him still..
“I’m leaving town in a week or so, myself.”
He will bike to California. What should I be afraid of? Every-
thing is possible.
Girls take over the spot, singing bluegrass songs with banjo,
fiddle, guitar, sundresses, flowers, boots.
Helicopter seeds lie one-winged on the porch steps, fading.
The river is no longer a river—after seeing something so many times, it disappears. I work with my writing until there is nothing left—no story, no feeling, no message.
Being, peaceful, or being, dull. Being, mournful, being burning:
a light that will extinguish. When was the first time you learned the sun would die? That everything disappears, betrays itself?
Hopelessness is also hope. I move easily in a quiet, open city.
This space is provided by army, weapons, violence. Where do words meet violence? Paper covers rock? Psychic Swamp 42
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No. Words don’t solve matters of the heart. We can hold onto
them only so far—then we descend into color and texture, while the words bobble shimmering above. Deeper still is the place where freedom and violence are made. Here, words have never been invented. -30-
No. Words don’t solve matters of the heart. We can hold onto them only so far—then we descend into color and texture, while the words bobble shimmering above. Deeper still is the place where freedom and violence are made. Here, words have never been invented. Psychic Swamp 44
The Impossible Community An interview with John P. Clark by Alyce Santoro John P. Clark, a social ecologist/cultural theorist/activist operating out of Loyola University in New Orleans, specializes in the “...potential of a positive practice of social transformation and social regeneration based on nondominating mutual aid and cooperation”; In other words, tall orders. His latest book, titled The Impossible Community: Realizing Communitarian Anarchism, outlines historical cooperative political/social/ecological movements, provides examples of successful initiatives currently in progress, and suggests that the present and future wellbeing of all life on earth is dependent upon grassroots revolution of thought and action. Alyce Santoro is an artist with an endless supply of ideas and projects. There is no easy way to describe her work. You must see it for yourself at alycesantoro.com. AS: To social ecologists, environmental issues are, at their core, socio-economic issues. The same sense of separateness that justifies our exploitation and domination of one another makes possible similar acts of violence against nature. As long as we remain oblivious to underlying flaws in our collective logic (i.e.: that it is reasonable to endlessly consume non-renewable resources on a finite planet; that peaceful, just societies can emerge out of competitive, hierarchical frameworks) any responses we could devise will be insufficient to significantly alter our current course. A social ecological approach to “saving the environment” would require balancing relationships between humans and other humans, and between humans and all other phenomena. It sounds like a tall order…and it is. In light of the obvious destructive effects of systems within which we are obliged to strive for quantity of goods for one over quality of life for all, we are now faced with two choices: pull off the impossible, or perish.
Reprinted from Synergetic Omnisolution (http://www.synergeticomnisolution.blogspot.com)
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The idea of “the impossible community” is that the community of solidarity and liberation appears as an impossibility within the confines of these structures of domination. So, the only viable alternative is to create—here and now—those impossible communities. We need to stop demanding the impossiJPC: Change can only happen now. That’s when we ble and simply do what is impossible. The strongest evidence for the possibility of something, including do all our living, thinking and acting. So, we need the impossible, is its actual existence. So, to begin to focus on how we can be most effective in creatwith, we have to do some serious anarchaeology, ing forms of social transformation now. We need uncovering the rich history of free community that to rethink the temporality of change and also the lies under layers of domination and the ideology of spatiality of change. This means rethinking the old domination. But, above all, we have to get in touch cliché “think globally, act locally.” The challenge is with the practice of free community that is very to think and act locally and globally at the same time. In fact, we can’t avoid acting locally and glob- much alive today, so that these living traditions can be nurtured and realized further. ally simultaneously, since global phenomena are largely made up of local ones and the magnitude I have in mind, historically, the enormous legacy of of the global impacts of local action are constantly increasing. But there’s another crucial dimension to cooperative community, including many tribal traditions, the caring labor of women and traditional this issue. peoples, historical practices of local direct democWe need to continue to occupy, in the sense of truly racy, movements for workers’ self-management, the liberating putatively public spaces, but we also have vast history of intentional community, and the multitude of experiments in cooperative production, to consider carefully the ways in which we are occupied, in the sense of being dominated. To change distribution, consumption, and living. This history continues today, especially on the margins of and in the dominant structures, we need to find a way to break free from their dominance, which is not only the gaps within the system of domination, and thus provides the “ethical substantiality,” the realized and institutional, but also ideological, imaginary, and embodied social good, that is our best source of practical. Our lives are determined powerfully by our shared systems of ideas, our collective fantasies, hope, guidance, and inspiration. and our common forms of social practice, or ethos. Occupy is part of the process that I am describing. The only effective way to short circuit this order of I devoted a lot of time to Occupy, and believe that, determination is to create, and then live, momentto-moment, other institutional, ideological, imagi- whatever its limitations, it has been enormously significant in engaging large numbers of people at nary, and practical realities—realities that embody freedom, justice and solidarity. To be effective, this the grassroots level, and giving them experience in participatory, directly democratic and consensual must take place above all on the level of our most forms of decision-making. This kind of experience basic, primary communities. is invaluable to the kind of libertarian communitarAS: Are you suggesting that social transformation can happen now, without waiting for radical change in the dominant political structure? Do you see “the impossible community” as a viable next phase in the evolution of the OCCUPY movement?
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the communities of compassion and solidarity that developed in the wake of the disaster were the closest thing to my social ideal that I have ever experienced. ian project described in the book. In such a project, the primary focus is on the regeneration of communities of solidarity and liberation through such specific forms as affinity groups, base communities, and intentional communities. At the same time, it requires expanding our efforts horizontally, through complementary cooperative projects in spheres such as the workplace, education, media and cultural creation, and vertically, through federative efforts at successive levels from the local, through the regional, to the global. Protest, occupation, and various forms of direct action must of course continue. But the creative, regenerative dimension must become our primary focus. Bakunin said, famously, that “the urge to destroy is a creative urge also.” There is truth in this; however, we need to avoid lapsing into the leftist pitfalls of reactivity and the culture of permanent protest. Above all, we must not forget that that “the urge to create is a creative urge also.”
“freedom” is a floating signifier, a flexible concept that can be appropriated for diverse and often conflicting purposes. It’s also a master signifier, in that it has a kind of ineffable charismatic power that everyone wants to latch on to. So the big question is what we mean by freedom.
JPC: Libertarians are people who are dedicated to defending and expanding freedom. However,
The term “libertarian” was invented in New Orleans in the 1850’s by the French anarchist philosopher
The “Third Concept of Liberty” that I discuss in the book proposes that freedom has several crucial dimensions. One of these, the one that seems almost intuitive for Americans, is “negative freedom,” or freedom from coercion, often epitomized as “not being told what to do.” This idea must be developed into a larger conception of freedom from all forms of domination. While domination functions through overt force and the threat of force, it also (and more usually) operates through other diverse strategies and tactics of control. The second dimension of freedom is personal and communal self-determination. This means, above all, that we are able to live in a community that is a collective expresAS: It seems the words “libertarian” and “anarchy” sion of our social being and our social ideals, rather can be broadly interpreted; “communitarian”, on the than being an obstacle to them. Finally, and most significantly, freedom means personal and comother hand, seems somewhat less ambiguous. Can you provide some basic definitions/current context munal realization or flourishing, the achievement of the good in our personal and communal lives. for these constantly-morphing terms?
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Joseph Déjacque. While he was here, Déjacque wrote his most important work, L’Humanisphère, and an important letter to Proudhon, the most famous anarchist thinker of the time. Despite their agreement in opposing the centralized state, Déjacque harshly criticized Proudhon on two grounds, first, for his sexism and support for patriarchy, and secondly, for his belief that the contribution of each individual to the value of a product could be determined. For Déjacque, true freedom requires the abolition of all historic forms of domination, including, obviously, the age-old system of domination of women by men. It also requires that production and distribution be designed to fulfill the needs of all, rather than being based on a spurious individualist theory of value and entitlement. Déjacque concluded in his letter that because of Proudhon’s acceptance of patriarchy and economic injustice, he was not a true libertaire or libertarian. Déjacque’s analysis also explains the meaning of anarchism in its deepest sense. This is discussed in the chapter of The Impossible Community entitled “Against Principalities and Powers.” Anarchism is not merely an opposition to coercion or to any particular form of domination, such as the centralized state. Rather, it is the quest for freedom from all forms of domination—capitalism, the state, patriarchy, racial and ethnic oppression, bureaucratic and technological domination, gender and sex role oppression, and the domination of other species and of nature. Which brings us to “communitarianism.” In the United States, this term usually has a relatively conservative connotation, and is juxtaposed to liberalism in mainstream political thought. In South Asia and Britain, it’s a more popularized term, often with pejorative undertones, and is linked to strong ethnic and religious identification and group conflicts. As I,
and many others, use it, it is an affirmation of the age-old tradition of free, self-determining community. This might also be termed “communism,” and often has been, though unfortunately this term has been co-opted by the forces of domination, just as the word “libertarian” has. Nevertheless, I like to pose the seemingly paradoxical question: “Why is communism so good in practice, but it never seems to work in theory?” What most people think of as “communism” has not been communism at all, but rather a form of oppressive state capitalism or techno-bureaucratic despotism, justified through an ideology (a theory that doesn’t work) that disguises it as “communism.” Such a system has often been very effective as a form of domination, but not as a free, just or humane form of social organization. We might call it “authoritarian communism,” but in reality, not only is it not really communism, it is in a very precise sense a form of anti-communism, the negation of communal autonomy. Historically, it has always feared real communities, taken power away from them, and done its best to crush or dissolve them. There is, on the other hand, a long tradition of libertarian communism, which is the form of organization taken by communities of solidarity and liberation. It has been practiced in indigenous societies, in intentional communities (such as the most radical early kibbutzim in Israel and the Gandhian ashrams or cooperative eco-communities in India), in the self-managed collectives during the Spanish Revolution, in affinity groups, in base communities, and in many families. It has constituted communism, in the sense of the autonomous self-determination of the community. It has often worked quite well.
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We can also call this form of social organization “communitarianism.” I find this term to be politically crucial today, above all, because I see the key step in personal and social transformation to be at the level of the person-in-community and each person’s moment-to-moment practice within that community. We show that another world is possible by making another world actual. We need to rethink politics as world creation, though it is equally a process of world preservation. I think this is why much of the most effective communitarian anarchist practice has come from groups with a strong spiritual basis that generates an all-encompassing ethos. This is true of groups that come out of long traditions, like the Catholic Worker Movement, the Gandhian Sarvodaya Movement, engaged Buddhism and Daoism, and indigenous people’s movements. But it is also true of small groups that draw on many communal and spiritual traditions and the great libertarian communitarian heritage, while finding their own way.
JPC: We can be in the midst of crisis without noticing it. Disaster came to New Orleans long before Hurricane Katrina, but its true severity wasn’t noticed. Before Katrina New Orleans was already the incarceration capital of the world, it had one of the highest murder rates in the country, the education system was devastated, medical care was a disgrace for a large segment of the community, and there were growing ecological threats such as massive coastal erosion–we had already lost an area of wetlands the size of the state of Delaware. Before Katrina, one saw bumper stickers that said “New Orleans: Third World and Proud of it.” After Katrina, we understood better what it means to be “Third World,” or more accurately, to be on the Periphery, on the margins of Empire. The awareness is more akin to horror than to pride.
In New Orleans, as in the world in general, we have been faced with the tragic problems of denial vs. disavowal. Denial is the inability to allow an idea to enter consciousness, though it always enters in strange, distorted forms. Disavowal is the inability to keep in one’s mind what one knows. It’s the problem The emphasis on the primary community in no of the elusive obvious. People often can remember way excludes the need for simultaneous action at every other level. The quest for direct participatory everything except the most important thing. These mechanisms often occur in families that have major democracy, for worker self-management, and for liberation from imperialist occupation, for example, problems such as violence, sexual abuse, betrayal, victimization. Sometimes the problem cannot even be cannot wait. However, the only way that these recognized. Sometimes everyone knows but learns struggles can avoid cooptation is if they are rooted how to forget that they know. The same mechanisms in liberatory transformation at the personal and work on the global level. In fact, the single most communal level. important development taking place on our planet is met with denial and disavowal. AS: On page 17 of your book you say, “What At the beginning of each semester I tell every one of emerges out of traumatic marginalization and exclusion is liberatory communitarian potentiality, my classes, no matter what the topic of the course may be, that I want to mention one thing: We are not any historical necessity.” Could you talk about living in the sixth great mass extinction of life on disaster-as-catalyst and about New Orleans as a earth. If an extraterrestrial came to visit the Earth and particularly striking model of the inherent interwent back to report on what was happening here, this connectedness of the social and the ecological? Psychic Swamp 52
would certainly be the number one item. News from Earth: “They’re going through a kind of planetary disaster that has only happened six times in several billion years!” Yet, when I go through this routine, I find that most of my students had never been told this news in their twelve-plus years of formal education. Denial and disavowal reign supreme. One thing that I learned from the Katrina experience is that the traumatic event can sometimes undo processes of denial and disavowal and awaken us to the gravity of our predicament. Such trauma can result in regression, which can be expressed in fundamentalism, reactionary movements, racism, nationalism, fascism, and the clamor for an authoritarian leader. We saw this in post-Katrina New Orleans, in the form of racist vigilantes, police repression, and prison atrocities. Or, it can result a new breakthrough, a new awakening, a new inspiration to act creatively and communally. The Katrina disaster was the most devastating experience I have lived through, but also the most uplifting and inspiring one. Post-Katrina New Orleans was a horrifying, heart-breaking and post-apocalyptic world in many ways. But the communities of compassion and solidarity that developed in the wake of the disaster were the closest thing to my social ideal that I have ever experienced. I feel fortunate to have spent a significant period of time living and working with groups of people devoting themselves fully to serving the real needs of people and communities. In such times of communal solidarity, we can see the emergence of that “Beloved Community” that Martin Luther King spoke about. This experience was a major inspiration for what I described in the book as “The Impossible Community.”
of the traumatic breakthrough. In the Buddhist tradition, the primary teaching is that one must be shaken out of complacency and come to the shocking realization of the universality of sickness, aging, and death, if one is ever to attain wisdom and compassion. In the Jewish tradition, a break with everyday reality and the traumatic experience of the sacred is described the beginning of wisdom. In the vision quest of indigenous traditions, extreme stresses are part of the path to a spiritual breakthrough. Both Western and Asian mysticism describe a traumatic “dark night of the soul” that is part of the path to spiritual awakening. Finally, dialectic is a kind of philosophical vision quest that works through traumatic challenges to all stereotyped thinking. In each case, trauma releases the ability to look at the gaps in our supposed reality and the incoherence in our conventional accounts of the world. Trauma is an encounter with death, but it is also an opportunity for rebirth. It helps us to see the possibility of the impossible and to think the unthinkable.
Many traditions have recognized the importance Psychic Swamp 53
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