Common Place 11: The Middle Country by John J. Parman

THE MIDDLE COUNTRY

COMMON PLACE NO. 11 / Summer 2018

In our age of hard yet porous borders, delimiting this long stretch of now-time, as Walter Benjamin called it, is difficult. We think weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re somewhere altogether else, but then our minds wander. I took notes throughout the journey, but I find that what matters more is what Benjamin also noted: the reception of the past in the unfolding present, its aftereffects. (Berkeley, Bastille Day, 2018)

THE MIDDLE COUNTRY “…this confrontation of one system of thought with another provided him with an analogy for what he believed to be the relations between different historical paradigms or mindsets or problematiques or conjectures within the Western tradition: stretches of our past are, according to Foucault, another country …”—Eric Griffiths, “Lists,” If Not Critical, Oxford, 2018, page 12. 1. 2. I’m here, but where’s here’s unclear, Your birch trees are not mine. Mine a known/unknown, quantum place were river aspens. Fishing of false footings and sprung traps, brought me there, I tell myself. narratives that kept spirits Your wood lapboards are also hopeful over seven years, another kind. Mine were unreliable recaps. painted, noticed as I walked to the rocks where I once swam. From Mount Retrospect, distance Your small meal isn’t the one obscures likenesses. The land I ate alone, an oat scone the seasons color, wind shaped and dark coffee with steamed milk. like the body my hands knew It was here we met, the eve even as much else of you of our sabbatical year, eluded me; minutiae tentative and then a dream. I write sometimes about you. surface, your hands, head, and lips The dreams I have are empty, close as they were once, like this— but you figure in poems. (my fingers press together)— These dreams I dream have phantoms, and yet you walk by quickly two of them to be precise. or turn away, or won’t turn, Sometimes one takes possession resolved and silent. Blame falls of my wife. I hear a curse of sorts, half of one, a fourth. on me for waiting half your life. They also figure in poems. Dying misleads. Occasions Their small meals aren’t like the ones don’t repeat, as I learned twice, I had alone. Not that they a June-in-January’s stand out. Birches and aspens desire for winter’s end, are similar in moonlight amends, turns back, time again. I imagine. Night joins us, equally possessed by sleep. Time divides and unites us. Our letters never sync. Space proves random, barely speak unless you’re ready. I wait. Across time I’m immortal, so never rushed. Beds are where the warp is felt, or one place.

3. In the end, a terrace, drink placed on a glass-topped table, the sun at an angle, green close and distant, the ocean intuited, a long walk through a terrain of white deer and their predators—not yet, he thinks, drink in hand, turning his head vaguely north, squinting, puts it down to find his hat. Alone, no one left to love or one to love not likely here, although he thinks of her. She resisted description, he was told over coffee, declined objectivity as pinned down, a specimen. Although he’d foresworn the rites, spring’s fecund buzz caught him out. Possession’s a zero sum, a transient comet. And he doesn’t figure in her thoughts. Benign, a null. But then this was where it always started. Ex nihilo, as they say. He’d made a go with that, long the game, chancing, playing odds, and no one odder than him. Took her measure: a season insufficient proof of love as he conceived it, what we intimate between us, close as one flesh, exchanging genes. All this flashed by, the terrace platform to his reverie.

4. Reading prods connections. God has two names; one can’t be said. Amid fire, four letters like a billboard. So, they wrote and behind this were the words, slippery and contingent. A seven myself, saunter at a distance, uninvolved. When she speaks to me, it’s books, and dreams above my station. (The Angel of History a woman and translator.) The myth is plausible, yes? Destiny and consequence, falling in, then falling out, calling, not calling, never, not sever, entanglement’s a vine that persists, I guess. Union with all, a woman specifically, get with child, births non-duality, God nameless, paternity suit hard to serve, to prove. I am. Okay, let’s run with that: bits named yet claimed whole whose stone rolled, divine in triplicate, here and there—the accounts differ. The A of H whispers French like Baudelaire, first modern. We attend. We studied French. Watching as Zeus charms and scores, Nameless can only look on. Rules are set, flouted, a calf prompts massacre, simple folk, the credulous, are struck down. Nameless wants to see the swell. Seraphim mask the Virgin’s pleasure and her agony. This will repeat, will repeat. (The women beat their breasts, priests mark a cadence: their taking a tattoo of beds, floorboards.)

5. The Goldberg Variations were often playing. Gould hummed as he played, notoriously, a busker or an eccentric at the piano, possibly sick of it, the audience sent away. No crowd for him. I liked her balcony, almost a room, no view except the car repair and the sideways look. I remember it precisely, every book. This was later. Recently, I dreamt of her old place, another In her bed—reasonable, as she’d moved. There were two main rooms, I think, while this had one, colors reversed as dreams do. I took number 41, and wrote no poems as I rode. They all came with, hidden as prose, to end up on a Zurich terrace. Still later, when she laughed scornfully in a café, I wrote this, too. By then, the humming stopped.

6. Think but don’t think or rather don’t name (slanted light across shelves, reflections, depth in a reveal, my cousin’s dog next to the car). I resist and then the shades of Walter Benjamin and Baudelaire slip past, and I read how in Tokyo a writer toiled for two decades, then wrote up the accumulated lonely, each garbed in narrative. Mine are in several drawers and closets, fragments used to grind ink and spot the bathroom floor with blood. What do they see before expiring? Desired and yet panic, probably, misgivings. Not that I would know, could know. Write it and others may copy, it’s said. Red the blood in round spots. This can be named and thought. 7. Oysters, she said, repeating the patois of the kitchen. She was an ocean creature. Another pried them open, a sea of longing, mourning, abandonment, abundance. 8. Always leaving, or we leave. Too much: we drift off, storm off; anger and regret follow. Who was close retreats from us or we from them. In the end, no difference, only ruins where her temples were. Some call these remnants generative: one person’s debris, unseen, is another’s mystery. I wandered in my torn coat, then found remnants on the ground. I dreamt of Walser’s jacket, green and new, his sister’s token.

9. How is it I think of her? Memories of her kitchen and her cats, blue fabric, a drama in seven acts, but then they go on, these lives. Others enter them. It’s odd how they invert the picture. A small marriage, someone said. I want to write it out, say how blue, a blue I chose, stays when much else was put away. Who’s betrayed if I think this? It’s all burnt anyway, save our late-arriving selves. 10. The urge to write it down, words suggesting rawness; organs spoken as demotic nouns and horizontality expressed. Yet identity is fixed in mind by such small things as gait or how she gasps. Words for the aftermath, too, a lexicon unique, worn from thumbing, no antidote for this strep life, alien to oneself, the tendrils torn from mouth to heart. It’s all gone and yet she came, the sheets stained off-white, the walls slightly marked. I was slow, my pen was slow, at a remove yet still close. Blood, sperm, and time were my ink. The particulars figured: each lover a universe that burned, became gravity in a fatal sense. No chance my pen encompassed her.

11. How we contrive to end up in sideways intercourse! Domesticity tries to tame this by conflating it with sleep, but we resist even as we acquiesce. We want and need the artifice, often supplied randomly by nature, the wind billowing the curtains to mimic briefly a pregnant belly, or the light moving across a bed. In these self-chosen scenes, we speak sometimes from and to our realest selves. We like a bed, but rutting’s what we’re there to do. Naturally, we deny this to each other. “Oh, no!” There’s no lie committed by this fiction. As a friend’s mother put it, “Not terrible either way.” For issue is a hazard of traditional horizontality. Arise! Arise! Vertical, we stagger from bed to crib or lie under siege, pawed or overheard, our quarters exposed as invariably too small. We must get away, we tell ourselves, but the pairs who flee may vary from issue’s parentage. We breed, not always by design.

12. Life’s relentless chronology tricks us into allowing later events to overshadow what went before. With biography, the completeness of a life and the distance from the subject flatten the narrative, although subjecting it to the biographer’s biases. In dreams, though, there’s often a remarkable immediacy.

Two Fragments from A WALK IN THE WOODS When I was 16, my sister and I traveled around Europe together. She was a junior abroad, studying at the Sorbonne, and I worked like a dog delivering newspapers to join her on our summer vacation. I think our parents doubted that I could do it, but I rose stoically most mornings at 4:30 and rode my threespeed black Rudge past the railroad station and under the trestle to where my route began. My memory of that route is caught up in the woods I rode through as dawn broke. Once a family of dwarf rabbits, tiny and brown, broke into a run before me—wildlife persisting amid suburban houses. Looking back, that town seems so bucolic, the opposite of suburbs as we’ve come to know them. In 1963, New Jersey was still often rural—farms, meadows, and expanses of woods. My father took me skiing once on some hillside, lending me his father’s wooden skis, brought to America from Norway. I arrived in Paris on 13 July, spending the evening with my sister on the balcony of Madame Mercier’s apartment on rue Bonaparte, which looked down on all the dancing. I spotted a cabin mate from the Aurelia, the Italian liner we took to Le Havre along with 1,100 other students. Madame Mercier was a friend of my mother’s father. She was small but imposing. Her apartment was filled with the furniture and art of another era, but her sensibility reflected everything she’d lived through. One of my sister’s friends, attached to the Embassy of the Cameroon, got us tickets to an evening performance of its National Dance Company at a huge and massively hot old theater. For hours, every kind of tribal dance was performed, even those of pygmies, as the audience set sweating and enthralled. After my mother died, I noted at her funeral that her life took in both the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union’s collapse. Her birth in August 1915 also preceded the Armenian Massacre, nine days of terror that cost a million lives. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, my mother studied Russian on public television, getting up early to watch the program. She had difficulty with foreign languages, but was able to thank a visiting Russian oil chemist in his language when my parents went to a convention in Texas. I knew my mother best in the period from the early 1950s through my high-school graduation in 1965. She was 35 when we arrived in Singapore and 50 when they quit New Jersey for Washington, D.C., where they rented a narrow townhouse in Georgetown and bought a 30-foot Canadian sloop they kept on Chesapeake Bay. My mother decided to secure the degree she abandoned when she married my father. We both got our B.A. degrees in 1970. Then she slowly went mad—strident at the outset. The political context in which it happened masked its seriousness. With each successive year, she got worse. On the plane, flying back to Washington in 1984 to deal with her, I read Ivan Illich’s Gender and wondered if her problems were physical or cultural. Faced with her full-bore insanity, it was hard to sustain the thesis that she was the victim of oppression. What struck me was how like a speed addict she’d become, unable to sleep and plagued by paranoia. Yet there were also moments of lucidity and pathos. That my father had fled affected her, even as she proclaimed her independence. We shared a lot of anxieties, but hers were amped up to max. Her values were inverted, too. A handful of dead leaves became objects of great beauty. Each trip in the car was like traveling with Don Quixote. My parents’ tiny house in Alexandria was a place of despair; every object felt like residue. Thanks to the help of my mother’s sister Sylvia and my cousin Cynthia—and my mother, too, who told the clearly alcoholic judge that my father was a secret drinker—she was committed and restored to sanity. In the annals of my family, this really was a miracle. My mother would have ended up a bag lady otherwise. Soon after her death, I dreamt of my mother as her younger self. She wore one of her fashionable outfits—in Singapore, she’d had her tailors knock off Chanel—and seemed entirely engaged and happy, in her element in a place where she felt modern and cosmopolitan, the most herself in her own view.

THE MIDDLE COUNTRY 13. The road south of Olema wound through dense, encroaching woods, straightening as I approached the lagoon. Bolinas forked west and Stinson lay ahead. Heat brings traffic; it was winter. I chose the cot on the landing to sleep alone. Waves all night, the sea down the block. Writing was my nominal purpose; to wait my reality. Coming, going: the way it’s said is this, but I doubt it is. Another time: Hood Canal, mountains across an inlet, a deck, a moment of certainty— brief, eclipsed by time, but there. Where life touches this other thing signs appear that we carry along. Waves all night, the moon rose and fell, their sum infinity or zero, full or empty. No shaman now to give them potency, no way stations, side altars, or relics, just the road, its hubcap shrines obscured, articles of faith scattered behind me. 14. Where life took them both before it took them apart— this is the gist of it, true; in retrospect, suspect. He thought how love makes women happy. They come abundantly, their gift. Men are incidental, projected on. Years before, parting near, his tattered, paper heart in hand. Time unwraps the carapace or you let go. Across a table: no distance. True is on a terrace now. Where else no longer matters, yet he set it out like tagger art or a tattooed arm.

15. A terrace opera. Love like a Russian gun: act three or five, a shot is heard. Bang! The dog is briefly deafened. He barks. The chorus sings. ‘Oh!’ from one wall, but no answer. Yet the question vexes. Love illusive, its quantum form evades scrutiny. The dog runs in circles, chasing it. But no, the scene has changed: one damn thing after another. Between the sexes, a screen. What you thought you saw, wasn’t. It was some other thing. Wrong is how it boils down; what you felt, love’s facsimile. A scrim, a crime, a good time. There is no truth, only sound mixed with movement, only heat and rivulets, the climax as predicted: ‘Oh! Oh! Oh!’ Again the dog is deafened. He cries, the chorus silent. 16. A grand piano, played on around the corner, audible where we sat, the surface flat, the gazes implied. Stanzas taken out would sing the whole saga: love’s acts mixed with reality, desire and the divides we cross to occasion it, how men lack what women have, to flip Freud’s theory on its head, how showered with gifts they are. We can’t believe it, then luck deserts us. I came back to this the other day, the song ragged in memory, pianissimo.

17. Dining room, monochromatic, companion kempt and waiter mechanical. Walk, train, walk. At market, two bags, a friend decades not seen, families recounted, grandchildren, one expected. At lunch, mentioned and I knocked for luck, the gods. This narrowed life, momentarily or maybe not, abandoning habits that took me a distance. “Hanoi,” a colleague told me earlier. “Better than China.” Narrow names the plants hereabouts, honors household gods, terrain with view, tilt, fault, and lions somewhere further up. Narrow is a memory, why I traveled once.

18. Greens. Kitchens are a leitmotif, domestic notes that speak to how passion’s corralled as conception or more simply as a marriage, untrammeled. Fruits. Preserves are laid in. What was spun is woven. Questions are raised, complaints made: “Don’t explain to me.” Dresses. A short, striped one derails without intent. Happens. Another’s house is another’s. Rooms. It’s so small a place the spines’ titles can be read. What favored quotes, then? In my mind, you moan them out. No issue, though, no harm done. Only my poems get with child.

19. The surrealism of imposed constraint gives each sound a meaning; instrument and player both, improvising on a score, but first preparing, tuning the body’s pitch, its voice, rhythm, timbre. If a torso’s taken on, one wonders, what songs are sung? Fifteen years. Seven years. I write them out carelessly, then reconsider: how beauty’s expected, but arrives without warning. I made a point of speaking up, raised by presence as spring rouses bees. Each offspring’s ornament passed along. She has her bearing. Her mind’s hand writes, addresses envelopes. Words too are desired. 20. I was 29. She was younger. From Tennessee, country girl, we shared a class. She married an older man, big guy, had kids. A year before, finally talked. I got what he was about, a good man. I have the card from the wake. She’s there in her black dress, that smile of hers, her pearls. I don’t remember that she smoked. Mortality is going somewhere distant, maybe Patagonia (I mention it because my cousin wants to go there. She’s living in a bus in Dogpatch to save up money for the trip.) First Class on Czech Air, perhaps, or Air India’s DDT sprayers and torn seats. Everything comes undone, organs failing, radios silent, sinking, sleeping. On my phone, they suggest I pay upfront for the burial. Forget it. Cardboard boxes are cheap. Find me floating in the bay, aflame, Patagonia written on one foot.

21. At breakfast, you were, I was. I watched you walking home, your woman’s gait long-legged. A child is singing who is not ours. Nothing is ours it’s said. Like cats we pass through, mostly silent, but yowling in heat. 22. Striations of my parenthetical life unlike an escarpment viewed or a great basin flown over, great swathes of time set out in public, whereas mine are self-contained, to be expressed as gestures, elements. They seem inconsequential now, the songs remembered but unsung. Tracing the ribbon of the scars, the blind may find a kind of sense. Where we were is so much dust behind us now, or lye. Acid in the face, a crevice dried up, these are time’s insults, some of them. Her hair’s a chestnut hue, as Stendhal named it. Bent slow, she regains youth as anecdotes form. That country’s not her native place, but then who claims to know where she belongs? Time has left her hair alone, an exception to its iron rule. If I touch it, perhaps a talisman like a Rhino’s horn, a lock for mortality’s key. A rise.

23. I like the way you pin down identity. Mine is in theory pinned: offspring, etc., but fluid, as I’ve written. Women anchor it. It may be that I’ve spent my life in their company, learning how I’m more like them in some ways, although a man, once a boy, never wanting to be other than this but aware how the borders shade. It’s my lasting sense that women rouse themselves. Men are just straw dogs, to fuck then toss away if they make the mistake of bedding them, and few will resist. In this respect marriage serves a need: sublimate, as you put it, get on with other things.

24. Once all those sheaves, waved about, would be like displaying the sheets without the requisite bridal blood. Life compressed them. Thrown here and there, our sweet prose, and later condemned to the fire. Affection is the last to go, detached from hope. I thought I saw you. No. The bench solid but you an illusion. You’re away, leaving traces. “Who are you?” you used to ask. I don’t know. Not the words, or perhaps the words. 25. Eons ago, an airbrush age, My father went upriver with his anthropological lens. In my mind’s eye, a woman looks back at him, her daughter unclothed, staring, the ferry like a train passing through, only slow as a man’s gaze. 26. Walking across the city in the afternoon, there’s no distance suddenly and then there is, time a concertina too when we grab it at both ends.

27. Oh, how the words (I think of you running up the hill) miss and hit. Outside, rain. The rug’s Iranian. When she wanted me (I think of crossing the road, an act of will), then it was fine. There’s no weighing to be done, no balance; there’s only (I was like a ghost) pain. 28. Time noticeably slows down. Conversation opens out like a film. An afternoon could pass. It takes that long. “Children are the end result,” I heard the therapist point out. In films, there’s denouement of some sort. We come back to it. “I didn’t catch that part.” “Nowhere to go,” the therapist said. It had no meaning, yet it did. She said it was the thing she liked.

Along with weaving, I sometimes make digital photo-collages. These are from 2014.