NO FAILED TREES

Brian Whitener

There are no failed trees.

First the lanes seem different: less sickness, more sickness. Each morning you watch the transition: solid to liquid to gas back to solid.

You meditate on the ocean. Place it next to and then inside your body. Always in movement. Each crest a trough like your body: what feels solid is a liquid, liquid a gas. The wave is a membrane as you are: a container, holding life while also open to a plunge from above.

In your dream, you wake up to your door moving and there is terror. It is your neighbor asking about the gas. You wake up and no one is there.

You drop acid and walk out into the ocean: you feel the joy of each drop of water at being so close to so many they love.

The first time you listen to the news and can’t stop crying. You organize your fear. You’ve watched before fear of the state be politicized, then disappearance, this will be no different but the road seems so long. So many without time. Every small collateral damage memory loss, houses lost, lives preyed upon even time to hold a memory is lost. Like running from a hurricane and you can’t find your people but then you do but they are too slick with rain and slip through your grasp.

The sun sets but into a body. Our bodies and needs and desires, too big, but also on the verge of failing.

In three pages of her essay “In Praise of Love,” Julia Kristeva declares: 1) love is rebirth 2) love mingles sexuality and ideals 3) love is wild and immeasurable 4) love calls forth vulnerability and vigilance 5) there is an abyss between men and women. It is hard to say anything and not try to say everything.

“For the first time, love and friendship weren’t separate things” is not the most memorable line in DeJong’s Modern Love. What draws me to it is it shows once you say love you’ve already said so much else.

You did everything that was typical; after wrestling you fantasized. If you try to trace it back you find it entwined with pleasure and hurt. Crushes and groups and sporadic. Always drawn to the figure of the membrane. You have something you don’t want but can’t get rid of it.

It is harder to write about depression because at first it feels like a selfinflicted wound.

In a 1990s Vogue interview Lil’ Kim says: “It may take time before we all start rapping about flowers.” You cut out this interview and carry it with you from apartment to apartment for twenty years. You are not a rapper but when will you start to write of flowers?

You think of Alexander Bogdanov giving himself a blood transfusion he wanted to be immortal but also he was a fierce defender of the democratization of scientific knowledge. Today’s immortals all have access to hospitals and we have forgotten Bogdanov gave himself successfully any number of transfusions which is something more than just a contingency.

Having escaped from Nazi Germany Erich Fromm wrote that authoritarian societies claim democratic ones are marred by selfishness thus the call to fascists to be unselfish and pliable. Even today when you remember Fromm’s rejoinder you are surprised: he writes that the only counter to a “readiness for submission” is self-love.

In a review of Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization Paul Mattick writes: “There is no market in despair; whereas the market in hope and health becomes the larger the greater the despair.” You saved on your computer a picture of a cloud called an “undular bore” which looks like a great oval tube multiplying itself into infinity across the sky. You don’t seek it out when you are sad but whenever you see it you feel less overwhelmed. You also have saved the image of a senior center’s sign engulfed in flames the sign reads closed due to COVID. Water falls from a cloud and finds the lowest point. When you think of the past that is what you see water always finding the lowest point.

What depression teaches you is that the chair is not a thing, it is in motion. In allowing thoughts to pass, we self-abolish. Depression registers life without connection is death and the pain of even the perception of losing access to it is enough to cause death itself. A thought or feeling rises through a pot of boiling water a droplet of air trapped inside a body of water, a membrane, an inversion of a cloud when it reaches the surface we are reborn.

The body becomes a machine an aversion. We spin out in a stasis of a frozen world, motionless in the echoing boom of regimented time, regimented bodies. Birds in flight fall, language fails, thoughts die on their branch. You place the body of a loved one next to yours and search for the pull of its gravity. Infinitesimal but you find it and motion starts again. The depressed mind is the ultimate proof of dialectic’s truth: the energy required to stop motion is infinite.

You dunk your face in cold water, you radically accept, you focus on each wave of emotion. You journal: “All writing has to be for survival.” Your phone holds only pictures of clouds each one holds itself imperceptibly together, each wants to connect. You look at a cloud and remember a line that you love from CrimethInc.: “When we fight on the basis of … love … we open ourselves to serve as a channel through which everything beautiful in the world can defend itself.” You would defend this cloud, but then you remember the line is about things defending themselves. Love is the channel from the inside to the outside but you too are a channel. Maybe this is also what Fromm meant by self-love: defend yourself, in self-defense be immortal like a flower.

WATER & RICE

Vi Khi Nao

rice I

Each grain is one

Eye slanted towards hell, Water me until my body

Becomes water II

Soaked in artificial agriculture.

My impulse for her Takes too long

To take a bath In a washbasin rice III

Called desire & compulsion.

Grown in Asia

To treat sprains & bruises: Rest now ice water IV

Before I compress You in my own mountain.

Colorless & tasteless rice V

I want him commercial & cold, Dressed in oxygen & hydrogen. His viscosity is my tension, This ion of temporality.

Wild in a swampy paddy

Thrashing with husk, I want her flooding me On my hillsides, in long terms Sleeping in me like a crescent.

ME AND THE EARTH, DESTROYING ONE ANOTHER

Elaine Kahn

On holy ground I walk, nursing myself, my brains. Star lights grease the water like a pinball machine.

I watch a stranger fall asleep while sitting in a chair. Waves push into shore. I piss in a boat. How life claims the total it withdraws from. I gesture in the shape of myself.

I am trying not to mind what happens. I still like the way my life feels in the rain. The way the night falls in my mind. A bell rings over the horizon like a curse word.

Beauty has no loyalty to what is moral. A fire sky, a toilet, a red rotary phone.