History

We are our history.

Too complex for words, we are every casual and causal link that has built to this moment, from Adam’s dust to the steel and rubber that transports us into one another’s lives and pulls us apart.

World Knowledge (BW)

All of human history at our fingertips and we’re stuck on the last page, reading over and over again as madmen and mad women tear it all down, to start over again or to rebuild, but not to make a better world for our children; for we are childless, and we are children.

I could cant plaintive aspirations for the future and the utopian landscapes of post-crisis self-realization, cry that you are an end in and of itself, the omega. But you don’t listen, and I’m not speaking; somehow, the silence gets filled up all the same.

London on the Thames (from Tate)

We are our shared perspective, from where we see the world and agree, that yes, from up here, it does look to be burning. Or perhaps it’s just the stifling, unifying cigarette plumes of eight billion cave dwellers who have agreed that the world has little time left, so why not just light one up and wait it out. If the world doesn’t end, well, we will anyway.

PA091787 (BW)We will always have our history.

Preserved in museums and memories that come back to us when the night’s libations have let us down, our history is the story of a species gradually, painfully, resiliently gaining consciousness and then, upon achieving this feat of evolution, imbibing every painkiller until we are no longer conscious.

We are our ancestors.

They cower, afraid to look up.

I tried to be a stone wall in the nuclear holocaust predicted by you, but every shadow that burned into me was just another reminder of all the ways that I am, too, human, too human, and made of skin that ripples and stains like a leaf of paper. On it, written the words you have already acknowledged as the pleas of a coward. I am shaken.

PA101798 (BW)

Totems (BW)Rosetta Stone (BW)I’m stuck between wanting to tell you that you are a towering example of strength and a sharpened shard of beauty, but I know the words only get lost from my mouth to your ears; impossible to cross the divide that separates us now that you have heard it all.

I talk about history.

You talk about dying.

We both get it.

I don’t get what I’m doing here, each passing moment stretching out to eternity and then it’s tomorrow and nothing has changed; I’m still failing at everything I try to do. I could see the whole world from down here; I don’t, though.

British Museum Ceiling (BW)

Cricklewood (BW)*

I was sitting in your living room when I received the note; a sky so full of clouds that I thought it must be night. It was the end of a day.

Another history brought short.

Another shadow on my wall.

History is what we label that which we cannot change; this is another part of our history, even if it isn’t ours.

I go on. You go on. She go on. We go on.

And then you’re gone and I go alone.

It used to be that if “love” were spoke with enough hope, with all the power of Hannibal’s elephants and all the radiance of Chernobyl and all the precision of Oswald’s bullet, any broken heart could be mended, no matter how many times it had been shattered.

That is now a part of history, too.

Head of State (BW)

So what?

So what if there’s nothing to be done? So what if our history is a collection of stolen artifacts and carefully curated facts to placate our brittle consciences? If our time is short, why shouldn’t our memories be, also?

PA091779 (BW)

I want this to be all okay; you, me, her/him, all with the collective sigh of our history.

PA101808 (BW)It isn’t, though.

It is rotten, I know.

It isn’t true.

It only trickles through.

We are guilty

of faux civility

weak and shallow

nothing more than a show.

This is our legacy.

This is our destiny.

This is our history.

I don’t control what I’m saying. I think in couplets when I’m away from you and you are acting as though nothing has changed. Everything’s changed. You dismissed my lips, unkissed.

Deceased (BW)

We have history.

*

You have history. It’s not easy to forget, it’s not easy to forgive, and when the cruel gray crows scatter your smile across a desolate field, it’s not easy to let go.

I am not a historian, I cannot be that detached.

Theatre Row (BW)Nor am I merely a supplicating audience member, waiting to applaud, steady with my tears, happy to concede defeat to the playwright. I write, too, and I don’t care if they are Shakespeare’s Histories, I make up my own endings.

You will loathe this, every word.

You will loathe me, too, and find my incessant presence to be a bother. This is already of history.

Yet, here I am, in attendance.

I bought the ticket, I took my seat, I put the world on silence for you.

So sing your song, recite your monologue, hit your mark, and kill the critics in the crowd who will insist that you’re not right for the part. The part is right for you.

I should’ve said that.

I didn’t say anything. You wept like Ophelia’s willow, threatening to drown all of Europe, but it only rains in London these days; the skies are gray, sure, but also close enough to touch. We didn’t touch. We stayed dry, we stayed indoors.

Underground (BW)

And then, that was it.

I’ve returned to this place I’m calling home now.

See the world, learn its histories, trace the rivers diverted by time and escape to the cities built on bones. Every street, every window, all of the tastes and smells, they lambast us with the history we think is behind us. Paint the walls, if you must, climb the scaffolding; it will all be history soon enough. History always wins.

PA091768 (BW)

We are history.

Queen (BW)

Who We Are

My apologies ahead of time if this post is not what you come here to read. It won’t be very funny (not that they ever are).

When I decided to bring this blog back from hibernation, I did so with the intention of writing exclusively about travel and directly related topics. Long time readers of this page know I’ve never been shy about getting into politics and writing passionately about social issues. Going forward, though, I wanted this page to eschew those topics as much as possible, to be a positive page buoyed by the joy of travel.

To ignore what is going on in my country right now, though, would be a disservice. To write some random entry about a failed trip I once took would be a lie, because that isn’t where my mind is right now.

This is not a political post. I want to write about who we are.

Put simply, this Travel Ban – the Muslim Ban, the Refugee Ban, whatever you would call it – is not who we are. I refuse to accept this as a Conservative versus Liberal issue. Shame on us if we allow it to become so.

Since World War II, when America was forced to reconcile with the tragic results of banning refugees in the 1930s, we have been a nation that said we were a home for the outcast. It has been our identity in the world; it has been our beacon, a figurative idea made literal by Lady Liberty who stands roughly 5 miles from where I type this.

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

This has been the spirit of this nation for over 100 years. That is not to gloss over our numerous failings as a nation, especially as it relates to foreign policy. Our actions have rarely lived up to our ideals. But we have had those ideals, and they have been what united us as a nation, even if we couldn’t agree how best to achieve them.

For eight years, dyspeptic voices warned us that President Obama was fundamentally changing the character of this nation. Well, in eight days, Donald Trump truly did it.

You can be fiscally conservative and see this is wrong. You can be socially conservative and see this is wrong. You can love your children and want to protect them and not turn your backs on others – that isn’t love, that’s fear. This isn’t Right versus Left, this is a basic question of our humanity. To shut our doors on those in need under the guise – the lie – that it will keep us safe is to fail on every level to be the nation we have claimed to be for a century.

I won’t post pictures of the children caught in the Syrian war because I don’t want to be accused of using emotional manipulation or propaganda. But you have seen them. You have seen these children, these mothers, these fathers; you have seen their suffering. They are no less human because the God they pray to answers to a different name than yours.

“Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”

I have been told often that we are a Christian nation. When will we act as such? How can we be a nation that professes that it is in God we trust, yet we have no faith that we will be protected if we do what is right?

I don’t know what motivates you. I don’t know which truth you hold most dear to your heart. I don’t know which belief guides your choices.

Here is mine: Humanity is flawed; it is capable of great evil and depravity, motivated by selfishness, greed, hatred, and, more often than anything else, fear. But within humanity is also the capacity for tremendous acts of love and sacrifice, resilience and hope. I believe that humanity at its best surpasses humanity at its worst. And I believe that there is no Judgment Day awaiting, no eternal reward or punishment; just the beating rhythm of our own conscience too often drowned out by the frightened bellows within us.

To those living elsewhere in the world: Know that the actions of these particular leaders are not the will of much of the people. It is not my will. I became a traveler because I do not believe in walls. I travel because my humanity is awakened when I open myself up to new experiences and new perspectives.

To those of you living in the US: Now, we must resist this spreading evil, just as generations passed resisted tyranny in Europe and elsewhere. We must not grow complacent or irresolute in the face of this onslaught of cruelty. This is not who we are as a nation. This is not who we are as people.

This is how we resist:
ACLU = https://www.aclu.org/
CAIR = https://www.cair.com/
IRC = http://www.rescue.org
Southern Poverty Law Center =
https://www.splcenter.org/
Planned Parenthood = https://www.plannedparenthood.org/

We are different; we are not separate.

 

 

 

Charles Simic Reads A Selection of Poems

You murmur your poems
in a hall of doors and mirrors and
I strain to hear.
Your voice barely carries
through the staid air
so I make eyes with the reflection of a bodacious blonde,
herself half awake.
These mirrors broadcast more effectively
than the second generation speakers erected by grad students.
You command this room, its stifled yawns and watering eyes,
but poetry is a dead art,
you quip,
selling twelve more collections
of your critically-beloved, publicly-ignored
jumble of words.
Well, I fail to make an impression on her,
the red-lipped heiress who exits
before the free pinot gris evaporates.
There are others:
a brunette in a knit cap,
two French girls discussing a boy,
professors of literature.
For an hour, we are your audience,
but afterwards, like ex-lovers,
we are too ashamed to make eye contact.

My Left Shoe

A Repost. “My Left Shoe” was originally published in Waterhouse Review.

Ryan Gosling’s left shoe
is made of gold and dipped in chocolate
and if sold
will save the orphanage.
My left shoe
is worn through the heel and reeks
of chicken grease and stagnant mop water
and if I were an orphan
I’d think Ryan Gosling was a saint.
My abs lack definition and my
cheekbones
can’t cut glass when I smile
so I’m happy there’s a Ryan Gosling
to carve the stainglass windows
of the cathedral
which overlooks the orphanage.
These children need something to look up to
and if it wasn’t the Holy Father
in his bedazzling display of light
they’d have nothing to believe in
besides Ryan Gosling’s left shoe.
And what sort of faith is that,
putting a man on such a pedestal?

Not Titled

It’s not okay to be in love. It’s, in fact, a very dangerous thing. I’d recommend you avoid it, but it’s not much of a choice, is it? You know how the girls are, which is not how the boys are, except when it’s exactly how the boys are, when they are all afraid that the next one is the last one, or the last one will be the last one, or that there never will be a last one. So they can be quite shitty to each other; we can be quite shitty to each other. We can also be quite beautiful in moments, the way a storm is beautiful when it’s holding court up above and a bird flies in place and for a few minutes it feels like the whole planet stopped turning; the sky is purple, your heart is a wind chaser, she is a safe place to rest and this cyclone keeps on spinning. No one asks to get off, but only one ride lasts forever and it takes all we have just to make forever feel like a full life. So we give in. To love. To being loved. And in the fall, we think, this is yet another of my many mistakes for which I will surely pay a dear price, but.

We can’t not.

Love in the Time of Ebola

New York gets smaller on a budget,
then cleaner, too,
held in the arms of a man who riddles on about time,
forgetfully.
Tunnels fill and tunnels whistle
with the passing of trains from Manhattan to Brooklyn,
carrying doctors, patients, lovers and lusters,
in expectant hesitation and anxious calculation,
to flower beds for the seeding.
Remembrances are scrawled,
hastily,
across faces and breasts
and the names of the long forgotten
no longer famous in the dark.
The eerie echo
of a hell above, heaven below hullabaloo
promising safety without numbers –
two against none –
that can save a soul,
tired, shaking and sweating.
Rising
out of the subterranean musk
into impenetrable air
can make a hand softer, a grip tighter,
a step quicker.
She’s come home,
long after midnight,
swollen with the blush of antiseptics and whispers,
warmed from within, cool to touch,
eyes red as sunrise.
And he’s come, too.

East Village Postcard