Lisa Rosenberg – Proof of Concept

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Lisa Rosenberg
Proof of Concept

In the only picture we have of my great-grandfather, he stands beside a wooden biplane, one elbow resting on the cockpit rim, a cigarette dangling from his other hand. We know very little about his life. Both he and my grandfather flew unofficially and were known for their mechanical ingenuity, although neither completed secondary school. My father, also mechanically gifted, graduated college and flew as a licensed pilot. I grew up surrounded by model airplanes, engine parts, blueprints, and shop tools. I earned a pilot’s license in my late teens, studied physics, then followed in my father’s and grandfather’s paths by entering the aerospace industry.
      My ambition was to be an astronaut. But even as I flew, and worked on numerous spacecraft programs, I rarely broke through an ingrained sensibility of ground-based, ground-referencing existence. As far as my internal guideposts were concerned, the non-flat Earth remained an abstraction; and my embodied knowledge of our planet with myself on it, as part of it, was largely the same as it had been in childhood—not early childhood, though. At five or six, I would lie on my back in the grass and look outward (not up) from the surface of the Earth straight into the sky, and launch my senses there.
      It must have been later in childhood that I learned to be part of the everyday flatness of things. Ironically, throughout those years my father and grandfather worked on unmanned NASA imaging missions at JPL-Caltech, and we slowly acquired a collection of outdated lunar mapping photographs at home. I ran my fingers over the bound pages: plain paper, simple black-and-white, the images stitched with slim fiducials. If I looked at a picture long enough, features would flip from convex to concave (bubble or crater? ridge or trough?) and back again.
      We were mapping the Moon. We had photographed the Earth from the Moon. Still, based on everyday experience, I considered myself a creature of the flat ground. I don’t, of course, mean topographical flatness (there were mountains all around me), but a foundational, referential assumption of living on a flat rather than a curved surface. Unlike the Little Prince’s unmistakably spherical world, the Earth’s curvature is large enough in relation to ourselves that it takes some work to observe. Physics tells us we’re always in flight by virtue of being on this curved Earth, in space, just as physics tells us why we can’t feel that flight. Yet the facts of our shared daily rotation and yearly journey around the Sun are rarely consoling or thrilling enough when we gaze at birds, aircraft, and sweeping clouds. We want wings of our own.
      Well into adulthood, I was invited to a neighborhood party for viewing the annular solar eclipse that occurred in May 2012. The hosts provided dark glasses, a sturdy rooftop, refreshments, and celebratory company. It would be the first time I witnessed an eclipse directly, rather than as a shadow cast by some version of a cardboard pinhole. I stood on an unobstructed roof, and looked out (not up) toward the Moon. All at once, I was a body, protruding into space from the surface of a spherical body, looking at another body ringed with light. That other body, much romanticized and studied, was a dark globe with obvious, curved gradation.
      Until that day, I didn’t realize that I had always seen the Moon as not only beautiful, mottled, and compelling, but flat. Decades in physics and engineering had not changed an internal image shaped by collective, inherited Western thought: by nursery rhymes, storybooks, paintings, myths, and love songs; by unspoken assumptions, ways of thinking, and ways of being. Even those early lunar photographs, my limited telescope time, and years in aviation had not fully dislodged the flatness. But watching the eclipse in 2012, I viscerally experienced the Moon as a sphere, and myself as standing on a round ball of a planet—all of us in motion. Bodies in space, we changed at the same instant, as if newly freed to hold our three-dimensional shapes.
      There I was. And here I am, sometimes, as in those early childhood moments of lying on the grass: lucky when I can recall the fully round, embodied, in-space sensation. Lucky to have learned, forgotten, remembered, and offered moments to relearn the same. Whenever I can be listening, sensing, and otherwise noticing and present, I am part of that motion. Lucky to be both flying and at home.    AQ

Rosalind Goldsmith – Levity

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Rosalind Goldsmith
Levity

Cheerless days. Serving up coffee, eyes clammy with fatigue. Shuffling home. Late. Leftovers. The kids whingeing about soggy beans. Long jagged cracks in the tiles that the landlord would never fix. The mold. Her bank account draining like the life draining from her heart. Her daughter’s sadness.
           Yelling at the kids despite herself—get up, do homework, do the dishes, do something. They lay on the sofa, on the floor, flat to their screens. She yearned to yank them out of their lethargy—to squeeze them, slap them, wring them out—shock the life back into them.
           Cal would be ok—he was lazy, sure, but still loud, and still telling awful jokes. Sash though—she got quiet, veered inwards, showed no interest in anything—not even her mouse house. Said nothing when asked about her day, just wandered off to her bedroom. So pale. Wouldn’t say what was wrong. And just these past few days wouldn’t eat—not honey and peanut butter on bagels, not jelly donuts, not strawberry ice cream with chocolate sauce.
           The mother twisted herself every which way, trying to pull Sasha out of her misery—to get both of them interested in something—chess, Pictionary. Charades. No go. She bought Cal a second-hand guitar, Sasha new tiny wooden chairs for her mouse house. They barely glanced at these gifts.
           The two of them lay sprawled for hours. Thrown into a dead stillness. Defeated in their bodies and minds, in their little half-lived spirits. It was Sasha—her refusal ran deep in her blood. And now she was pulling Cal down with her.
 
           On an evening when the mother was so tired she couldn’t stand it anymore, she snatched Sasha up off the floor, clutched her shoulders and shook her. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ she screamed.
           Her daughter scowled, shivered, light as a blade of grass, a wisp of a thing, so thin, so brittle. She pulled away and ran off to her room. The mother collapsed on the sofa beside her son. Hid her eyes behind her hands and groaned.
           They sat quiet. The mother pushed out a breath like it was hard to get it out of her lungs.
           Cal laid his hand on her arm. ‘Are you ok?’
            ‘Oh sure,’ she said into her hands.
            ‘Did you hear about the rope?’
            ‘The what?‘
            ‘This rope went into a bar and—’
            ‘Oh no. Not now.’
            ‘Yeah, but you’ll like it. It’s good.’
            ‘Good enough to make your sister laugh? Why don’t you tell her?’
           He was quiet a moment, attentive, as if listening to an echo of what his mother had just said. ‘Ok. I will. I will tell her.’ He folded himself forward on to his knees. ‘I’ll try.’
           It got worse. After a few months, Sasha was so thin that her mother took her to a doctor. The doctor said they should encourage her to eat.
           When they were alone after school, Cal made sandwiches for Sasha, weird combinations that he called obnoxious concoctions: maple syrup and peanut butter, cherry jam and m and m’s, and he would give them strange names—a wink and a frog sandwich or a barfly and dustmop sandwich or a cosmonaut and sausage sandwich. And he cut them into strange shapes. Sasha never laughed, never smiled, never ate the sandwiches.
           Four weeks before Sasha was scheduled to check into a rehab centre for eating disorders, the mother bought three yellow balls from the toy store. For two weeks she practiced in her bedroom at night until she got it right, and one afternoon she stood in front of her children in the living room and juggled for fifteen seconds. They watched her, amazed. Sasha smiled—a little timid struggle of a half-smile—the first smile in months. The mother taught them the basics she’d learned from a boy at work. This was something—finally something.
           They both tried it—fumbled with the balls at first, laughing and dashing all over to retrieve them. Sasha got two balls up in the air, dropped them both and gave up. But Cal, thin and wiry and intense—he latched on to it with a vengeance and practiced for hours. Sasha watched him as if hypnotized. Cal would bow and apologize every time he dropped a ball, and Sash would smile and say, ‘Try again.’ And he did. He tried and tried until he got it right and Sasha would clap and say, ‘Bravo!’
           When the mother got home from work now, she’d see Cal standing in the middle of the living room, arms pumping, a flight of yellow above him, and Sash curled up on the sofa watching intently, nodding and clapping.
           The mother took Cal aside. ‘It’s a great thing you’re doing here,’ she said. ‘You’ve brought her back to life.’ She hugged him, stroked the hair off his forehead, tucked in his shirt.
            ‘Now can I tell you the joke?’ he said.
           She listened to his joke about the rope in the bar and the frayed knot. He helped her set the table for dinner. She thanked him and he closed his eyes and put his arms around her and held on.
           When he mastered the three balls, he asked his mother to buy more. He practised with four, then six, then eight. Sasha watched his every move.
           After a week or so, he began to make sandwiches for her again, and now she ate them, almost without thinking, while she watched him practise. She put on a little weight, began to eat dinner again. Her mother cancelled the rehab centre.
           He studied videos on YouTube, got better at it. One afternoon, he noticed that Sasha was distracted—staring at her hands instead of at him. He picked up a spoon and juggled it with the balls. ‘Look!’ he called out to her. The spoon twirled and caught the light. Sasha laughed, delighted. ‘Can you do plates?’ she said.
           Everything went up in the air: Keys, peaches, bunches of grapes, side plates and saucers, wooden spoons and small bowls. ‘Watch this, Sash!’ he’d yell, and then toss up into the air a series of household objects unremarkable in themselves but extraordinary in their patterns of suspension—running shoes, baseball gloves, candy hearts, frozen lamb chops. He juggled Oreos, rolled up socks, toothbrushes, rice crackers, bars of soap, dolls, ears of corn, face cream tubes, shampoo bottles, adjusting each toss according to the weight of the object. He juggled anything he could find, and she watched in awe.
           It was strange, the mother had to admit it—and sometimes plates and saucers broke—but she loved how her children were now—vital, full of life—and she was grateful to her son. She’d been distant from him recently—her anxiety about Sasha pulling her away from him, but she’d change that. She bought Manga comics for him, and arranged guitar lessons.
           But the comics and the guitar lay beside his bed, untouched. Cal was obsessed. He practised for hours every day. Sash watched him, in thrall, as she willed whatever objects were in play to stay up in the air. And they did! Sometimes the objects floated up there for longer than they should—as if they were suspended just under the ceiling by an invisible hand. When Cal juggled bright objects like glasses or jewelry, they glinted in the light. Every object soared up like a falcon, then floated down gently on moth wings.
           When the mother got home from work, exhausted, Cal would tell her what Sasha had for lunch, how she had watched him, how she had laughed. His mother would slump down at the kitchen table and look up at him and smile.
           It was summer, and the children were alone almost all day while the mother was at work. But she didn’t worry. Cal was her saviour, her daughter’s guardian angel.
           Cal went out in the mornings with a plastic bag and brought home whatever he could find out in the neighbourhood—a baby’s boot, a plastic elephant, tiny toy cars, a keyboard, a doll, wine bottles, a stuffed lamb, beer cans, dvds, paperback books. Day by day he increased the number and variety of objects he juggled—he could toss up a whole heap of different things and keep them soaring—and the more objects he juggled, the more his little sister laughed and clapped and encouraged him.
           He sweated and strained to keep heavier and heavier objects suspended – a frying pan and a pot, with a tricycle wheel, a bag of onions and an acacia plant – he made it look easy, kept all the objects upright as they soared up, each one on its own ellipse, each one describing a perfect arc. And at the apex of the arc, every object, no matter how heavy, would hover for a second – suspended, spinning there, winking in the light.
           Sasha was entranced. The objects her brother juggled were alive and grew wings – and if they ever threatened to crash to the ground, Cal snatched them up out of danger and tossed them back up where they belonged, flying. A plate was a phoenix, a tire was a dragon, a doll was a dove or a cormorant, a wine bottle, a dragonfly. One afternoon, he juggled all the furniture from her mouse house, along with three peanut butter and honey sandwiches, cut into quarters. Not one sandwich fell, not one tiny chair disobeyed the trajectory of his will.
           The sun came in through the living room window and glanced off all of these objects in the air, and it looked to both of them—engaged in this labour of juggling and watching—as if gravity itself gave up in the face of their intent and abandoned their living room. Simply walked away.
           As the summer wore on, Sasha became well. She chatted with her mother when she came home, helped her with the cooking, ate two servings at dinner. She made marshmallow cookies with blue icing for Cal. She began to read the paperbacks that Cal had brought home to juggle. She memorized the jokes he told her, and told some of her own. Her pinched expression disappeared—she wanted to learn line dancing. Decided when she grew up, she’d be a ballerina or a pilot.
           Cal tried harder and harder to keep the magic happening. He knew he’d have to scale up his efforts. Like Mesmer, Svengali, or Rasputin, he held her spirit in his hands. He found more and more interesting objects to juggle, and ways to make them spin at different angles, different speeds. Doughnuts, pillboxes, five-pound bell weights, his guitar, her collection of glass cats—all went up in the air. She was a little worried about those cats, but he didn’t drop one. She never even wondered how he did it—just accepted her brother was a magician.
           Every morning Cal had to meditate for at least an hour to focus his concentration. He would sit cross-legged in his room, close his eyes and imagine the sky as a blue substance that could permeate matter, the stratosphere as a discrete orbit with its own gravitational pull, empty space as a collapsing star that drew everything into its centre. These visions were clear and precise.
           As the objects became more difficult, he had to spend more time meditating. One hour became two, became three. One day in July, after a whole morning of meditation, he achieved his masterwork: He juggled eight lit candles, keeping them upright and lit the whole time—she was thrilled—and asked him to do it again and again.
           Towards the end of the summer, the objects—no matter what they were, no matter how heavy or awkward or unusual—were no longer enough for her. She’d grown used to them and now wanted to see something truly spectacular—Catherine wheels, lit sparklers, whirligigs—there had to be frantic motion, flashing lights, intense spinning.
           Cal worked harder, using every scrap of his concentration and will to get those objects to spin and stay alight and to achieve that remarkable almost impossible floating effect, when the objects seemed buoyed up above the air, beyond the natural impetus and arc of their trajectory.
           He meditated now for four hours every morning. Sometimes his visions blurred—and he had to get the pictures clear and distinct before he could start. The effort of concentration began to tire him. The higher and longer he made the objects float, the dizzier and weaker he felt. He went to bed early, often before Sasha, and woke up late, barely able to lift himself out of bed.
           He would sit on the edge of his bed, holding his head in his hands, unable to stand. Strange dreams stole his sleep away from him. He dreamt one night of a crow he was digging up out of the earth, brushing the dirt off its wings. His mother asked him if he was alright. He told her a joke about a duck and some grapes.
           Every object he found made him more anxious—would it work—would it float. He caught a mouse, hid it and juggled it with her stuffed mice. She found that hilarious, begged him to find more mice, and juggle with twelve of them. He could only find three. One of them died of fright in mid-air. Had a tiny heart attack. She was distraught and cried. He buried the mouse in the acacia plant and made up a prayer for the mouse which he taught her word for word and asked her to recite until she stopped crying.
           It was late August. On an afternoon when it was grey and rainy outside, Sasha was standing by the window staring out. Cal came into the living room with his bag of objects and she slumped onto the sofa, and burst into tears.
            ‘What’s wrong?’ Cal said. He knelt beside her, staring at her as if she had a fatal wound that he could do nothing to heal. Or as if she was that wound.
            ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I don’t know.’ Her voice was a whisper, her eyes dull, her expression flat. She looked like she did before—turned inwards, empty and blank. The sadness—that didn’t seem to have any cause at all—or none that he could see—had come back and taken her over again.
           He juggled three bananas, six foil pie plates, two pairs of sunglasses, five trivets and a little plastic dog. He got the dog to spin. ‘Look, Sash!’ he yelled. But she didn’t watch. A trivet veered out of its orbit and smashed to the floor. He picked up the pieces.
           The next day at lunch she wouldn’t eat her barfly and dustmop sandwich. He told her a joke. She stared at the table. ‘What can I do?’ he said.
           She was silent for many minutes. ‘I don’t know,’ she said.
            ‘I’ll tell you what. I’ll break my record,’ he said. ‘I bet I can juggle twelve candles, three sparklers and eight side plates, all at the same time, and I bet I can get each one to touch the ceiling.’
           She looked up at him then. ‘Really?’ she said, with a premonition of a smile.
           For five hours Cal prepared himself for this stunt. He tuned his thoughts like a laser beam. He banished time so that his visions were not of the future but of the present, simply pictures of what was actually happening. He imagined every object rising, saw the ceiling of the apartment as the horizon of the universe. He called on all his strength, his will, his force of focus, until finally he stood in the middle of the living room, the lit candles in one hand and the plates in the other.
           He began with the candles. Up they went, upright, arcing gently, scorching the ceiling and floating back down into his left hand. The three sparklers followed, spinning and brushing the ceiling. Then up went the plates, wobbling, grazing the ceiling, and then sinking back down. At one point all the candles, all the plates, and all three sparklers hung suspended an inch below the ceiling in a spinning, defiant constellation. Cal was aghast—for an instant he felt a terrible fear—but Sasha was amazed. She laughed and watched in awe as each candle, sparkler and plate came back down, and went back up, one by one, under perfect control of their master.
           After three minutes of juggling, Cal opened his palms and allowed each object to return, like a tethered beast, to his waiting hands. He grinned at his little sister. ‘Tada!’ he said, opened his arms wide and began to bow. She stood and smiled and clapped. He caught her eye and tried to speak. Then he folded, crumpled, collapsed on the floor. The plates fell to the ground and smashed and the candles and sparklers went out.
           The mother came back from work at 6:00. She found Cal lying on the living room floor, broken plates, candles and sparklers all around him, and Sasha kneeling on the floor beside him, patting his cheek gently, trying to wake him up.
           The mother tried to revive him, screaming his name, shaking him, but he didn’t respond. She called an ambulance and sat on the floor beside him, holding his hand, begging him to wake up. For a few seconds his eyes fluttered open. He saw his mother’s face beside his, and looked into her eyes. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I tried but it’s no good.’ He looked at his sister who was crouched beside him, tears running down her face. ‘Sash,’ he said. ‘You’ll have to learn to—’ He sat up suddenly and fell back down, his hand reaching up towards her face.            AQ

Carlo Rey Lacsamana – The Trespasser

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Carlo Rey Lacsamana
The Trespasser

I

In exchange for fixing the power switch, the bar owner offered him a month of free breakfast of cappuccino and a sandwich of his choice, since the owner knew he would not accept money as payment. He would rather trade his talents and capacities with other people’s talents and capacities than sell them. Never let money be the mediator between man and man. He didn’t work. Work in the normal sense of its worldly engagement: being employed, contracts, salary, routine, etc. All these things he found extraordinarily tedious, rigid, and too artificial. To work is a form of bondage; no animal wants to be in chains. His ex-girlfriend saw this evasion as living a wayward life. Despite his intelligence, his knowledge of things, and his artistic nature, she dreaded his lack of concern for the future. Of course, she wanted security! Who doesn’t? Future and security: nothing could be more ambivalent. She thought he was charmingly vague.
         His vagueness—that is his refusal to be part of universal conformity and standardized living inspired disgust and admiration. Friends laughed behind his back, his family considered him a kind of failure. On the other hand, people who really knew him admired his will, imagination, idealism, and improvisational skills. He was never tempted to pursue the countless, dazzling diversions that lure young men. He took seriously the simple pleasures of life. The simple attracted him for they were striking; simple yet high minded, dangerous, and exciting. This irrepressible feeling for the simple was, perhaps, the secret of joy.
         What is the charm and logic of spending the glorious days of one’s unrepeatable life inside the dusty office room staring at a lifeless immobile screen making abstract figures, writing dull notes, sitting on a helpless stool for hours and eternity, waiting, till the judicious hand of the wall clock startles you: ‘It’s six, you can go home,’ he said eloquently to a curiously sympathetic friend. ‘And have faith that tomorrow will be as saturnine as yesterday and all the other tomorrows, going about again and again in this lifeless, lugubrious repetition.’
         ‘What a shame! What a shame!’ he exclaimed. He had naturally a plentiful stream of exuberance and humour. To embrace the world, to smell a strange flower, to get drunk with a stranger, to read a wise book, to squeeze the breasts of your lover, to sit in a corner to listen to a street musician, to defecate in the morning, to escape to the sea, ah! The sea!… to… to… love! He thought out loud these simple longings of life. ‘To!’ he cried as if referring to an invisible lover with tormented cheerfulness and passion. ‘Life must triumph against ennui!’ One must stretch this victory to the end. Indeed, his charming vagueness puzzled the people around him.
         The warm, sweet, foamy cappuccino mingled delightfully with tobacco. He devoured it up to the last drop. It tasted essentially good because it was free. He put out his notepad and pen: two indispensable instruments which served as mediator between his ideas and the marvellous world. They made thinking something light. On the blank page fell waves of sunlight: warm, tender, golden, like daffodils, solid light he could touch and feel. What was he thinking? There was something godly about the sun, the sheer warmth, the unknown power which stirred the heart with a hot, furious impulse of becoming. The sun was both calm and careless, patient and reckless. This contagious influence of the sun violated his bounds of reason. Like the wild animals his heart was possessed with that impulse for serious playfulness. One must explore the possibilities within one’s self and their painful limits to one’s transformation. In the grandness of the universe, he felt he was a fragmentary piece of something incomprehensible, terrifying beauty. And that strange feeling was enough a design to live wholly for the moment’s sake. He wandered and wondered out loud.
         And observed the world around him. The pretty young students walking their way to school, the fruits at the fruit stand, the pigeons drinking in the fountain pool, the bicycles peacefully parked on the corner. One could write epic stories about these things, he thought. He observed and wrote the hours of the morning, the pages bursting like pomegranates: poems, thoughts, ideas, soiled with wandering cigarette ashes and petals of divine sunlight.

II

Midday. The restless city was hidden under the blinding lustre of the midday sun. The city. Land of insatiable desires, of open secrets, of crowded ambitions, of petty crimes, of active limbs and confused minds. A world where the power of the screen creates distracted men; and man, obscure, faceless among other men, always at the mercy of want.
         He came to the food market at the busiest hour of the day. To buy food? Absolutely not! Watch how he spy and prey upon the train of fruit and vegetable stalls. To thieve? He could; but he believed in the kindness of man so he asked; besides asking was less risky. The customers wandered in search of the most brilliant red tomatoes, the most-slender bananas, the most electric bundle of spinach, the most seductive eggplant. They paid for what they got. He foraged for free.
         Fruits and vegetables which couldn’t be sold: the leftovers, the physically “unmarketable” food like odd-shaped potatoes, wrinkled lettuces, pillow-soft tomatoes, slightly withered cabbages; unattractive to the sophisticated eyes of urban consumers. Even in flea markets the instinctive obsession with outward appearance reigns supreme. What was deemed as “trash” he recouped and eat.
         At the end of the day massive quantities of food enough to feed a whole starving city went to landfills. What a mountain of waste we create every day! The very fact was sheer agony to him. How could one submit to this logic of waste? So much waste. The blindness! But he saw the wealth that lie hidden in those heaps of brilliant fruits and flocks of greens about to be thrown. Rummage.
         Politely he expressed his reasonable concern to the vendors and they in return listened and with the innate sympathy that tied all human beings had warmed up to his buoyant and sensible proposition. Before the garbage collector cleared the whole place, they put aside the leftovers for him. And there he was: choosing and picking: the variety of colours and textures of fruits excited his senses; the lusciousness of the greens delighted his appetite. He came and went without fear of necessity. The waste could always feed him.

III

The perfect full moon had arrived. He stopped, took a deep breath then climbed the fence covered with thick passion vines. Ah! The moonlight was full at the back garden of the church; flowers brimmed: poppies, daffodils, nasturtiums, hyacinths, primroses, scillas, pussy willows. Whatever they shut the door for? he wondered.
         Thanks to the choir girl who sang in the church he had discovered this majestic spot. And it was on this freshly cut lawn surrounded by magnolia, apple and lime trees where they both discovered the ecstasy of making love out door. It made him sad to look back. Last summer! Memories however happy are still sad.
         ‘Isn’t bad for you, smoking cannabis?’ he asked ridiculously.
         ‘Are you really that annoying?’ said the choir girl. She thrust the filter away and lifted her bare arms to embrace him. ‘Love me’.
         ‘What if I don’t Ave Maria?’, he said jokingly, imitating the voice of the priest. ‘Of course, I’m kidding!’
         And then they began, slowly and delicately, to undress…
         ‘They gasped between kisses. Swung back and forth. They laughed like little kids while they lay there in each other’s arms.
         But tonight, he was alone. And the moon that distant white body of fire that mystified the minds of lonely poets and desperate lovers shone with ominous intensity. It seemed the whole tremendous Creation improbable without that radiant little pebble hanging about the pressing darkness of the wide boundless sky. He could not express his curious, admiring affinity with the moon; he felt a pain of joy running through the space, racing through light years in his blood. He was alone. Why some people are afraid to be alone at night? When one is alone at night the senses become magnetic. The ears hear the breath of things, the eyes see the soul of things, the nose smells the stench of the past and the sweetness of the future, the mouth imbibes the darkness—the intoxicating darkness like wine. Alone at night you are one with everything, and the terrifying feeling of getting closer shoulder to shoulder with silence itself. Alone at night you are quite sad.
         He stretched his arms and legs like a crucifix. The silver moonbeams nailed his young pale body on the soft grass; the brittle yellow flowers cracked beneath his back. The hollow church and the trees watched him as he penetrated the grandeur of the space above him. He opened his mouth wide like a dark well. ‘Light years,’ he whispered. He wanted to swallow the moon like a host. To be distant, far, far away, remote but blindingly bright. Light years. He tried to measure the distance of the moon. Mouth wide open as if to swallow the light of the stars, the odour of flowers and trees, the lost memories, the awakened dreams, the entire history of his insignificant being. Quietly his soul screamed. Guilty of living; without resistance, without fight, he surrendered to the celestial prison of the sky. ‘Oh, terrifying beauty!’ he screamed and slept like a free man.     AQ

Bryan R. Monte – Walls and Curtains – An Interview with Andrei Codrescu

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Bryan R. Monte
Walls and Curtains—An Interview with Andrei Codrescu

Andrei Codrescu’s recent work, Walls and Curtains, an audio podcast in thirteen episodes, is the subject of this email interview conducted in October-November 2021.

Bryan R Monte: What was your initial inspiration for Walls and Curtains?

Andrei Codrescu: My stepfather, who was a brute and a ‘train engineer’ in 1950s Romania, ripped my dog, Nemo, from my arms. I have been trying to find my schnauzer, and take revenge on the brute ever since. I have fantasized about having the man torn by horses à la Middle Ages, tortured on the rack and slowly crushed inside an Iron Maiden. The oeuvre I produced since issues from this spring of hatred, revenge, and imaginative dismemberment. This includes my novel, The Blood Countess (1995), translated in 15 languages (just in case he may have been hiding from my wrath in Albania, or Japan or…), the journal I edited, Exquisite Corpse: a Monthly of Life & Letters (corpse.org)—he was the corpse—and many poems and essays since. I conceive of my literary work as a razor in search of my stepfather’s neck.

BRM: How did your original idea or inspiration develop into this episodic story?

AC: My story is based on a true childhood trauma, but the subsequent adventures of two, ten-year-old boys who decide to find Nemo on the other side of The Wall, is inspired by the times and the place. The dog and the boys are real, but everything else is a collage of adventures that follow various walls and curtains in real and imagined zeitgeists.
      In Romania in the 1950s, the Communist Party mandated public boredom. The suppression of curiosity was the main activity and product of our Soviet-flavoured republic. Curiosity was a state monopoly. The job of the state was to survey the citizenry for possible interest in the workings of power.
      Walls and Curtains is a condensed epic of two boys’ productive adventures intended to break through the hard boredom of optimism to the absurdity of another world. This they (and every citizen of the Soviet Empire), called ‘The West’. The boys imagined this world to be very intelligent and powerfully entertaining. And mysterious: they had no idea where they were going next.

BRM: How long did it take you to write this series?

AC: One Covid year, 2019-2020.

BRM: Were some sections more difficult than others?

AC: I can’t remember. Writing is, for me, a means of forgetting the things of which I am writing. Once written, these things become everybody else’s business. I think 🙂

BRM: Did you plan the episodes of Walls and Curtains in advance or did some develop as it unfolded?

AC: I did not plan any of them—I just sat down and let my trained finger tap my subconscious like a fishing line. Occasionally, I threw back fish that were too small or too familiar. I kept only those things that made me laugh. I believe that if the past isn’t good enough for a laugh, it is better off repressed. Or left to specialists, people like writers of memoirs who went to creative writing programmes.
      In Romania, to get back to the larger context, serial literature after 1956 took a full decade to nearly extinguish the mysterious orality of my childhood. Writing Walls and Curtains I awakened an ancient sit-around-the-fire seed that lay at the bottom of my overwritten self like a forgotten pomegranate seed in a garbage bin behind a food market in Queens.
      The nearly fatal blow episodic orality came from television. When Western television dramas appeared people’s brains froze and their fancies started retreating. In Romania, all work stopped when the American soap Dallas was broadcast. Everyone stared at the screen and the only question visible like a Chernobyl cloud over the heads of the spectators was ‘WHO SHOT JR?’ I didn’t watch it, so I don’t remember if there was an answer, but this is why in my story, Walls and Curtains, the question ‘DID THEY FIND NEMO?’ looms so large over the series—it remains unanswered because I plan a sequel.

BRM: Did you discover any differences and/or challenges in creating a story to be presented orally versus one presented textually?

AC: Yes. I think people like to hear stories now. We live in a post-reader world.

BRM: If so, what were some of those differences and/or challenges?

AC: The main difference is that when we used to read, we would ignore everything that wasn’t in the text. If someone interrupted us, we killed them. This is why most readers in the past were murderers. If someone is telling a story, it’s OK if the bell rings, or a siren passes. You can always make the outer sounds part of the orality in progress.

BRM: Walls and Curtains is set in your birthplace, Sibiu, Transylvania, Romania. Why did you choose this setting? Why do you think you were revisiting your origin story in the first months of the Covid pandemic?

AC: I was very, very bored. Podcasts came into vogue, but I couldn’t listen to any of them. I decided to source my own from an older oral world. This happened to reside in the ten-year-old boy in Sibiu. I carefully unwrapped him out of the mothballs where I keep him whenever I run out of subject matter. Since you read some of my other books, you know that I have unwrapped this boy so many times, he has grown out of his swaddling into a middle-aged man, with a pot belly, who smokes a cigar.
      He is by no means the ‘inner child’ that so many Americans strain to unearth from the lifetimes of entertainment that has turned them into a fine powder of clichés. Au contraire, he is a kindly nursed and well-fed creature that is layered in such a way that I can use my pen like a scalpel to separate him at whatever age seems appropriate for my current project. In this case, I had to remove the potbelly and the cigar, as well as a great many accoutrements of aging, and extract the ten-year-old. Once cleaned of all that mature goop, he was quite serviceable. I oiled him and wound him up. He marched into the story.

BRM: In your books, The Disappearance of the Outside and Whatever Gets You Through the Night, you present two storytellers, Mioritza and Scheherazade respectively, who tell stories which take all night and are told in mythic time or Mircea Eliade’s illo tempore.

AC: Stories that last all night around the fire are no longer common. Alas. We should reinstitute them at friends’ houses. The cold fire of TV is a solitary and sad affair.

BRM: Was this also your intention with the episodes of Walls and Curtains, for example, when one or both of your character fall asleep during their escape in episodes 4, 9, and 13? Is this because the story takes all night or ends in the dark?

AC: Children’s imaginations thrive in the dark. All stories are bedtime stories. Fantasies of escape take place at night because one is invisible then. The best heroes are thieves, dragons, and silent predator animals—they all work at night.

BRM: Which narrative techniques did you use to portray this time out of time?

AC: The same as any fairy tales, folk tales, and 1001 Nights, which is a compilation of fantastic stories. Whether written or told, the voice of the storyteller must be present. The techniques are the property of the storyteller—each one is unique.

BRM: Flight and exile are two recurring themes in your work. In Walls and Curtains, you and Shlezzy are trying to escape to the West.

AC: Reality is nasty and predictable: we write (even speak) to escape it. All humans are traumatized by history, circumstances, luck, poverty, or wealth, etc. The earth is a penal colony, purgatory, prison. Humans are a form that expiates. Escaping it is the goal of all religions, of poetry, and of stories. ‘Realism’ is a sadistic fiction.

BRM: After 55 years in America, why are these themes still so important in your work?

AC: America has more elbowroom to stretch out and explore. Otherwise, it’s a country born in wars like every other place. It is also a country easy to escape from, if there was any place to escape to.

BRM: Do you feel these themes have changed and developed over time?

AC: Yes. There are a myriad of ways to escape. In the course of storytelling or fantasizing, one climbs a ladder of experience. Getting away is tentative at first, then one’s steps become more certain. It takes ten years to get the courage to go to the unknown place that may or may not be there. After that, it’s a breeze. The abyss starts to look familiar. You’ve been there before. Déjà-vu, déjà-eu, but without any practical memory of what’s in it.

BRM: If so, how?

AC: With a pen, keyboard, razor blade and wrist, or socially compatible criminal congeries, or another form of intimate desperado association.

BRM: How similar do you feel your route to the West was to the escapes mentioned in your books, especially the steel door in the Danube River, in Wall & Curtains with the room beneath it stocked with an abundance of American style food and jeans and T-shirts?

AC: My escape was a lot less dangerous, but just as tense. I had to renounce my Romanian citizenship. We were allowed to take only two suitcases with clothes. My mother’s photo albums and my handwritten poetry notebooks were not allowed. The airport police pawed through our clothes for hidden gold coins. The clothes smelled like onions and bacon from their hands when they put back our rags. This was a good thing because I had to start writing everything new, and I had to remember, and then imagine, all the people in the photographs. There weren’t that many, since most of my mother’s family was murdered by Nazis in Auschwitz. The clothes I threw away in Italy.

BRM: Cracks appear often in Walls and Curtains, first as a secret code or map of escape, then as cracks between the gravestones in the Ursuline convent tunnel, and also as the cracks between the floorboards in the shoemaker’s house, into which you lose your gold coins. In another book you wrote about: ‘the cosmic crack that story telling can create, and it is our choice whether to go through it into another reality or to go through the flesh crack and return to where we are.’ What do you mean by this?

AC: As Leonard Cohen says, ‘there is a crack in everything/ that’s how light gets in’. An artist is more conscious that cracks (spontaneous or premeditated maps) are a precondition to entering a (or THE) mystery. Writers are different than priests or therapists because writing (creating or finding) cracks is not an answer or a therapy. The results (god, health) are not predictable, and I might say, not even imaginable. The Internet memes escape through portals constructed by engineers, it is a crude simulacrum of the organic imagination of a true dreamer.

BRM: Your escape through the tunnel reminds me of Aeneas’ visit to the underworld. Like Aeneas, you had a guide, a golem, whose eyeball lights your way through the tunnel.

AC: There are helpers out there, mostly kind animals with bright eyes who thrive on innocence. This is why they help mostly children. There are also plant guides and generous souls of the dead. The guides are not assigned; they choose the children (poets) they guide. I think the dead are free to choose.

BRM: Did you think of The Aeneid or other classical works when you wrote this part of Walls and Curtains?

AC: The Aeneid, like all the classics and moderns, are present in any story: language is a vehicle propelled by the motor of previous stories. This vehicle gets better and faster the more knowledge it consumes. Language has memory, thank the gods.

BRM: You use a post-Modern, broken narrative with many temporal digressions, anachronisms (for example, discussing crypto-currencies or receiving a phone call from Mark Twain in a story set in the 1950s), making self-reflexive comments on your own narratives, and telling stories without endings. In Whatever Gets You Through the Night, for example, Scheherazade says ‘To write a great story, violate the tenses.’ And just before that, she says ‘To tell a great story, leave them hanging.’

AC: Time is permeable. Chronology is a convention of sciences, but even in mathematics, discovery is not necessarily chronological. You did not need Newtonian math to think up quantum, though it was (and is) a great workable math.

BRM: Does this explain why your penultimate episode of Walls and Curtains is open ended for the reader to finish?

AC: Absolutely—there is a sequel—there is always a sequel, or a prequel, or a related (parallel) non sequel. How do we go on? We must find out what’s next or under it all or any ‘why’ that shows up.

BRM: Does this explain why the last episode has an anti-ending with a Nemo imposter?

AC: Every ending is a faux-ending; a red herring. Even death is a red herring. AQ

Karen Lethlean – Family Flights

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Karen Lethlean
Family Flights

A text message is my first hint. Natasha, my daughter is employed at the Northern Territory airport, she knows people, who know these things first.

                     NT are closing borders 4 p.m. Tuesday 24th March.
                     Any interstate arrivals will be required to self-isolate for 14 days.

         Confirmed by a similar message from the administrator who organizes my casual shifts at a nearby school. Plus, media announcements. Chief concern is the virus will affect isolated indigenous communities with limited health workers or facilities.
         My flight, Sydney to Darwin was booked for Saturday 28th. Not a top-end tropical holiday, not an outback adventure, but rather an attempt to assist. Be a helpful grandma, while her husband is on a military deployment overseas. General tasks associated with caring for 15month old. She’s been a solo working parent for over a month and I wanted to be closer. There ensued a flurry of face book activity to see if anyone could define what such self-isolation would entail.

                     …separate room. Separate bathroom.
                     …meals left outside, passed under the door. No outside activity. No visitors.
                     …in same house, but you’ll probably need to be in different areas.

         All doable except for a little boy, my grandson, not able to understand why Nana can’t come out and cuddle him. I imagine his insistent bashing on doors. Plus based on my whole reason for travel, I would not be of any assistance. Rather filling these requirements created a hindrance.
         Our next contact included phone calls. Airline already changed my journey arrangements twice. Progressively earlier in the day, I’d been scheduled to fly more than a thousand kilometres further south, to Melbourne, then take another flight to Darwin. I understand these changes. With very few passengers, logical to pool travellers through two other major cities and combine numbers, make up a plane full. Plus, ever earlier flights allow sufficient time for transition of luggage.
         We can’t see any alternative so Natasha and I talked about cancelling the flight.
          ‘I don’t want you to put yourself in any unnecessary risk.’ She said.
          ‘Yes, I was worried about progressing through another airport. Increasing my risk of coming into contact with the virus.’
          ‘Then what if you did get sick, I couldn’t stand thinking you’d passed it on.’
          ‘Not sure what I can do.’
          ‘Maybe, better not to come, mum.’
         I hear emotion in her voice. No adult child wants to cry for their mummy’s comfort. Neither of us can sleep. I want to be there, know she needs me. But don’t want to be responsible for anyone getting sick. While everyone else sleeps we message over face book, thus avoiding text message alerts. I promise to contact the airline and see what can be done to change my travel date.
         Initial enquiries using airline webpages prove frustrating. Possible to get an altered departure date, but their system won’t let me do so unless I vary both legs of my journey. Any return dates show simply not available. Can’t be right. I am, of course offered an opportunity to call. But…Due to closure of a Philippines call centre, unless you are travelling within the next 48 hours, do not call. Leaving me wondering why not staff a local call centre, especially right now! Border closure does put me within the 48-hour window, so after discussions with my husband, I try. We are up early so I make a call, before 6am, get in a queue. Waiting. Ironically one piece of background music includes lyrics about not being able to get home. I imagine this light blinking somewhere, staff not rostered until at least after 8am. Operational hours of this call centre are not announced. No one sees, no one knows, I so desperately want to help my child. When my call is answered, and the clerk realizes my travel date is several days away, her initial reaction is to cut me off short. She is dismissive, abrupt and annoyed with my non-compliance to the 48-hour rule. I tried to explain I need to travel to assist my daughter. Not helping. I tell her about borders closing. She is still yet to switch on any empathy. Finally, things start to drop into place when I explained I must travel tomorrow or at the very latest, Tuesday. This latter option risks a delayed flight and arriving outside the, I want to say, curfew. I pay extra, much less if I take Tuesday’s option. But now I don’t want to risk any further delays. Added bonus, a direct flight. She also allocates me seat 7A. Never been that close to a plane’s pointy end.
         I am on the way. Amid other travellers racing back before border closure. (Later I hear a similar tale of a self-employed man who went south to visit his sick father. Only to drive the return 3,000 plus kilometres, a day later, in order to cross soon to be closed borders) On my plane only aisle and window seats are occupied, ensuring social distancing compliance. With so few passengers, extra snacks were served.
         I can cuddle the baby on arrival. I can be there for my daughter.
         Any tourist opportunities have long fallen by the wayside. Even popular night spots like Mitchell Street with its bars and backpacker accommodation are eerily silent. Only bottle shops remain open. Unless blessed with a window to passing trade and therefore an opportunity to offer take-away food, restaurants remain closed, tables and chairs stacked away, or wrapped in an acreage of calico fabric like popular Casuarina Shopping Mall. I’ve seen similar in Sydney. And know drastic action is being taken.
         With minimal air traffic and closure of terminal businesses, Natasha’s job looks more precarious with each passing day. Adding an extra dimension to her worries. At least I am present during an angst-ridden staff meeting day. She hardly slept at all. Stress is written in those eyes. How will she manage? I tried to negotiate with my bank, hopeful to assist financially, to tide her over until this global madness settles down. It appears they want to punish me for potential generosity rather than assist. Faced with this barrier, I cannot be helpful by drawing on my funds.
         She returns with news that new executive management decided to, ‘take a little from a lot of staff, in order to keep functioning.’ Many have agreed to fewer days, working from home, and taking pay cuts so that when normality returns experienced staff will remain. Great, at least one burden is lightened.
         No good news, though, with her husband’s deployment. Faced with travel restrictions, any replacements cannot be assigned. Only gossip circulates about a potential repatriation. Hovering from, forced to remain, to be back only a few weeks after the initial deployment date, a compulsory fourteen-day self-isolation to be added. The most extreme option is a non-conclusive: he will return some time following depletion of virus concerns. I make a Book of Face post, following a women’s support group’s offer to assist where members might need…

                     Can you arrange for an Air Force plane to be sent and collect my son in law?

         My airline, shortly afterwards announces cancellation of many domestic flights. I hold a totally useless return ticket. They knew well before! Never mind, I am stuck, but can help. Hold my grandson, show him birds outside, chase Max cat around inside, listen to a little boy’s ever-increasing language skills, and just be with family. Deal with, or redirect attention away from some of my daughter’s worries.     AQ

Matthew Brennan – The Hang Glider

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Matthew Brennan
The Hang Glider

You’re not a bird because you fly like one.
It’s that you’re free—no gravity, no walls—
and so you hear the wind the way birds do.
Cut loose from outcroppings of rocky cliffs,
you slice zigzags above a river, turning
one way, another, waiting like a hawk
to sweep across the sky and glide until—
the gust that carried you now gone—you tip
your wings and start the necessary fall
by spiralling in downward circles ever
smaller, tighter, like a twister’s cone,
and then, windless at last, return to earth.

Simon Brod – Jacques Charles Hears the News

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Simon Brod
Jacques Charles Hears the News

           The first, untethered, manned flight took place by Montgolfière, on November 21st, 1783

           Charles’s Law states V=kT, where V is the volume of the gas, T is the
           temperature of the gas (measured in kelvins), and k is a non-zero constant.

 
Perish that pair of paper-making parvenus!
Pretend all they will, with their painter-decorator friend,
they’ve nothing new to add to what Kongming
achieved fifteen hundred years ago.
Such primitive technology! They haven’t the first
idea what they are playing with, the witless wonders
claim the lifting power’s in the smoke!—
as if all the advances of our enlightened age
stood for nothing. The only thing they know
is how to bloat and bask in their own hot air.
Blast their oversized lantern, and blast my luck!
Just two more weeks and my gas-filled invention
would have got there first.
                                                               But, pasting the King’s face,
bold as sunshine, to the side, so His subjects could see
Him float overhead…you have to admit, it grabbed
the nobs and half-wits, the crowd watched open-mouthed.
And our Sovereign’s smile seemed to widen
from having smoke blown up the royal arse.
Even a fool could have seen what would happen next:
the swirl of burning cinders from the fire,
the monstrous face all pock-marked with flaming holes.
Thank God no-one was harmed.
                                                               You mark my words:
once my machine has taken to the skies,
nobody will want to fly a paper bag.
This episode will fold into a footnote,
an oddball folly used to illustrate
a universal scientific law:
the hotter you make the air, the more it rises.

Jennifer L. Freed – Adularescence

/in

Jennifer L. Freed
Adularescence

Behind your closed eyes, you guide your star-
ship past Orion. You whisper
about grain supplies, warp speeds, light
years. Back on Earth, your wife and I
keep watch beside your rasping
body. The metastases have travelled
everywhere.
                       Even in your semi-dream, you hear me
ask you where you’re going. Your body
has grown gray and slight. Your lungs have both
collapsed. Base camp, you whisper.
Waiting for me…seeds.
So, as everywhere you’ve ever gone,
you carry bud and bloom and green.
I imagine biodomes, their moonstone sheen
rounding plains of dry space rock, iridescent
as our mother’s moonstone ring.
For a moment, you and I are small,
dinner simmers on the stove, and we are
watching Star Trek on TV, enraptured
by the lives beyond our galaxy.
                       You will never eat again. The nurses
give your body what it needs to be at ease.
You lie still, serene. Mostly gliding now. Then
your eyes abruptly open, and you beam
at us. Hello! How did you get here?
You take in the tubes, machines, electronic beeps.
Your wife thinks fast, strokes your cheeks, tells you
to mind the control panels, tells you they need you
in the colony.
                       Again you close your eyes. All day
you drift. That night, you lift your index finger, gaze, amazed
that it is glowing blue. You say it is your portal.
There are two, you whisper. One
is where the word is always ‘No’. The other—
and your finger faintly moves, draws a tiny circle in the air—
This one is where everything
is possible.

AKaiser – Swift Diachrome

/in

AKaiser
Swift Diachrome

Was it fright,
or planned flight?
Against a sea salt expanse
black & white confetti tossed
or a drove of dice rolled out into air.
Some look like the grade school drawings
we made of any bird in any sky, a two-stroke
stretched wide check mark.                 Still center
holds feathered blades to a churning heart.
Squawking flock departure into spacious
winter void. Glance back with those
same eyes open at birth at the
wingless man in a heavy
coat to keep his
arms warm.

Agnieszka Filipek – Patches

/in

Agnieszka Filipek
Patches

My mother taught me how to mend and sew
when clothes got worn out.

She’d take me to the haberdashery store
to pick colourful patches

baskets filled with flowers, insects,
and animals like a little zoo.

They came alive on a leg or an arm.
Sometimes I’d get a patch for my backpack as well.

I couldn’t look outside the window while at school
the teacher would shout and put me in the corner

and there I’d stand with my back to the classroom
only the butterflies on my elbows flying free.