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Notes on a life not merely taken.

*

February 16 can’t be shrugged away with "he invited what he got." He was no fool. If he invited it, he knew it was an invitation they'd accept at their own risk. 

In all my life of blithe habituations I’d not imagine I could wish a person dead. I must have missed the gist of dictum. Words can hurt, as surely as the other threats. There are so many forms of death, for anyone expressive.

Death by tuning fork, or death by branding iron. Conventions with buffets. The carving up of cochleas.

The turning of the stomach.

February 15th I received a shipment of discounted tee-shirts, tee-shirts having flowery big peace signs on them.

By the end of February 16, I was all for offing someone's president.

*

Navalny showed more courage, better courage, than most people would dream of having. Not a lick of sappiness, for anybody’s Valentine.

The smile had seemed indomitable; in the end the footage shows him shaven, dark, emaciated in the cage. Those two black eyes, minus the celebrated blue translucency, look grimly toward the camera; then, too soon, he has to turn to go.

But as he does, both of his hands (relinquishing their grasp upon the bar) flash out the old familiar signature: their V for victory.

*

Through all the portraits of his daily life, he seemed determined, eloquent. Often arrogant. The smile, deliberate, was an affront against affliction. A hardness mobilized, perhaps, to tamp the anger down (although it animated him against implacability).

To the resistance (against huge authoritarian self-interest) he pledged all the lucks he had—the luck of looks, supportive family, intelligence and humor (an ironic edge), his confidence in his ability with media.

Just try me, said the gaze.

The bastards took him up on it, and made a martyr of him.

*

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FROM A LONG WAY OFF

Who would not delight in Borges’s “certain Chinese encyclopedia” in which it is written:

animals are divided into:  

a) belonging to the Emperor, b) embalmed, c) tame, d) sucking pigs, e) sirens, f) fabulous, g) stray dogs, h) included in the present classification, i) frenzied, j) innumerable, k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, l) et cetera, m) having just broken the water pitcher, n) that from a long way off look like flies.

With this one mock-taxonomy, Borges confounds the very categories by which we make semblances of order. Not only he, but many underminers of the rules and categories of an intellectual procedure (critics such as Foucault, who was also known to quote this passage) anticipated, wittingly or not, the instrumental revolutions looming in the searchlights of the Internet—now as then—the Googling eye: what fundamentally regrounds our old attempts to organize experience.

Our disposition to the tree was partly biblical; but so too then inevitably our own attempts to think a search engine omniscient. (An omni-comprehensiveness requires a pure impossibility: that we exceed our best fact-checkers' comprehending.) So welcome now to 2020-plus, its futures as myopic as its pasts, its engines unexpectedly wide-ranging, in comparison with prior instruments for inquiry. It's also differently unfree. It’s inquiry with outsourced memory, an exquiry. It isn't just the volume of the misimpression but the speed, that makes it potent. Where media were once accompanied by time for meditation, now no more. It's yes or no, and fast. The instrument is ever implicated in the grasp.

What make a Borges churchlessly transcendent isn’t just his sense of the preposterous, which cuts through lots of categoricals and commonplaces tied to time.  He gets us closer to an understanding of poetic languages, which don't gain depth by mere accumulation or in piling packets up under a rubric such as “content”—till it's genuinely countless.  No, his insights are informed by an imagination's meta-visuals, proportions hatched of sensory experience, morphologies of unfamiliar forms. During his lifetime, physics gave us ways to “feel for” waves not just “composed of” particles but inrelations among motions in particularities, and from our ways of seeing anything at all.

The venerated reasons of the heart, the loves of mind (which sometimes seem distinct, sometimes alike) will change. Community is less in locability, or tenability, than colloquy. But we would have to speak across the boundaries.

Work past the seizure to relinquishment, past the ossifying, into oscillation; past the parts at odds, toward alls-at-once. We’re granted no security but our unsettlement.

So love is not for claiming: It's for falling.

And poetry's own raison d'etre is no high or fancy naming.

It's a calling.

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Under earth or in the deep. You get the drift. (I scattered my dad on the Strait, and found out crematory remains are oddly HEAVY.)

I'd hoped to float. Fat chance.

A friend I'll call Corinne once asked a bunch of us, her husband's poker pals, to join her on a boat-ride out across the Passamaquoddy Bay, to do the scattering of his remains. I brought the biggest blossoms from my blue hydrangeas, my ex brought his Old Overholt (unblended rye), and out we rowed toward the middle of the bay.

Turned out she had 3 cannisters of ash. Not just MacLeod’s remains—but also those of his own mom and grandmom, who had gone unscattered by their own descendants. Now Corinne would spread them all.

We puttered to the loveliest of spots, and cut the motor; had our first brisk swig of whiskey.

*

Each cannister was marked by a distinctive label.

It wasn't just the difference in monikers upon them, although always "maiden" names and matrilinear connections are some revelations of their own. My mom, who’d been the secret power node in my own childhood family, kept everybody's focus on the Smallwoods, not McHughs. The Smallwoods were her deep preoccupation, the McHughs an afterthought, or maybe a mistake.

To my mind Aodh (the Hugh who sired the Mc) was plenty fascinating, all the more so when I looked up Smallwood derivations (tree-lover that I was born to be) and was crestfallen to hear they weren't the owners even of a copse or grove. (The rust's always at work in an ironic destiny: my mother's Smallwoods were a tribe without a lick of woodland to its name.)

And urns are generations of technology, not only family history.

Our poker pal McLeod now bore a bright white laser-printed label, but his mom's was typed by Underwood or something: all the e's were just a little raised, the paper yellowing.

But Gram's cremains were in the tin I liked the best, the greyest tin, with dents, that bore an awesome elegance of script. The county clerks back then had practiced penmanship, and final name-tags merited a hand's best flourishes. The years had added amber to the boundaries.

Corinne now pried the tinwork open, and removed the heavy bag. And, therefrom, out poured grandma. (Wait, I swore to tell the truth: she didn’t pour; she more kerplunked. Her "ashes" were like rubble from a bombsite, chunks and knuckles, bits of clavicle and tooth, remains that sank down heavily, unevenly, and fast, evoking more of human quandary.)

We took our second swigs.

*

McLeod was next, his ashes something else: a fine particulate, a magic sparkle, utterly consistent. (Somebody in dust-land got degrees from Disneyworld.) Our pal, whose terse remarks had punctuated games with sharp acidic wit, now poured like powdered rainbows from the sack.

The fluent streams of him made ribbons in the currents. And those, in time, in turn, in slow downswoops, attracted porpoises at play. Hot damn. They wove some patterns through him. We were wowed.

Eventually my best hydrangea blooms went bobbing off above where he had disappeared. We drank to his abiding memory.

Then it was time for mom.

*

It took a moment for us all to understand Corinne, who now was asking to be motored towards the fish farm.

The fish farm was the first in a survival map to boost an area that had resisted the emoluments of LNG. The fish farm also was the area of bay where plastic feed-bags and discarded Pepsi cans would litter surfaces around the salmon pens. The pens themselves were frothing with some upteen thousand growing adolescent fish just now discovering their nets were overcrowded.

You sure? we asked. It's so much uglier. (We had our true romance.)

That's right, she said.

And here is why.

Bitch never liked me.

I'll be damned if she will rest for all eternity down there, commingled with my one-and-only love.

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Photos to come.