YOU WILL HAVE BEEN WRONG AND WON'T REMEMBER

Moloch fucking killed poetry, just as Moloch did the air, water, and earth, even the moon for all we know, took Whitman’s liberation and crammed it into a useless degree program, with right ways and wrong ways and bottomless scorn, shaming the expressers, correcting the hopeful, becoming the decider, critiquing those just wishing to smell a gardenia again, a carnation, using old semiotic systems to re-encrypt the banality of goodness, dashing the mere glimmer of a dare-I-say-it dream upon the profaned, plastic oil littered stelae of packaged Machu Picchu tour trams. And the vain protesters nuzzle their way into the web, clueless, providing the new dictionary of sneers, neologisms that deflate all humor, morph joy into Schadenfreude, archiving away generosity in long abandoned dust-buried subway stations, and the Good Gray Poet’s arm over the shoulder of a comrade becomes a television commentary for the news entertainment industry without the slightest sensation. The electricity of touch was the first thing to become extinct.  No one remembers that. No record exists. The pliant organ donors die before the billionaires and in the end it doesn’t matter, who is to say the cocktail party with the excruciatingly perfect cocktail dress and purchased smile sculpture is preferable to the shit-covered egg plucked for hunger from the straw in the shack with the tin roof in the vertical housing in the valleys of the impoverished town of Bucaramanga?  In the end, I say, I prefer the egg, I prefer to watch the cocktail party on TV, a black and white TV without cable, and if the picture goes out when it rains, I still have the egg, for now, and the rain.

But know ye this, O Congregation of Moloch, you will have been wrong and won’t remember, you don’t remember the name of the street corner where you stood when they threw bottles and hosed down the marching or which side you were on, what colors your cheerleading uniforms bore as the blood flowed down the streets and while you faintly remember thinking, “It’s not time,” at the time, and now, the echo is faint, you think, “Later, later, later does seem a familiar song, one I might sing even now without looking it up in the Hymnal of Despicable Thoughts, although it is quite possible that I only heard others singing, others saying, others preaching, others chanting, perhaps while Walter Cronkite spoke, I don’t remember, and yes I have heard of Laos and Chile and might generally be able to assemble the map pieces, jumbled in a jigsaw, with a hint regarding their shapes, is Guatemala squarish?, but listen, as if it mattered, time passes and what happened then is not what is happening now, this time it is different, this time I will remember, if I have time,” you say, but the truth is, you will have been wrong and won’t remember.

Validation of a life on the verge of exhaustion or extinction comes with the thump of the stamp in the passport, the status travel that the congregation, one by one, stands to announce in sharing time, humbly as a peacock, these necessary mission positions and dining undertakings in Pakistan, Zimbabwe, Peru, Turkey, Colombia, Ukraine, New Zealand, with a quick stop for espresso in a Paris bistro for two weeks, they call it living well, revenge, yet unacknowledged torture, varicose veins standing in lines, uncomfortable sensations in the stomach, sunburn, salt water in the snorkel mask, sad altitudes, forced itineraries no better than the memories of production standards meetings minutes, minutes in the boardroom and the hospital, same deal, far, far away.  Not travel that is desired at all, but lust for having traveled, for telling of having traveled, for showing the artifacts of having traveled, just as the poet loathes to write, disdains to compose the undeniable truths, these heartbreaking facts, this awful editing, the blood that flows from the chewed fingernails.  But, to have written!  That is something else.  To have written is to have the refuge and the reward and meaning itself lasting longer than the day on the beach, the rough draft, the sand crabs, the italicization and missing quote marks, the forced relaxation, dietary changes, mundane addictions, and odd toilet papers of the world.

Is that snow I see outside my window again? If I stop writing for a week, force myself to abstain like a Zen monk without wine, fasting so my consciousness hovers above my desk or hammock, out of body, seeing myself in this state of dis-composition, this is not a pretty picture, unbearable in a sense, but the meditation sets in and reveals: some faction of the world must relinquish life first.  Better over there than over here, as they say, better they die than we do, for now, although inevitably, every number wins the lottery, every number completes, war or no war, civil rights marches or gay pride parades, the funerals are coming, more rapidly now than ever, more and more, visitations, obituaries, familiar dead, faces that fade and tones of voice that sound funny in the recordings that were preserved for just such an occasion as this.  And all the members of the congregation begin to forget what they were supposed to remember to forget and what they were supposed to forget and who, and that disease begins to infect them all, the disease of not remembering, the disease of blank stares and horror at what was forgotten more than what was remembered, most of all for what was deliberately forgotten, of what was ignored, of the deaths that preceded over there by the congregation's will, the deaths that they thought could forestall their own, and for what, which could be formulated into a question if the difference between a question and a statement made any sense to anyone in the congregation any more, even at all, even a little, even an atom's worth if difference. Now I will try to remember. I have to follow the incredible shrinking man as he crawls down between the stitches of the white Fruit of the Loom underwear he once was able to wear, now to live within the threads, slipping with brilliant resolve past eternity

– March 8-10, 2010

THE LAST SAINTHOOD

An Orison Viagra for the start of the millennium

Clinton's mind, this dawning day, and history
All are clear. Four young deer skitter
Across the gravel road beside the wood,
Above which he can see the shooting star.

One hundred more newspapers yet to go,
One hundred more orange tubes he has to stuff.
The headlines echo "HIV and Democracy:
Extinct, Extinct, Extinct"

To search his recollection was not hard.
He knew the past and, now, could cite it all,
Like walkers in Fahrenheit Four Five One,
He'd memorized Nineteen Nine Nine events,
That late but final freeing of our needs
Of human flesh. It came late, yet it came
And came to stay and came again, in rerun.

Government then prepared us for the end,
Decreeing that the lie would never hold,
The nucleus had loosened, spreading outward
To the rim. Our secrets would be told;
No detail could be spared.

They should have stocked the cellars
To prepare for the millennially rotting chip
With rice and beans and tuna fish.
The water must be purified. We all make do.

Now Clinton brings the news, his new post, door to door.
We have swapped responsibilities, switched roles and class
In a new century, after the fall.
Politicians are the poets; once-professors dig the wells.

He hears the AM talk shows as he drives,
From Pittsburgh, Georgia, Ciudad Mexico.
Dialect and twang and tongues reveal
Their pasts, not now perverse,
Since the lie has gone away for good.

The white crane circles Hiawatha Lake, assessing ice,
In search of landing sites. That trampoline in tatters,
Suspended in a tree, might well suffice.
A pickup truck is hauling pigeons in a cage
Back to the homes they would not home to in their rage.

That orison Viagra rose Niagara-like into the skies,
A prayer of pride and shame and fury, on that day that day.
A mixture iodized, a purifier for the water in our cellars,
For the years we wasted, back before the martyr lay,
Slain the saint of oral sex, the crippled grin, the sad device.

And all knees bent and all heads bobbed that day that day.

Once Barney knew the glories well that Monica had owned,
How she knelt before the offering, its modest point and dull surprise,
Described in court as quarter-thick and penta-length, this stele.
Clinton's arms, outstretched to sides, reached phone and Betty's page device.
The crucifix position, with his back against the desk and Barney sees, envisions,
How the issue came to rise, how the spew of ecstasy and ivory,
A guilt of gilded declaration, fireworks so fixed in time,
History's propulsion, with a splashdown rivaling Apollo's,
Upon the fabric blue, like ocean waves of icon matter,
Pattern worship object for tomorrow's classroom text..

Once Maxine grieved her race, the chains that bound them,
Chains of iron metamorphosed, link by link, to family ties
Unearthed by the founder's love for Sally, how he put his aged hand
Deep in her reproductive roots, his fingers striving, reaching out
For the excuse of ownership and finding naught, an emptiness
So black and rich that Maxine rubs her checkbook to her cheek,
Her chest, in vain, also in search for kin and coal
That might have changed, compressed itself to diamond roses,
Ropes of helix DNA, men twisting in the wind.

And Mr. Hyde thinks of his last transforming, when the draught
No longer served his lust. The child he grunted into life
Now gazes down from far across the continent,
His slavish drool imposing heat on Mr. Hyde's unhampered head.
That child, now grown, had driven spikes between two unions,
Severed vows, imposed a prophylactic curse, a vampire Frankenstein.
The haunting passed and absolution antidotes concocted
In the House of Usher. Webs dangle from the furniture,
All weeping sacrificed.

And Newt, who licked the cantaloupe, comes out of hiding,
Longing openly for Clinton's taste, a sample of her melon sliver,
Fragrant oval crevice where the whitish jet of blissfulness
Splatters nose and teeth and tonsils, such abandonment of haste,
But he can only wish that it were his endeavors
That made monitors ablaze, that hit the books, that flat recorded
Lessons in the way to please and pleasure. His was not the orgy
Taken to the grave yet made eternal, etched in the stone tablets
And the wooden schoolroom desks where children carve
Our nation's new publicity, since privacy was slain that day that day.

Now saints all and the radio explains to Clinton
Wrapping up the paper route
Of fishing spots in Arkansas, of copper flies if weather please,
Or nickel lure those sunny days,
Or fun in hunting squirrel meat.
Another caller tells, confessing, to the station, so routine:

"I have fucked at dusk in flowers on the Croisette by the beach in Cannes.
I have fucked along the railroad tracks of Rome.
I have fucked on grassy mountainsides outside Xalapa, Mexico.
I have fucked in crashing waves and underwater.
I have fucked in doctor's offices in Bogota, Columbia.
I have fucked in a tent in Yellowstone.
I have fucked in a sleeping bag at Big Sur, by the oranges of Hieronymus Bosch.
I have fucked in a carnation greenhouse in Denver.
I have fucked in a mobile home outside Miami.
I have fucked in the doorway of a quaint European hotel.
I have fucked while dining in a Paris restaurant.
I have fucked in an ancient stone windmill on a Greek island.
I have fucked in the back seat of a car on Sunday afternoon on a country road outside Urbana.
I have fucked during a Wim Wender's world premiere movie screening.
I have fucked in the Louvre and in the Chicago Art Institute.
I have fucked on the equator.
I have fucked in Golden Gate Park.
I have fucked while listening to "A Chorus Line."
I have fucked in a moving car, while driving.
I have fucked in the back of the bus.
I have fucked on the nude beaches of the former Yugoslavia.
I have fucked in my parent's house.
I have fucked in a very clean park in Zurich.
I have fucked in cyberspace.
I have fucked in the Denver Public Library.
I have fucked on a train leaving Barcelona at midnight.
I have fucked in London.
I have fucked in France.
I have fucked in somebody's underpants.
I have fucked in ancient Mayan ruins.
I have fucked on hotel balconies overlooking the Caribbean and the Pacific, in Veracruz and Maui.
I have fucked in prison.
I have fucked in graveyards."

Owing to the fact government pierced the lie,
Removed the veil,
Destroyed the split between all thought and deed,
There was no difference,
Just like Jesus always said.

To tell the children? How to not?
Or let them overhear?
Sit them down at the beaming hearth and listen, listen well.

A spring of urine, arc transcendent,
Leather in the kitchen cupboard,
Hot and red the spanking bottom,
Anus, mouth and organs pulsing,
Missionary impositions,
Ancient multiples in India,
Those who touch themselves, no other,
Those who cannot touch forbidden,
Fruit insertions maharaja,
Fingers, feet, and penis proper,
Impotence and faithful sadness,
Pure and pervert anesthetic,
He who knew a thousand others,
She who singly had accepted
Stranger's commands for another pat
Of butter on the plate,
And those with fantasies beyond
The reach of an ability to state.

Children read these books and hear the stories told.
Uncle Remus limps to woodshed archives.
Look at woodcuts of affairs official,
A new national geographic.
The box was opened. Christmas came.

A line of 2000 women, naked, standing tall and short, obese and willowed, black and pale and Asian-eyed, those who disdain and look at broken watches, those who gasp and remember rapture, and Clinton must service all, bowed down, his penance for a time, but not eternity, so we may be forgiven, long forgiven, long forgotten what to our forgiveness would be due. Is there time to pay the penance? Who had guessed such penalty was joy?

Still, there is time. The clocks have stopped, the pre-ordained disaster when the numbers rolled around and hit the marker, the millennium, the dates and figs of flavor while the Senators spent their final hours dissecting spots of semen and measuring the penis, counting pubic hairs that danced atop a soda can.

He yawns and sees the ranch house nearing.
The radio plays on, the national confession.
Hillary is sleeping, waiting, outstretched everything
Beneath the goose down comforter.
He's coming back where Y2K had leveled all,
Us all, and nothing more could be sold by showing skin.
We were sated by the secretless of life,
The end of privacy, our home.

A sonnet must be written for order
To be found. Composing thought in heaven,
He sits beside the wood stove, where even
Owls peer in and quiz him. Fence and border
Crumble dusty, like disgust, and are gone.
He could write a speech or he could wander.
Smoke ascends to roof. He waits for thunder.
There is none. Peace in Saskatchewan,
In Vegas, Bombay, Durban, Monterrey;
The world, an image nation, one at last
And free. Clinton stirs the ashes. Night's passed.
Time to rouse mate, roosters and a new day.
"Ask not where finger ends and synapse starts.
We're dreaming; flesh is what composes hearts."

© 1998 Springer-Petrie, Inc.

Rantoul and Die, for old times' sake

My review of Rantoul and Die, first posted in 2006, is revived here in commemoration of the current new production in Los Angeles. I should note that the publicity for the new production (http://www.rantoulanddie.com/about.html) refers to people here as the "ugliest" people, who live in the "grimy little world" of central Illinois, which pretty much confirms my first impression of this Mark Roberts sitcom.


RANTOUL AND DIE

The first act of “Rantoul and Die” repeats an old fable about a scorpion crossing a road on the back of a turtle. Or maybe a rabbit. There is disagreement on this point.

The animal is inconsequential. More to the point, playwright Mark Roberts does not tell the story in the traditional sense. As usually told, the scorpion rides over a body of water, not a road, on the back of the animal. The scorpion promises not to sting the animal. After all, if the animal drowns, so will the scorpion. Halfway across the lake, the scorpion stings.

"Why would you do that?" the animal asks when the scorpion strikes, and the scorpion, although about to die, claims he has no choice. It is his nature.

“Rantoul and Die” takes the sting out of the story. In Roberts’ version, the scorpion strikes because it is his nature... and then goes on to kill another day.

After the first act of the play, my fear was that Roberts himself was like his specialized scorpion, the stinger shown on the ad for the play. He could make vicious fun of the low-rent service employees of Champaign County and enjoy watching the local audiences laugh, unwittingly, at themselves.

When someone writes a comic play about rural Americans, the operative word is usually "affectionate." You can spoof them, even ridicule them, but in the end there is some feeling for the bizarre and simple foibles of the characters, characters you have come to know and love. Think "Junebug." Think Beth Henley's "Crimes of the Heart." Think Larry Shue's "The Foreigner."

“Rantoul and Die” is given a smidgen of this sensibility in the second act, with the entry of a new character played by Joi Hoffsommer. As Callie, the manager of the Dairy Queen, she spoonfeeds the afflicted her soft serve ice cream while rattling off the reasons for her quirky behavior, her fondness for her 13 cats, her early memories of Peanut Buster Parfaits. Her unaccountable bursts into one-note laughter, a sound that trails off into the far distance, is a kind of laugh you are likely to recognize.

The first laughs in the first act on the night I attended were drawn at the first mentions of 1) Rantoul High School, 2) Rantoul Dairy Queen, and 3) vomiting while giving a blow job when drunk.

"Rantoul and Die,” act one, contains a similar degrading string of jokes, plus a constant stream of explicit sex talk and foul language. Whether these jokes emerge from a place of superiority and condescension is hard to tell, since Roberts writes in lengthy, personal program notes that the play was written "during one of the most insane, self-destructive periods of my adult life."

But why did he write it? These are not stories from his life. I doubt he would be associated with any of these characters. By the second act, there is a sort of sympathy generated for a character, brain dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The final image of that character falling to one side is inexplicably funny and almost moving.

Mostly, though, I think Roberts deals in the stock in trade of the Los Angeles television and movie industry: contempt. I don’t think he is willfully mean toward his characters; he merely writes in the language which he’s most familiar, and I don’t think it’s all that funny unless you are willing to laugh at the people themselves, the characters in his play.

"Rantoul and Die" is not by a long shot the worst play I've ever seen. I seriously tried to consider if it would have a chance to be performed at Actors Theatre of Louisville, where they are known for their midwest rural shit-kicking comedies. But I think the answer is clearly "no."

The problem is, at least in the first hour of the play, nothing happens. It is not “plot-driven,” the reviews admit, hard pressed to discover any story or theme at all.

The performers can't be faulted. Nor can the director. These are well honed, professional performances. I laughed at non-joke lines because of the delivery given them by Mike Trippiedi and Anne Kearns, not by the jokes themselves, which often seem incongruous (or randomly ascribed) to the action and characters.

Just hours before the play began, I flipped channels and landed on the redneck comics on Comedy Central: Larry the Cable Guy, Jeff Foxworthy, Bill Engvall, and a fourth guy. I was impressed at their timing, their wit, and their interaction with the audience, despite the trailer park stance and crude perspectives about life in rural America.

I didn’t feel bad identifying with their rural, redneck jokes. You sort of know they’re kidding, that they identify fondly with the people they are making fun of. I’m not sure I got that impression in “Rantoul and Die,” where the people behave the way they do because "it is their nature" -- in this case, to be venal, unfaithful, violent and stupid. Other than “sweet” (but perhaps also mentally challenged) to describe Callie in the second act, one would be hard pressed to find other adjectives to apply to the characters in “Rantoul and Die.”

I originally posted comments about “Rantoul and Die” on this site, so that my lawyer friend could read them and argue with me. We Tweedledee'd and Tweedledum'd back and forth heatedly. There was never any intention for those notes to be read or published openly. Mark Roberts found those notes with a Google search and was offended, not surprisingly, in what he saw as a personal attack. I guess it is my nature to write criticism. I’ve done it for too long. Far too long. And, in keeping with the correct telling of the parable, both scorpion and target got hit by this particular poison.

STARFISH

by Eleanor Lerman, from Our Post-Soviet History Unfolds.

 

Starfish

This is what life does. It lets you walk up to
the store to buy breakfast and the paper, on a
stiff knee. It lets you choose the way you have
your eggs, your coffee. Then it sits a fisherman
down beside you at the counter who says, Last night,
the channel was full of starfish. And you wonder,
is this a message, finally, or just another day?

Life lets you take the dog for a walk down to the
pond, where whole generations of biological
processes are boiling beneath the mud. Reeds
speak to you of the natural world: they whisper,
they sing. And herons pass by. Are you old
enough to appreciate the moment? Too old?
There is movement beneath the water, but it
may be nothing. There may be nothing going on.

And then life suggests that you remember the
years you ran around, the years you developed
a shocking lifestyle, advocated careless abandon,
owned a chilly heart. Upon reflection, you are
genuinely surprised to find how quiet you have
become. And then life lets you go home to think
about all this. Which you do, for quite a long time.
Later, you wake up beside your old love, the one
who never had any conditions, the one who waited
you out. This is life's way of letting you know that
you are lucky. (It won't give you smart or brave,
so you'll have to settle for lucky.) Because you
were born at a good time. Because you were able
to listen when people spoke to you. Because you
stopped when you should have and started again.
So life lets you have a sandwich, and pie for your
late night dessert. (Pie for the dog, as well.) And
then life sends you back to bed, to dreamland,
while outside, the starfish drift through the channel,
with smiles on their starry faces as they head
out to deep water, to the far and boundless sea.

End of Blog

the bottom line is
no matter how much i do
i cannot be long