Peter Max Lawrence: "figure"

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[According to popular sources, there are 689 days, 12 hours and several minutes remaining.]

Soren Gauger: from his upcoming novel, "Unspeakable Things"

Chapter 10

The Sadness of the Anthropologist

[Extract from the personal diary]

    You would think that after so much time in the tropics there would be very little that could truly scare me. In fact, the human mind works quite differently. At the age of twenty-five I devoured every exotic “delicacy,” participated in every ceremony and camped out in every jungle without the slightest concern for my own life. And I might be the same today had I not begun traveling with older anthropologists. I learned many invaluable things at their side, but I also learned two very destructive things: fear and sadness.

The fear I learned first of all by example, by watching the old men toss fitfully in their sleep as they recalled the horrors they’d been through, or jump at every loud noise. I knew one man, Gerkin, who actually slept with a revolver under his pillow, until it went off one night as he slept. The bullet missed him, but he did go deaf in the left ear.

There’s a certain way of picking up your fork when you believe it may be the last time. A certain way of shaking hands when you expect to be the victim of an ambush. A certain lack of conviction to a laugh when you wonder if there is anything to the world apart from misery. Whenever I cough, I check to see if there’s blood in the saliva. Every scab I locate is likely to be the onset of some venereal disease. I have inherited all these manias from watching the behavior of my elders, even though their paranoia initially appalled me. I even sleep with a gun under my pillow, and knowing what happened to Gerkin doubles my insanity.

The other way I have learned to fear is by watching horrible things happen. My address book is a cemetery. That horrible wail as Clinbourne’s mule lost its footing on a cliff road. The smile on Brothers’s face as he handled the poisonous frog that killed him. The messenger dryly reporting that Greenblatt had been viciously attacked by the natives who had theretofore been his generous hosts. Stories like Greenblatt’s are the most terrible, and the worst for one’s state of mind. All feelings of trust and security become utterly provisional.

Then there’s the sadness I mentioned. No less infectious. The sadness of the anthropologist is a complex one, a mixture of sadness for oneself, for one’s privations and sufferings, for the rotten and ravaged state of the present-day wilderness, for the paling of reality before one’s youthful dreams, for the slow demise of one’s ideals and the grim recognition that one is becoming coarse and intolerant, for the fact that the only people one relates to are corrupted to the very same degree as oneself, and are consequently unable to lend a sympathetic ear, if such an ear really exists at all, for the fact that simplicity is not, can not be beautiful any longer, in both life and culture because simplicity requires something like honesty, and as I mentioned, there is no one that can be trusted.

Actually, I omitted my greatest fear from the above. The fear that the present notes could be found after my death and read as some sort of comedy.

I am not writing to amuse.

Nor to instruct.

I would simply like to be taken on the same grounds as one might take a stranger in a cafe or at a bus-stop. That much civility would do. As though there were nothing absurd about a ghost – I will someday be a ghost – speaking his thoughts aloud in a private text, addressed to no one in particular. Forget for a moment, I beg of you, that this is private. Pretend we are meeting on equal terms. I will bring my delusions and prejudices and you will bring yours. And for a brief moment, you might forget who’s listening.

Peter Max Lawrence: "Symbols"

Rodney Nelson: "Hurry To Do"

green had made a differing of sky and earth

and when it went the pavement returned to rock

matching the cold gray above

                     all memory

of wood and leaf scent dried into a spice that

north wind could not activate or became a

nut with ground hardening over the churchyard

plots

                     interring the two the so-young man and

woman would not have gotten easier had

to do the dig now in a storm coat

                     might be

no one around to bury their grandchildren 

It is, in fact, on the stroke of six; it is a winter’s evening; we are walking to the Strand to buy a pencil.  How, then, are we also on the balcony, wearing pearls in June?

…when the door shuts on us, all that vanishes.  The shell-like covering which our souls have excreted to house themselves, to make for themselves a shape distinct from others, is broken, and there is left of all these wrinkles and roughnesses a central oyster of perceptiveness, an enormous eye.  How beautiful a street is in winter!

-Virginia Woolf from Street Haunting: A London Adventure

Philip Quinn: "Who prepares the body, packages it for the host?"

The Egyptian punches the time clock, pulls the brain out through the nose, 

     helps voyage the dead

What’s left—a crippled mime stored in a painted oblong box

The mummy’s unwrapped empty eyes of love

In the book of the dead, Horus and Anubis form the crew

Put the heart/soul on the scale with the hieroglyphic scars of the past

Somewhere along the wrinkled road map

After miles of caffeinic steering

Fingers reach for the devil’s glove

In the orbiting cathedral

Places wear out from genuflecting knees

Witness the bracket lines around the shellac mouth, the pictograms holding down 

     the motionless chest

No mirror steamed with breath shows the stranger

Entrusted with the cold final touch

Eric Beeny: "Sometimes the Noisy, The Vast Clock"

Sometimes the noisy, the vast clock, a sudden

gasp, or gap,

such awful

beautiful trees,

and there are

others, our lips into them

violently astonished.

If we had not been noticed,

privately pleasant,

surging with questions,

we transparent shades

shrinking in shock

with heart-shaped fists,

sensation minus wind,

spoken of, heard of,

afraid.

Of, patience indeed

weeping,

you couldn’t prove the most distant

limbs or leaves,

or do anything taller,

immediately

hesitant.

…small scars

Too thick to number

Where the long cold

May come and come

Till the slow frost

Buries at last the lush summer

And the heart grows numb.

-Madeline De Frees, from Recession

Chris Wiewiora: "Mass"

A huddle of the already arrested lie facedown, cheeks ironed into the asphalt, and handcuffs cinched behind their backs. They were supposed to be an example to the rest of us. And yes, the aura of pepperspray burns in our nostrils like hot sauce and the lingering static half-life from tasers tickle our uvulas. We jerk our shoulders forward, challenging: What, you think you can stop us?

Then there’s a quiet flare of white. Not a white flag of surrender, but a Victoria’s Secret push-up bra stuffed into a Bacardi bottle, filled with Shell gasoline. The crackle of a First Strike match head. A hint of sulfur. Potential.

Hesitation: Snuff out the wick. It can all be over. Throw it, throw it, throw it. Our chorus drowns out the thought of stopping short. We grab the still-lit bottle. Kinetic.

To try to finally disperse us, teargas launchers abracadabra. At the same time as the guttural huff of a tube clearing its throat of a canister, we catapult the Molotov. Our arms empty, but open. We watch the glass bottle and metal canister arc in the sky—crossing an invisible line—and then kiss.

But what if the good days should strike us dumb,

How can we endure without falling silent,

How can we endure without falling silent when poems are shown to mean nothing,

This, for the present generation’s praises:

We wrote it, that poetry, then we fell silent, listen:

Now it is time for the drums…

-Paavo Haavikko, from Birthplace

Winter’s cove, no longer distant as the moon at anchor,

        looms where mounds of bones mark the whalers’

last village in this world.

-Duane McGinnis, from Diving off the Klallam Coast

So the commander gets them all around the campfire that night and gives it to them straight.  Men, the desert is dry and this one has monsters, and that water is all we’ve got.  Right.  So up again the next morning, and onward.  But this is not a morning like any other because now they see coming toward them another huge caravan in a factually weird condition.  All the people are wet, really soaking, and they are slogging along as if it was raining cats and dogs.  All the wagons are slugging through mud and the people’s hair is plastered down and it really is totally wet.  They see one guy with his mouth full of watercress, then another.  Wow.

- Robert Creeley, from Presences, a Text for Marisol

Bruce Boston: "The Holocaust Machine"

…eventually the surroundings grew unrecognizable and I knew I had gone beyond all previous boundaries.  I have heard people describe the moment, when setting sail in a ship, when one finally loses sight of the land.  I imagine the experience of unease mixed with exhilaration often described with this moment…and I must confess I did feel a slight sense of alarm—a sense aggravated by the feeling that I was perhaps not on the correct road at all, but speeding off in totally the wrong direction into a wilderness.  It was only the feeling of a moment, but it caused me to slow down.  And even when I had assured myself I was on the right road, I felt compelled to stop the car a moment to take stock, as it were.


-Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day

Eric Burke: "The Black Sail of the Universe"

Oh!  Liebestod!  (if only)

The team at The Planet Formerly Known as Earth took a short break in which to consider whether the world is really going to end.  It is.  Posting resumes, with this modified painting from the collection of Anthropologist Daris Swindler.  Anthropology resume, too.

According to popular sources there are 716 days, 22 hours and some minutes remaining.