Author: asitoughttobemagazine

Basket

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Basket

by Angie DeCola

Once held a pile
of biscuits. Since then sits
still in the corner, a tabby
watching marbles roll
and sound across the floor.

Next to the table now not on it,
basket’s useless as ripped pages
of a tablet, an unchewed chiclet,
a glass of sweet muscat when the meal
needs something dry and viscous.
Basket’s as mistaken as a misread cue card—
muskrat instead of whisker, mascara for mosquito.

Basket feels as much a quitter
as the secondhand guitar—two unused
props in their corners, gritty and tired
on the grained pine planks.

Basket needs purpose—to fall like Niagara, to topple
the notion of blending the way Fallingwater house does.
Basket wants to go back to the prairie, to belong
there with the prairie dogs, who might be prey
for cliques of birds and cats but still
prove themselves daily, digging hole after hole,
rising out of them to scan the grasses and,
in the nick of time, going under again.

Basket doesn’t know what it’s here for.

***

Angie DeCola’s poems have most recently appeared in Crazyhorse and Copper Nickel. Assistant poetry editor at storySouth, mother, and freelance pastry chef, Angie currently resides in the tiniest little town she’s ever lived in, in southern Michigan. Her poem “Basket” was first published, in a slightly different version, in The Greensboro Review, and is in the process of reinventing itself as a children’s picture book.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: WILLIAM REICHARD

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PALIMPSEST
By William Reichard

The dead call to say they’re not dead, or they are, but in any case, would I please stop writing about them? All of my old lovers call to say they prefer their privacy, so maybe I should stop writing about them. My brothers and my sisters call, then my mother, then my partner, all to ask, would I please stop writing about them? All right. But what then? This morning I sat in an office surrounded by a sea of papers. They all had to be put in order. So I put them in order, in neat little piles, then larger groups, then into the folders and the files where they belong. This is what I’m good at when I’m not writing about the lives of those I love, have loved, may love; when I’m not borrowing heavily from the lessons they’ve learned through pleasure and pain. This afternoon I stopped for the things we need to keep our house running: cleansers, cat food, laundry detergent. I pick them up week by week, we use them up week by week and then I go and get more. This is what I’m good at when I’m not remembering the fields of my youth, the evenly spaced rows of green and black, plant and soil, the odd sunflowers that sprang up because hungry birds carried the seeds from feeder to nest and dropped a few along the way; the sudden tall yellowness of such flowers in the cultivated order of things. This is what I’m good at when I’m not recalling a former love, the bend of his back, shoulders sculpted by afternoon light. This evening I made dinner, something not too good but edible. This is what I do when I’m not reliving the scenes of a childhood I remember more from stories than experience. I feed things: my partner, my cats, the strays in the garage. This is what I’m good at: taking care of people and things that need taking care of. This, when I’m not thinking of my parents, their lives intersecting at just the wrong time in order to make each of us, my brothers and sisters and me. When I’m not dwelling on this then I’m washing the dishes, washing the clothes, taking out the garbage. This is what I’m good for: running my little life, when I’m not locked away in my room, trying to write about all of the things I’m told I shouldn’t, yet must, and do.


Today’s poem originally appeared in Midway Journal, and appears here today with permission from the poet.


William Reichard is the author of four collections of poetry, including Sin Eater (2010) and This Brightness (2007), both published by Mid-List Press. He is the editor of the anthology American Tensions: Literature of Identity and the Search for Social Justice (New Village Press, 2011). He lives in Saint Paul, MN.


Editor’s Note: Today’s poem contemplates what it is to be a writer, and William Reichard obviously gets it. If you are being asked to stop writing about the ones you know and love, you are probably doing something right. If you are not writing, there is plenty to do to comprise a life—chores, errands—but what kind of a life is it when you are merely surviving, as opposed to living? Amidst the clarity and logic of today’s prose Reichard breaks into beautiful lyric imagery. In so doing, he lets the reader know what always lies beneath the surface—even of the mundane—when one is a writer.


Want to see more by William Reichard?
William Reichard’s Official Website
Mid-List Press
New Village Press
Knox Writers House
Interview in Literary Magpie

Diving For Dear Life

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“Diving For Dear Life”

by Ashley Browne

 

Thirty years ago I sat on a battered Royal Navy destroyer somewhere off the Falkland Islands, listening to the BBC World Service announce that the Argentine forces on the Falkland Islands had just surrendered.  It was traditional for the BBC to tell us (and the Argentines) things before our own command did, simply because the U.K. Government usually told the BBC first.

Some three months earlier, my friends and I had been merrily drinking our way around the bars of Gibraltar, celebrating the end of a long and fairly tedious naval exercise in the Atlantic.  There had been glimpses in the news of the forthcoming trouble in the South Atlantic but when the story finally broke of the Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands, our initial reaction was one of ‘where?’  In all honesty, the majority of us had no idea where the place was, there was a rumor that the navigation officer may have known but even that couldn’t be verified.

As we parted company with friends on other ships (a couple of whom, sadly, we would never see again), none of us could really imagine where this journey would take us.  Being as heavily trained as we were, the extra exercises had little impact on us mentally and the accompanying soundtrack of the ongoing negotiations had the misleading but comforting effect that it would all be sorted out before any fighting broke out.  The chilling reality dawned on me when I had to donate two pints of my own blood to be held in the sick-bay chillers “just in case”; nothing hits your 18 year old sense of invulnerability more than watching your own life-force being stored to possibly save your life at a later date.

Fast forward four weeks and we now found ourselves in a truly frightening shooting war and the ship was now very much in the front line and remained so throughout the rest of the conflict. During a series of hard fought air-sea battles against the very useful Argentine air force, this same ship sustained heavy damage and a number of my ship-mates were wounded.  Two of those ships that had been with us in Gibraltar were now at the bottom of the South Atlantic with some of our friends in them.

As might be expected, those dramatic events are still sharply etched in my memory and even after thirty years I can still capture the feelings and sharp emotions that surged through me at the time; the clenched, controlled fear of doing your job under fire, the deafening and intensely metallic sound of battle and the odd sense of almost zombie-like detachment that comes after the adrenalin surge of combat winds down to be followed by twitchy, nervous exhaustion and a few hours of comatose sleep if you were lucky enough that the watch system was in your favor when stood down from action. The general sense of enduring was always there; constant fatigue, cold, damp weather and short rations are my abiding memories of the time but always sweetened by the constant piss-taking humor which can still make me laugh today looking back.  We knew we were far from being an invincible war machine but just had to tough it out, the Royal Navy’s overbearing tradition of not giving up saw to that, rarely mentioned but tangible just the same.

With hindsight, our sound training (the end result of the Royal Navy’s torrid experience during the Second World War) and an ingrained sense of (at times black) humor saw us through physically and mentally. Petty differences were put aside for the duration.  Of a crew of near five hundred, only two men were taken off the ship as a result of what could be considered to be nervous breakdowns.

The Falklands are back in the news here in U.K. and the recent coverage of veterans’ issues combined with a long talk I had with a younger friend who has completed several tours of Iraq and Afghanistan, got me thinking about the effects of the high level of exposure to active service and direct combat on British service personnel and their families and associates in recent years.

Like the United States, the United Kingdom has had one arm or other of its armed forces engaged in active service on a more or less permanent basis since the end of the Second World War, from Korea to Afghanistan, in conflicts ranging from full-blown conflict to policing and peace-keeping operations, some as a result of savage civil wars, such as Bosnia in the mid-nineties.  Putting the politics and rights and wrongs of these conflicts aside, this has resulted in worrying levels of mental disorders among the young men and women involved and has directly impacted families, friends and colleagues who have to pick up the pieces, often with very little help from official channels in the shape of the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and the National Health Service.

All modern armed forces train their personnel to a point where they can cope physically and mentally to be able to carry out their allotted tasks while under extreme conditions that mirror as closely as possible combat situations .  Men and women will be exposed to harsh physical conditions, tiredness, limited rations and repetitive exercises. All of which are designed in quasi-Darwinian way to filter out those incapable of “making the grade” and expanding the concept of what is possible for those that do.

While this induced mental and physical hardening is an obvious prerequisite for men and (more frequently) women engaged in combat, the enforced bottling up of natural emotions and the subsuming of personal feeling into that of the team is almost certainly one of the main root causes of later mental problems including PTSD.  Modern military training is targeted at helping men (and increasingly) women in combat (and other dangerous military situations), overcome the immediate and natural reactions of a human being when faced with a danger.  Programs such as the U.S. military’s “Battlemind” initiative and similar programs in other NATO forces, have been highly successful in preparing troops for a shooting war but are not geared for helping those same troops wind down and rehabilitate into society, when their services on the battlefield are no longer required.  Although the U.S. has recently updated “Battlemind” to take into account post-deployment rehabilitation and help for spouses.

It is probably fair to say that although every major conflict throughout the 20th and 21st centuries has produced casualties with wounded minds, the Vietnam War was the one which really focused the Western world on the potential for long term mental harm to troops involved in modern warfare.  The shameful treatment of “shell-shock” sufferers in the First World War is indicative of how poorly the subject was understood at the time, although some effective pioneering work was carried out during that war, particularly by W.H. Rivers and others at Craiglockhart in Scotland (as readers of Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy will be aware).  Although the condition was recognized at the time, little or no follow-up research was done on those men that returned from the trenches of France or the Middle East and many of these men lived the remainder of their lives alone with their condition unable or unwilling to share what they had seen with their families.

By the time of the Second World War, advances in clinical psychiatry and the large scale involvement of psychiatrists with the armed forces, had bought about some recognition that men in combat had a limited “shelf-life” if they were not going to suffer long-term mental harm.  This thinking was borne out by later analysis, the fighting effectiveness of troops that had been in combat for 30, 40 and 50 days fell away exponentially, until at 60 days they were effectively incapable of continuing to fight.   Units had to be rotated out of the front line as regularly as could be allowed, in order to recover, both physically and mentally. These men often recovered quickly and one of the key factors in this was that unit integrity was maintained. Surrounded by friends and colleagues of a similar mindset and experience, they were able to reconcile their experiences and recognise that their unit provided a support mechanism, effectively a surrogate family.  I can remember conversations with my own grandfather (a veteran of France, Dunkirk and the Western Desert) on the subject and recognizing from my own experience, the importance of the bonds of those friendships to our well-being. Nothing describes it better than Shakespeare’s ‘Band of Brothers’ speech from Henry V, at that moment in time it is genuinely a form of love.

The Vietnam War produced its own set of special problems for the troops involved.  After the early phases of the war, men were drafted into units piecemeal with little acclimatisation time, the unit integrity and support mechanisms of the Second World War were often lacking and the war ultimately became unpopular at home, leading those doing the fighting feeling that they were lacking in true purpose.  Added to this (and this is true of present day Afghanistan) the fractured nature of the fighting and the lack of a clearly defined front-line, meant that even when out of combat, true relaxation was never easy.

Perhaps because these issues were so widely known combined with the sense that a generation of America’s male youth had been badly let down by the system and the later high level of interest shown by the media, writers and film-makers (some of whom had served in the war), the Vietnam War is now viewed as something of a turning point in the recognition and treatment of war related mental disorders.

The term Post Traumatic Stress Disorder was created by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) in the 1970’s and listed in their (then current) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 3 (DSM-III) at the behest and prompting of the Vietnam Veterans Against The War organization and their supporters.  PTSD is part of a larger categorization of mental disorders and while being far from exclusive to war veterans, it has provided psychiatrists, clinicians and general practitioners with a set of clearly defined set of symptoms that can be identified and possible cause can tracked against the patient’s history of traumatic events.  This has been of particular use when dealing with combat veterans.

The key factor in this is recognition of the symptoms and early treatment; a rape or assault victim may receive counseling as part of any criminal investigation and subsequent assistance program, in essence they will rightfully be expected to have been traumatized by their experience and hopefully any symptoms of PTSD will be picked up quickly and can be treated sympathetically. This kind of counseling, unfortunately, is rarely the case with returning combat troops in the U.K. at present.

The U.K. has lagged badly behind other Western countries in its approach to identifying PTSD symptoms amongst servicemen and women, there are no longer dedicated military hospitals in the U.K. and the facilities at Selly Oak Hospital in Birmingham are effectively (and rightly) dedicated to the treatment and initial rehabilitation of those physically wounded.  This means the onus falls on an often overworked chain of command and chaplaincy to recognize when servicemen and women are displaying any of the classic symptoms of PTSD. Turn around times between deployments is often rapid and those same men and women cannot easily be monitored when on leave.

Recognition of any potential problem becomes even more difficult upon a man or woman leaving the armed forces and the loss of security and new stresses and strains may often act as a trigger for any latent problems.  Unrecognized and untreated the outcome for PTSD sufferers and their families can be tragic; by 2007 more Falklands veterans had committed suicide than had been killed in the actual conflict. Divorce rates are higher than the national average for the same group and the high level of ex-servicemen amongst the homeless in the U.K. is perhaps indicative of the level of untreated mental illness.

Fortunately, there are charities in the U.K. which are leading the way in dealing with combat related PTSD for ex-servicemen and women, chief among them being Combat Stress.  These organizations provide assistance to PTSD sufferers, advice to general practitioners and support to partners and families.  Diagnosis and some basic Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is often all it takes to help someone. Recognition that what they are experiencing in civilian life is not necessarily a result of their combat experiences is often the first step to stability for most.

As a result of a rising profile of combat related PTSD in the U.K. due in main to campaigning by ex-service groups and the likes of Combat Stress, some research into the condition is now being carried out at St Thomas’ Hospital in London.

In 2004, after some 17 years of keeping a lid on my own symptoms post-Navy, I finally sought out some counseling.  At the time, I doubt many people would have thought I had a problem but I was starting to recognize in myself some of the odd and at times, disturbing behavior I’d seen in some of my old Navy friends whenever we met up.  I was one of the lucky ones, my symptoms were (and occasionally are) pretty mild and I had the financial wherewithal to address the problems. Others aren’t so lucky.

I don’t think anyone comes through war unchanged, some less than others but providing help for those most affected by the wars, that our politicians send us to, is a lesson that this country and specifically its government needs to learn quickly.

The Gift of the Wise Man

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The Gift of a Wise Man

by Janet L. Factor

myrrh  n.  An aromatic gum resin obtained from trees and shrubs of the genus Commiphora, valued in the ancient world as a perfume and as an embalming agent. Traditionally, gift of the Magi to the infant Jesus.

This set down / This: were we led all that way for / Birth or Death? -T.S. Eliot, “Journey of the Magi”

Not so long ago I found myself an inadvertent party to a conversation at my health club. A woman was complaining about a video she had recently rented for her daughter. The movie was Old Yeller, and she had rented it because it had been recommended to her as a classic, something that every child should one day see. Her daughter had been very upset by the story, and the mother was indignant.

This movie is the tale of a stray yellow dog that is first rejected and then adopted by a farm boy on the frontier. The two grow to love one another and become inseparable. Then one day the boy’s family is attacked by a rabid wolf. The dog successfully defends them, but is badly bitten by the wolf. The boy’s mother warns her son that the dog is doomed and must be put down, but the boy cannot accept this verdict. He quarantines Old Yeller until one day, the virus wins and the maddened dog turns on him. Then he recognizes his mother’s wisdom, and reluctantly he carries out the now clearly merciful sentence.

The angry woman summed up this plot scornfully: “A boy loves his dog and then he has to kill him! What kind of lesson is that for a child to learn?” At the time, I had no ready answer, although I felt a passionate desire to defend the movie. I had seen Old Yeller when I was perhaps 8 years old, and had anyone asked, I should have said that it was one of my favorite movies. Yet I was just as upset then as her daughter was now. Although it has been decades since the one and only time I saw the movie, I can still vividly see the climactic scene and feel the bitter anguish I felt then. But I loved the story and have always valued my experience of it. What profound lesson had it taught me, that I should even now feel so strongly about it?

After much discussion and soul-searching, I have come to the conclusion that the lesson of this story is a stark and yet a very necessary one. What I learned from Old Yeller without ever consciously realizing it was this: the price of love is loss. No matter how happy, no matter how perfect and true the love, it will one day end in tears, for we cannot escape our own mortality. It is a lesson about the fundamental nature of the human condition that we all must master to become truly adult. In the movie, it is the mother, mature, who foresees death, and the young boy who seeks to deny it. In accepting at last its inevitability and indeed necessity, he takes a step forward into adulthood. And I, watching, took that painful step with him.

Why, then, did this modern mother object so strenuously to her daughter’s experience? Perhaps she was like the other parents of whom I recently heard, who, when it was time for the old family dog to be put out of his pain, told their children instead that they were taking him to live with a family on a farm, where he would have lots of room to run and other dogs to play with, a place where he would live happily ever after. Love can sometimes lead our hearts astray. For while it is natural to wish to spare our children pain, in doing so too assiduously, we deny them indispensable knowledge.

I believe that acceptance of one’s own mortality is the root of all wisdom. In both Eastern and Western cultures, the precious gem symbolic of wisdom is the pearl, for in converting the grain of sand within its shell into a pearl, the oyster takes inescapable pain and uses it to create a shining beauty. Likewise, it is only because our time is short that anything we do in our lives truly matters. If we do not see an end to life, we remain always children, living in an eternal world of make-believe where nothing makes any real difference because the play will go on and on, and can always be re-imagined another time.

Without the understanding that we are mortal, we cannot appropriately value our own lives. Unless we know that life is fragile, and brief even in its luckiest prolongation, we will not treasure each moment of joy that comes our way; we will not hasten to seize precious opportunities before they pass beyond our grasp. We may not always cleave to those we love, not thinking how our time with them is limited. Until we understand that we must die, we cannot begin to live.

Many times I have turned these thoughts over in my mind, for on July 20th of the summer of 2000, my father died. As I sat upright in the front pew at his funeral and listened to my older brother tell the tale of Dad’s life, I thought to myself that if the pain then in my heart was the price I had to pay for this man’s love, I would gladly pay it again, a thousand times over.

My father was not a rich man, he was not a famous man, he was not especially handsome nor at all proud. Yet there was a greatness in him, for Dad was wise as few men are ever wise. Of all the people I have known in my life, and I have had many beloved teachers, he is the only one I would honor with the ancient title of Sage. Thoreau says, “To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically.” This my father did, from childhood through the moment he died, suddenly, unexpectedly, but as befitted such a wise man, not unpreparedly. For what is death but the greatest problem of life?

Dad was born into rural poverty in South Dakota in 1919, the youngest of three illegitimate children at a time when that status was still a curse. At the age of two, already scarred by his drunken father’s abuse, he was abandoned along with his siblings at the grim State Public School in Owatonna, Minnesota; his desperate mother had found a man willing to marry her but unwilling to support another man’s children. The searing experience filled Dad not with bitterness, but sweet compassion. “Kindness is the most important thing in the world,” he told us. “I learned that at a very early age.” He resolved to be a better man than those his mother knew. He had no patience with macho posturings: a real man to him was one who had the fortitude to stand by his wife and support their children. Correspondingly, he was a vocal supporter of feminism and of reproductive choice.

At five he was taken from the orphanage to live with a farm couple; when he was nine they adopted him. He was forever grateful for and returned the love they gave him. Later when Grandma, aged and long widowed, was no longer able to live on a farm, it was Dad who took her in.

Growing up in that tiny town, conscious of his outsider status, Dad set to work to discover who he was and what he could make of his life. Long before he finished high school, where he was a star athlete, he had read and re-read every book in the local library, seeking a broader view of life’s possibilities than could be had from the dirt roads that converged there. “There is no such thing as a good role model,” Dad told me. “I knew as a boy that we are all unique individuals and there is no reason to try to be like anybody else. I only wanted to be the best me that I possibly could.”

After graduation, in the midst of the Depression, he joined the farm crews that migrated from South to North and back again, working the plowing and the harvest, earning money to help keep the farm, which was saved only by FDR’s moratorium on farm foreclosures. (That made Dad a lifelong Democrat.) When World War II came, he joined the Navy, wanting to serve but also seeing it as a passport to the wider world. His intelligence, skill, and cool head-when mental maturity tests were given in training, the results caused officers to exclaim “God! Factor was born old!”, which made Dad laugh-earned him a position as pilot for those trickiest of airborne vehicles, the blimps that ran escort missions with convoys off the coasts, spotting U-boats from on high.

After the war the GI Bill offered opportunity, and Dad seized it with both hands. He attended the University of Minnesota, earning a degree in chemical engineering with such distinction that his professors urged him to stay on and attend graduate school. But Dad refused, for he had met and married my mother. “Life is short, and I am already over 30,” he told his teachers. “I want to have time to raise a family.” Raise us he and Mom did, sending all four of their children not only through college but on to graduate school. Dad also continued his own education, for he remained an inveterate reader, with a special fondness for history, which he studied for the light it threw on human nature. Books were the only material possessions he cherished.

Throughout his adult life Dad worked for his community. He served on the school board, sat on the city council, headed campaigns to pass school tax levies, led the United Way fund drive. One of his last acts at the PPG factory where he worked was to plant the seeds of a project that has since reclaimed to nature large areas previously laid waste by the industry’s by-products, while simultaneously cleverly recycling the city’s treated sewage.

Always Dad loved jokes, especially puns, and was known for his good humor and joie de vivre. “It’s a great life!” he frequently exclaimed. Yes, it was, we agreed, and well-lived; and we made that the theme for his funeral.

As my family rallied to cope with his death, almost everywhere we went, we found that Dad had been there before us. It began even before he was officially dead. As we sat in the dim waiting area of an unfamiliar tourist-town hospital, the emergency room physician came to ask our permission to cease efforts at resuscitation. There was still some small amount of electrical activity in Dad’s heart, he told us, but it had been more than half an hour since he had had a heartbeat, and there was certain to be major brain damage even in the unlikely event that they should succeed in their attempts to restart the beat. Did we still want him to go on? My mother, my oldest sister, and I all said with one voice, “No! He would never want that. Stop! Let him go.” We could speak then without hesitation or guilt because Dad had made sure we knew how he felt. He had foreseen, and smoothed our way.

Once we were home and the dreadful duty of making phone calls to my brother, other sister, family friends and relatives was over, we turned to the more prosaic problems and found most of the work already done. His important papers were gathered together. His will was there, though he had taken care to arrange that his financial assets would pass automatically to Mom. All information my mother needed to claim pension and other benefits at his death was placed in an envelope labelled in large letters “Louise-Important.” His grave and marker, and one for my mother beside him, were long since bought and paid for.

The only omission, which at first I found puzzling, was any expression of wishes about the conduct of his funeral. It seemed a strange lapse. Mom struggled with the decision, then chose to have a traditional funeral at the church, with family selecting the music, and anyone welcome to speak in Dad’s memory. As my siblings and I scattered to find Dad’s favorite books, then settled down to peruse them for appropriate quotations, we found that there too he had gone ahead of us, trusting that we would follow.

In all the books, appropriate passages were carefully marked. In the anthology of poetry that my mother had given him at their marriage in 1949, he had inserted two bookmarks with the name and page number of the poems also written on them (they might have fallen out, you see, and in important matters Dad was always careful to prepare for any eventuality). One piece was Edwin Markham’s great elegy for Abraham Lincoln, Dad’s hero, which I read at the funeral. The other was a love poem, a last farewell left for my mother. Late the night before the service, I found that in Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, he had highlighted the ode to Death that occurs in the midst of “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed,” and written clearly beside it “A perfect eulogy.”

Whitman’s ode is perhaps the most eloquent expression in the English language of the adult attitude toward death: understanding that this is the price for the beauty of life, and willingness to pay it. As my husband stood at the lectern and read the lines that Dad had chosen, my heart was torn with the beauty of it and the irony. We sat in the church where my father had been a member for some 50 years, where he had taught Sunday school in the prime of his life and served on the church council into his late 70’s. The pews were full of friends and members of the congregation who had grown old sitting there beside him. Yet almost none of them knew what both the struggling speaker and I knew, knew what depths of Dad’s soul were being expressed in these lines of poetry about accepting mortality, for Dad, devoted family man, staunch friend, amiable co-worker, pillar of the church, and scrupulously ethical public servant, was a lifelong atheist.

I do not mean for a moment that he was a man devoid of reverence; no, he was filled with it. But Dad revered the real world, the one in which we all live and die, this place that is relentless and terrible even as it is beautiful beyond all hope of expression. Humble indeed he was, but when Dad bowed down it was not before some omnipotent autocrat, but before the powerful wonder of this world. He was what is sometimes termed a modern pantheist, one who believes that the Universe and God are but one and the same thing, that life and non-life are united in this overarching order, and that anthropomorphic conceptions of a personal divinity are but primitive and petty imaginings compared to the sublime glory of the real.

         I knew these were the beliefs that shaped Dad’s life, because I shared them. I came to this view through my scientific training, even as Dad came to it through the application of his own meticulous intellect to his vast knowledge and experience. He spoke frankly to me about his philosophy many times. But he confided in very few, only those that he could be certain were spiritually akin to him. It was not until his funeral that I finally understood why.

As I followed the formal ritual of the service and listened to the pastor’s predictable homily about the gift of eternal life, what struck me most about these mythological trappings that I well knew my father had never believed was just their childishness. What a transparent fantasy! How was saying that Dad had gone to heaven where we would all rejoin him someday (provided we were good) any different from telling a child “Rover’s gone to live out in the country. Maybe someday we’ll be able to go visit him, but not right now?” It seemed to me insulting that I should be offered this juvenile fare, like a lollipop, to assuage so deep a pain, as though the death of one’s father were a mere pinprick.

There is no pain like the pain of grief, for its cause can have no remedy. Death is final. It must simply be borne. Sitting there on the unforgiving wood, I thought “There is no consolation possible for this.” Yet many in the church seemed to feel consoled. How could this be?

I saw then what I had never seen before, understood the appeal that religion holds in a new way. For this minister was not, as I had thought, offering us a patently inadequate anodyne for our mortal agony. No, he was inviting us instead to turn our heads away, to deliberately spare ourselves the fearful prospect of the coffin that stood before us, and so avoid suffering altogether. “Let’s pretend,” he was saying. “Let’s all pretend that Don isn’t really dead, that nobody ever really dies. Then we will never have to pay the full price for the love we have enjoyed.” His words were but denial writ large: if it seems unbearable, refuse to bear it. Don’t look; turn your face away.

But closing his eyes to the truth, however fierce its aspect, was the one thing that my father would never do. The sage will always look straight into the tiger’s maw. Dad loved a passage from Olive Schreiner’s Story of an African Farm, one of the books that shaped him as a youth: “All things on earth have their price; and for truth we pay the dearest.” The road to honor is paved with thorns; but on the path to truth, at every step you set your foot down on your own heart.”

Yet he was never hard-hearted nor cynical. To live such a life, a life spent with open heart as well as open eyes, requires courage of the first order, a courage that many of us find hard to summon when pleasanter prospects are dangled before us. It is so much easier to remain as children, playing only in the sunshine, afraid to face the dark.

That in itself, I finally realized, was a truth to which Dad did not close his eyes. That was why he had confided his views only to those who already shared them. Dad knew, because he knew his fellow humans, that not everyone, not even all of those who loved him, would be willing or able to follow where he led. Because he loved them too, he would not cruelly force them there. Dad would never deny to those who loved him, and whom he loved, the comfort they derived from their religious beliefs. Having himself walked through fire, he grudged no one any wellspring.

That was why he had made no requests as to the conduct of his funeral. Eight decades of experience had taught Dad well that funerals are for the living, not for the dead. A man so brimming with compassion would have seen it as selfish to insist on a simple, secular service, and Dad would never have his last act be a selfish one. Instead he refrained from saying what he wanted, so that those who mourned him could have what they needed.

But those of us for whom this was not what was required had to find the means to answer our own needs, even as Dad had always done. So to that hallowed platform where so many nativity scenes and passion plays had been staged, we brought our own. For those with eyes to see and ears to hear, we stood up, one by one, and spoke our simple truth.

My brother told Dad’s story: This was a great man, he said. I read Markham’s poem: Great men are born of the Earth, I said. My eldest sister read the final passage from Edgar Pangborn’s A Mirror for Observers, a lyrical homage to our planet: He will return to the Earth with love, she said. And last my husband rose, coming before us in my father’s stead to read Whitman’s glorious ode: We are mortal, we are mortal, we are mortal, he said. We are all mortal, but be not afraid.

Be not afraid, for behold! this knowledge is a precious gift. It is that myrrh borne by the wise man to the cradle of the infant he adores. Sweetly it perfumes the sheets of lovers; gently it secures the shrouds of the dead. The joys of life and the pains of death are not two things, but one, and can only be wholly grasped together, even as the full glory of Spring can only be known to those who choose to endure Winter.

We are mortal, and Dad did not fear the fact. Instead it inspired him to live his life with vigor and joy, to make what difference he could while he could. “Birth is a death sentence,” he often said philosophically. He needed no divine disciplinarian, no fear of hell nor hope of heaven, to keep his feet on the narrow path of righteousness. Dad was virtuous because he loved virtue, and for no other, no lesser, reason.

We all face a choice. We can go on being children all our lives, even after our parents are gone. We can even pretend that there is an eternal and perfect father, an omnipotent father, up there somewhere where we can’t see him, and that he will always take care of us and tell us what to do. Or, mature, we can accept this difficult gift, though our fingers tremble in the opening. We can willingly anoint ourselves with this essence that unites us with all those who have gone before, and will come after. We can carry it in our turn.

I do not wish to think of Dad as residing in a far-off heaven when he is alive inside me here and now. I do not need to pretend that there is an ideal Father hidden somewhere above the clouds when I have a wise and loving father within my very heart. Knowing that he could not stay, Dad deliberately gave to me everything I would need to face life without him. He showed me how the perils of this world are part and parcel with its loveliness.

Wisdom is indeed a pearl of great price, for the truth of our mortality is the hardest truth of all. But can we not choose to make this understanding the seed for our own pearls, each of us wrapping it about with the shimmering substance of our own lives, so that when we come to die, it will be a thing of beauty that we leave to our loved ones in the treasure house of their memories? Such was the gift that my father left to me.

***

Janet L. Factor is a Contributing Editor for Secular Humanist Bulletin, where she delights in exploring the unity of opposites in her column, Heart & Mind. A student of biology and history, Janet believes that the epic of evolution frames the short stories of our lives. She is Founder and Organizer of the Springfield Area Freethinkers.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: REGIE CABICO

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IT’S NOT SO MUCH HIS KISS I RECALL AS HIS VOICE
By Regie Cabico

A shy pebble rippling water. Each phrase
a school of startled ginger fish shimmering
through the telephone line. I’d like to invite
you to my place & immediately I became
a frightened puppy in a tropical rain forest.
Only to my surprise, I was in Brooklyn
reading Lorca in his living room, calmly
sipping tea. He played me Joni Mitchell
crooning the lines he loved & even tried
to sing the high notes. His falsetto cracking
midair as we both laughed. That’s when he
rested a photo album on his lap & pulled
a picture of himself, a young boy swimming
in a Buenos Aires blue reflecting pool. I wanted
to lick the nape of his neck instead said, You’ll
have to teach me how to swim. I’m afraid
of water. That’s when he placed his lips
to mine, our most perfect palates open as we
pulled away to catch our breath.. You have
to be relaxed otherwise you’ll drown. I kiss
him again feeling ribs beneath sweatshirt,
our hearts racing the way a diver freefalls
plunging in a sea of pearls


Today’s poem appears here today with permission from the poet.


Regie Cabico is one of the country’s leading innovators and pioneers of poetry and spoken word having won 3 top prizes in the National Poetry Slams as well as the Nuyorican Poets Cafe Grand Slam. Bust Magazine ranked him in the 100 Men We Love & The Kenyon Review called him the Lady Gaga of Poetry. He received 3 NY Innovative Theater Award nominations and won a 2006 Best Performance Art Production award for his work on Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind. Other theater credits include the Hip Hop Theater Festival, The Humana Theater Festival & Dixon Place. He has appeared on two seasons of HBO’s Def Poetry Jam and NPR’s Snap Judgement. His work is published in over 40 anthologies including Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café, Spoken Word Revolution & The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry. He has taught at Urban Word NYC, Poets House, Kundiman, Split This Rock and has been on the faculty of Banff Arts Center’s Spoken Word Program. Mr. Cabico received the Writers for Writers Award for his work with at-risk youth from Poets and Writers. He is former NYU Artist in Residence for Asian Pacific American Studies. He performs throughout the UK and North America & resides in Washington, DC.


Editor’s Note: I had the pleasure of seeing Regie Cabico perform recently at NYC’s louderARTS weekly reading series. He gave one of the most engaging, entertaining, and raw performances I’ve seen—poetry or otherwise. Mr. Cabico rolls up his sleeves and delves into the theater of the real, exploring queer themes and other matters of the human condition, as thoughtful and honest in his humor and wit as with his tenderness. A true performance artist in his own right, Regie Cabico’s words are as riveting on the page as they are displayed before a riveted crowd, his peacock feathers on full display. After his performance, the drowning of today’s poem stayed with me for days. When asked if he had any books for sale he replied, “Nothing for sale online but my body.” The Lady Gaga of poetry indeed, and then some.

For a real treat, watch Regie Cabico perform today’s poem live.


Want to see more by Regie Cabico?
Inspired Word Performance on Youtube
Three poems at EOAGH: A Journal of the Arts
watch Regie Cabico perform “Capturing Fire” live

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: KIRUN KAPUR

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ANTHEM
By Kirun Kapur

Love begins in a country
Where oranges weep sweeter
And men piss in the street;

Your hands are forever
Binding dark strands
In a plait. Your mother’s

Childhood friend has steeped your skin
In coconut oil, tucked her daughter beside you—
All night the room is a womb, live with twins.

Heat’s body presses every body. Sharp chop
Of your uncle’s cough clocks the hours; your sister’s
Washing, the rush of your thoughts. Morning is nine

Glass bangles hoisting sacks of sugar
From the floor. I’m not talking
About a place, but a country;

Its laws are your mother, its walls
Are your dreams. The flag it flies
Is your father waving away.


Today’s poem originally appeared in AGNI, and is reprinted here today with permission from the poet.


Kirun Kapur grew up in Hawaii and has since lived and worked in North America and South Asia. Her work has appeared in AGNI, Poetry International, FIELD, The Christian Science Monitor and many other journals and news outlets. She has been a poetry fellow at The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Vermont Studio Center and McDowell Colony. This year, her work was awarded the Arts & Letters/Rumi Prize for Poetry. She lives in Massachusetts, where she is the co-director of The Tannery Series.


Editor’s Note: Today Kirun Kapur shares with us a beautiful lyric poem, replete with images you can nearly smell and touch. The dialogue between title and text is poignantly framed with the poem’s raw and honest conclusion.


Want to see more by Kirun Kapur?
AGNI
Beloit Poetry Journal
Beloit Poetry Journal Poet’s Forum
Crab Orchard Review
Clapboard House

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: JASON MYERS

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HOTEL ORPHEUS
By Jason Myers

Rain, Eurydice, more rain.
It seems these mountains are married
to cold, damp clouds. I’ve known
no sun here, where you are
not. I sit by this window
and peel the skin from a pear.
Darling, I needed to see you
and now I see rain, hotel porn.
Somebody sent chrysanthemums,
some roses, an orchid. They smell
nothing like you. My nose is wasted
on onions and cilantro’s summer noise.
I won’t cry any more. I won’t wake
in the middle of the night and reach
for the phone to call you.
This rain, how it seems to seethe
like water hissing from the lips
of the kettle, begging one more dance
with Darjeeling. I watch the news
of India, a 70-year-old couple killed
in their hotel room. Didn’t Dickinson say
the world was made for lovers?
Well, she died alone and this pear
tastes like salt. O little town
with your shut-down steel factories,
build me a ship, there is a river
I need to cross with waters so dark
dawn looks like night and my own name
is sung on the waves like a curse.


Today’s poem originally appeared in AGNI, and is reprinted here today with permission from the poet.


Jason Myers grew up in western Maryland, and graduated from Bennington College. He received his MFA from NYU and has also lived in Berkeley, California and upstate New York. A finalist for the National Poetry Series, he currently lives in Atlanta, where he recently received a Master of Divinity degree from Emory University


Editor’s Note: Don’t look back. The unheeded warning that left Eurydice in Hades and Orpheus destined for his own darkness in the world above. But to be human is to look back, and that is what Jason Myers grapples with and succumbs to in today’s poem.

One of the things I love most about lyric poetry is its concern with the same themes humans have been struggling with since before the invention of the oral—let alone the written—word. We have all looked back, despite our best efforts to restrain ourselves.

Beneath the layers of time, of progress, of modernization, there is little difference between the heart of the musician poet who sought to retrieve his lost love from the depths of the underworld and the heart of the man sitting alone in a hotel room in a steel town. Both men know to their cores what Myers means when he says, “there is a river / I need to cross with waters so dark / dawn looks like night and my own name / is sung on the waves like a curse.”


Want to see more by Jason Myers?
Cortland Review
Conjunctions
B H Journal
Terrain.org

Albert Herter

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Magic and the Link Compliment of the Borromean Rings in America

by Albert Herter

 

A salvo

The Lacanian want-to-be-analyst in America is not unlike John the Baptist who when asked to identify himself said ‘I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness…’  There is a wildness in the cry of those who cannot be but amateurs (in the sense of lovers and without financial benefit) but on the other slope we have the fate of a tamed and harnessed Lacan, in the stable with all the other thinkers waiting to become usable in American universities, servicing the humanities.  One receives a credential with a sigh of defeat.  But despite this wildness the amateurs would like to contribute to the edifice being constructed across the Atlantic, and in South America.  Eventually we would like to build on New York bedrock. 

Marie-Hélène Brousse, during the Paris-USA Lacan Seminar at Barnard College this past September, said that when Lacanian analysis comes to the States it falls flat.  Only in the Arts, specifically directors such as the Coen Brothers, Tarantino, etc., is Lacanian analysis alive and well.  It is alive in so much as it is ‘subversive’ and ‘creative’.  This is in fact my own history, coming from an arts background and education, I found Lacan through a gallery.  I now belong to a reading group that is currently reading Miller’s address to the congress and the group consists primarily of musicians.  There is a dearth of ‘men of letters’ here, no symbolic fortress to support us.  As Lacan already noted during his sojourn in the States – there is a deficiency in the symbolic.  We are adrift in a soup of imaginary phosphorescence, bursting, oozing, continually reconfigured.  No wonder the Health Care Industry compensates with an obsessive reliance on statistics and categories- that makes everything appear impossible.  So this is the field one wishes to practice Lacanian analysis on.  An amorphous threat of litigation is pervasive.  As far as I understand, the bare minimum in order to practice legally is a two-year social worker program.  In some senses two years is not a long time, but in terms of an ethics of desire it is a very long time.  Presumably one learns more than how to call the police if the patient mentions suicide but still.  I considered making analysis my art practice.  At one point I investigated what sort of credential a fortune-teller requires. Perhaps we are the new magicians. W.H. Auden wrote ‘To believe that a world of nature exists, i.e. of things which happen of themselves, is not however invariably made.  Magicians do not make it. ” Just as the Imaginary after the Symbolic is not the same, Magic after Science would not be the same.  One need only conjure up the image of CERN, the 27 km circumference circular tunnel located 100 metres underground with its 2,400 full-time employees searching for the God particle to get a sense of the desperate need to make nature cough up another signifier.

There is a magician in England named Derren Brown who is ‘a performer who combines magic, suggestion, psychology, misdirection and showmanship in order to seemingly predict and control human behaviour, as well as performing mind-bending feats of mentalism’.  He is essentially a cognitive behavioralist suggesting actions to weak-willed volunteers.  In addition to his stage show he has a series where he exposes frauds who claim to speak to the dead or heal the sick.  He keeps company with men like Richard Dawkins.  What I would call the missionaries of science- Brian Greene, Daniel Dennett.  The prevalent magic of today is the magic of suggestion, hypnotism, nudges. Algorithmic magic. Everyone knows that the birth of psychoanalysis was tied to the renunciation of hypnosis.

 

Rogue analysis, Black Market analysis

The practice of Lacanian analysis in America is irredeemably political, at least for the foreseeable future.    

Ego psychology fit very well within the American program of forging individuals, harnessing their desires to the wagon of capitalist growth. A positivism and naivité which wanted to know nothing of lack or castration.  The New Yorker reports that Freud has finally landed on Chinese soil and will hopefully work the same magic, to reinvigorate the engine of endless expansion.  The article asks ‘Does psychoanalysis have a future in an authoritarian state?’  It tells about the suicides of workers at Foxconn factories, which make iPhones and other electronics, and a series of murderous attacks on young children by middle-aged men. According to The Lancet, nearly one-in-five-adults in China has a mental disorder, as defined by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.  As regards the USA, perhaps Lacanian analysis has no relevance to a country that has not yet experienced a sort of ‘historical narcissistic disaster’.  Which has not yet been truly occupied.  And it may yet be awhile before the ground is fully prepared.

A certain school of thought in physics ends in the many-worlds hypothesis.  One can see in the movie ‘Source Code’ what sort of philosophy this leads to.  Never mind that in this reality you are a war veteran without an abdomen or legs, in another reality you get the girl.  In effect it feeds the fantasm, till it balloons up and competes with the real.  Thus the proliferation of gadgets which are auxillary components to amplify the imaginary and the symbolic.  The real erupts with actual combustion.  Soon it will be our symbols that will be under cyber-attack, our databanks.  What will the ordinary psychotics do when their phones, which are their true supports, are taken away?

I have been enamored with a video since university, which is called “Not Knot” that was made under the direction of Bill Thurston who is at UC Davis and is one of preeminent topologists in the world.  It is essentially a guided tour from Euclidian 2 space into hyperbolic 4-space, specifically a rhombic dodecahedron.  This space is defined by the Borromean rings taken as an axis. Every knot or link, with some simple exceptions, emits hyperbolic spaces.  I will just say that Roger Penrose used to admit a bias towards hyperbolic space in terms of the actual universe i.e. that the cosmological constant was negative.  In fact the rings are shrunk down and disappear to infinity ‘where light can never reach them’.   Perhaps psychosis can be thought of as a flirtation or proximity to the pure zero of the ring.  The neurotics float about in the more or less flat and uniform areas defined by the extremes of the rings.  The idea of the link compliment is a way of deriving one world from the three of the Borromean ring.  There is such a thing as One. This Borromean ring also has some similiarities to Penrose’s twistor (one can see the three rings in the twistor pictured above) which Edward Whitten, one of the premiere string theorists has since taken up with the hope that it may provide an escape from the proliferation of dimensions string theory has required in the past.  Could one say that the knot is on the side of being and the space defined by the knot is on the side of existence?  The videos narrator says the space around the knot is just as real as the knot itself and asks the question ‘What is life like in a space with a single line missing, or in a plane with a single point removed?’

Miller ends his rumination at the congress on Oedipus at Colonus, which was Sophocles last play written when he was eighty-nine years old and only performed four years after his death.  The Peloponesian Wars between Athens and Sparta had persisted for twenty-five years at the time the play was written.  It was a tribute to his birthplace.  Fitzgerald’s commentary reads ‘Oedipus has indeed endured his suffering with courage, but it is not until he has acted, and acted as the agent of divine justice, that the passionate man is fit to embody and to symbolize human divinity.’  ‘His rage and sternness in his last hours are the means of an affirmation.’  In New York we wondered if this was the harbinger of the end of psychoanalysis proper.

Andreas Economakis

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine
“Moon Fish”
(photo by Andreas Economakis ©2012)
  
THE LETTER B

when you find yourself avoiding
the letter b in your address book
when your heart feels a foot deep
in heavy liquid
you catch yourself 
alone on the couch
unable to move on
though its been 2 years
cracked pieces on the floor
pissed off at yourself
needing a sorry,
what a sorry ass you are
drowning your thoughts
in booze and work and books
and mindless little things
that no matter what
don’t let you escape
you’re forever in a loop
you reach out and touch the image
and it repeats itself
ad nauseum
ending with the ugly part
until you find yourself
on your couch
looking for an answer
to a question that was never asked
an answer that was never given
a hand that was never held
lips that moved away
eyes that turned to ice
a song you miss hearing
and you ask yourself
why
must I be like that
why
can’t I be like the rest
why
must I be like the rest
and you sit
and wonder
what would it have been like
and you find yourself unable
to escape from yourself
for one minute
a prisoner of the past
in a future already written
wanting so bad to say
I love you.
 
-Andreas Economakis
 
This piece is part of a collection of words on blindness entitled: The Blindness of Life. The author is not a poet.
 
Copyright © 2012, Andreas Economakis. All rights reserved.
 
For more stories by Andreas Economakis click on the author’s name below.
 
 

Elias Khoury’s Little Mountain

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By Karim Abuawad

Written by the Lebanese man of letters Elias Khoury, Little Mountain (al-jabal al-saghir 1977) is a novel set during the early phase of the Lebanese Civil War, a war that lasted from 1975 to 1990. Paradoxically, the civil war in Lebanon has had a tremendous impact on Lebanese literature as it generated an unprecedented number of new works which were influenced by it, so much so that the civil war has been characterized as the “midwife” of the Lebanese novel.

The appearance of these novels about the civil war, which were written from the perspectives of those who fought the war as well as those who were devastated by it, is now considered to be a threshold for the start of fully fledged experimentation in the Arabic novel, or, to put it in generic terms, from the realist mode to the experimental one. Although this experimentation in form can be traced back a decade earlier, to writers such as the Palestinian Ghassan Kanafani (especially his formal experimentation in All That’s Left to You), it is with appearance of these civil war novels that this mode of experimentation became normalized, or more accepted. Therefore, Little Mountain has come to occupy a special position on the trajectory of the Arabic novel’s development. Given that the century-old Arabic novel is a relatively new form within the much larger Arabic literary tradition, the importance of this movement from the more or less traditional realist mode to the experimental cannot be understated.

In an essay entitled “After Mahfouz,” Edward Said describes Little Mountain as the first departure from the style of novelistic writing that dominated the Arabic novel for much of the twentieth century. While it is an overstatement to claim that this novel is the “first departure,” I think the general gist of Said’s characterization is accurate in that it symbolically points out (as the title of the essay suggests) that Khoury’s novel marks the break with the realist style which the Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz had mastered, or even perfected, as some would have it. Writing about this break that he locates between Mahfouz and Khoury, Said says that “from this perspective Khoury’s work bids Mahfouz an inevitable and yet profoundly respectful farewell.”

* * *

It would be somewhat misleading, however, to say that Little Mountain is about the Lebanese Civil War. A more accurate way to describe it would be that it centers on the experience, told from hindsight, of an individual who gets implicated in this most horrible of wars. The novel tells the story (or to put it more accurately, the ramblings) of a fighter who has chosen to join the ranks of the fiddayyin, a group comprised of Palestinians and their supporters which fought in the civil war, despite the fact that this group fought against the Christian militias which were supposed to protect the interests of the minority to which the narrator belongs. Right from the outset, we come to understand the novel’s main narrator as someone out of place, as someone who positions himself outside of the locality to which he was assigned by virtue of being born in a certain neighborhood and to a certain family.

This, of course, is never spelled out explicitly in the novel. We come to understand the precarious position of the narrator (who is never named) from the choices he makes and from his decision to affiliate himself with one group over another. To put it succinctly, his position is based on affiliation rather than on filiation. The difference between the two, of course, has great implications to the formation of the self as this makes such formation reliant on an ethic of movement or becoming rather than on that of being. Crucially, these decisions are never explained ethically or ideologically. While they certainly have these elements built into them, they are part of an underlying scheme rather than part a manifesto-like, simplified explanations.These choices come to define the narrator’s private narrative as well as the larger narrative that he chooses to become part of. In a situation such as a civil war, choices are not a luxury, but a necessity.

In “After Mahfouz,” Said discusses some of the crucial aspects of Khoury’s style vis-à-vis the formation of selfhood. “Style in The Little Mountain” he writes,

is, first of all, repetition, as if the narrator needed this in order to prove to himself that improbable things actually did take place. Repetition is also, as the narrator says, the search for order—to go over matters sufficiently to find, if possible, the underlying pattern, the rules and protocols according to which a civil war, the most dreadful of all calamities, was being fought. Repetition permits lyricism, those metaphorical flights by which the sheer horror of what takes place…is swiftly seen and recorded, and then falls back into anonymity.

The point Said makes via the narrator about repetition is quite illuminating. For him, repetition is not the opposite of order. Rather, repetition is a search for order in a situation in which order is obliterated by a chaos that has become part of the mundane, everyday reality. The paradox Said points to shows us that even in the chaotic form that Khoury creates, there is an underlying desire to seek an order that could possibly mitigate the traumatic experience of the individual. From this standpoint, the traumatized subject constantly seeks a fleeting order even when the subject appears to do anything but seek such order.

To illustrate some aspects of the style that Said mentions here, it might be useful to start at the beginning. That is, to start with a passage that appears in the first few pages of the book, and which gets repeated time and time again throughout the loosely connected five chapters of this novel. In fact, the constant repetition of this passage also illustrates the hyper-episodic narrativity, or the utter inexistence of causality, in this novel.

Spoken by the main narrator, the passage gives us crucial clues about the style in which the novel is written, but, more importantly, about the narrator’s choice of affiliation. He says:

Five men came, jumping out of a military-like jeep. Carrying automatic rifles, they surround the house. The neighbors come out to watch. One of them smiles, she makes the victory sign. They come up to the house, knock on the door. My mother opens the door, surprised. Their leader ask about me.
–He’s gone out.
–Where did he go?
–I don’t know. Come in, have a cup of coffee.
They enter. They search for me in the house. I wasn’t there. They found a book with Abdel-Nasser on the back cover. I wasn’t there. They scattered the papers and overturned the furniture. They cursed the Palestinians. They ripped my bed. They insulted my mother and this corrupt generation. I wasn’t there. I wasn’t there. My mother was there, trembling with distress and resentment, pacing up and down the house angrily. She stopped answering their questions and left them. she sat on a chair in the entrance, guarding her house, as they, inside, looked for the Palestinians and Abdel-Nasser and international communism. She sat on a chair in the entrance and they made the sign of the cross, in hatred or in joy.
They went out into the street, their hands held high in gestures of victory. Some people watched and made the victory sign.

From the repetition of the sentence “I wasn’t there” we come to understand two key notions about the way the self is constituted in Khoury’s novel: chaos and absence. The self is first and foremost constituted by absence, an absence that is not complete, but rather an absence from its designated place. We should remember that the narrator is never named, and this perhaps is the ultimate absence, an absence from one’s own narrative. Such elision cannot be taken lightly as it highlights a crucial choice on the part of the novelist, a choice to make out of an absence a disfigured and incomplete presence.

Thus, the only thing that is captured of this narrator is a chaotic and disfigured narrative about an incomplete, incoherent life: episodes from a sheltered, confused childhood in the predominantly Christian neighborhood known as “little mountain,” episodes of street fighting without an apparent objective or justification, and finally a short episode about the fighter’s time in Paris where he goes to be treated of his wounds.

Narration in Little Mountain, then, is always an organizing principle, regardless of the form (or lack thereof) it takes. In Khoury’s novel, the principle of chaos or chiasmus (depending on the generosity and patience of the reader) becomes the device through which the self makes sense of itself as well as of the incoherence in the midst of which it happens to be.

Notes:
Khoury, Elias. Little Mountain. Trans. Maia Tabet. New York: Picador, 2007.
Said, Edward. “After Mahfouz” in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays.