Here’s Chyrstos.

From Fire Power

Sometimes Sitting in the Airport

when the normal white women
in pretty summer dresses
laughing eyes
bows in their hair
float by
burbling inane remarks
playful comments
like a vast bouquet of flowers
lilies of the field so happy
I hate them fiercely
just for that

OK. Before I start I just want to say I actually love much of Chrystos’ poetry. It’s fierce, truthful, blunt, unforgiving. These are all traits I admire and respect.

But.

There’s always a but. And always the oblivious human being who walks right through misery, causes it, even preens in its heat, all without ever seeing the human being in the middle of the rage and pain.

That’s one of the things it means to be human. No changing that. Not without evolving the whole species. And maybe not even then.

Not that I think talking to those “normal” women is worth anything. I don’t. Actually I think it’s a waste of time. They are oblivious to anyone outside their immediate need and desire.

I know them. I’ve been trampled by them. But am I mad? At what? It’s like an ant being mad at the boulder tumbling down the hill. Or me being mad at the earthquake because it wrecked my yard. I mean what point is there in that.

The trick seems to me to learn to spot them and avoid the suckers. Get on with things that really matter, that you actually want to do.

So when I read Chrystos’ poetry I wonder about all that spinning rage. All that energy. I imagine it turned like steam into a potent force turning a wheel instead of just loose heat not moving anything or anyone.

But of course that’s not true exactly. It moves me, her other readers. But moves to what? I can’t help but wonder if it is an efficient use of the power that rage gives.  Actually wonder. I don’t have an answer.

However, apparently not everyone feels that way.

Here’s an amusing example.

I recently joined a poetry group on a professional networking site. I just watched the threads build for a couple of weeks, to get a feel for what is discussed, etc. I commented on a few posts – “nice use of form to support meaning” etc. I went to check out a couple of the attached blogs – writers that post in forums often have blogs of their own as well. In one case I left a question about that very poem to which I had appended the comment “nice use of form”.

The thing about forums and blogs is they have different “rules”.  A blog is a sort of personal space. It is run by a group or a single person with the right to think and speak their point of view. You open yourself to dissenters of course, but it is your “home” and you can dis-invite at will. But a forum is something else. It’s more like a classroom where rules of collegiate discourse apply. That’s why when you get a silly-assed commenter just there to fart in public, one calls them a troll. (Sorry to Troll folk out there.) On a personal blog one simply “deletes”; the blogger is his or her own moderator. On a forum that job falls to someone specific – or it should do.

My comment on the writer’s blog seems to be what started this.

His poem had a stanza that said (essentially) that the world would adjust to your “tune”

I said:

Love the way you use form here, but…

You know how when you go swimming in a lake and if feels like, after the horrible cold shock of plunging, the water rapidly gets warmer? Nope. You get colder and fit yourself to the temperature of the lake. So really eventually you will harmonize to the world’s tune.

The comment was not well received. But OK. It’s his blog, so I just left and didn’t go back, just like if I was in a lecture hall and I didn’t agree with the speaker’s conclusions. I can speak to it, but essentially, for the duration, the hall is his or her “home”. So you leave if you don’t like it. That’s what common courtesy (and democracy) demands.

There was another commenter on that personal blog (we’ll call him Mr (all in caps) Odd Online Name) that tried to shut me down. Rather rudely. The owner of the blog, to his credit, said that all commenters were welcome.

Mr Odd Online Name is also a member of the poetry group I just joined.

A few days after this incident I posted my first question for the group. I decided to go with very, very basic poetics and thus be non-confrontational.

I said:

Anyone here have a strong preference of poetic orientation? Lyric or mimetic? If you do have a preference, do you know why? Curious is all.

Apparently Mr (all in caps) Odd Online Name had been lurking. He responded to the thread with this:

Mr (all in caps) Odd Online Name • First of all, I request you to kindly mend your tone and tenor Mr. (portion of my actual birth name). You are not a chilled bottle of Beer I suppose. Please don’t denigrate yourself. What is your credibility to talk about strong preference of poetic orientation? Here there are no lunatics under the guise of poets. If anyone is a lunatic he would answer you. Finally, I should say that have nothing personal against you. I have seen many who crave for instant popularity at the cost of the real poets. I will not tolerate anyone who insults the honorable poetic community.

I laughed. LOL’d for quite a while. Then I waited for a day to see what the group would do.

Nothing at first.

Here’s what I wanted to post in response:

Dear Mr (all in caps) Odd Online Name,

Thank you for your reply to my question. I will assume that you are simply ignorant of the basic terminology in my query, and so will direct you to a resource where you can remedy your problem. I suggest you start with The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, which has an entry called “Poetics” and addresses Western and Eastern forms of poetry, broadly the terms I used, mimesis and lyric respectively.

I am glad to hear that you have nothing against me, but such a protestation of friendship as you made does make me wonder if you use comparable language with all strangers who ask questions about poetic preferences. Perhaps you just need a better translation program so that you can be clearer in your use of English? Since it seems absolutely crazy to attack a perfect stranger on a professional networking site, and even madder to attack another poet in a poetry group for talking absolutely basic poetics, I will assume you are just incapable of accurate or sensitive use of language at this point in your education. Such and interesting thing in a “real” poet.

I suppose I should address the question of “credibility,” but I’m quite sure my two graduate degrees, publication credits and status as a educator give me no position of any real importance; I am quite sure whatever your background happens to be is of much greater importance to you.

As for asinine posturing and those who crave popularity, I am quite sure you know much more about that than I, so I will leave that to your clearly practiced hands. I feel quite happy, even gleeful, at the image of you protecting “the honorable poetic community” so I wish to offer you my sincere thanks for such an entertaining welcome to this group.

And finally, Mr (all in caps) Odd Online Name are you really making fun of my name?

Yours sincerely,

(My other name)

But I didn’t. Moderation in all things, yes?

And of course, some of the group members posted remonstrations.  But really, what sets people like this guy off?

and here I am in another one today. Don’t know why except that I have developed a ganglion cyst on my left foot and the fucker makes my whole foot ache.

and this poem I’m writing is kicking my ass

and, and, and…I could probably whinge-around all day.

I’ll try to control my temper in future posts but I’m promising nothing.

I get really tired of it when that someone is another woman telling me how I should respond. As long as I choose my behaviour carefully, protect myself and those who are vulnerable, what the frak is so scary about an angry woman? Really. Do you know?

Anyway, in celebration of appropriate anger here is a poem by Gregory Scofield.

Not too Polite Poetics

his diagnosis was not conclusively cutting edge
nor was the conversation charming
like was I a closet peace pipe smoker
or did I eat rabbits
with the fur still on

but what was my tee-pee creeping technique
did I make my move closing time
sneak up cruise past
make those heads tilt eyes swing
just this way, boy

or simply hang around
looking seductively stoic
like a Curtis portrait
waiting and contemplating
their move

our west I discovered
I didn't need to kiss up
to graduate head of the class
despite the prerequisite
keeping my mouth in check

not polite to stick my grudge nose
in their Native Lit class
say my piece on First Nations first voice
demand Kinsella visit Hobbema
or take a course in Cree colloquial syntax

like all First Nations writers
I must adhere to ethnic demands
make my poet's entrance
wrapped in a Pendelton blanket
sunburst geometric design

maybe a Navojo ring or two
to give me the authentic look
a ghost dance shirt
might come in handy
reflecting history bullets

when I get too mouthy
for their comfort
they want Yeats Dickinson Longfellow
a cosy chit-chat afterward

I barely pass the visiting poet's test,
answer why I'm so angry
so impolite, so defensive
is not what I want here
but the chance to speak

without backs up or a drum solo

I went home, went to bed and slept for four hours. In the middle of frakkin day. And still woke up like a pit viper on mad-juice. I want to be a tyrannosaurus, eat all the cute little bunnies and destroy everything pink.

Blah.

Certain things make me really mad and to be truthful I suspect that at least some of the things that make me mad are the result of my pedophile “uncle” (hereafter known as “P”).

Yuck, I know. (Please relax. I am not going to tell you about that set of experiences, rather I would like to briefly meditate on the outcome today, all these decades later.)

I acknowledge that some of my aggression is the result of trauma and emotional damage. However, I suspect I would have been aggressive whether or not P turned up to the family property that summer. My father was a terrier with an attitude. He was, frankly, terrifying in his rages and drunken affection and I have inherited some of that disposition, although not the alcoholism. (I associate the feeling of being out of control with the hurt of others and therefore do not partake to the point where I feel that instability which precedes drunkenness.) What I suspect is that P narrowed the focus of the natural aggression. I react poorly, for example, to threats to my physical or emotional safety or to the safety of children or others under the power of a “well wishing” majority.

One time, as an example, a boyfriend thought that pushing me into a corner was the answer to my anger at a bit of his behaviour. Before I knew quite what was happening I had a pair of scissors in my hand and the points were headed for his throat. He had very long (and fast) legs. Last I saw of him he was booting it down the road outside the apartment.

I have fought very hard to control the actual outcome of my anger. I did not kill the bugger above, for example. And as soon as the threat was gone, so was the anger. I will not tolerate what I consider to be abusive behaviour. Even things as simply juvenile as snides, snarls, slammed doors and tossed heads in the work place I consider worthy of disparagement, nay, outright scorn. I recognize it makes me an uncomfortable, and vaguely threatening person to be around and there is no cure for that I’m afraid. I just stay away as much as is possible from people who are afraid or threatened by my presence. I don’t really care if a 30-something year old acts like a 10 year old except when I have to both witness it and suffer its effects. If you want to be a princess do it away from me. That’s all I require. I don’t think it too much really. And if you do decide to sport your tiara and flip your hair at me, I will attack.

A lot of people see that as a problem though. I keep being told that I can be assertive without being aggressive, for example. Actually, I’m not sure that this is really possible, not without changing an important component of what makes me me. It’s who I am, welded, now, to the bones of what I would have been.

I am a badger. Leave me alone and I am kind of fun to watch. But I have enviable claws and a disposition to dig.

I do like being me for the most part. While I have had several rather nasty things happen to me in my life, I feel more than compensated by my “gifts.” I hear the sky singing, for example, and when the brain shifts sideways I can also experience yellow as a “ting” sound and other such cross-modalities. I can think; I can reason. I can flow in and out of the experience called “art.” I have wonderful children and friends. I live in a country that will take care of me should I need it. And perhaps most importantly, I have a strong sense of ethics.

This last – my sense of what is OK and what is not OK in the commerce between people – I thank P for that. The horror that was his life, his actions, his pain and inability to control it, left me (and others) irrevocably changed. I can never be what I would have been, but I don’t think of justice as pertaining to the outcome for the transgressor but justice is rather the eventual outcome for the transgressed. And I think justice has been achieved: my life is a good one all told.

I am aggressive and not simply assertive, it’s true, but I suspect that my justice achieved is really due to my agression, so it is not something I would forgo for others’ comfort’s sake. I can’t help but think of the time and current places where the chucking of full grown women under the chin, the silly diminutive names and bottom pinchings that highlight genderized power disparities and the people who counsel the few outraged women to accept what men are like for the sake of peaceful co-existence. Rage has its problems, of course, but it is also the social change engine.

For me one key to living with rage is the control of my behaviour. Yes, I make most people uncomfortable but I never actively set out to hurt except in self defense. Rage is a form of power and it must be controlled. P taught me that. Still, I don’t think social ease is something that should be overtly fostered, rather the self awareness that must underpin any real acceptance of others should be the focus of our joint efforts. (I mean, the vocalizations of the deaf make many hearing people visibly uncomfortable. Whose problem is that?) Hair flippers that gain self awareness stop being hair flippers. Since I see the source of hair flipping and its generalized form, princess pouting as emotional immaturity and as such an emblem of emotional damage in a woman that should have achieved a higher level of maturity, I think that addressing that damage is the way to achieve justice. So I leave it alone until flipped and then inquire if the person realizes that she isn’t really a princess. “You do realize that daddy wasn’t really a king, don’t you?”

Don’t you think that should be warning enough? Certainly it’s  better than smacking her upside the head.

The other key to  living with rage is a profound respect for the nature of what is. Slipping into the easy but empirically incorrect comforts of belief is dangerous to self, but more importantly, dangerous to others. The princess pout limits the pouter but it actively hurts the eye and ear of the one witnessing the shocking loss of decorum. To be more serious, I do find that my ability to feel joy, to fall into awe, is directly relational to my ability to accept how I actually am, where from I, in fact, came and where to, in fact, I will go. Princess pouters cause me pain and while I can moderate my response to that pain, I cannot stop the pain itself. Nor should I have to really. It’s not that I expect the princesses of the world to stop being affected assholes, just that I expect them to do what I do and control their natural propensities. In other words, pout all you like, just don’t do it near me. I mean, really, all of us need to shit but most of us learn to do it in a way and place set apart for such unsocial needs. Princess pouting is just a sort of emotional defecation. Do it in private please.

I suppose you can see why I am not universally liked. Oh the joy of living with others.

I don’t know the results of the interview yet, and frankly, dear….

The thing is that I really don’t.  It’s as if the interview, at the tail end of a divisive, team-shattering process, has reset some sort of inner target in my head.

And that realization made me think about how I have been in these last 50 some odd years.

It’s as if  I have a free floating targeting device in my head.  For example: moving along, a good day at the university, driving a well-loved country road, my mind just floating. Then – blip – focus – as it notices the signs of deer – drive – float – blip – focus – the condition of the tulee in the pocket wetland – drive – float – blip – focus – new plants in the white farmhouse bed in a yard – drive, float and then these two young men. Focus. They are driving what is probably their mother’s car, decide to slow down on the road in front of me. I slow down. They go even slower. I am very close to them now and the driver turns his head to the passenger and grins. And slows even more. So I pull out to pass and he speeds up and pulls in front of me.

The target snaps in place. I back down behind him and then the grin again. What happens next is that I run them off the road. The flash of terror on the driver’s face was gratifying.

I feel the hormonal rush for a little while but the target just unmoors and goes back to floating. Waiting for the next environmental trigger.

It’s not just anger that triggers the lock but it is a useful feeling. I am going to court in the next week on behalf of a young, deaf, Native American girl to protect her from persons who do not have her best interests in mind.

I’ll drive days when I am locked onto some specific case or project.

I’ll get in my car at 10 PM to drive 8 hours to get a niece who feels at risk. I’ll  find out a friend is in need, drop everything, drive across country to help.

Not good things, not bad things, just the effect of the targeting thing in my head.

The problem is not the feelings or the targeting aspect of my mind, but that I have so little control over what they seem to lock onto – some things that do matter, things that don’t really matter, things better left alone.

Better for me, if I could say – “hey you, lock on there.” The things my mind finds of critical importance are sometimes really odd.

Imagine if I could control the lock-on, if I was as imp0rtant to me as that young girl?

Stars! I would be fierce in my own defense.

Radical thought.

Personally, I think anger a wonderful feeling. It’s got a clean feel, and carefully guided, it is really useful. It is powerful though, and if it comes up forcefully and with surprise it can easily cause trouble. The thing is, that since my recent doctor’s orders (it’s much harder to surpress the feeling at the moment), I get mad at some new things and — surprisingly to me — just don’t get mad at others.

For example, a woman pulled out of her parking spot on the edge of a very busy street without looking and plowed right into me as I was travelling along the street. Huge noise. Hit me right in the passanger door, scraped down the side of the car and pushed me into the next lane. Apart from momentary shock, I just didn’t care. I pulled in to the curb, got my information and waited for her to come up to the car. My main concern was that she was OK, and she was so I just got her information, went on to complete my errand (groceries) and then went home and reported it. I wasn’t even the littlest bit upset.

Then there was the woman at the Starbucks. Oh boy. I was at a mall (bad idea just before Christmas), I was tired and needed a coffee. I walked over to the Starbucks, lined up, asked for my tall dark roast, the barista pulled it, placed it on the counter in front of me, announcing what it was, and another woman reached in front of me a took it. She started to sip it, then complained to the person that it wasn’t right, and that it had too many gounds. The two people behind the counter said nothing (very carefully). My goodness, the rage I felt. Stupid, stupid woman. I turned to her and said, “it might be that it isn’t right because it isn’t yours.” I think it was more my tone than my words. She started to tear up. 

I suppose I should have felt bad but I have to say I didn’t. I just looked at her. I felt rage but at the same time my face felt expressionless. She put the coffee down and backed up. The barista took it and dumped it out and told her that the Christmas Blend (which is what she had asked for) would take a few minutes to brew.  The other employee gave me my new cup and I walked away.

I think the rage I felt was not so much at the situation but at the mindlessness and meanness of her behaviour. Amongst other things, I really don’t like people who make unnecessary difficulty for those who have to work menial jobs in the service sector. It seems such a venal thing to do. Anyway, I didn’t throw my coffee at her, so I suppose a verbal slap wasn’t too bad. It’s just that in the past I would have held my tongue because I know it won’t make any difference to how she comports herself, and in this I was right, because as I walked away I could hear her starting to complain about having to wait for her Christmas blend.

Getting mad at stupid people is sensible in many ways, but there are so very many that it might be a bit exhausting. At least I didn’t waste my coffee by dumping it down her front, I still have that much control.

Since it is right at the beginning of term I have only been to one class so far but in it I got the first reading assignment. Descartes.

Again. Descartes.

OK, so I know why. I even agree with the teaching strategy. He is clearly important to the development of Western thought about the idea of what consciousness is, but — Descartes.

Every time I read the bugger I want to hurl the book across the room. Radically doubting everthing down to the phenomenological subject, OK, I get that. But to say that we are going to rebuild the world, rebuild our sense of what we can trust (i.e. things our senses tell us, you know that there is monitor in front of your face, that it is not an illusion) after all that rigorous doubting by saying, ‘well we know god isn’t a deceiver…”  Excuse the fuck out of me! How does he know that, if all he can really trust is the fact of his existence? And if he can trust this thing he was told (you know the god thing), then why not some other thing he was told?

Bleh.

So I put down all my non-fiction, and went to the bookstore and found a Kate Shugak novel. I like Kate and her dog/wolf Mutt. An Indian woman that has a bunch of fearsome aunties, this I understand.  I like the way Kate kicks nasty ass. I like the way she is just plain honest about things.

I have another class tomorrow, but before then I will read Kate’s most recent (to me anyway) story and get the taste of Descartes gone. Bottom line: there is only so much of this rational irritation I can take before I need to take a bath is something more real.

Still there are lots of good authors coming up in the course handout. There’s Locke and Putnam, Fodor, Turing, Searle, Dennett, Churchland and Heil. I don’t agree with all of them, or even most of them (especially some days), but none of them make me want to hurl the book either.

I remember 1968.  I was 12 and had moved from the northeast of the US to Houston, Texas. When Martin Luther King was shot, I had been in town less than a year. I didn’t know how to comport myself in the place. I didn’t know it wasn’t OK to let my dark-skinned neighbor child (a Mexican foster kid staying with a white foster mommy) into my house, and that based on that transgression, my neighbors’ parents wouldn’t let them play with me.  I didn’t know that my voice (with its faint British accent) would arouse such suspicion.  I didn’t know that it was OK for the white teachers in my school to reduce the Mexican-American Spanish teacher to tears by refusing to allow her to sit in the teachers’ lounge.  I was pretty stupid really and because of that I was kicked out of the sixth grade. (It was my first, but not last, expulsion.) I probably deserved it; I was terminally insolent.  I have to admit, to them, I was probably a really nasty little brat.

I wasn’t particularly well informed as a child, especially not politically.  What I remember really are the sensations, the fear, the tension: the mouths, spittle flecked, purse lipped, and the eye glare.  When we first moved to town we stayed in a hotel right near a hospital, which happened to be only a short distance from an all-black neighborhood. Not that I knew that at the time, but it explained why I so quickly took to hiding and listening in secret dark spots.  The tension between the people who populated the hospital staff, the internationally travelled surgeons and research personnel, the whites in the area, and the near-by black residents who still had the occasional essentially unpaved street, shacks with no air conditioning and a plague of silverfish, roaches and rats, was enormous. They were all right there next to one of the most advanced hospitals in the world and they didn’t get along very well.  I didn’t understand it, but I could feel it. I responded by developing my natural sneakiness.

That was the year I heard about the concerned fathers of Houston who turned over the school bus with a bunch of black children in it.  I remember hearing about it, but it was on the sly. My parents spoke about it in hushed tones, huddled together in the dining room. They didn’t know I was there, hidden as I was behind the green baize screen separating the area from the living room. I got a lot of my knowledge of the world that way.  I told you…I was a nasty, sneaky little kid.

That year was bad. Some very good people were killed because of the hate and fear and there were some very prominent people who turned out to be angry lunatics. I mean Robert Kennedy was assassinated five years after his brother. Then there was a police riot at the Democratic National Convention: imagine various domestic “armies,” civilian, police, and the para-military National Guard, fighting it out in the streets. Mr Avalon could be right – that we are headed for another eruption. ”True believers“ whether religious or political, like the cyclic Great Awakenings or regular resurgence of homegrown terrorists like the right-wing nut-job Timothy McVeigh or the guy who shot George Tiller, seem to be endemic to the American world, resulting in and from regular bouts of hysterical social blindness. Still, once ’68 was over, civil rights did keep coming, the Vietnam War did end, and us liberal types did not bring on, as it turns out, the Apocalypse.

The ’67 Summer of Love turned into the ’68 Summer of Hate–so what happened in ’69? Oh yeah…the Stonewall Riots and we walked on the moon. I may not have much faith in the existence of group rationality, but I do have faith in history.  Based on it, I suspect we will survive our current crop of enraged loons, and next year there might be some interesting things to come.