White thread, black ink
This post doesn’t want to write itself. Nothing does. Nothing wants to come out of my pen right now. Not since the divorce. But today is different. Today is Rosh Hashanah, Jewish New Year. And today I am stealing some New Year time to write because I can feel the weight of crumbling walls of silence sealing my lips. The unspeakable is a cage in my body. One with the bone now, after 39 years.
This is not the first silence I’ve had to keep. Sleeping well is for those whose speech has not been stolen. The first magazine I remember was blacked out with magic marker. There were words in it, paragraphs, pages marked out shabbily in great black stripes like jail bars. Time magazine all locked up because even English words in Indonesia were too dangerous, superfluous at best and more likely corrosive to the elusive unity to which the fat men in blue suits with lots and lots of sweet tea and coffee were pledged.
My house fell down a few years after I left it. The Man remarked on behind the blank ink that smelled sharp and acrid returned from Egypt in shame in 1998 and lived out his years in a quiet suburb before dying in peace ten years later. Meanwhile, the taste of melatonin is acrid on my own tongue, the taste of the forgetfulness the nation constructed like a shallow-buried coffin, or a little cocoon of amnesia. Certain things are blacked out in Our Memory, as a nation. Time indeed is jailed up. And I try to sleep.
In the light of a pale dawn I can feel the sunlight licking through the blankets, burning sleep away like chemicals in the pool where I swam when I was three, four, five years old. Somewhere with a name I have forgotten and the smell of Dutch tradition served with tea and biscuits at four o’ clock sharp, just as the mountain coolness was settling and mist was running up the valley. I remember it would rain there and feel like snow. I remember the cracked edges, the muck, the slime in the dry pool the last time we went. A dying resort propped up by a dying regime, cleaned with chemicals. And the jungle all around. Some parts of life can’t be blacked out.
When the word divorce entered my vocabulary a year ago it smelled with the astringency of a bad lemon. It smelled like bodies I have known. Words we do not choose float through us every day like little birds. Some sad. Some unaccountable in their flight. A few, perhaps, limned in the dawn. And then there are the days when the skies are clear day after day (it has been the driest summer in Seattle since records began) and the birds do not come with the dawn. Divorce is a broken down clock, a rusted thermometer. Divorce is defined as an absence, and it feels heavy, like the caked wet sand upon which my house stood when I saw some bureaucrat’s vision of censorship in that magazine.
How do you build on this? What do you say to a new year that does not crumble away? What do you say to a new year when the skies are clear and the birds do not come, day after day after day and the dryness of the soul rusts out the moveable joints that keep life from imitating the stiffness of the ones I saw in their little wooden coffins?
What do you say to a new year that does not feel like yours, because (as usual) you are neither/and, both/or, and not really fully identifying. Jewishness fits me like a bad suit, but that’s progress these days. And families make their own little sand labyrinths when they break.
The sun that licks me in the dawn feels black like the ink that was my first memory of the pen. Obscuring. My throat is done in black ink these days. The beast hills I want to write about loom silent and unattainable in my memory. If forest is an undiscovered country, I have been sent there alone and gagged.
Perhaps you think I find this bone cage choking. This black coloring stripes over my heart, along the inside of each rib. I don’t. All of my words come to you through louvred blinds. To be free is to attain a weightlessness I find in the flight of the birds that are going silent in my homeland as their forest is cut down. Birds of Paradise. Known the world over. European merchants thought they did not have legs because they were traded and sold as pelts, and the European imagination gilded them with the touch of the esoteric, exotic, divinity a-wing. These people did not see them for sale for 10 dollars to tourists, dead legged and stiff. Or chained to posts in the village like little parrots trailing the glory of three foot feathers like trapped sun rays behind their little bodies. The freedom to be weightless, I conclude, is a freedom heard in rumors in the jungle, but perhaps one that is difficult to attain after 39 years of scars.
What flies then? Speech anyway. That’s my bet. Speech through the black bars. Speech rolling off the tongue floppy and engorged, glazed and stiff prose unseeing as the eyes of the sharks gutted in the fish market. If your pose doesn’t stink to heaven it doesn’t make an impression. If your prose doesn’t generate rumors of weightlessness in the markets of 16th century Spain at least sell it for ten bucks to tourists. Speak something, anything, to ring in a new year. Find out if bitter lemons can be preserved. Cook up something that will lure the beasts down out of the mountains. Kill a chicken.
There is the story of Ariadne and the Minotaur, which seems to slip into my hands like her thread. There are rumored ways out of labyrinths. There is magic in taking a thread of a chance. Unspool your words so they glimmer in the dark. Follow them out. Carry a sword, not for Minotaurs, but because sometimes when the black ink clogs you up enough you need your own blood for ink. Keep speaking.
Speech can open the doors of the dawn. Speech can turn the year and flip the sun into the high sky. Speech can conjure the scent of tea on a quiet, cold morning in the mountains 35 years ago. Speech can raise a dead resort to life and imagine a way for a crumbling old bureaucrat to go home to his wife or mistress and believe somewhere in the hollow behind his wardrobe in something. Poetry maybe. Pornography. Forbidden literature. Hope finds herself whispering to censors too.
If I were to gather the threads of this essay I would say, what? Speak so your tongue doesn’t feel like wet sand? Find the smell of wet, fresh tripe and make prose even if it gives you the urge to vomit. See the glimmering bars of a hot afternoon and the windless day that never ends after divorce and believe. Believe in the coolness of night. Believe in drinks and dancing and the feasting potential of death. Believe in speech even in a world where the sky is painted in black bars of ink, the Birds of Paradise are chained, and the jungle always eats the floor you stand upon.
So in the mornings I feel the black cage and I do not shake. I wait. I wait for the sun to lick through the bars. Not because they will go away, but because when has a white glimmering speech thread ever cared for bars or crumbling walls or labyrinths?
Somewhere there is a ship back to Athens, and I’m going to catch it.
