Morpheus at it Again!!

 

The first important thing about dreams is that they're scripted. The events in a dream are inevitable. Predictable. I knew for example that my dear college friend was going to get us arrested, and no — not the one you're thinking. He was zipping back and forth, from room to room, frothing. WE COULDN'T AFFORD TO RAISE SUSPICION! I grabbed him, and like a supple hyena or a crowing snake, he eluded my grasp at every turn. Now, we're in the Bathroom, but someone has just entered, so we each take in a stall (does he do so willingly or does it require a good shove?). Turns out he's in the stall of the someone who'd just entered, getting pissed on by the someone, all curled up like a feeble half-dead roly poly, getting pissed on. Afterwards, he definitely smells of ammonia, but no less frenzied, soaked in piss now. Huge flakes of cocaine blow out of his nose onto EVERYTHING. Again, he eludes my or anyone's grasp. He storms the stage of the venue and begins hacking away at the band's instruments. Putting up a struggle, he's wrestled to the ground, cops are on the scene. I volunteer my freedom, knowing without doubt they'll catch up to me sooner or later. The paddywagons keep getting updated year after year. Here's a new one with a seat that climbs up to the roof. The wagon, of course, is completely transparent. That's no surprise. And spherical. That's one of the newer features. I can see everything in the world now. This is without doubt the highest perch I've ever occupied in a moving vehicle. About 3 stories, give or take...Later, we're all together, out-on-bail, G-- has bought more cocaine instead of paying for damages. My family's there. G--'s feeding cocaine to my father, while my father's asleep, just laying a snowfield there, right there in Dad's protruding lower lip...

Is this prison? My crazy toothless grandma is coming onto me, her wet pimply lips the color of a fresh bruise, slobbering, palavering, speaking in tongues, confirming the evil prurience aglow in her eyes. Now, she's pawing at me. Her flabby flesh rubs against my thigh, my cheek, my neck. Something's wrong. For Mom, nothing is out of the ordinary. Nothing could be more normal. She's already in her race-car with the Guardian. My girlfriend/girlfriend-to-be/girlfriend-never-to-be says she's driving out to New Orleans, and I'm almost seduced: The Crescent City weighs in the scale of my mind. But no no no, none of this is ordinary, none of it is normal, and I race down to Mother, who's already revving up the engine, with pupil-less, glaucous eyes, possessed, non-human. Somehow I know my sex-fiend Grandma is behind it all. Where did they come from, now? A rank of bald men, suspicious, walk up a ramp in the distance. They also play a role. I'm sure of it. I follow them into a small bedroom - truly more like a sleeper car - and am about to confront them, about to attack, infiltrate, turn this plot on its head, when inspiration lights. I wheel out a compartment beneath the bed, and I find 5 Nicaraguans stowing away, terrified for their lives. Aha! The jig is up!

Go Back, Daughter

My little girl is out. She is crying on my sleeve. Bawling her eyes out, threatening to denude me with her sobbing. She's afraid of your little girl, who is crying on your sleeve, bawling her eyes out, drenching your Sunday's best. I look down at my little one, I massage her neck, pat her head, tell her, "Go back inside. Stop crying. The adults are speaking. Go back inside. Dry your eyes. Go to mother." She does not budge. It gets worse. Now she's screaming. Pointing at your little girl. And screaming. Tears streaming down her contorted face. Your little girl is also screaming. Pointing at my little girl. Their words are not words anymore. Only noise. It's so loud, we can't hear ourselves think. "Go back inside, daughter", you say, gently pushing your girl toward the front door. "Let daddy talk. This is daddy business. Go find your mother." I'm embarrassed. Embarrassed about my little crying girl. I will not have anyone thinking I mistreat my child. You're embarrassed. You also don't want to make a scene. Neither of our little girls leave. Neither of them stop screaming. They're ripping our shirt-sleeves off with their tugging, with their weeping, their primal howl. I start screaming at you. "Shut your little girl up," I scream, "She's making my girl cry." "Your girl's pointing at my girl!" you scream, "I will not stand for it!" "I will not have you terrorizing my family!" "Fuck your family!" "Fuck my family? Fuck yours!" "There, there little girl, go back inside." "Run to mama, girl." Both of us take a strained timeless breath and look up at the heavens. They are implacable. They are not our cheerleaders. We both, at the same time, silently, to ourselves, plead for guidance. There's no instructional manual for parents. We're all alone.

And then, Jane Elliott, 3rd grade teacher from Randall, Iowa, stops dead in the street. She looks at us, hears our little girls screaming, and advances her step. She approaches, at first cautiously, and then with purpose. Our little girls see her. Their crying stops instantly, as if a switch were flipped.

"You are only human," Jane says to you and I, "Your little girls are only human. This world is frightening, and we just continue to make it more and more frightening. That's what terrifies your little girls and launches them into uncontrollable fits of despair. We must listen to their screams. It is the only language left in this world - the scream, the discomfort, the gut-wrenching exhaustion. Listen to them, but do not console them. They will not be consoled. They hurt, they are in pain, and no amount of consolation will erase this. Listen to them. Teach them. Lead them by example. The example of love, of community. No little girl will respond to anything but. We are not altogether different, you and me, me and you, all of them, all the little girls in the world, all the would-be parents in the world. We share the common language of scream. In this, and only this, we build community. The only way we heal is if we all of us scream away the pain, scream it away together, the pain of being human, of not knowing, of never knowing how to parent our little children. Let's all raise our voices, every single person in the world. Let's dance and scream and raise our fists and belt our lungs out. The world will never be safe until every private lawn transforms into one great big scream, one great big lawn. There's only one lawn in this world. The lawn of scream."

Jane Elliott, 3rd grade teacher from Randall, Iowa, begins to walk away. She stops. Suddenly she turns around, blows us a kiss, then flips us the bird, laughing.

We look at each other. We look at our little girls. They are drying their eyes. I immediately think: "No cornfed broad from Nebraska or whereever is going to tell me how to raise my child." You also immediately think: "No cornfed broad from Nebraska or whereever is going to tell me how to raise my child." We each walk toward our private front porches, silently, pensive, a little hostile, darting back a look as if to say we're both of us in control. As we each enter our private homes, our little girls clutch at our sleeves, wiping their snotty noses on them.

That night we lie awake in bed until sunrise. The next night we don't sleep either. Now it's our 14th day of insomnia. Simultaneously, though apart, in separate beds, but with one thought, we wonder what led us so astray, and how long it will take for the world to end.

Our little girl can't sleep either. It's 11 pm. She opens the door cautiously. Mommy's soundly sleeping. Our little girl climbs gently into our side of the bed. She curls up in our arms, her tear-soaked face presses against our breast. "Daddy," she says, "I can't sleep." "It's alright, little one. You're alright. We're alright," we say. A tear rolls down our cheek. And then another.

3 part interview with the inestimable Jane Elliott:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

WHAT'S up DOC?

film still courtesy of "The Prince von Pappenschmear, A Prequel", New Camerata Opera

Since 2016, I have collaborated with New York-based New Camerata Opera as a commissioned librettist. Our original opera serial for Youtube, entitled "The Prince von Pappenschmear" debuted in Spring 2017. See the first chapter here. The following year, we released "Chapter 2: A Prequel": Click here.

I am currently working on the third and final installment and am getting back to brass tacks and character studies.

The narrative was inspired from the biography of Dr. Ernst Grafenberg, after whom the G-spot was eventually named. He was an early contraception activist and scholar of female erogeneity. A Jewish German gynecologist who believed he was relatively exempt from persecution, because most of his patients were Nazi wives. Though he was a respected doctor at the University of Kiel throughout the 1920's, he was forced to resign his position at the university in 1933, and later imprisoned for stamp-smuggling. In 1940, largely through the efforts of Margaret Sanger of Planned Parenthood fame, he was released and emigrated to New York City, where he spent the rest of his days.

Following is my character sketch for the fictitious Dr. Erving Griffenberg, a romantic and devoted scientist who concocts an interesting method of resisting Nazi hegemony:

"It's so difficult telling people they're wrong, that they've been wrong. Nobody likes to admit that. It's just as hard to tell yourself you've been wrong your whole life. That what you counted as truth, as virtue, could very well be mistaken. For all my career, as a man of science first and foremost, Truth has been my beacon, my sometimes subtle, sometimes not so subtle lady in the mist. But truth is not the whole truth, so to speak. It is Life itself I've always championed, toward which I've always trained my critical and poetic eye. The preservation of life has always been my goal, and always it has been the nucleus of my scientific quest. I dare say it's the nucleus of any science. Science is performed, explored, employed for the sake of the living, to ensure that they go on living. That has always been my truth, my virtue. But when truth tells you that in order for life to continue, death must be implemented - when truth delivers such a paradox, what do you do? What can you do? How must you proceed? It is not enough to announce, like Dr. Pangloss, that you cannot any longer. After all, he wasn't a real doctor. Symbols are important, and the symbol of life is perhaps the most important. The symbol of the babe, in other words. The newborn mewing kitten and the bleating calf have driven their diaphanous tendrils into the deep soil of our imagination. Nobody argues with the babe, the helpless, the pure, the contingent, and hopelessly imaginative being that believes it really is a magic creature. It cries for the breast and always without fail receives it. It is the divinity of its own universe. All human life is performed in order to return to that state of magical omnipotence. Our end-goal is always that Elysium of serenity and potential, however well we know that our fate is really ashes and dust. To take that Holy Mecca of infancy away from humanity is to displace it, to shoot earth-shattering tremors to the very core of our being. As agents of the intellect, however, we need to ask why life means just that for us. Why is that Truth? Why our end-all be-all? And should that fleeting promise of the infant hold unqualified significance for us? Should the Baby withstand all criticism, all reflection? And furthermore what of hostile life? We know from biology, from evolutionary science, political philosophy, if not to say all of the humanities, that much of life is hostile. In its very nature, life is indifferent, to the point of hostility. Hostility to the entire human project. And what about particularly hostile times like our own, when life has been shoved aside from the banquet of inheritances? There is no doubt that now Life’s enemy, the power and greed of mankind has replaced it at the table. Too much life of the last 20 years has been traded for a pittance at the battlefield. What is it traded for? A passing stability? A temporary holding pattern, a mirage of peace, at the expense of more life, more waste? The powerful are never interested in the essence of LIFE. Bold Life interferes with their digestion. Nature teaches this. Since life for the powerful is nothing more than a bland spread for their biscuit, great pains are taken to extract its flavor. The powerful, it is well known, are a breed of delicate dyspeptics. Life then becomes a new thing, it becomes deflavored, devalued, and new factories are erected to manufacture and process this new barely edible life. It is now a thing for profit, for gullets, a thing for the buying, selling, swallowing, and forgetting. Once capital-L Leben is processed and drained in this way, it gets filled with dust. Not a magical dust mind you, but a quite ordinary, tasteless sawdust. But life, my inner voice screams, is truth. Life is virtue. How to reconcile this? How to live in this inimical contradiction? The babe is my profession, both symbolically and literally. How to think these thoughts when babes are mere cannon-fodder - corpuscles shot straight into the maw of obese, cellulitic power? The conclusion must be that life is no longer life, the magical babe no longer magical, that birth is an adversary to our preservation as a species. it is science's imperative to put an end to this imposture. Only thus can we shift away from this farce, this rank borborygmus of civilization. We are trapped in an enchanted mirror of Life that haunts us with our infernal reverse-image. We are like the witch the Grimm brothers tell us about who one day realizes she is no longer the fairest in the realm. The hope is that since mirrors are optics, chimaeras of light, perhaps one day we can trick the mirror itself and gaze once more at the maiden within, and her suckling babe. But first we must fool the witch.”

- Dr. Erving Griffenberg, 1934, Kurfürstendamm

If the Los Angeles Central Library is a sanctuary at all...

If the Los Angeles Central Library is a sanctuary at all, it’s a sanctuary for refractory noises. The History department is all ambient sighs, scamperings, minute percussions, canters of steam, incessant flapping of wings, whooshes, rushes, a riot of perfunctory hums.

Only when the silence breaks down, its innards eaten away by time and oxygen, conduits paper-thin like decayed leaves, only then can I see the naked mechanism behind every library silence, each moment of peace! Gases knock along the walls, dried-out pistons scrape the air for oil. The whole room heaves in exasperated breath. 

A man in a ski-cap to my left is taking notes, and with each annotation, smacks his hand on the page, as if each note and every thought were some ambushed mosquito no longer worthy of existence. Another man, sweating Biblically in thick velour, sings “These are a few of my favorite things,” snickering. Further down the carrels, by genealogy, an exasperated librarian works on a patron refusing to stand. “Are you inebriated?” her voice erupts in operatic surprise. 3 cops and 2 guards lead him out, like a kitten from a laundry basket.

I pore through Laquer’s history of Weimar, reading about the Berliner chansons, that right now make too little noise for this room.

MEZUZAH

~~

It is writ that my body is a temple, sanctum sanctorum, that the architect's name bind my hands, inscribe my forehead, collophon my doorpost. That I dump holy grains down my gullet, to let wholesome crumbs fall out. So much is handed down from on high. 

But the scriptures know me not. They never visit me at home. They know not where I live, nor the sort of house I keep. My temple is a quarry of vapors, where all day surface-fires score the rocks. About my mouth, doleful phantoms moan, who in life never chose a side. They are led whereever the gadfly takes them, these unvoiced, uprooted wraiths, who in life never made their stamp. I am thrown headlong into the hawthorn of the valley, and emerging scathed and lashed at by shrubs, I peer into the sky. Dark slender v's seek out the rank carrion of memory; come too late to the slaughter, poor birds, for already my bitches and curs pick their teeth on the hillside. In the center of the gorge, far from its aurora, there is a kingdom: a sallow, retentive king strokes his underthighs with lamb's oil, in a palace like a lizard head. At precisely 5:24 p.m. every day, the left eye of the lizard closes to a slit, and the right one opens wide. At precisely 5:24 a.m. the reverse happens. All the houses in town must adhere to this schedule. They must also throw their lilies out, vase and all, from their third-story windows to the cobbled street. This is done at precisely 5:25 p.m., through the right eye of their domicile. The barefooted poets sweep up the flowers and the glass. In the market-place, manticore zookeepers torment the pink nipples of perfect little homunculi, much to the amusement of the crowd, and so it is said of the goddess. The goddess of the hearth changes each new day, and the villagers waste their mornings taking down old apotropaics and installing new ones. A small rebel faction does not submit to this protean faith, but instead plaster the glen with love-notes, subject to the whim of the storm. A little orphan writes in crayon on my fountain. I have never caught her, but if I do, I will lead her back to the orphanage where her bones will make good porridge. But first, I must kiss the ivory fang that hangs above the gate, said to include the edicts of the Lord. 

My fountain is the only place I feel at one, because there I peer my beautiful face.

Train Preliminary #7 ~ THANKSGIVING

THANKSGIVING, 6:17pm R-train to Bay Ridge

- Plugging along the track, this trusty ole steed, deliver me post-haste.

- Convivializing to my right, a hispanic family of multiple generations. The adults seethe in excited conversation, the baby is silent in the stroller, staring cottony at the elders. No more than 15 on the train. It is cold outside. Thankfully the chilling, demoralizing rain of yesterday is over. Nonetheless, the warm womb of the train is a welcome sensation, this night of communal repose.

- I just rode 4 stops on the L with a Mexican tourist, learning about the holistic healing seminars she'd just completed. I gave her advice about the city and geography. I should've gotten her name or contact or company. She was going to spend Thanksgiving window-shopping in Williamsburg. I could've invited her to the feast my friends were preparing. Even if they had minded, I wouldn't.
But lo that ship has sailed. And that is just what these train encounters are: rogue ships sliding by in pitchest midnight, hoping against hope to scrape off the barnacles on the hull of their neighbor.

- All kinds of phenomena you see on the NYC metro: buskers, breakdancers, beatboxers, comedians, poets, panhandlers, priests, pantomimes, pushers, and pimps, masters of their own strange island, old Jews in caddies and wigs, hipsters in fedoras (short-brimmed, low-crowned, of course), hobos in cargo pants and windbreakers that have bitten into, grafted, and fused with their flesh and the empty cars that precede them, Koreans, Kurds, Kenyans, Lithuanians, Latvians, and Lapps, Malagasy, Montenegrans, Nairobis, Nepalese, Omanis, Patagonians, peasants from Kamchatka, fishermen from Minsk, Svalbardians, Kalallit medicine men- because everyone's a phenomenon, a billboard of herself - mother, father, child, drags, trannies, herms, queers with cat carriers, valises holding valises holding valises, to-go rotisseries suspended in air, brand-new toys, broken toys, hot-air balloons, a waxing gibbous moon, fish with hooks in their lips, Eris in a sundress, wolves with hackles raised, pigs in Ralph Laren, feces on their wrist, squirrels, bandicoots and basset hounds, constellations in their eyes, a beachhouse in their prayers, eternal discord in their gut. The spirit of the subway. The geist of the city. The King of the Hill, Top of the Heap, NY, NY.

- I've seen 3-card monte on the train. I've seen a grown-man at high noon writhe onto the train with his pubes out, and wriggle salaciously like a legless lizard. I've seen a young sleeping tourist wake with a start and projectile vomit across the aisle. I've seen a Thai lunatic in daisy dukes whipping himself and telling monkeys to go back to their country. And the lesbian lover whose shadow he trembled under. I've bled on the train, pissed between the cars, and like anyone who's spent a sufficient number of nights in NYC, I have lost the contents of my belly somewhere along the endless 24-hour Pollacked linoleum floor.

- I appreciate the layout of some older cars, the way the seats come in at right angles. You do not want to get trapped in the crux of the L: No legroom, inaccessible, you really want to make sure you're going to sink in for a while; these aren't one-stop seats. Unless of course, you're like me and enjoy forced discomfort, enjoy the proximity of your knee to some businessman's thigh, love having to slice through someone's inertial slumber to get off at your stop. These seats are alive. You're alive when you sit in them. You're not on a train. You're on this black coach of sorrow, we're all on together, lunging, lurching, facing each other, burping in frills, soaring over divots and ravines, inevitably, inescapably, at break-neck speed, our stomachs pushing up up up into our lungs, our nerves frayed, our wits in a tangle, our knuckles clutching on for dear life, our eyes like shucked oysters in their sockets,
until at last we reach our destination, our coalligned and monstrous destiny, our terminus. And it's not Bay Ridge.

Train Preliminary # 6 - October (?) 2014

6:33pm

- M-Train - headed toward Brooklyn from 14th St. Always the same, slate-sky benches, slate-slate siding, gumball-spectrum vomit throw-pattern on the floor. Other lines switch out cars; the M never does. The M is on the orange line, and this complements its cool slabby interior with a slight squeeze of color.

- Almost all the seats are filled. There are approx. 10 standing. About 50 in all. YOU DON'T ALWAYS THINK ABOUT IT. 50 people on your train right now, sometimes 80 during rush-hour, or 100, and the train has what 10 cars => 12 (?) => more? That means there are nearly 1,000 on each train during peak hours. And how many trains are worming along at any given time? How many burrows per day? Where are all these thousands and tens of thousands and millions of human particles headed every day?
It's always the same, isn't it? THE GREAT AMERICAN CITY.

- The windows of the M-train are large, you can see all of the East River from where you're standing.

- 6 phones are out within my radius. More phones than I remember this morning. Could be there's less to look at on the morning train, less memos to parse, less newsbits to skim, less e-thoughts to archive. Most morning people - and I mean most - check their Weltleben feeds before boarding the train, in the privacy of their nook, over coffee, OJ, toast, NPR, and jam. But throughout the day, the world begins to slip our knots, makes a run for it, goes to pasture, takes to sea, leaves us in the lurch, so when evening comes around, we're clutching clutching clutching to get it all back. Progress.

- AND BESIDES, isn't it more natural to disengage at the end of day?

- Right now there's a little pipsqueak with an adult face, sitting inaptly on the floor, legs wrapped around the center pole, pretty as a posy, for the general amusement of our eyeballs. A Marcel Marceau in the making perhaps. Or a Jeffrey Dahmer. Or just another SHOWTIME kid. I have no doubt but he'll climb that pole someday and make a fantastic pole-dancer.

- Marcy stop: a father with a stoller wheels in, baby recognizes his mom already on the train, Hi mommy, hi baby. I wonder briefly how Papi knew which car Mami was in. But only briefly, and then I exit the train.