Roberta was pretty enough to be a homecoming princess. I was a non-athletic math and science nerd, and forever grateful she went against custom. Furtive glances in the high school hallways led to flirtatious smiles, and one evening I summoned the nerve to park in front of her house. That was an accepted dating technique in Portland, Oregon, circa 1958. I was 17 and driving my first car, a 1947 Chevy Fleetwood fastback. Paid a hard-earned $75 for it. It looked super cool parked in front of Roberta’s house, the light from the street lamp shimmering off its sloping back. She came out of the house, and I invited her to sit in the car with me. To my relief and terror, she did.

That began a courtship consisting mostly of short trips to the A&W Root Beer drive-in after dusk. For guys, the drive-in dates showed that someone had found us desirable, and that one of the highest status symbols on Planet High School was within reach: sexual intercourse. The drive-in visits were followed by curbside make-out sessions in front of her house. This falsely reassured her parents of no bad behavior.

Adolescent passion in Fleetwoods was a fumbling of buttons, buckles, and bra hooks, with forays into unfathomed territories portending incomparable wealth or loss. Night after night, our passion ended in a stand-off. But as time went on, her defenses weakened, and I stood a little closer. I was obsessed with losing my virginity to a woman who was under considerable pressure not to lose hers. She and her family belonged to a fundamentalist church, the Wesleyan Methodists. My upbringing was among ordinary Methodists, whose pilgrimage relied more on homily than on fire and brimstone.

And so it came to pass that the desire to fornicate brought me to the Wesleyan Sunday services, where you could actually smell and feel the heat of hell. The charismatic preacher was a magnificent orator, beginning with a few daily temptations and the lies we tell ourselves. Before you knew it, the congregation was bound for a tour of the devil’s realm, with fire and brimstone everywhere. The preacher’s face, puffy even when calm, was blood-red, drenched in sweat, and swollen near to bursting. “Amen!” escaped from old men like vented steam, fanning the preacher’s fire. At times I thought he was going to have a stroke as he bellowed warnings and predictions of the soul’s imminent demise. And then his voice would soften as he delivered our only hope, God’s eternal love and forgiveness, a pillow held out to catch us in our fall. To those caught, it was spiritual euphoria.

After Sunday church, the congregation gathered at the home of one of the families for a potluck. By then the preacher’s furnaces had cooled. The oral violence, the threats and accusations, had been stored for the next flame-throwing sermon. Away from the brimstone, he was one of the sweetest men I ever met. The radiance streaming from his face could only have come from the constant touch of God.

God touched me at the Wesleyan summer camp. I had already been to the camps run by the ordinary Methodists, where grace before meals, a few bible readings, and prayers before bed were the only required stops on our spiritual journey. Roberta had invited me to attend the Wesleyan camp, and I had agreed, not wanting to jeopardize the course my sex drive had mapped out. The Wesleyan camp had daytime crafts and physical activities like the ordinary Methodists had, but evenings were different. Each night we gathered in a Quonset hut auditorium for the saving of our souls, and each night we heard a new voice. The camp recruited its attendees from a large region, and with them came a phalanx of preachers for the calling out of ripening young sinners.

To that point in my life, church had been a Sunday routine, and I regarded myself as religious. Church attendance had been required of me and my sister from early childhood, but our parents only attended on Christmas and Easter. (At the time, I was critical of them for this apparent hypocrisy.) Besides the Sunday services, I attended weekly classes for children, and later for adolescents. These classes also served critical secular needs, as it was there I first encountered girls socially, out of school. I had my first dance at a church social, and later my first kiss, an awkward bumping of lips in the bushes beneath a stained-glass window. By the time I started dating Roberta, sex and religion were already intertwined. But I believed in God and had proof of His existence even before I attended the Wesleyan camp meeting.

Earlier that year, a friend and I had driven the Fleetwood out into the hinterland of Sauvies Island, 40 square miles of dikes, farms, and bottomlands at the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers. My friend and I were of the opinion that adventure was more likely to be found by following the unpaved roadbeds on top of the dikes to the most remote parts of the island. It was a self-fulfilling opinion, as we eventually came to a place where part of the roadbed on top of the dike had been eroded away. After stopping to conduct a thorough engineering analysis, we got back in the car and abruptly nosed into the far wall of the washout, hopelessly stuck not only miles from home, but from the nearest farmhouse.

It was a horrible situation, and I didn’t know what was worse, leaving or staying. It would be a long walk back, and required the abandoning of the beloved Fleetwood. I feared it would be brutalized and pillaged, the fate of abandoned cars. And even if we got help in time, the towing fee would bankrupt me. The only positive option I could think of was divine intervention. So I walked off a little ways by myself, got down on my knees, and begged for deliverance. I promised God to do His bidding the rest of my life if He would only rescue the Fleetwood from its terrible predicament.

As I walked back to the site of the disaster, I saw something moving on top of the dike at a great distance, maybe a mile away. It was another car, coming from the opposite direction, from the most remote part of the island. As it approached, I could hardly believe my eyes. Attached to the front bumper was something I had never seen on a sedan before. A cable winch. It was a miracle, my miracle, in answer to prayer less than five minutes old. God must have been hard up for new workers. There was no other reasonable explanation.

From that event until the Wesleyan camp meeting, I had not been particularly busy on behalf of God. It might even appear I was hard at work for the other guy. The Miracle of Sauvies Island had been reduced to intermittent moments of guilt lacquered with lame promises. But I think it was that incident more than anything else that primed me for the camp meeting’s preacher-of-the-night. My journey on the Road to Damascus, as well as on the road to coitus, began in the Fleetwood.

I don’t remember the details of the preacher’s exhortation, but I do remember the lighting. It was semi-dark where we sat on folding chairs in the Quonset hut, while up front the fluorescent light was glaring – not the sort of light associated with parting clouds and throngs of angels, but of Quonset huts. It was almost too functional, showing the interior of the building to be wholly without character except for a small cross and framed picture of Jesus on the wall behind the preacher. Whatever one might think of fundamentalists, they are less concerned with the material.

At some point during the sermon – as usual, hot from the fires of hell and the burning love of God – the visceral words scoured the lacquer from my guilt-ridden soul. I felt a power in me not mine responding to the preacher’s bidding. It pulled me up out of the chair and to the front of the hall, where I was so overwhelmed with Spirit I started crying. A few others had also come forward, and for each of us there was a preacher waiting. They were intimate with the experience and would be our guide. Mine led me back down the aisle to the door. But outside, he let the Spirit move me, and I felt drawn to the area behind the hut, near the wall closest to the sermonizer. I was euphoric, filled with God’s love and forgiveness, crying from pure joy, kneeling on the ground, leaning forward on my hands, gushing happy tears in near-total darkness.

Suddenly, on the ground in front of me, within a foot of my knees, there was a small circle of white light, no more than two inches in diameter. Everything else was black night, and the light made no sense according to the known laws of the universe. It seemed not to have an earthly origin, as if it had been beamed from heaven.

My guide was kneeling beside me, his arm draped over my shoulders. I kept babbling on about this light, and he finally said, “It’s coming through that knothole in the wall.” Maybe he was tiring of my obsessiveness and wanted me to move on, taking a chance that a little ordinary reality wouldn’t hurt the mystical process. And it didn’t. Rather than deflate the moment, that too became part of the mystery. I had been carried to that bit of ground by an external force, and had not seen the small circle of light until after I had knelt down. It was no less of an experience because God had used humble elements of His universe – the Quonset hut’s knothole and fluorescent lighting – to show me He was listening. He had made it tangible.

The experience was so strong the euphoria survived sleep and lingered well into the next day. I was in a state of bliss, with a constant radiant smile.

* * *

There was something of ecstasy in the mystical experience, and in retrospect it had properties that seem related to those of the aftermath of the sexual climax, as if they share a common physiological origin or pathway. In the euphoria following the sexual climax, I have sometimes experienced a strong sense that I have stepped outside of the limits of time, that my partner and I exist in an eternal realm as well as in a finite one – and in that eternal realm, the moment will continue forever. Although the content of the post-climax euphoria may vary widely among individuals (and within individuals), the euphoric sense of timelessness is probably a universal human capacity.

Unlike medieval troubadours, a charismatic evangelist might bristle at equating the sexual climax with the touch of God. But the preacher’s argument is compromised by his own charisma. Whether emanating from him, a rock star, or Bill Clinton, charisma is subtly to overtly charged with sexual as well as spiritual energy. And charisma affects the self as well as the other. It is no wonder so many preachers fall by the wayside.

After camp, I continued going to church with Roberta, and may even have uttered a few involuntary amens. But like the aftermath of the miracle on the dike, there was no follow-up labor for the Lord. Eventually, even the mystical experience became material, the organic high against which all future euphorias would be measured.

In his book, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (1902), philosopher and psychologist William James demonstrates the mystical state to be a universal human attribute, available to all peoples and religions, and not the province of a particular set of beliefs. Though the prerequisites can differ, the experience is essentially the same for all: euphoria, the overwhelming presence of a supernatural power, a flood of revelations and insights, and feelings that cannot be described in words. The experience commonly lasts for an hour or two. Euphoria, ineffability, and a supernatural presence were strong characteristics of my Quonset hut experience, but I have no recollection of revelations and insights. Too bad – I would love to know now what was revelatory to my 17-year-old self.

James was never able to experience the natural mystical state. But he did experiment with nitrous oxide, which led him to conclude that “our normal waking consciousness . . . is but one especial type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.”

Although a large subculture has experimented with psychotropic substances since the 1960s, the natural mystical state in America today seems primarily confined to practitioners of evangelical religions. The experience may be most accessible as a “calling out” within a group setting. Thanks to the televangelists, many non-evangelicals no doubt view the natural mystical state as temporary insanity at best, and fraud at worst. Others may have an elitist view: Mahatma Gandhi was a mystic, but Mrs. Jones down the street is merely out of her mind.

A dozen years after my natural high, I began experimenting with acid (LSD) and psilocybin mushrooms. These produced amazing states of mind, including a sense of contact with the supernatural. But it was not an experience of God, at least not in the Christian sense. Instead, I felt I had risen to a higher realm of awareness, of feeling, of being. The mystical state without pretext and preparation. But it wasn’t pure. Along with the experience of the supernatural were bouts with paranoia and episodes of fantastic images and perceptions – hallucinations – ultimately having little or nothing to do with a spiritual journey, at least for me. And the return to earth was often accompanied by a debilitating depression, opposite the feelings I experienced coming down from the natural high.

The closest I have come with chemistry to the natural high is with James’s vehicle, nitrous oxide. In the dentist’s chair. The first time was the most spiritual. I rose to a realm so high the worst imaginable thing was reconciled. For me in the early 1980s, that was nuclear holocaust. It was reconciled in an infinite place above the horror, where the universe always rights itself. As in the natural mystical state, I was aware of a supernatural presence that can be experienced but not described, except by metaphor. It is a realm where the urge to live is in the rocks, where life is the universe experiencing itself.

Every now and then I would descend to the dentist’s chair to see how he was progressing. I was so euphoric that I hoped he had plenty of work left to do, and in those days he did, as my mouth had become a silver mine of cavities, crowns, and root canals. With the prospect of more nitrous oxide, it was a struggle to take better care of my teeth.

* * *

In the experience, the supernatural presence is immediate, infinite, and unknowable. Call it God or not. Whatever it is, the mystical state has no doubt of its existence. The experience and its realm may be confined to us, but the experience itself argues the opposite.

The mystical state is a psycho-physiological capacity residing in all of us, a component of our being, like thumbs and laughter. It could have evolved from another purpose, another psycho-physiological function, the sexual climax, our most accessible path to a natural euphoria.

From my perspective, it took a lifetime to reach the maturity needed to write about these events. I am fortunate that aspects of the mystical experience feel as fresh now as when they happened. Roberta and I broke up before graduation, and never saw each other after high school. She married and had children, then died too soon in the late 1980s. But she is still in that long-ago memory, and somewhere we are in an eternal moment forever.

 

 

 

 

 

Richard LeBlond is a biologist living in North Carolina, where he worked for that state’s Natural Heritage Program until his retirement in 2007. He continues his biological research, and has added travel, photography, and writing. Since 2014, his essays and photographs have appeared in numerous U.S. and international journals.

 

“If we continue speaking the same language together, we’re going to reproduce the same history.”

-Luce Irigaray

 

Like a drippy faucet, the taste of raw beef, the smell of an outhouse on a summer day, three paper cuts on the palm of your hand and the need to zest a lemon, we meet in a dark place, hammer falls from some voice we cannot see, the police appear but our passports have expired so we cannot find shelter, nor can we escape deportation though we want to stay, want to find safety with our loved ones, want to hold our friends in warm embraces, want all the things the normal people want and need and work hard to achieve, however we appear as not-normal people, whoever constitutes the normal people we count ourselves as the people normal people despise. At brunch we steal napkins, they say. We steal toilet paper, they say, from the lavatory. They say we steal candy from the kiddie jar, we steal tips from other tables, and we spray-paint little monsters over top the blinking cameras like deformed daggers or broken spoons. So they say. In turn we bow down with mouthfuls of forgiveness, weeping, they say come back later, come back sometime around Sunday evening. Don’t worry about us, we say. We’ll be fine, we say. Go back to your lecture, we say. Go back to your life. Go back to driving and texting and ordering drones to drop bombs on elementary schools. We will be fine. We will survive or in the very least we will fester and require semi-adequate medical attention.

Please believe me when I say evening seems to barricade our thoughts from spilling over, running lines before an audition, voicing objection to objectification as if becoming a second wave feminist will solve all our problems when we possess firsthand knowledge contradicting that assessment. The lack of intersectionality stumps the assumptions. So much glassware goes unused, so many fingertips, so many pieces of grandmother’s fine china never make it out of the hutch when we eat like a sleeve of saltine crackers alongside peanut butter and jelly sandwiches halfcocked or wishing some scrub would harness more potent sea flavors or something. Alphabetical wish list bullshit. Forget about the flounder, tilapia, whatever. Eat sand.

Notice our most respected criticism makes my jean shorts feel inadequate, makes the Marx Brothers something other than funny, makes the last object I peered at seem like a symbol for oppression or salvation or gratification or enslavement or incarceration or detention when I simply saw a man in a black cloak holding a stack of blueberry pancakes smothered in warm semen sitting atop a framed picture of a naked hunk juggling fire, but truth be told: after grifting for three years a hot stack of pancakes can sometimes remain a hot stack of pancakes, I think, I hope, I chant: so much for education, down with intellectualism!

These green grass magicians want all the fame and stuff. I like to think of them as flowers who bloom only for a minute, or like sailors away on a visit, or frankly I don’t like to think about them because time proceeds and we cannot stop it and even if we could stop it there’s no way to make them understand. We fall so far outside the vision of those chicken eaters we can only pray for the readers of the future to get on board, like Fredrickson or Ardwar or some other minor magician I’m not thinking of right now but probably others exist for whom such an analogy fits. Besides, time travel narratives don’t always work. Be quiet! Shut up! Find a hold of yourself and put all the wishes you ever wished into a cardboard box and kiss it and hug it and make the love you wish you had inside you to it for the rest of your life if you can—can you, that’s the question?

Frankly, the room looks polished and blue-lined and froggy. Truth be told, feelings get jammed against their will and we weep for fortresses unable to confound our enemies. Think about it. This room here, the ballroom, holds neither balls nor perks of being a diamond. Where, I might add, has the moat gone? We see no moat. No moat. No fucking moat! Seriously?

Absolutely, we should question authority. Absolutely, but when the cops appear with assault rifles and tear gas and pepper spray we cannot rely on mud buildings and handshakes. I want only to rest, to sleep, but they won’t allow it. They won’t turn their music down or turn off those lights. My vagina makes my penis so angry whenever I get really cocked up about this topic, but sincerely we need a game plan to stop these hegemonic powers. Just ask yourself: why wear a cape when you can wear a voice against the cement nonsense they breed in our Taco Bell restrooms? Not to mention jalopy noise or credit default swaps or anything under the FCC radar. Don’t believe me? Go outside right now and flag down a driver to masquerade as your mother so when August gets here you’ll have something to say; you’ll say, listen: I have something to say, and then you’ll open your mouth and say something. But now you know not what you’ll say. That’s part of the game. Go find a deer or goat or foal or something. Maybe a Neptune baby. It does not matter at this point. All we say and do becomes rainbowed gargoyles if you think about it, so I send messages to my aunt in Nairobi. She cannot hear me. She thinks the main character in The Great Gatsby is Gatsby. How am I supposed to talk to her without first drowning myself in her disgusting backwoods reality? She may seem as distant as the next star in our solar system, but ask yourself: are there other stars in our solar system? That is the question.

Trying to teach anyone anything these days compares to waterboarding. Why can’t I use bird-language? Why can’t I send a gift in the mail? Do you play like the rest of them, or can you feel the glass underneath? I’m seriously asking. This isn’t a rhetorical question or a narrative device. Volume increases and we get weighed down. I know. It’s cyclical. And relatable. Just wait for the sunrise and begin counting—wait, forget the whole counting thing.

Reader, you seem fond of your impending avalanche. You seem impregnable, like the type who cannot make it to the end of this piece but will pass judgment on it and will likely discuss it as though you have read it, studied it in a scholarly manner, when in your heart of hearts you know you conjure lies. You pretend to understand us, but you cannot understand us. You’ve never read Don Quixote. You have no idea why Foucault dubbed it the turning point toward the modern era, the revolution in our thinking about mimesis. You’ve never read Moby Dick. You have no knowledge of the strangely beautiful homoerotic love story composed in its first hundred pages. You’ve never read Ulysses. You haven’t a clue what Bloom eats for breakfast nor what Stephen Dedalus means when he refers to “that word known to all men.” We could go on and on. This façade of dominance you wield makes a mockery of everything. So many liars, the lot of you. Who counts as one of you, if everyone counts as one of you?

But here we stand: the subjects of your accusations. Here we stand: the ones dubbed guilty of malfeasance. Just think about how ludicrous you sound. Think about your expensive coffee, your caramel-flavored soup or think about sharp-finned fish swimming in black water while five men in hazmat suits fish quarters from the deepest spot. We try to reach the border with our children but they stop us. We try to secure passage, try to sneak back into our own quantum universe, try to smuggle our children back into the slag. We want asylum from the wicked but only find the muzzles of their AR-47s. Can you imagine holding a thirteen month old baby boy with a runny nose who cannot understand language of any kind who wants something to eat but has nothing to eat because an alien outbreak has caused an infestation of some disease no doctor can cure on this side of the fence? What about just plain spacemen in rain suits unfit for the desert making foliage a priority, making Scandinavian sea turtles a priority, making blasphemous injunctions while hummingbirds picket the White House while all these pitches make noise one way or another wondering why can’t we just go back to Wyoming? Why can’t we just get on the road and drive from California to Wyoming? Why can’t we just revert to childhood ourselves and forget the game these monsters play in their piggery. Haven’t you ever noticed these things? Haven’t you ever considered the soft hands of gravel?

Let me explain.

A room remains a room until it becomes a cell. Inside a cell the room no longer remains a room. No longer a room, no longer a space with an exit, now the cell smells different to most who can attest. The smell remains a smell until it becomes the truth. We lose our children at the moment we step through the gate, the cell, the ship, none will let us fix our problems. We grew up inside something else. We grew up southward or northward or extraterrestrial. Someone condemns us for our star color, someone says our star color matters. How can this be life? Why, we continue to ask without ever receiving an acceptable answer, does our star color matter but our eye color doesn’t matter and what about our habit color? Logically, our habit color should matter much more significantly than our star color. Our habit color forms because of our own choices whereas our star color simply align us with a birth moment, nothing of our own doing. So why these arbitrary hierarchies? Before landing, we observed the inhabitants for some time. We formulated assumptions based on statistical analysis of vectors and sine waves and the like. Half of us captured a glow, the other half furrowed the lunchmeat and crowded into some form of liver function or caterpillar stance. Help me, we whispered. Help me. But no one came. The room, therefore, never began as a room in the first place. Sunlight makes everything look like a room. Moonlight makes everything look like a cell. What difference does it make? In the end we cannot retrieve the time we lost. We cannot grumble either. Cereal dry or cereal over milk, wooden wedding bands or silver wedding bands or titanium, it does not matter. The system won’t let the real hackers hack. The government won’t destroy itself. And we remain here without our own volition intact.

Which leads us back to the ongoing match causing all this misdirection, redirection, intuition processing with so many folds of understanding we retain little to show the pizza delivery man other than a rack of phony hundreds. Climb back into the memory hole. Pick up the blindfold, we tell the brightest among us. Expand, if you will, on the method of your characterization for the committee. Is it a committee? Or is it more like a board? Can individuals actually wield power in this dynamic, or can we only tell officially sanctioned narratives in the officially sanctioned ways of telling? Have you made it this far? Are you still with me? One minute I speak in what Paul Thomas Anderson calls “rhyme and rub-a-dub” while another minute I crack the fucking split of it. All these guts everywhere from when I found the parcel and fed the gravy to the men who made me extrapolate the plan. What plan? We have a plan you know. Did you think we didn’t have a plan? We do. We certainly do.

The plan involves the secret. The secret involves the plan. Between those two statements you will find all the answers. I cannot yield the trophy without quality intelligence, without xenophobic hatred for everything living, call it misanthropy or call it frigid degeneration of social mobility. We face the firing squad for our transgressions. My son thankfully stands absent, otherwise I would stop functioning, just look at the paucity of given situations akin to these. Can we afford to ignore the hate beams, I wonder what life looks like from the other side of the fence, the space over there, the land of forgotten troubles, the goal of us all.

See this bund, this cape, this catchment area we call home means nothing to you foreigners—they say “you foreigners” as if everybody wasn’t already some foregone conclusion waiting to find a gripping enough ending, as if having never read Sartre or thinking about existential predicaments at least one measly minute. Victory or not, look closely and you’ll find a glaring omission in your general report. We’ve become contagious, you know. We’ve become a contiguous state. All abutted among the others. Everybody knows foreigners breed diseases. A dead bird carcass rotting in the sun from who knows what maybe some other disease maybe glaxo syndrome maybe kreemo dependency, either way a foreigner stands surely to blame, the disease most surely arrived from abroad.

Just think, all these filing cabinets talking about capturing experience. So many binders, yet we never planned on capturing anything: not experience, not a flag, not nothing. We make certain models of cars without revving engines, I suppose. Vindicated, these trappers we call representatives digress with malt beverages and sour faces behind closed escape hatches and once I heard a man melt a face for changing the guard too soon or something similar forgive me if I’m misremembering what happens you know out west shit happens all the time.

Minus time, minus psychic distance, poetry fire becomes the poetry of fire or fire making, fire poetics, where flames produce smoke smote or eclipse or put under pressure by glaciers enveloping volcanos erupting and spurting ash into the sky. All of nature disappears, like it or not, believe it or not. Then the sky turns black. All the natives choke to death. We chant and escape. Our portal opens. Figure someone somewhere wished these wishes into existence. I mean, how many times have we witnessed these same events?, Nietzsche would say many times, all the times, we see this in Béla Tarr’s film The Turin Horse, which makes it impossible to eat a boiled potato without eliciting sorrow the size of Texas. We want no more to do with Texas. We want nothing to do with you, Texas. We want a reason to release the fireflies instead. We want to send an invoice to the world-masters explaining why we cannot stay, why we have to leave, why our children will die at the hands of interstellar drug dealers or rapists or both if you disallow us to exit. We want answers and no one wants to give us answers, so this world seems too tight for living.

What then would you have us do? Driven by evil insects, these so-called decision-makers actually want nothing to do with making decisions rather someone higher up on the phone tree makes half a penny on the dollar more than the next person on the phone tree and before long the world gets smothered in war like nachos, like topographical chicken pox only now toxicity-levels plague the atmosphere, disallow our ships liftoff as though our fuel won’t work, and then our physical disguises start fading away. Following this event you will regret capturing us, you will wish you had released us. We will not flinch. We will not cower. But why not show mercy? Why not free us? Why not look the other way? Why not stop those who want to destroy us? Don’t you realize what you’re doing? Don’t you see what’s coming next? Soon you’ll wish you’d done things very differently. Soon you’ll see our underneath. Soon it will be too late.

 

 

 

 

 

Christopher Higgs writes sentences in Los Angeles where he teaches narrative theory & technique in the creative writing program at California State University Northridge. He’s the composer slash assembler of two books: The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney (Sator Press) and ONE (in collaboration with Blake Butler & Vanessa Place, Roof Books), two chapbooks, and shorter work for print and online venues, including: AGNI, Denver Quarterly, and The Paris Review Daily.

 

Luke 1:81

I am thing. Certain.
Stricken dumb, call me Beta.
A blessed shadow.

My mute-loose tongue laps
virgins and stricken in years,
Wholly ghost, I rise.

 

Luke 2:53

A light to lighten
tarried afraid mis-spaking;
marveled salvation

Lettest depart peace,
wist ye not the openeth
heat of womankind.

 

Luke 3:39

The Wildman cries,
“Here’s the news, can’t fill his shoes!”
I fan the fire.

In my tight Levi’s
I’m a wild flamer. Hot.
The coo of heaven.

 

Luke 4:45

God don’t mess with no
Son-of-a bitch. Fat with fame
And me and we, Heal!

You dirty devil,
Hold thy peace and come out. Spake.
What? A word is this?

 

Luke 5:40

Launch deep and draught nets
And when they heave, withdraw wild
Into –ness and heart.

Strange new wine busts old
bottles and drunk man
desireth better spirits.

 

Luke 6:50

Work it all weekend,
kissing cheeks, shaking
a withered finger.

Fruits and floods corrupt;
Oh mercy. What a house. All
spirit and eye beams.

 

Luke 7:51

My boys be marvelin’
in brothels and bars, spinnin’
tales in deadly mouths .

Son, when her tresses
tingled the sweet spot of sole,
what love forgave thou?

 

Luke 8:57

Mary, Joanna,
Suzanna. Reap seeds, candle-
light devilish snubs.

Choke swine and awaken
dead hearts of Legion. Bewail
not. Eat meat. Bite tongues.

 

Luke 9:63

Mountains change things. Not
hole, or nest, my house is cloud.
It foameth secrets

of slain and rise and
three. And then came twelve, five, two,
and fifties. Fragments.

 

Luke 10:42

Spirits, I wolf, lamb
I am Serpent, seventy,
a miracle in your mouth,

labour in your field.
And fire on the mountain.
Love your scorpion.

 

Luke 11:55

Jesus doesn’t like
division or the law. Woe
is a white bone bled

dry. With closed eyes and
forked tongues, dummies search for signs
on wicked platters.

 

Luke 12:60

Jesus likes sparrows
a little but hair even
more. Give me an hour

and I will make that
tongue sing; Covet cloud loins,
and showers will come.

 

Luke 13:36

Jesus likes touch. Dig
and dung it, and fruit will come.
We all loose ass, weep

and gnash on Sabbath.
Spread your branches and gather
your brood at the pits.

 

Luke 14:36

Same lame maimed dropsy
story. He who exalts the
wives of oxen on

the ground near hedges
by a highway resurrects
recompense. Hear ye?

 

Luke 15:33

Wholly ghost, I am
the eldest son of the field.
I want party. Skin

silver sheep so life
can cloak from ye. And brother
remains lost, not found.

Dig this… ashamed he
Was. Wasted. An unrighteous
Mammon.

For the children of
this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light.

 

Luke 16:32

Unjust in the much
At least a table tittle,
I knoweth hearts, wives, holy dog

tongue lapping waves
of a great gulf, begging thence
and burning with thirst.

 

Luke 17:38

Here a lo, there a
lo, everywhere women grind
beneath eagles-a-

thither in rain-fire.
Trow not, good stranger, glory
a whole lotta faith

 

Luke 18:44

Blind camels stuck with
needles justify better,
And you don’t know it.

The mock-spit and scourge
Of one beat will rise on three
then your eyes will see

 

Luke 19:49

The stones cry and I
cry and He cries. We all cry
trenched about on stage

Attentive thieves cast
long shadows when fleeing this
house of bought prayer.

 

Luke 20:48

Authority is
A durst beat, stone re-
jects teetering

on the tongue, a word,
my word will grind, be powder
for widows cheeks, Son.

 

Luke 21:39

Mites of truth I say
Widows rise against nations.
Pestilence famines

for answers in hearts.
Moons—perplexed and roaring—shall;
Heaven and seas shall…

But my words shall not.
Come early to the temple,
Overcharged with drunk.

 

Luke 22:72

Let’s eat God and kiss;
And deny plus three; sayest
suffer in a cock

crew. Smote present past
the Christ I bred. Heeled our ear,
severed by tongue; We are

Peter and tears, Man.
Know not what thou sayest, but
if that’s what you say, We
am. Let’s eat meat, you hear?

 

Luke 23:56

For, behold, coming,
Blessed are the barren wombs,
paps which gave no suck.

Mountains, Fall on us;
and to the hills, Cover us.
If they do these things
in a green tree, what
be done in the dry?

Jesus cried, Father,
into thy hands I commend
my spirit, loudly:
he gave up the ghost.

 

Luke 24:54

Jesus rolled the stone,
Left his linens
But it was I, Wholly, with the women and Mary’s. Ask Cleopas, and

Oh man. Amen!

 

 

 

 

 

Chad Faries is the author of two collections of poetry, The Border Will Be Soon and The Book of Knowledge. A recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, he lived and taught in Central Europe for many years. Currently he teaches at Savannah State University, where he also hosts a radio program on WHCJ 90.3. When not in Thunderbolt, Georgia, Faries gets lost on his motorcycle whenever he can. Above all, he is a “Yooper”—a native of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

 

1. Slighted by a stranger’s greater insight, the ideal citizen attacks those who question the nature of a power they do not themselves understand. These retaliations serve our function in two ways: servility, leading to hostility. Enduringly oppressed, the ideal citizen lashes out in ignorance at rational, anti-national opposition. We hear no call to amend this type of behaviour.

2. The ideal citizen informs on lawbreakers in order to show obeisance to power and to settle scores. The act of Revenge, to Sir Frances Bacon a kind of wild justice, is a necessary recourse for every member of the classes below ours. It is our duty to make revenge widely accessible through diverse media, to encourage minor acts of treachery that incite extrajudicial mayhem and subsequent mass incarceration. We hear no call to amend this type of behaviour.

3. Though wars, civil or extra-territorial, are temporarily disruptive to the economy, when we decide to re-establish peace, bankers are brought upstairs with promising figures for infrastructural growth. Reparations pass through politicians, architects, engineers and resource managers who renew the status quo until such time as planned chaos comes again. Men and women will build in the face of insurgency and permitted radicalisation. The ideal citizen will die for their country during war and peace in preparation for war. We hear no call to amend this type of behaviour.

4. A word about our habitat. Skyscrapers laid sideways, foundation to penthouse, circle Earth at the height of altostratus clouds; it’s very comfortable here. Access to colleagues is hologrammatic, our beds made from electrostatic-impulses with pillows that beat into our ears the rhythms of the heart beamed in from hardworking families below to whom we are just another polluted day when the sky is blocked and hope lifts its chin to the fist. The ideal citizen’s heart must beat with vigour at all times. We hear no call to amend this type of behaviour.

5. It has taken no small amount of effort to complete our ring of protected steel with help from friends whom we own, centuries of pioneering ladder climbing, the psychologically-damaged-through-the-ages pushing out to the stars from where the view down – particularly today – is never the same as the insect colonies of the planet rise accumulating and distributing at will, in every known sense free. We hear no call to amend this type of behaviour.

6. The ideal citizen could be more challenging, we agree, than doggedly aspiring to mediated greatness, visible throughout life at all points up to and including the end of the ladder, where, shrinking, ashen, restrained by medicine, they peer through a hole in the clouds to request with their dying breath the whereabouts of their soul. We hear no call to amend this type of behaviour.

 

 

 

 

 

Daniel Roy Connelly was the winner of the 2014 Fermoy International Poetry Festival Prize, a finalist in the 2015 Aesthetica Magazine Creative Writing Prize, and winner of the 2015 Cuirt New Writing Prize for Poetry. A former British diplomat and Ivy League salutatorian, he holds a PhD from the University of Saint Andrews on the colour of Othello’s skin. Published widely, he appears in the current editions of The Moth, Acumen, and Critical Survey. He is an actor, theatre director, and professor of creative writing, English, and theatre at John Cabot University and The American University of Rome. Read more of his work at www.danielroyconnelly.com

 

 

2016, bronze

 

 

 

 

 

Timothy Cleary’s sculptures are a blend of proverb, elegy, accusation, joke, and self-portrait. He lives in Hermantown, MN, and teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Superior.

 

Recently, there has been a dramatic growth in creative writing programs in higher education. According to data from 2009-2015 Associated Writing Program (AWP) catalogues, the number of undergraduate creative writing programs in the United States has increased from 313 to 720, a growth rate of 130% in six years.

At this time of rapid growth, many institutions are reexamining their goals for creative writing instruction, and this article discusses the underlying tension between institutional desires to make the value of creative writing instruction transparent in a quantifiable, data driven way, and individual desires to help students make meaning and value that engages, as Robert Penn Warren wrote, “knowledge of human nature, human needs, human values” (“Knowledge and the Image of Man,” 191).

This tension can be seen on the AWP website itself. In “Our History and the Growth of Creative Writing Programs,” a statement directed to a more general audience than other subsections of the extensive website, AWP makes several assertions similar to those of Robert Penn Warren’s. For instance, they assert that “Writing classes often demonstrate the efficacy of the human will—that human experience can be shaped and directed for the good: aesthetically, socially, and politically.” They argue that in addition to the study of literature, “In creative writing classes, students also analyze psychology and motives, the dynamics of social classes and individual, regional, and national beliefs.” However, on that same website, in the new “AWP Recommendations on the Teaching of Creative Writing to Undergraduates,” a culmination of several years of research, the AWP Board of Trustees articulates a much more quantifiable approach to undergraduate creative writing instruction, and one that sharply diverges from graduate writing instruction. They argue that “Whereas the general goal for a graduate program in creative writing is to nurture and expedite the development of a literary artist, the goal for an undergraduate program is mainly to develop a well-rounded student in the liberal arts and humanities, a student who develops a general expertise in literature, in critical reading, and in persuasive writing.” The recommendations focus on critical analysis of literature, isolating and emulating “craft techniques,” and “practice in writing.” In the 2,849 word document, the word “human” is altogether absent, as is “social” and “political.”

While the glaring absence of humanism in AWP’s recommendations for teaching undergraduates is striking, it is also understandable. Creative writing as a discipline is still fighting to be taken seriously in the academy. By focusing on an articulation of the quantifiable and transferrable skills that creative writing can offer, AWP makes the case that creative writing is complimentary and relevant to all undergraduates regardless of their disciplines. This, in turn, is helpful for universities currently struggling to justify the worth of humanities-based courses. While “human” is not a part of AWP’s recommendations, the word “craft” is one of the most repeated key words, occurring nineteen times in the article.

This focus on craft echoes the current language in most academic institutions. Taking a cursory look at top-tier creative writing course descriptions for undergraduates shows that “craft” is the most often-repeated key word. For instance, the first learning goal for University of Michigan’s Introductory Creative Writing course is: “To hone writing craft, style, and mechanics in at least two of the following genres: fiction, poetry, and/or drama.” The first sentence of Stanford’s Introduction to Reading and Writing Poetry explains that students “will write and read widely, exploring various aspects of poetic craft, including imagery, metaphor, line, stanza, music, rhythm, diction, and tone.” While University of Iowa doesn’t include the word “craft” in their undergraduate course description, they emphasize the workshop practice they made famous through their graduate program, and they currently subtitle their graduate creative writing courses “Art and Craft.”

“Craft” is inarguably a vital word in the contemporary creative writing classroom, however, it is also a word whose meaning has been recently radically altered and diminished. Originally, craft was synonymous with both art and intellectual power. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first accounts of the word occur in the late 800’s:

Craft

c893 1. Strength, power, might, force

c888 2. Intellectual power; skill; art

Now, due to radical changes in how many undergraduates are studying creative writing, who is teaching these courses, and how the university is attempting to justify liberal arts education, strength and intellectual power is no longer addressed as a craft-based goal. University of Iowa’s course titles that all begin “Art and Craft” most succinctly articulate the split. Stanford chooses to define craft in terms of specific literary devices, and University of Michigan puts craft in the same partition as grammatical mechanics.

Some might argue that this changed definition of craft is not that important, that students are learning the same things under different names. This new naming, for instance, is what University of Iowa is highlighting in its course title “Art and Craft,” and the program recently boasted writing teachers like Marilynne Robinson, someone who is very vocal about the need for students to experience the university as preparation for “citizenship and democracy” rather than training students to be a “docile, most skilled, working class.” Some might think that students are still learning fundamental lessons about the ways in which literature participates in social and political practices, that they are still learning to be sharp-minded and critical about the systems they operate in, and that they are engaged in a process, as the AWP “History and Growth of Creative Writing Programs” statement asserts, that can “demonstrate the efficacy of the human will.”

In some particular cases, this is probably very true. However, the reality is that not only has the number of creative writing courses for undergraduates radically changed in recent years, there has also been a large shift in terms of who teaches these courses and how much power and resources these teachers have. During the 1970’s, adjuncts and lecturers made up 20% of the higher education teaching force. Just forty years later, that number has risen to over 50%  (Gwendolyn Glenn, “Rise in Adjunct Faculty in High Education”). Combined with the graduate students who also teach university courses, the chances of undergraduate students taking a course with a tenure track professor who has sustainable resources, considerably more time to write and connect with other writers and their ideas, and who benefits from institutional respect, is very slim. For instance, in Fall 2015, 100% of the sixteen sections of introductory creative writing courses at University of Michigan (English 223) were taught by either GSI’s or Lecturers, 100% of the twenty-six sections of University of Iowa’s Creative Writing Studio Workshop (CW 1800) were taught by either GSI’s or Lecturers, and 100% of the eight sections of Stanford’s Beginning Fiction Writing (English 90) and the Introduction to Reading and Writing Poetry (English 92) were taught by Lecturers. While graduate students and adjunct lecturers are often excellent teachers who often make impossible sounding workloads and resources possible, they have little to no input into the ways in which courses are structured, administrative goals are established, and the ways in which their teaching is evaluated. What generally results from this situation is a system of university administrators establishing a long list of quantifiable standards for these teachers to demonstrate in order to keep their semester-by-semester jobs. The more their performance is streamlined, quantifiable, and easy-to-track for already over-worked committees typically outside the creative writing discipline, the greater the chances are that these instructors will receive future employment.

In the introduction to A Poetry Handbook, one of the most renowned how-to-write-poetry books, Mary Oliver advocates teaching creative writing in this limitedly-defined craft-based way, and her argument takes an alarmingly essentialist position: “Everyone knows that poets are born and not made. This is true also of painters, sculptors, and musicians. Something that is essential can’t be taught; it can only be given, or earned, or formulated in a manner too mysterious to be picked apart and redesigned for the next person . . . Whatever can’t be taught, there is a great deal that can, and must be learned. This book is about the things that can be learned. It is about matters of craft, primarily” (1). Chapter titles such as “Imitation,” “Sound,” “Line,” and “Form” make clear that, to Mary Oliver, craft is a set of literary devices that does not extend to explorations of identities or socio-political contexts. She writes, “Emotional freedom, the integrity and special quality of one’s own work—these are not first things, but final things. Only the patient and diligent, as well as inspired, get there” (18). Ironically, the same moves that most creative writing institutions are making to reduce the meaning of craft solely to mechanics and literary devices in order to serve a greater population is also a move that neglects to give students opportunities to seriously engage with intellectual issues they were not “born” for.

Establishing opportunities for undergraduates to explore craft in a fuller way that includes rigorous attention to the line, a background in literary devices, and connects this learning to larger contexts about what they are writing about and why would help all undergraduate students understand the social value of literature, and it would give them a responsibility to their craft that goes beyond themselves. In this digital era where the most creative experience many students get is crafting their Instagram account, helping students connect their writing practices to issues that go beyond transferrable skill sets is vital. The organization Voices of Our Nation (VONA) is an excellent example of what can happen when craft is approached in this fuller way. VONA was established in 1999, and allows all writers of color—from beginning to advanced—the chance to work together in multiple genres. According to their mission statements, VONA has three goals, and the first one is about craft: “In VONA’s multi-genre workshops, developing writers of color explore their craft in an atmosphere of support and understanding.”

Some might ask why craft needs to be accompanied by “support and understanding”? What do we need to understand and support about metaphor or word choice? In the recent book Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle and American Creative Writing During the Cold War, Eric Bennett explores the ways in which Cold War politics affected the creative writing programs at University of Iowa and Stanford, noting that America’s fear of totalitarianism and quantified systems that emerged from World War II, affected the creation of these foundational MFA programs. Students in these programs were taught that writing and the study of literature was necessary and urgent work that explored questions about human values in order to create a better world. Certainly, this vision for literature was steeped in romanticism, but it was also attempting to question institutional agendas of professionalization and the deepening of the university interest in creating students with specialized knowledge bases. Bennett articulates that one of his primary missions of the book is to make clear that approaches to creative writing and literary conventions which “go without saying — assumptions that are invisible because seemingly timeless — once emerged from contingent historical circumstances” (162). During this current time of dramatic growth in creative writing programs there is an alarmingly consistent new institutional assumption that the undergraduate study of craft can be separated from the human and socio-political world the students occupy. This assumption allows universities to frame the discipline of creative writing as a set of saleable skill sets, which they believe will justify the discipline’s existence in a 21^st century climate where, because of high costs and often unmet (and unrealistic) pre-professional aspirations, the purpose of higher education is often criticized. The problem is that this new packaging does not articulate any specific goals or skill sets that will help students question and engage with the current socio-political problems they are facing, and to engage with these problems in the complex, individual ways that the discipline of creative writing has been historically meant to foster.

 

 

 

 

 

Julie Babcock holds an MFA from Purdue University and a Ph.D. in the Program for Writers at University of Illinois-Chicago. She is the author of the poetry collection Autoplay (MG Press, 2014), and her fiction, poetry and reviews appear in The Rumpus, PANK Magazine, The Collagist, Rain Taxi, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and the Indiana Arts Commission and is a Lecturer at University of Michigan.

Abc

Test

 

“Curve,” 2015, Ink and found image on found paper. Matthew Craven.
Photo courtesy Asya Geisberg Gallery, New York.

“You’re the same kinda bad as me!”
-Tom Waits, “Bad as Me”

 

If we drove our cars like we walked down a crowded street, we’d all be dead. Stop and think, no, wait, please don’t wait or stop and think, learn to think and move at the same time, like you do when you’re driving your car— which you spent more on (yes I said moron) than anything you will ever spend in your pitiable life. I live and love and work in New York City, the world’s worst transgressor of pedestrian ethics, save that poor old New York City has an excuse: New York City got killed a long time ago by cell phones. Now the madding throng is struck even dumber by staring straight down, at the empty palms of their sweaty, empty hands. Like I said, if we drove our cars like we walked down a crowded street, we’d all be dead. Or there would just be fewer people.

*

Especially Florida. And New Jersey. Which could be good.

*

You should see the shitheads stop smack dab in the midst of such the smallest egress. Pause and check the weather, check the sidewalk without stepping, check the fair and saddened moments that surround you until your ultimate demise you godforsaken fool because you’ve stopped in the middle of 12 people walking briskly to attend to something, anything, other than your glacial maneuvers. On a second by second basis, the secure estimate would range somewhere between 500-1000 people making stupid moves as walkers down the street. Note the wide expanse three feet from you where you might pause and eat your empanada. You’ve stopped me in my ever precious 35 seconds of silence in order to look up at the sky on a tread as thin as half of your immense and overwhelmingly oppressive frame.

Please pay better attention as you walk.

*

Just a few simple reminders as to the definition of our subject matter as adjective: lacking inspiration or excitement; dull. Also dull, boring, tedious, monotonous, uneventful, unremarkable, tiresome, wearisome, uninspired, unimaginative, unexciting, uninteresting, uninvolving; MORE.

*

A MACHINE FOR DISAPPEARING might well be the way our sorry ass country might do some good. Give us a MACHINE FOR DISAPPEARING to 39 stand up chaps and truly lugubrious gals (chicks) and we would triple the world’s productivity simply by aiming the gun at undesirables. Spend 1/3 of the budget on missiles for Syria’s disappearing on this newfangled machine and we win as a race of humans, death to those seriously deserving by dint of being in the way.

*

And the clowns move forward with the snow men.

*

Now I am unable to go about my urgent business being dull or boring, because you just got in my way. Now I am unable to be tedious or monotonous because your ass just decided to stop in the middle of traffic for absolutely no reason whatsoever and most definitely not because your dog had stopped to take a shit in the middle of heavy foot-traffic. I am unable to remain uneventful, unremarkable, uninspired, unimaginative, unexciting, uninteresting or uninvolving because you had to pause on a sidewalk and check your pockets (which were still empty once you stopped moving, by the by). Actually, I can’t get by because you stopped in the middle of the skinniest passageway in all of New York City.

*

Mongolian font to be sure. Retarded as China, retarded as America in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, as dumb as America in America. Mongolian as my hillbilly tattoo, got from my vice-rid hometown downtown whence the passersby are truly scary now. My hometown is a Mongolian football on the flat, middle American Mongolian horizon. A football full of beer with a platter of cheese-stuffed sausage and several dips for several bowls of heavily salted snack chips, my hometown. Most of it is made in China. There are no pedestrians in my hometown, however, they are in their cars, going to get more dip.

*

Hey lady now would be a good time to tell your kid to stop making that noise.

*

We give the average traveler very long shrift. Afraid to ask our slow-witted companions to lower their volume in a public sphere, we assume every jackalope at the gate is a first time traveler. The average traveler is a pedestrian and evidence of the lowest common denominator of human behavior.

*

AIRPORT GROTESQUE— Girdles avail for your obese subjects. If you are fat enough to require the lifting of arm rests at your airplane seat, you need to purchase two seats. Airports as Leisure Zoos. Airports most definitely qualify as pedestrian examples of etiquette.

*

Manhattan at Xmas as idiocy pure and simple. New York City as exemplary of pedestrian idiocy. Note for instance the Fifth Avenue clog about two weeks before Xmas. About a dozen blocks stock still, stopped to a stock still stand still. If a poor terrorist sleeper cell could’ve only had five simple office windows they could have doubled the amount dead in September, 2001. The sudden idiocy dawns on a fairly normally well heeled and level headed 50 year old father of two and absolute panic sets in, as in attack. Attack! But the terrorists are as stupid as the tourists, they, too, are staring at their cell phones.

*
This city is duly ridiculous. Propped on droopy sea scaffold rank with mildew.

*

An immodest proposition to be sure. If the selected few might waltz with gun-shod, bullet-shy freedom, offing those deserving of the simplest, unspoken codes, like don’t take up more space than you deserve, fat-ass. Gimme a gun like my American obesity deserves. The guns wouldn’t kill, but remove, revoke, make utterly certain those folks who are not intelligent enough to walk down a simple city street on their own two feet without ruining someone’s day for their brain dead disrespect of every other human being’s right to personal space do not deserve to remain on this place rent free. The peeve is for people who take up more space than they deserve. They should be eliminated along with child molesters, rapists and murders. Their violations are as severe. Maybe we could tax them special. The stupidity tax. Or better to simply eliminate them. Enough money in the world already.

*
But yet any airport gate provides ample evidence of our global idiocy en masse as pitiable specie. Pitting African against American, injury attorney against artisanal bourbon cooper, plumber versus highwayman with 12 string axe from Asheville, North Carolina, wrongly rerouted due to wind shear in Chicago, to this, your tent, your middle western tin can of discontent. My money is on the plumber. Only his toils match the bluntness of his tools, the bluntness of his intellect, the severity of his abler anger, his jagged, angular angst.

The blue of his collar’s sky matched only by the wideness of berth afforded his brighter brethren.

*

Trauma here we come.

*
One way to solve the population problem: make every airplane flight a death match. Every stroll to the corner store also offers endless arrays of small choices on the huge haul of vacating a gasping mother’s poor outer crust of pestilence, endless cysts— the pustules that are her overpopulation.

*
Your neighbor, she gobbles another garlic, pork tube. Now her breath smells like the crease between her pubis and navel. Clammy as yesterday’s ham, pungent as the rot of corpses all around. Pull up a flotation device, folks, come join the pageant. Snacks for sale— they make you smell. Flutes for fruits and never a tasty steward.

*

One who gets wise by way of Schlitz and macaroni and cheese can easily grow accustomed to vintage Veuve Clicquot and crepes galettes. Why does it not work backwards? The stronger specimen, accustomed to shark’s fin soup, cannot, somehow, get used to a sardine tin. The weak link tortures the high priest with his incompetence. The strong sort tortures the weakling by way of the temper’s tribulations.

*

Nothing is quite as appalling as the choosy eater. A grey and white and yellow plate— well done mush, in essence, drives me to spasms in any public place. My patience blanches watching a young woman carefully pick every green pea from her tiny platter of mixed-diner-vegetable provisions. Once at a museum reception I watched a man take a tiny bite of a blueberry. Picky is icky. I wanted to smack the chopsticks out of her hands. I wanted to slap the fruit out of his fingers. You are eating in public, act as if you had some manners.

*

Stop quick in the fairly madding throng. The lights are lit! 900 Strollers stick on the blue grease paint of sidewalk stuck by December sixty degrees of melting per minute. Trust me, I’m your alderman. Trust me, I’m your library, trust me, I’m your artisanal newspaper. Trust me, I’m about to slaughter you with the freedom afforded a righteous USA fan, through stink of pink tape. So many truly stupid people stroll our freest streets. Much population could be struck. Stricken. Stroked. As the DADAist said 100 years ago, get rid of 99% of Germany and we would be OK— in America, eliminate 99.9% and dig!

*

Why does a dog yawn when nervous? Does the canine brain require extra oxygen to process anxiety? Then why does the human feel the need to stuff some food substance into his regurgitation route whenever a television isn’t nearby? Is it the same reason given for the human who cannot but fiddle incessantly with a piece of plastic wrapping when sitting in a crowded but otherwise quiet public place? I prefer dogs. But my therapy dog needs a therapy dog.

*

How can the public announcement voice in an Asian airport requesting the presence of a dozen American passengers at the desk of the departing gate never have spoken a word of English in her life? Is it somehow a pre-requisite that the entire universe be so inconsiderate? When one is American, one thinks it’s just Americans who are idiots until he crosses a border. Any border, any time. We are not alone.

*

Density bespeaks idiocy.

*

Any human activity requiring a ticket automatically shaves off half of the bearer’s intelligence quotient and thus makes them a pedestrian. PhD’s disappear into thin air. Watch a seasoned, well-traveled, well-dressed man board an airplane, for instance. Once he’s licked the sickening syrup of anticipation from his sweaty face and stuffs the nearest dead animal into his gaping maw, he’ll drift toward sleep and snore all the way to Detroit, Phoenix, Dallas, Anchorage— burping up dreams in his oily bliss.

*

My family just took a luxury cruise. I stayed home, thereby dubbing my next essay A Supposedly Fun Thing I’m Not Even Going to Try. Imagine all the pedestrians on that boat! I’d rather not.

*

Excluding present company (I’m alone), one isn’t particularly concerned with education, lest he call the smallest human decency, the sparest courtesy and dignity, the basest etiquette or the simplest animal shame an education. Cross your enormous legs you fat, stupid fuck and tuck that pudding-stained sweatshirt into your thread-barest sweatpants. You’re in public now; you should have left your diaper at home.

*

There is something to be said for the human being who understands how to carry himself in the public world. To wit— when you are walking in a crowded, narrow passage, don’t stop stock still. Step aside, and turn your head and then your body around and away to look for or at whatever you’re looking for or at. If you are passing in heavy traffic, don’t slow down. Once again, if human beings were automobiles we’d all be dead. Then animals would reign again and murder would be crucial to survival. The world could eat its own annoyance.

*

The poor soul borne of a moron begets another moron. This is not advocacy for murder or cannibalism (mind you, the Lord knows we have enough to eat if simultaneously thrifty and generous)— but if horses are glue and frogs become ink, can’t we find a way to make idiots into bullets? Can’t we find a double-duty, fool-proof way to protect ourselves from ourselves?

*

It seems all Americans in the airport are military today. Nothing against them— they too need to feed their spawn with the dead by killing sanctioned from on high. They will grow fat as saints, healthy as second-string basketball billionaires. Someone strong needs to protect us from China when that grave, grey nation comes a- calling for payback.

*

No, really, we all revel in eyeballing your extra 60 pounds of belly fat as you take up five seats for a nap at the overcrowded airport gate. We understand your sleep is needy, both beauty and brain, we’re tired too, but it must be exhausting for you eating that many inhuman meals in a single day. Please, snore a little bit harder for us, we can’t hear you clearly enough, can’t smell your rancid breath on our ways to Los Angeles, Stockholm and Guam.

*

Women are more important than men. In Tokyo— no cows, no fruit, no dirt and the old cigarettes teach the new cigarettes about flowers. In Seoul traffic cops wear helmets for good reason. I’ve never been to Norway, but their sneeze is Snorri Sturluson. We are told it is America’s fault for the globe’s demise. Until we witness a Lithuanian king drive through his reckless, crooked night, or a Mexican president sink like a shit-sack, or watch the Chinese learn how to drive. The world devours itself like the ancient symbolic snake— spineless, unaware and unscrupulous.

*

Pity the unpardonable sot who can’t sit still for more than a minute with only his thoughts, the poor, tortured troglodyte who must fuss with the vacancy in his overhead compartment for fear of the shifting contents within. The unforgivable cluck with no peace in his naked soul, no parcel of understanding of the joy of indifference, unaware as we prepare for our initial descent… I am not an angry man. Brace for impact. We are all exactly the same. Everybody’s empire is empty.

 

 

 

Born and raised in Waukesha, Wisconsin, Scott Zieher has published four books of poetry, as well as numerous books and articles on poetry, art and vernacular photography. He is co-owner of Zieher Smith & Horton, a contemporary art gallery singled out by The New York Times’ Roberta Smith for “their abilities to find young or underexposed talent.” This essay, a screed toward less humanity, does not reflect his general attitude, serving instead the smaller purpose of aiding the author in identifying his fears. Zieher lives and works in New York City with his wife and two sons.