Danilo Lopez Blog: 2009

Saturday, December 12, 2009

Elliptical Structural Elements in C.D. Wright’s “Deepstep Come Shining”:
Language Poetry as Symbolism to the Nth Potency

Poet Carolyn D. Wright has been termed “language poet” and “elliptical poet” (Burt). Language poets aim at a “systematic” derangement of the language (Meyer). Inspired on the works of Wittgenstein, Saussure, Levi-Strauss, Barthes, Lyotard, and Derrida, Language Poets seek new forms in poetry and fiction in opposition to the rigid language structures of classical poetry (See Exhibit 1). Language Poets are at the forefront of Post-Modernism (Klages), which is a continuation of Modernism, which was a reaction to Victorian and Classical forms. Language Poets are often identified with the political left and other causes against the conservative establishment. What elements of form and syntax are manipulated or deranged by these poets? Have they created new forms or just turned inside out and upside down already existing forms? Which of these forms can enrich the poetic toolbox?

To understand Language Poets (LP) we must go back to Ludwig Wittgenstein and his concept of “language games” in his book Philosophical Investigations. In it Wittgenstein asserts in a series of aphorisms that people are trained to react in a certain way to the words of others. Words have multiple purposes and listeners must interpret the context of such words in order to decide what to do and how to react to these words (2). The interpretation is done through rules the same way it happens in games (31). Only one who knows the rules of the game can ask significant questions or react appropriately to a sentence. The rules of the game are learned within the realm of culture, and these rules change through time, space and context. The process of naming and creating names is a language game (7).

The process of language is the process of life. Language and the action it is woven into is also a language game (7). Other language games are, among many others: constructing an object from a description (drawing, painting), forming or teasing an hypothesis (philosophy, science), reporting an event (journalism, creative non-fiction), solving a problem (mathematics), making up a story or reading it (literature, reading, interpreting), presenting the results of a problem in graphics, diagrams, or tables (visual symbols and conventions), etc. (23).

Each of these games has its unique rules. For example the sentence “a dark cloud appeared on the sky” may have different meanings whether it is uttered within the context of a newscast, a novel, a poem, or a scientific paper. Thus, speaking a language is part of an activity or form of life (23). By knowing these language games we can get free of old pictures of language processes and communication and uncover the disguised (philosophical) nonsense that governs us (115, 464).
Ron Silliman sees language as a series of contexts always in transition and flow, where meaning is a convention in constant flux.

Exhibit 1 - Language Poetry in context: a quick mapping

Denotes influence Denotes opposition

Michel Focault urges us to detach language from the game rules by way of a metaphysical realm (Focault, 1979). If we free ourselves, our minds, our thoughts from the “bewitchments” of meaning including the response to questions like what are the true, the good and the beautiful -which to Wittgenstein are simply philosophical constructions, part of a language game- life acquires new meaning and philosophy is liberated from limiting contexts. From here emanates the LP dictum to liberate words and sentences from the limiting context of syntax rules and thematic meaning, and their aim to assign new symbols to old words and new meanings to old contexts. If Wittgenstein’s aim was to solve philosophical problems by dissolving them, LG poets aim is to create new literature by dissolving the rules of the old syntax.

In Deepstep Come Shining (DCS) Wright uses a host of tools of the poetic trade to conform to the poetics of language poetry, and then some more including, but not limited to: in medias res, name making, short sentencing, paratactical arrangements, random lists as poetry, sentence break, shift between slang and educated diction, allusion as illusion, verbalization of names, use of words and letters as forms, application of the mosaic-quilt-collage visual concept to language independent of meaning. Meaning in language poetry is irrelevant. LPs want the reader to co-create the text, invent the context, devise the meaning, and be delivered from the shackles of syntax, language, and ultimately culture and established authorities.
The following Exhibit 2 illustrates the use in DCS of several literary devices. Literary devices are images used in poetry by the writer to relate poem to reader in a more effective way.

IMAGE SAMPLES IN BOOK COMMENT

In medias res Meanwhile the cars continued in a persistent flow down
Closeburn Road p. 3 The book starts in the action of the trip, a previous, unknown action is implied by meanwhile
Simile It is unlike night p. 4 (also repetition) What it is not rather of what it is like
Metaphor The ruby progression of taillights p. 3 Red = ruby; movement = progression
Personification The land claims saturate levels of green p. 5
Analogy They would have been blue. The eyes. She did not have. Blue
as the chicory in yonder ditch p. 7 Also sentence break

IMAGE SAMPLES IN BOOK COMMENT
Colloquial English Turn off that stupid damn machine p. 10
Educated English Kepler’s invention of the camera lucida fell into oblivion some
Two hundred years ago p. 10
Synesthesia Hear the trees p. 16
Synecdoche Boneman, Snakeman, Alligator couple, Broomhead, Thrasher Name making?
Hyperbole, foreign language Keep me in your arc of acuity, siempre por favor p. 15
Random list as poetry See p. 21
Verbalization of names To river, to cream, to feather p.21
Verbalization of gerund To suddenly p.21
Name making Magiccicadae, onionlight p.22
Repetition Come shining. The land obtained in exchange for two blind horses. This land became known as Wrens. God is Louise. Several places in the book
Synesthesia So Gloucester had to smell his way to Dover p. 22
Use of words and letters as form Love it Leave it Love it Leave it Several places in the book
Line breaking There are enough signs. Of the lack of tenderness in the world. P. 28
Allusion The sky, convict gray p. 31

IMAGE SAMPLES IN BOOK COMMENT
Slang English He had a shitty attitude p. 32
Shit. I burned the shit out of my shit-eating tongue p.37
Paratactical arrangment Why would anyone choose the absence of chlorophyll. Is orange really your favorite color. Don’t you just love a trumpet vine
p. 40
Collage As in page 51 where we move or are standing still at the same time on: the recovery of vision after an operation of the eye, the shape of a shirt on the floor resembling a well, horrible spots on a horse’s side, a sun on the tree hill of crystals, moon over Milledgeville as only a story, and a saucer light on the wall as the hand of god
Allusion as illusion Paint what you see, Undifferentiated dark P. 52
Voices emanating from the emptiness p. 53
Syntax and syntax symbols overthrown There is an absolute absence of interrogation and admiration signs in the book

As we can see from this sampling, the symbol in poetry is taken by language poets and by Wright in particular to higher levels of abstraction: the whole book, the whole of language poets’ work is a symbol of rebellion against the Establishment (whether it be literary, academic, political, or social). It is a rebellion against the structure of language itself. Nevertheless, due to its apparent obscurity, it is improbable that the reader of LP is a statistical average.

Poetry is said to be for elites. LP is probably for smaller elites of academic circles and other poets. The average reader, the wider audiences, will not likely “understand” the meaning of LP nor will be able or willing to co-participate in its creative process. It is up to another tier of poets to dis-entangle the conforming minds of most common readers. By taking academic positions, as many language poets have done, they can reach to future generations of poets who will in turn create their own isms, their own holons, in the pursuit of new aesthetics, morals, and truths.(Brown, 262).

In the meantime, the techniques depicted in Deepstep Come Shining and the poetics that inform the work of LP, can provide a searchlight to improve the craft, renew the themes of poetry, and bring innovation to the structure and forms of poetry and fiction.

What research topics could be explored regarding LP? Several come to mind: Who is the typical reader LP aim to reach? Have they changed the structures of language and the purpose of meaning and symbol in poetry and fiction? Are they able to communicate their poetics theory through their writing? Would their aim only be possible through the creation of a new language or a new structure of language? Is that possible or is this just another ism in the long chain of isms in literature and philosophy? Do they achieve an aesthetic value with their work? Is language poetry a form of anti-poetry? What will this language poetry lead to, what is the next holon in the chain of being? If the aim of aesthetics (poetry) is the creation of beauty rather than meaning (truth or good which are the respective realms of science and moral), does language poetry achieve its aim?

Works Cited

Brown, Montague. Restoration of Reason. Michigan. Baker Academis, 2006.
Burt, Stephen. "Burt Reviews Wheeler's "Smokes"", Boston Review, 1998
Focault, Michel. Governability, Ideology, and Consciousness. No. 6, Summer 1986, 5-21.
Hejinian, Lyn. The language of Inquiry. Internet article in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E=P=O=E=T=R=Y website
Klages, Mary. Literary Theory: A guide for the perplexed. New York. Continuum, 2006.
Mason David and Nims, John Frederick. Western Wind. New York. McGraw-Hill, 2006.
Silliman, Ron. The New Sentence. Internet article in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E=P=O=E=T=R=Y website
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. New York. The McMillan Company, 1979.

Saturday, December 5, 2009

Panic

Up there a sign on a rusted valise reads:
She is gone, it is over down here
Mai kaikan ai daukisa!

A boy tries to clean the yellow paint from between his
Fingernails, inside the cook cries, secretary to other realities
Umpira ai kaiks!

Old TV receptors adorn the wall separating us
Strange plantains grow on almond trees
Strangers from other dreams play familiar rhythms
They begin with tree strings and fused metals
They end with broken backs

Upla kumi sin balras!

His-Panic

Down, down and up the hill,
we have three lanes where two only
should exist,

báaxten na’?

Texaco, Marlboro, Wendy's and
Ray-O-Vac signs waving good bye
to the traveler

báaxten na’?

the neighbor to the North has sold us
everything, except anti-pollution
devices, handicap codes and health
insurance

báaxten na’?

Goodyear, American Airlines and
Visa card,
let's send cocaine in exchange,
and immigrants, and sugar, and labor

lu’um nohoch kool

prices are low, prices are cheap,
they have sold us everything, including
Madonna, Michael Jackson, and The New KOB

lu’um nohoch kool

Everything
Yaab winik

let's send them good leather, some arts
and crafts, and tax evasion and interest debts,
even some children to adopt or to take
body organs from

Yaab winik

they have sold us everything,
except wealth

kim sah!

Hispano

Trato en vano de separarme
Vuelo sobre tierras de cuchillos
Y uñas amenazantes
Vuelo sobre flores raras que
Devienen pájaros
Canto canciones del barrio
Invoco el regreso de mis padres

Wáguchi Bùngiu le sièlubei inébewalá bíri
Nübinlá bidáani lun barúeijan ya uboúagu
ĺtaralá

Wednesday, December 2, 2009

Julia

Sandinista phantom
Warriors assault her store
With commanding Gringo rifles

She doesn’t retreat but
Stands her ground tall as a building
A mechanical reprieve shrouded in ignorance

“Yan nini lika Telemaco” his plump lips uttered
“I felt whole cuddling in his chest” she recalls
Both naked and restful like newborns asleep

Then came the conflagration of children
All five aching for love, bundled like grapes
Better a concubine than a fatherless clan

She collected green bananas discarded by
British companies to make rondon and huavul
She roamed The Bluff and the mines selling stuff

“Children make you fat, big as peas are small”
But children grow and depart stolen by wars and
coup d’etats, they belong to the world, that’s all

Remember Dead Man’s Creek?
She danced there the Palo de Mayo
White eddies circling her Mulata-de-Tal feet

Age doesn’t run or stand still
It just happens whenever it wants
It shrinks your body, wrinkles your eyes

Dance, syncope, collapse do not match
“Another son stolen by death” was her last sentence
With early signs of spring on their wet laps

The Atlantic mountains shone green
A double rainbow fronting broad blue skies
The persistent rain undrawing the river

The lamplight promenading her face

Papi

I grew up with the century and
Died with the revolution
Papi, a stern departing from the shore
I heard of a distant war and
Enlisted in the King’s Army
Papi, custodian of unknown countries
I learned to read and write that’s all
Summation and subtraction were a bonus
Papi, a martial blue-eyed mariner
I met Anita at school
She was a teacher I a devoured man in love
Papi, a fresh masculine gorge
I loved her voice coupled with
The guitar but couldn’t restrain my appetite and lust
Papi, an embattled ferment of tongues
We made seven children before she passed away
The others are leaves of my mane
Papi, a freedom of suns, a needless arpeggio
“Pipo, lit my smoke please? But
Don’t tell you mom!”
Papi, an accomplice of mine
“Lani, Pipo sit on my feet
I’ll walk you like a robot!”
Papi, the mailman, the security guard
“Ligia, Pipo! I asked you to comb my hair
Not to shave my chest and arms!”
Papi, the funny guy, the laughing man
All my kids are married
A young woman is what I need
Papi, the manhood who ripens
In the hospital bed all gathered around
His eyes ajar like
a door to a secret room
his mouth mumbles
as if praying in church
the monitor faintly blips
as if counting the end
the doctor feels his pulse and
gently shakes his head
a hopeless stare

it feels strange to hold my uncle’s
hand so much smaller than mine

Sunday, November 8, 2009

Grandparents

Friday, September 4, 2009

Michael Heller: Antennae of the Race
An approximation to “Earth and Cave” as a model to mimic

1. Ordering propositions

1.1 For my final project I have chosen a poetry-memoir book by Michael Heller [b. 1937], an Objectivist American Jewish Poet who has been awarded several poetry prizes, including the NEH Poet/Scholar grant, New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship (NYFA), National Endowment for the Humanities award, and The Fund for Poetry.

1.2 The book in question is “Earth and Cave”, published by Dos Madres Press, Loveland, Ohio, 2006, but written in 1965 in Nerja, Spain, at the start of a then “unarticulated commitment to writing, to poetry” [Heller]. The book contains poems, prose, drawings, photographs, journal entries, haikus, and maps. It applies the basic tenets of Objectivism: memory, the relation place-poet, politics, emphasis on form over content, and the use of everyday language.

1.3 Given Heller’s personal and literary relationships to first and second generation Modernist Imagistes, the early Objectivist poets, the Beat Generation, The Language School, the Black Mountain Poets, and other American Avant Garde movements, I will use an Integral approach of analysis.

1.4 Integralism[1], as a literary criticism scheme, is in its infancy. I intend to provide, therefore, orienting generalizations drawing from the Objectivists’ poetics, but also from vital elements of the four quadrants that an Integral poetics would employ: the I [internal world of the Author], the We [cultural order of potential Readers], the It [or actual Text], and the Its [or Context(s) where the concretization of the text occurs].

2. Methodological topics: the histories of literary theory and criticism

2.1.1 It is believed that Aristotle wrote his Poetics in 335 BCE as a compilation or prescription of guiding principles to write good poetry [tragedy, comedy, and epic verse]. His study of tragedy is summed up thus:

Tragedy, then, is an imitation [mimesis] of an action[praxis] that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude [epic]; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper catharsis of these emotions. [2]

2.1.2 If tragedy is an imitation of life, we must look at life [at memoir] as an inspiration of tragedy. The poetry of tragedy -action, characters, place, language- is reflected in the book we are about to analyze.

2.2 Aristotle found that every tragedy includes six parts: plot (mythos), character (ethos), thought (dianoia), diction (lexis), melody (melos), and spectacle (opsis). Up until the 1960s Aristotle was the major source of guiding principles regarding literary creation, analysis, and criticism in the Western civilization. Concepts like feeling, imagination, genius, reality were used by philosopher-critics to describe and highlight the value of literary works.

2.3 Then Roman Jakobson[3], based on the work of Karl Bühler[4] came up with a modified Organon Model about linguistics shown in Figure 1 below:
Figure 1 – Organon Model modified
In this model the following Functions[5] are depicted with numbers:
1. referential (= contextual information)
2. poetic (= autotelic)
3. emotive (= self-expression)
4. conative (= vocative or imperative addressing of receiver)
5. phatic (= checking channel working)
6. metalingual (= checking code working)
2.4 One of the six functions is always the dominant function in a text and usually related to the type of text. In poetry, the dominant function is the poetic function: the focus is on the message itself. When used for literary communication, the Organon Model may suffer another transformation as shown in Figure 2:

Writer
Code
Text
Context
Reader

Figure 2 – Organon Model in Literature

2.5 Depending on which viewpoint critics adopted, different analyses and theories have been derived about literary texts or narratives:

2.5.1 Writer centered theories are those known as Romantic, Aestheticism or Humanistic. Aristotle, Muni, Longinus, Horace, Bloom, Wilde are examples of theorists on this venue. They were concerned with the author’s genius, technique, and voice, and saw text as an extension of her and her mastery of craft: metaphor, simile, imagery, voice, diction.

2.5.2 Context, Writing [text], and Code centered theories gave rise to Marxist, Formalistic, and Structural literary analyses among others. Trotsky, Lukacs, Brecht, Adorno, Benjamin, Althuser, Eagleton, Jakobson, Bakhtin, Shklovsky, Tomashevsky, Murakovsky, and many others developed these theories. Before free verse and the beginnings of structuralism, text was studied by its metrics, stanza, rhyme, rhythm –in one word- form independent of meaning.

2.5.3 Reader centered theories are known as Reader-Oriented literary analysis. Prince, Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer, Jauss, Iser, Fish, Rifaterre, Culler and others are examples of theoreticians in this vein. Reading was an innocent activity, until structuralism, reader oriented and psychoanalytic theories uncovered the implied minds writing and concretizing texts. Meaning and intention, reception and response became the dominant of the era.

2.6 The separation or isolation of the text from writer and reader, were conducive to Structuralist and Post-Structuralist theories, whose proponents have been many since their beginnings in the 1960s up to this day. Among others, important contributors were Saussure, Barthes, Propp, Levi-Strauss, Greimas, Todorov, Genette, Lacan, Kristeva, Deleuze, Guattari, Derrida, Man, White, Bloom, Focault, etc.

2.7 Outside of the domain of this course, but no less important, are other theories like Modernism, Post-Modernism, Postcolonial, Feminists, New Historicism, New Criticism, Queer Theory, Deconstruction, Eco-Criticism, etc. whose exponents include Baudrillard, Lyotard, Jameson, Eagleton, Said, Spivak, T.S. Eliot, Woolf, Beauvoir, Millett, Showalter, Cixous, Irigaray, and countless others.

2.8 Different to theories are poetic movements [i.e.: Dadaism, Ultraism, Exteriorism], phenomena [i.e.: Latin American Boom], and scattered writings from more or less famous writers [Besant, James, Vargas Llosa, Borges, Ramirez], or paradigmatic texts by certain authors [A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, Hopscotch] that have inspired numerous theories or served as research and test ground.

3. Holons within holons ad infinitum: the Integral Approach to art and literature

3.1 What appears evident is that new spheres of knowledge [holons] arise as science, technology, and social, literary and cultural studies employ new research techniques in their fields of study. There is always a new “ism” in the ever moving away horizon of epistemic quests. It is the same for literary criticism. These are not true or untrue theories, they are simply partial. It is in the sum of the parts or in the complementarity of the same that a full theory –a theory of everything- is possible or at least useful. But even this theory of everything is destined to be short lived when it is surpassed by new epistemic discoveries.

3.2 An Integral approach would use 4 quadrants of reality is shown in Figure 1 next page[6]:

I
The writer
IT
The Text
WE
The reader
ITS
The context
INTERIOR/
INDIVIDUAL:
Intentional

Freud
Plotinus
Buddha

Hermeneutics
Consciousness

EXTERIOR/
INDIVIDUAL:
Behavioral

Locke
Watson
Skinner

Empirical
Form

INTERIOR/
COLLECTIVE:
Cultural

Khun
Weber
Gadamer

Interpretive

EXTERIOR/
COLLECTIVE:
Social

Comte
Marx
Lenski

Systems

Figure 3 – Four Quadrants of Reality adapted from Ken Wilber

The I quadrant is the interior of the writer, her intentions and consciousness [or unconsciousness]. Freud, Plotinus and Buddha are examples of people who have studied this realm. The We quadrant constitutes the reader[s] realm, that elusive entity that is at one time specific and archetypal; a cultural phenomenon. The Its quadrant becomes the context[s] realm, the social systems that exist in place and time. The It quadrant –in a modification of the original figure- is made the text, the resulting form so extensively studied by Propp, Bakhtin and structuralist, post-structuralist, and deconstructivist theoreticians.

3.3 In other words “(…) the holonic nature of reality –contexts within contexts forever- means that each of these theories is part of a nested series of truths. Each is true when highlighting its own context, but false when it tries to deny reality or significance to other existing contexts. And an integral art or literary theory –covering the nature, meaning, and interpretation of art- will of necessity be a holonic theory: concentric circles of nested truths and interpretations” [Wilber, 113].

3.4 It would be almost impossible to analyze a work of literature from all possible viewpoints, so one must make decisions and: 1) define the universe of study [what theory or instrument]; 2) select the holon from which the analysis will be done [author, text, context, reader or any combination thereof] keeping in mind that choosing a theory or focus should not imply any demerit to other theories not used; and 3) draw the conclusions of rigor.

3.5 Four holons envelop a literary work: the primal holon or maker [author, writer] with her conscious ad unconscious intentions; the artwork itself or text in form, function, structure, and content; the history of reception and response of the viewers or readers; and the numerous contexts [space and time] in which the work is produced, read, and continually recreated.

4. Heller wandered from the Imagistes to the Objectivists and to Nerja: the writer’s I as the sum of his histories

4.1 Imagism as a way of making poetry was pushed by Ezra Pound, a first generation Modernist poet, in the USA in the 1909-1913 period. Louis Zukovsy, a second generation Modernist poet, befriended Pound in 1927. William Carlos Williams, another Imagist poet also befriended Zukovsky through Pound. This net of poetic friendship expanded through the 1930s to include Charles Reznikov, Carl Rakosi, George Oppen and Basil Bunting. They published in the famous magazine Poetry, edited by Harriett Monroe, who insisted in providing a name for the group. Objectivist was such name, their poetics: a look at the poem as an object of art, an emphasis on form over content, of resonance of words over meaning. They believed in using everyday words as opposed to elitist vocabulary; they wanted to highlight language, ethics, a world vision, and were against war. They also promoted verse libre, a concentrated language of imagery, an opposition to the use of mythology or classicism, and eventually, the exaltation of a modern, urban. and Jewish life and heritage. They also were in favor of left wing politics and Marxism.

4.2 Zukovski wrote on the Objectivists poetics:

"Writing occurs which is the detail, not mirage, of seeing, of thinking with the things as they exist, and of directing them along a line of melody", and that objectification relates to "the appearance of the art form as an object".[7]

4.3 The Beat Generation Poets of the 1940s [Ginsberg, Kerouac] got in contact with the Objectivists through Pound. Other younger poets also contacted the Objectivists in the 1950s [Levertov, Sorrentino] as did the Black Mountain Poets [Creeley, Corman] who published Objectivist work in their magazine Origin. Zukovski’s aleatory writing influenced the Language Poets in the 1970s [Hejinian, Harryman, Howe]; while Oppen and Reznikoff –less formal and more political- influenced other poets like Shapiro, Schwerner, Filkenstein, DuPlessis, and Michael Heller.

4.4 On the poetics of the Objectivists, Poet Ron Silliman writes:
“... The process requires you to position yourself within the terrain of a poetics. All any literary formation is, in one sense, is just such a process carried out consciously, collectively & in public.
To see that, one need only look at the three broad phases of Objectivism –

§ The 1930s, interactivity, optimism, joint publishing projects, critical statements, recruiting (Niedecker)
§ The 1940s & ‘50s, almost totally receding, with several Objectivists either not publishing and even not writing for long periods of time
§ 1960s onward, the emergence & success of these writers precisely as a literary formation”. [8]
Heller got in contact with the Objectivists in the 1960s, so he belongs to the third phase of the movement and its expansive net of branches:

“Poetry renaissances, I think, are very individual occurrences—that is, they happen on a personal, even private level. My sense of one began while reading Oppen and Zukofsky in the late 1960s and continues to this day whenever I return to their work. Experiments, great activity, enlarged publics do not necessarily constitute a rebirth. We poets are so hungry. And between hopes and resentments, we descry prophetic uprisings and revolutions of the word. Meanwhile, to borrow from Marianne Moore, every time a poet or poem "takes the top of one's head off," the possibility of renaissance is implicit”.[9]

5. Earth and Cave: parenthesis and new beginning for the emotional I

5.1 In order to know the primal holon, the poet, one can resort to primary sources –the poet- through interviews or to secondary sources, the texts, other critics’ studies, inference, deductions, and inductions become the tools to be used. But psychoanalytic theory tells us that the poet cannot know about the unconscious, so the primal holon can never be fully comprehended. A glimpse on Heller’s poetics:

“Holderlin, Heidegger, Hitler, the three Hs (as well as those lovely three German Bs) are inescapable elements of our environing culture. Beyond that climatology, when I was living in a small village in Spain in the 1960s, beginning to write and publish, the Irish novelist Aidan Higgins (a neighbor that idyllic and formative year) placed the works of Benjamin and Musil in my hands. Scholem, Gadamer, Habermas, Kleist, Canetti, one could go on and on. The hook of the German philosopher-writer has been set deep in me. It has probably cast an unnecessarily ponderous mordancy across my poems. Needless to say, my reading skills in German are nearly atrocious, thus much has come to me via translation”.[10]

5.2 We know that Earth and Cave was written at the beginning of his career, a period of avid reading, of formation and soul search. He had probably read also Oppen and Zukovsky whom he continues to read to this day. That is proof of his faithfulness to the Objectivists as a source of inspiration and formation, of evolution and positioning. It is a defining lifetime worldview.

5.3 Heller recalls the first night of late June 1965 arriving at Nerja with his wife by bus, the acrid manure smell in the air, the hunchback carrying their bags into the hostel. “Nerja in the 1960s was a place in transition, and so was I” [i]. The air also smelled of political change for the decaying Franco Regime. Nerja was a sort of refuge for political activists, like poet Jorge Guillen and Garcia Lorca’s brother, Paco. The book came about from notes taken in the streets, at the beach, at the desk on the rented house, some were completed in New York upon Heller’s return to the USA.

5.4 He calls himself a then “would be-poet, semi-tourist and sentimental traveler” [ii]. The caves are a “metaphor and reality” [ii]; one wanders inside the caves, discovering and searching, with no fixed charter; as he was himself at that point in time: “a wanderer of my own inner life” [ii].

5.5 Before we get to the Introduction a two-page drawing –plan and section in black and red ink respectively- of the caves dated 1961 places the reader in context. A memoir is a very personal account, no mimesis there. This is what fiction tries to imitate. What better way to know the reality we want to mimic than to look at our won life or the life of others?

6. Chaos and complexity: patterns and structure of the It work

6.1 Earth and Cave cover portrays a full-body picture of the young Heller walking along a narrow street of Nerja. It is a gravel dead-end alley surrounded by white two-story houses with closed wooden windows. He faces the camera wearing sun-glasses, a blue polo shirt, white khakis, boat shoes, and a dark brown belt. His already bald head and constant beard are clearly visible. An overlaid palm tree adorns the cover. The book itself is an object of art with its sturdy cream-colored cover and inside sheets. Numerous drawings and sketches illustrate the book: of the caves, of instruments found in them, of figures drawn on the walls millennia ago, of skeletons semi-buried on the ground.

6.2 The formal structure of the book can be described thus:
Castaña Silvestre Introduction, a poem
5 prose pieces, histories within histories
Short takes on a bus, a poem
A poem
A prose-poem
The Parities Sunday/sundown, a poem, haikus
Notes from a trip to Toledo, journal entries
Timespace
Timespace
Incident
Space
Space
We extranjeros A poem
A political poem
Before breakfast, haiku
Fishermen’s quarters
Buriana beach
4 prose-poems
In English Fishing, a poem
Prose-poem, history
Devekuth A poem
Three prose pieces
Find sense to change A poem
Dream [dated 1968-2005]

7. Magic and Reason as perceived by We

7.1 The essence of the caves are its darkness, bring light and they cease to be. They are changed, carnivalized. To the locals they are a source of proud origin but also of income. To Heller they are a metaphor for search, self, and change. He regrets the conversion of the cave into a fake:
“Installing the Son et Luminaire which pettifies. A Hollywood cave, not one bit real” [25]
“A gypsy family. They live in caves just above the gorge, work only when they have to.” [9]
“the old men
The survivors
They come to live in daylight
Mending nets” [24]
“They used the bolld of the animalsthey painted or they drew blood from themselves and made the images upside down or in other ways secretive”. [37]

8. Text and sub-texts: the many layers of “Earth and Cave”

The poet as observer:

“How do they exist?” [3]
“The complexity of forces at work on this people” [3]
“The foreground shimmers, wavers. The far banks green and brown…” [4]

The uses and failings of memory:

“Strange, but after that nothing is clear in my mind” [3]
“Twice I couldn’t find myself” [36]
The histories within histories:
“…a fisherman hung himself…” [3]
“…she grabs a knife and chases him…” [3]
“G., foreign born, American novelist…” [5]

City name as list poem:

“Almururadiel
Valdepenas
Manzanares
Ciudad Real
Orgaz” [16]

The poet as philosopher:

“We are not ourselves
But the paradox, we are no other” [29]
The politics encountered:
“When dedicated the cross in the churchyard, the town officials and the guardia, I did not hiss with the others”. [31]

The Jewish roots:

“Feeling myself the stranger, the Jew” [37]

9. A stranger in Paradise: the village Its as maker of the soul

9.1 In Earth and Cave, the inhabitants as much as their land are an important part of Heller’s transformation. He feels a stranger always, but not necessarily rejected, looking for a common sign, even if a metaphorical one:

“Strangers, they to me and vice-versa. (…) The stranger makes quite evident that he or she is different. The commonality –if there is any- is in the primary roots, maybe hidden in the caves” [25]

9.2 He sees the objects but not always its implications:

“So are we separated because we do not acknowledge what a phenomenon like the caves might tell us?” [25]

9.3 The quest of the hero [the poet] involves always displacement in timespace, but also a travel to the self, a coming of age. WE are always coming of age, as we mature:
“From Malaga to Granada over the mountains (…)
Many stops in the middle of nowhere” [7]

10. Beyond the limits: a possible agenda for future examination

10.1 In the author quadrant: how do we get to know the author? Are interviews and psychoanalysis enough? To what extent inference, deduction, and induction help? Are biographies and auto-biographies helpful?

10.2 In the text quadrant: how do we comprehend the text? What can we ask about form, function, and structure of the work? How can we discover meaning?

10.3 In the reader quadrant: Are there principles that bridge the arc between author and reader, creation and re-creation? What works best for different types of readers? Can readers dissociate the author’s intention from their own interpretation and still find meaningfulness in the text?

10.4 In the context quadrant: How do reader and author contexts interact? Is there a context that encompasses all contexts? If contexts are in constant change, what is the importance of knowing them? What is context, what are the important constitutive elements?

10.5 In general: are the tools we use to write and analyze literature a direct result of our worldview? Do all theories stem from or favor a political ideology? What can we learn from real life and history that we can apply to fiction? Is the historical novel a new genre or a hybrid genre?

11. Useless are the battles without visions: findings that enrich my poetics

11.1 Heller notes that:

“There is no question that the tenor of contemporary civilization is marked by its uncertainty, its hesitant mood on matters both cultural and political. Poetry, ever sensitive to the nuances of its surroundings, must limn or bode forth the environmental conditions out of which it arises. That poets, those presumed antennae of the race, might be picking up the signals and putting them somehow into the work seems only too obvious.”[11]

11.2 A poetics is a conscious act; it is a decision that stems from our worldview. Its workings may belong to the arcane, at times a discipline, others an inspiration. The conscious act, nevertheless, may take the shape of a manifesto, a mission, a philosophical formulation, or a series of principles or beliefs that inform and form our work.

11.3 These principles most address the writer, the text, the reader, and the context[s]: what we think of them, how we engage them, how we relate them, how we build them, what our intention is. Constant self-criticism is paramount, as is the reading of other authors, the interaction with them and readers, with culture[s], and the creation of the conditions propitious to the creative act itself.
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Works Cited

Heller, Michael, “Earth and Cave”. Loveland: Dos Madres Press, 2006
Middleton, Richard, “Studying Popular Music”. Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1999
Wilber, Ken, “The Eye of Spirit”. Boston: Shambala, 1998
Wilber, Ken, “A Theory of Everything”. Boston: Shambala, 2000

[1] In his book “The Eye of Spirit” Ken Wilber sketches the contents of this integral approach to literary and art criticism.
[2] Poetics, Chapter 6.
[3] Roman Osipovich Jakobson, (1896 – 1982) was a Russian linguist and literary critic, associated with the Formalist school. He became one of the most influential linguists of the 20th century by pioneering the development of structural analysis of language, poetry, and art.
[4] Karl Bühler (1879 - 1963) was a German psychologist known for his work about gestalt.

[5] Middleton, Richard (1990/2002). Studying Popular Music. Philadelphia: Open University Press, p.241.

[6] Adapted from Ken Wilber, The Eye of Spirit, p. 10
[7] "Program: 'Objectivists' 1931" and "Sincerity and Objectification: With Special Reference to the Work of Charles Reznikoff”, by Louis Zukovski. Wikipedia.
[8] Silliman’s Blog, October 30, 2002. Internet.
[9] The Cortland Review, interview with Michael Heller December 4, 2008. Internet.
[10] The Cortland Review, interview with Michael Heller December 4, 2008. Internet.
[11] Michael Heller in an interview at www.saltpublishing.com

Antiques Shop

The antiquarian

He searches for antiquities. He collects expensive trinkets. He looks for them and finds them. He studies them. He penetrates them and puts them away. Some time later he returns to them and generally finds out that they are gone. They disappeared and he gets very worried thinking he lost them for ever, thinking they were never his. Quite often, though, they wait for him. There is always a thread of life that keeps them attached to him, in a latent state of suspension: a grandfather clock abandoned in the basement, long medusa hair locks hanging from a blue hatbox, solemn wicker and black leather loveseats covered with white dust, broken family portraits with flat faces in them, archaic wooden canes with embroidered golden handles, dense wet poetry books with an infinite number of pages, discolored boardroom games with blind decks of cards, worthless copper Roman coins, stuffed animals manufactured at absinth tanneries

The first time I saw Juanita she was walking on a sidewalk in a Los Robles street. It was in 1977, five years after a 7.8 earthquake had obliterated the city center of Managua, and all the shops, office buildings, government offices, churches, gas stations, and homes in it had either been destroyed or relocated to the outskirts and beyond. Los Robles, therefore, was not the exclusive neighborhood it once was, the neighborhood where the socialist guerrilla has crashed a house party with the cream of the political and military elite inside, killed the owner, and freed the other guests [now converted into hostages] only after a large number of revolutionary leaders had been sent abroad in a private airline jet. Now, numerous small businesses were renting the former mansions and continued their operations. The streets were checkered with signs of all shapes, colors and sizes announcing their trade: an exclusive French restaurant, an upscale book shop, a hat store, the national writers association headquarters, a group of expensive lawyers buffet, a medical center and clinic, a pharmacy, a hardware store, another pharmacy, a laboratory, yet another pharmacy, a commercial school for typing and computers, a night club.

The metallic blue dress faithfully followed the contour of her trim body, the black shoes marked the concrete sidewalk like a clock’s pendulum the seconds, her long wavy black hair moved worriless to the cadence of her generous hips, her long tanned arms perfectly balanced her six feet tall frame, her black eyes fixed with authority the indefinite horizon ahead; no stockings, no make up, no purse, no jewelry, just a dressed up Girl from Ipanema on a majestic march to nowhere. My two-cylinder four-door tan Suzuki slowed down by itself and I found myself offering a ride and she gracefully accepting. The travel agency she worked at was only two blocks away, time enough to get her first name and the name of her city.

He carefully rounds the halls of his business. Admirals dressed in pink are fiercely sacrificed by his insolence. The abandonment of offices and factories has meaning as long as the terrible exercises of language and memory do not befall euphoric, and the patterns of survival do not become exclusively inept. The frozenness of his pre-established relationships finds an echo in the totality of his non-search: a dumb and blind oblivion that requires forty days to initiate. ‘My spirit will always write’ he thinks with no explanations, ‘it is concerned with the songs, etcetera’. Finally sleepiness defeats him and schizophrenia takes over as an affective vehicle with which to implore hatred.

Her bare chest moved up and down in unison with the waves slowly caressing the shore. Her plump breasts mirrored under the moonlight the two other hills motionless beyond the opposite shore. The water was black-blue, with a silvery part that trembled on the surface of the Apoyo lagoon. “The purest of my relationships belongs to you” she announced suddenly sitting up. Her sincere eyes were like darts on my pupils, her Monalisa smile just insinuated. Crumbs of sand fell off her back. I cleared a few hanging from her hair. We kissed. We imagined Franz Kafka wandering inside volcanic craters, we recounted the plateaus that mischievously slid between the high green mountains of Jinotega north of the country, we discussed the nonsensical origins of Dada and Marcel Janco, we made a blood pact to always be together as in a Romantic tragedy turned Shakespearean play, we painted her poor Guanuca neighborhood with words describing its dusty streets with wandering dogs and wooden carts pulled by a pair of tan, tired, salivating oxen, a peasant at the reigns. We kissed again, and we made love madly. I was a rider taming a mare; she was Medea casting spells on me.

The Pawn

He writes in the shadows, representing and acting the false reality that surrounds him. The incredible weakness of his persona does not pretend anymore to rise and walk, waving a fist. The first time, it was darkness, and a long night covered the firmament. Invisible words populated the night. Like a mad man he injected his imagination with faces resembling hatred that he himself destroyed for good. He relived the neigh of a phantom horse. He was Don Quixote with a thousand unknown Dulcineas and ended a poor Chinese communist hiding in the caves of terror.

We torched the police station.

The Writ

He feels good walking by her side, biting the fruits that will never fall, being a rider that ignores how to ride. “Dress more colorful” she tells him, get the objects and something more. But an abandoned hangar knows best how to enjoy this nostalgia, this ingratitude, this happiness, this mortal sin.

The police had taken her, and countless others, at a rally close to the National University. We were marching down the street that connected the closest main avenue to the campus, a good 2-mile stretch of concrete pavers covered road we many times used at projectiles against armored Jeeps and soldiers in full anti-disturbs gear. The noise was smoldering: three helicopters hovered above us with megaphones shouting “Surrender! Desist and disperse or we will shoot!”; we were chanting protest songs and the usual slogans “Freedom or Death”, “We will not be defeated!”; the Jeeps revving their engines while closing in on us; the tear gas shells flying over our heads. One hit me right on the forehead and I fell, burnt and bleeding. She kneeled besides me and I saw a green hand that emerged from a green sleeve pulling her hair, then the back of a Garand coming to my eyes. I do not remember the thud that knocked me unconscious.

To recover your property

He feels a floating emptiness orbiting his head. He lusts the necessity to distribute his force again on her brimming energy. He refrains himself to not carry again her soft shouts with shaking hands. So many suns in the horizon, so many battles eternally fought. Chastised avatar punished with eternal life and forced to learn all the names, all the heads, all the attitudes.

“Juanita Méndez Pérez! You have a visitor!” The guard at the Ward yelled as if shouting numbers at a bingo parlor. I had convinced my Dad that Juanita was an architecture student like me and that she had been taken prisoner by mistake. He had important connections in the National Army and he and the Chief of National Security had kept a close friendship after graduated from the same high school. “You are asking for a lot. Are you sure neither your son nor this girl is involved in any activities against the government?” General Gerster asked my Dad while looking at me. His office was large. A fat man in khaki uniform, the black tie disappeared into the shirt half way down his chest. The bald head shined atop to descend into greasy gray hair neatly combed on the parietals. The glasses with thick black frames augmented the penetrating gaze of his green eyes. A ring, big as a rock, adorned his right hand, a memento from the Military Academy at West Point. He held a Parker fountain pen on the left waiting for the go to sign some papers on the desk, large as an altar. A black and white picture of General Somoza in full uniform hanged on the wall behind him. My Dad looked at me and asked me to wait outside.

Juanita emerged from behind a metal door painted in dark green. She had dark shades under the eyelids, her hair looked in disarray, but despite wearing the orange uniform of the inmates, her majestic demeanor was intact. “Hello, Ms. Mendez, I am Dr. Alejandro Cuadra Macias, Mr. Lopez’s lawyer. I came to inform you that we have arranged for your release. These are the papers that indicate you are free to go”. The Monalisa smile struck me again as a guard uncuffed her hands.

The Antiquarian’s Song

He carries the word inside, Ulysses submerging his body, jumping the crystal-and-fire ship. He toys with the word; a wood and leather pentagram spelling the song “more than yesterday, less than tomorrow, such is my love for you today”.
She is all gone wrapped in the doubt of not knowing, when or how, or why or if his promises were able to seduce her desire for blood.

The police found the cadaver of General Gerster on his bed. His hands were tied upwards to the headboard. He was completely naked, the legs separated. He had been castrated and his genitals tucked in his mouth. The newspapers in Nicaragua are good at providing these types of sordid details. It is not unusual to see photos of heads of decapitated peasants impaled on a two-by-four by the roadside “THE NATIONAL LIBERATION FRONT STRIKES AGAIN, this time around three men from the town of El Pedregal fell victims of the assassins, who claim to fight against the democratically elected government of commander…”

“General Gerster had recently abandoned his wife and two children, a boy 7 and a girl 5, and moved into his vacation home with a former inmate, Juanita Mendes Perez, who at the time of closing this edition, was still missing”. The newspaper went on to provide more vivid details of the murder. Her unexpected call unsettled me, love decanted in the everyday war of things that contain us: cell phones, keyboards, flat screens, back then telephones, typewriters, TV sets, people craving to trap with their gaze your image and my word. We could realize our dreams now that our skin is on fire. Let’s write our hidden history on love poems and woman’s tears, let’s escape dangerous geographies and tulips fields. The purest of my relationships contains you, incessant bride, continual rain, certain light illuminating my dark cave. I arranged for her to get out of the country.

Fallout

He will wander there to the end of his days. Repentance, this side of the conscience, cannot be full if the act persists.HeI will stay there to the end of his days; that is his place, even if he must travel far.

I received the first letter from Honduras in April of 1979. She was using a pseudonym, Medea de Agrileza. It was a brief but warm missive tucked inside a small white envelope addressed to my postal box in Managua. Her neat cursive handwriting in blue ink told me she was good and getting ready for the big assault. Look for me when this is over, she wrote, I miss you infinitely.

She sent two other letters, but I had travelled to Mexico with political asylum, so I never received them. When I return to Nicaragua in September of 1979, my mother told me of the letters that she chose to destroy “to save me from further hells”. I asked for Juanita to many friends and acquaintances. No one gave me word of her whereabouts. I thought her dead in one of countless battles with the national army, I imagined her slender figure in green fatigues carrying an AKA 47, I wrote to her each night in the mill of my mind. I left the country in 1985 and did not return until 2003. I bought a newspaper to get updated on politics and culture. There she was in the front page, ‘the judge of the people’, they called her, who had ascended through the painful ranks of revolution and poverty, marriage and university, childrearing and divorce, to become one of the most accomplished women in the country.

Her bureau was located in a section of the city where several bus routes intersect at a large former shopping center converted into government offices twenty years ago. It was relatively easy to see her for she had an open door policy. An assistant in military uniform was in her waiting room taking names, motive for the visit, and arrival time. There was a woman in her sixties with a long braid with many gray hairs and a disease of the skin asking for justice in a case of invasion of lands. There was a young couple in their early thirties looking for help in an eviction case, he was carrying a baby, she a baby bag. There was an old man so wrinkled by time, his eyes were like two slits in his face, yet two tears emerged from them. There were no less than forty people all pushing the assistant like the lepers and the crowds unto Jesus, and then there was me.

“Your name sir?” he asked me politely ready to write. I thought of lagoons and moons, of sands and breasts, of wars and mountains, of exiles and kisses, of conversations and lovemaking, of secret letters and false names, of Gregor Samsa and antiquarian shops. “She looks really busy, and my affair is really not that urgent. I will be back tomorrow, thank you so much” I responded and went out the door content with treasuring her Monalisa smile the last time I saw her.

Angel's Water

Angel’s Water

“At all events, not even the most contagious disease can deter them from flocking, adults and children, to the house where the corpse lies on the table, and later to the church where it is exhibited in the coffin, to touch it, to kiss its hands.”

Carmen Sylva, The Queen of Roumania
The Forum, June 1889

“Pull it! Pull it! You got him! You got him!” My uncle Albert sounded so proud of me, but he was really proud of himself for being such a good teacher. I pulled with my right hand the string of green nylon wound up around the short wooden stick in my left. The sun was scorching despite the breeze that swept the calm blue waters of the lake. There were only gentle waves rocking the small boat, so it wasn’t difficult at all to stand, with my legs slightly apart, my tennis shoes firmly planted on the wooden bottom, where a decayed blue snorkel, a pair of equally decayed blue fins, and a dirty rag, which used to be red in a distant life, competed with the space left over by puddles of water. He was on the opposite side of the boat, with his professional fishing cane and metal rod on guard. I could hear the swoosh! Of the nylon and the hook with live worm baits each time he sent it yonder on the water.

I managed to pull the fluttering fish to the surface; in its desperation to escape, it splashed some water on my khaki shorts and my red tanned face. My uncle came over carefully setting the cane inside the boat, on a bench, and came in my direction. He was making movements and faces as if managing my arms by remote control, a proxy fisherman in action. He wore long khakis and the same US Army boots that took him through German territory during World War II. He had taken off his white t-shirt to get some sun; I could see his hairy chest and the scars, entry and exit, that a Nazi bullet had marked him forever.

“You son of a gun! That’s not one but two fish in one hook! I am damned! That’s what I call beginners luck!” Still today I cannot say if we was happy for me or upset that I, in my first fishing excursion, had beat him and his own game. He had not caught anything during the two hours we had been there, while this was my third catch of the day. He took both fish; they were two black ghost knife with their typical white caudal fin frantically flapping left and right. He carefully unhooked them and placed them both in a plastic yellow bucket that had seen many lakes and rivers. Then without saying another word, put his shirt back on and started to row towards the shore.

My mom and my dad, my aunt Rosy and her daughter, Ana, were all sitting under a wide sycamore, as old as a cave, as tall as a building, as wide as a train, on portable aluminum and canvas chairs we had brought in my uncle’s Army-green Jeep. I liked that Jeep. It was the same model he had driven in the streets of Washington, D.C. chauffeuring General Eisenhower before his transfer to the German front. It was the Willys brand, with the folding windshield, eighty inch base wheels, and three bucket seats.

“Please sing ‘besame mucho’,for me mamita” my Dad pleaded to my mom like a little boy asking to stay up late in bed a few more minutes or have a third helping of Hershey chocolate, bobbing his head towards her sitting on his right. She never said no to any of his supplications, and so started the tune, guitar on her lap and arms, the angelic voice, the beautiful face. There were no other people in sight so we had the entire lake to ourselves. I overheard Ana asking his mother “what is so fun about fishing? Daniel should be doing something else”, “like what?” my aunt replied, “This is what eleven year old boys do, besides playing with toy soldiers or reading The Fantastic Four comics, or flying kites, or throwing spin tops”, “That’s stupid!” interrupted my cousin exasperated. I could only guess her long face and bored demeanor by the scoff that followed. “At least he’s not a jerk like you know who”, aunt Rosy remarked. Now, Rosy was not really Ana’s mother, but Uncle Albert’s fourth wife, and she was trying really hard to win Ana’s acceptance; even I could see that. She never could, so my uncle moved on to his fifth, and then sixth, wives.

My uncle had a large property with a really nice cottage in the mountains, about 5 miles from the lake we were fishing at. This was his third year at trying to test his skills, or rather luck, at farming and had sub-leased a portion of his land to a cooperative of peasants interested in harvesting okra, potatoes, and lettuce, in accordance with a new program the government had implemented through the Alliance for Progress sponsored by the USAIS. Some times the peasants had no way to pay him, so they would give him a percentage of the crop as payment, or a couple of chicken for Christmas or a turkey for New Year’s Eve. It was obvious that he and the peasants had developed a very friendly relationship. He even had hired some of them for household work. He had Jose as a gardener, Agustin as a driver, and Leonor and Zoila for cooking and doing the laundry.

My mom was finalizing his song when Agustin came in racing his horse Alpino; it was the descendant of old Colonial Spanish horses, the Jennet-type, with dark brown buck-skin and a long mane. Agustin dismounted rapidly, took off his cowboy hat and, after shyly nodding to us in salute, he went directly to where my uncle was sitting and whispered something to his ear, covering his mouth with the hat. My uncle listened attentively, blinking slowly and looking at the nothingness of the horizon in the lake. All eyes were on him and Agustin. It was one of those uncomfortable silences interrupted only by the soft breaking of waves on the shore and the sound of the wind singing through the branches above our heads. “We have to go back right away” he said looking at no one, standing up, folding his chair, providing no explanations.

The dirt road that led to the cottage was barely wide enough for two Jeeps travelling in opposite directions. A dense forest of pines, oaks, and balsams framed the way; clouds were slowly forming hiding the sun every now and then. Discreet thunders cascaded in the distance. The house was surrounded by a white picket fence; it had a porch where three colorful hammocks hung. The wooden floor and walls creaked when we cousins ran around playing noisy Indian and cowboy games, so we were always sent to the wide surroundings, where the St. Agustin grass grew wild and rubber trees abounded. My uncle went to his room and left almost immediately. I was on one of the hammocks when I saw him almost running and getting on the Jeep. He was going alone. He looked for the key struggling a little bit to find the ignition, suddenly he stopped. He went back into the house; apparently he had forgotten something. I don’t know what got into me, but I took that window of opportunity to jump off the hammock, walk towards the back of the Jeep, and hide under a large plastic cover he kept there, as in a prison escape.

He drove along bumpy roads for what to me was a time without end. Under the cover I could only see a darkness getting darker. He finally stopped, turned off the ignition and got off the Jeep. I could hear his footsteps on a gravely soil moving away. I heard horses huffing and, as if coming from inside a closed box, mourner women wailing and weeping inconsolable. When I thought no one was around, I slowly lifted the edge of the cover, took a peak, and started to get out. I felt the same way I felt the times my elder sister Lani and I would offer my grandpa to light up his Valencia cigarette, steal one from the pack and sneak to the back patio to smoke it. I’m pretty sure today he knew what we were doing.

I got off the Jeep and walked towards the structure in front of me. It was a small shack made of vertical reeds tied together, wood pylons made the columns and beams of the house. It had a roof made of dried palm tree leaves weaved together; a truly peasant’s home. I had been in one before, when my dad went to offer her condolences to Leonor, a maid we had, when his husband passed away. It was crowded with relatives. The women were crying around the open coffin. The men were divided in two groups. One was playing a game with an old deck of carton cards while drinking rum in small shot glasses a young girl, barefooted and not older than nine, was passing around in a rattan tray. The other group was outside, smoking buttless cigarettes, drinking black coffee in clay cups, and telling dirty jokes. My mom wondered around the small space. She sat at a small beaten table with a stack of old newspapers on it, a Bohemia magazine with Fidel Castro’s face on the cover, a dark green glass vase holding a visibly deteriorated plastic rose, and a tin can with no label and loose change inside. My mom, as if moved by an unknown spirit, went straight to the tin can and turned it over. The coins fell disorderly on the table, clinking and running in all directions; a twenty five cent currency rolled on the surface and fell to the floor spinning and few times. I watched it flatten on the ground. When I turned my eyes back to the table, my mother was holding between her index and thumb fingers the wedding ring my dad had lost several weeks ago. She fired Leonor on the spot.

As I approached the shack the wailings grew louder. Afraid of being caught, I went around and look for a crack in the wall. I found it and what I saw through it was as much as appalling as it was morbid.

I stepped back for a few seconds. Rushing to my mind came in the image of a family trip we had made two summers before to the beach. There was this row of rustic changing rooms on the sand made of the same reeds this wall was made of. While taking off my shirt I heard noises coming from the room adjacent to mine. These were very strange noises, a cross between pain and laughter, between the asthma attacks my mom often suffered and the murmurs I sometimes heard coming from my parents bedroom. I put my eye through a crack in the wall. There was this gigantic man on top of a dark skinned woman; they were lying on a large towel on the floor. He was sucking on her big breasts with fury, one on each hand, as if trying to tear a large fruit from a tree trunk.

I went back to the crack. Scores of people, old and young, men and women, children even, were circling a mahogany table chanting and praying; some where holding candles in their hands, others held improvised fans made of newspaper to hush the heat and the flies from their sweating faces. The table was about four feet by eight feet, or so it seemed in my mind at the time. Things you see as a child appear to be much smaller when you return to them as an adult; houses, streets, rooms, people… everything appears to shrink by some magic spell of time and space. A rattan cradle was placed on top of the table. At the beginning the people circulating in front of my sightline did not allow me to see all. But there was a moment when I had a clear view of the table and the rattan cradle on top of it. Long white linens were placed on the cradle, their folds falling to the dirt floor and on the linen… the corpse of a baby girl, naked. Her eyes were still open, expressionless. An old woman, dressed all in black with her hair tied in a bow behind her back, carried with both hands a large clay pitcher or tinaja.. Every now and then she would pour water on the baby’s corpse and white sacuanjoche flower petals would come out of the pitcher. These people had devised a system to collect the water washing off the baby’s corpse into a wooden bucket placed at the feet of the table. People would go around the table in circles and take water from this bucket with small clay cups, and, after saying a short prayer and making the sign of the cross; they would slowly, but eagerly, drink the water.

I could not believe my eyes. My chest was pounding with a force only felt after I had finished number one at the 100 meter competition race in school. Filled with a mixture of remorse, fear, horror, and disgust, I listened to the prayer my uncle recited after gulping his share: “Holy angel’s water, may your juices give me strength and prowess, may your blessings be dispensed upon me, so my body, my mind and my soul will be cleansed of evil spirits and unwanted diseases”.

As quiet as I could, I went back to the Jeep, got beneath the cover, and quietly waited his return, shivering under the freezing rain.

The Hells of Valhalla

The Hells of Valhalla

“Im 19. Jahrhundert war die Nation ein Glaube, die Kunst gab ihr Ausdruck”
"In the 19th Century the nation was a belief. Art expressed that belief."
Jörg Traeger

Exhausted, Lieutenant Alfred D. Lopez of the US Third Army advancing on Kronach accommodated the M1 carbine besides him on the trench. The US Ninth Armored Division had completed the difficult task of passing the Remagen Bridge. The 62 soldiers in his Company, grouped into four platoons had seen an unusual number of casualties. Crossing and capturing Wernberg was even more difficult. The Luftwaffe planes had been excruciatingly accurate in their attacks. The new Hornisse planes had devastating firepower not known before during the war. The platoon he commanded had lost three more soldiers and now only ten remained. They had been disconnected from the rest of platoons so he decided to function as two squads of five soldiers each. Ahead of them lay the hills and forests of Regensburg, then, to the south, the Danube River and even further south, Munich, their final destination. The orders were to capture everything and kill any Nazi opposition they encountered on the way. It was the morning of April 24th 1945.

He was so far away from his beloved country in both time and space, in the end one and the same. He had not seen his native country since leaving on a cloudy morning of May 1933, at fourteen years of age, departing on the cargo Orly off of the port of Bluefields in the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua and sailing to New Orleans where his father had a sister. His father Thomas never married his mother, Janice. Thomas had a family of his own and Alfred did not discover the existence of the word concubine until many years after leaving his hometown. At least Thomas had provided him with a one hundred dollar bill he hid in his right sock before boarding the ship. Only his younger brother Adolph, the accomplice of so many adventures, had come to bid him farewell. There he is on the soiled wood planks of the port not able to lift his hand and wave. A tear slides on his cheek, a tear he quickly wipes with his left shoulder.

“Lieutenant, sir?” asked Private Johnson sitting to his left in the trench, extending his right hand with two cigarettes between his fingers “Yes, soldier” he answered with closed eyes “Care for a smoke, sir? These are my two last ones. I don’t want them to go to waste on some Nazi’s mouth”. After a second he caressed his moustache as if combing it with the thumb and index fingers of the right hand. “Sure, Danke schoen! Thank you very much”. He was completely fluent in German. He had shown ability with languages at an early age while helping Janice with the food and trinkets store she ran from her home. Bluefields had been a British Possession for many years during the eighteen and nineteen centuries and most of the population spoke English only. The three other languages widely spoken were Miskito, Sumo and Rama, the tongue of the aborigines or native inhabitants of the region. A busy port for American and Canadian ships, Bluefields was a mixture of many races and languages. Dutch and German traders, Chinese and Lebanese merchants, Spanish and French engineers, and politicians from both parties that arrived from the capital, Managua, had made of cosmopolitan Bluefields their permanent home. Alfred spoke most of those languages or understood them. Learning German as part of his training in the Army was relatively easy.

Private Johnson lit a match on his boot and moved it closer to Alfred’s mouth, carefully cupping it with his hands. He was a very personable boy from Casper, Wyoming. His bright blue eyes seemed brighter behind his dirty face. Alfred mimicked the same cup with both hands and inhaled deeply, as if getting ready to plunge into The Pool, that darn pond of cold water hidden in the rainforest close to Bluefields. He let the smoke out in an exhalation that lasted as long as the inhalation did, emptying his lungs of all smoke and emotions. Once, as kids, he had to pull his little brother Adolph out of treacherous waters of The Pool. He was teaching him how to swim and encouraged a jump from a tree bending over the water. When Adolph didn’t come out he jumped hurriedly and brought him to the edge semi-unconscious. A group of boys gathered around pushing each other “Is he dead?” As he pressed his chest frantically, streams of water and saliva came out of Adolph’s mouth, between coughs and convulsions. Alfred was the town’s hero after that and people would let him get away with anything. “Hello Alfred! Nein, nein you don’t owe me anything, it’s on me!” said the Dutch owner of the bread store. “Mistel Lopez, Mistel Lopez, pleez tell youl mothel new close line heel, filst two yalds, flee fol hel, to honol you!” said Jin Wang from the clothes store. His eyes were closed again, trying to catch some rest after hours of sleep deprivation. “Death tunes her violin” murmured Alfred eyes closed again. “Sir?” asked Johnson confused. “Death says: I will play an old song that has no end, I will play it in the air, on the earth, at the sea” continued Alfred slowly and then explained in a faster tone “It’s a war poem written by a Nicaraguan poet who fought in World War I”. Private Johnson was puzzled “I didn’t know you were a poet… Nicaragua? Is that where you are from? Where is that?”Alfred lifted his left hand palm facing away from him “This is the USA” then he took the cigarette to his mouth and kept it between his lips. He placed his right hand below the left “This is Mexico, and my right elbow is Nicaragua”. “Ah! It’s in South America!” Private Johnson grinned “Yeah!” Alfred conceded dismantling the map, taking the smoke again with his hand, not bothering to explain the difference between Central and South America. Private Johnson stood up to stretch his back. “The machine guns opened fire” continued Alfred in his head when he heard a whistling and then a deaf thud. Something heavy fell by his feet splashing his face with mud. He opened his eyes to see Private Johnson’s spasms in a pool of muck, blood regurgitating out of his mouth, a nasty hole in his neck also vomiting blood at the rhythm of the heart.

At sixteen Alfred had lied about his age in order to be accepted in the Army. When World War II broke out in 1939 he had been in service for four years already. He had been chosen to study German and soldiers with his skills were in high demand. After helping England with code deciphering he was sent into enemy territory when Pearl Harbor marked the end of American neutrality. “Medic! Medic!” he frantically yelled throwing the cigarette and placing both hands on the private’s jugular artery, blood sneaking through his fingers. “We’ve been spotted sir! It’s a bird’s nest sir. Must be a Maschinengewehr 42!” he heard Sergeant Miller shout from the other extreme of the trench they had excavated. “Everybody keep down! Nazi nest ahead!” he ordered. He could hear the clicks of everybody’s weapons getting ready to respond. Medic Smith arrived almost crawling from the left. Suddenly bullets started falling all over, shrieking above their heads and lifting masses of dirt like mini-explosions, arrows of lead fired from the hill 200 feet ahead of them. “O’Brien is down! O’Brien is down!” yelled Miller again. The bullets came in a second ferocious barrage seeking to obliterate the voices uttering English. It lasted for an eternity. Silence. “Creeping along the mud of no-man’s-land, staying still like a dead tree trunk” the poem kept reeling in Alfred’s mind. He signaled the others to stay down, still and quiet. Smith moved his head left to right while piercing into Alfred’s eyes and covering Johnson’s face with his jacket.

The sun was setting behind the black forest. Alfred had ordered a reconnaissance squad to go around the nest and try to surprise it from the flank. He and the other squad would approach from the other flank in a classical pliers maneuver. As they drew near, they saw a group of four German soldiers whispering among them. A fifth soldier manned the M42. But Castillo in squad two cracked a dry branch with his boot alerting the Nazis who discovered them “Achtung! Amerikaner!” and hell broke loose. It was bullets and yells, running and ducking, “Fire! Fire!” Alfred commanded from the other flank leading squad one. The nest was caught between two lines of fire. The soldier at the M42 aimed his infernal weapon towards Castillo and pulled the trigger. Branches fell, dirt flew, blood splattered, rifles were split in half, “I’m hit, I’m hit!” it was pandemonium, “Feuer! Beschuss Amerikaner!”, “Castillo! Move! Move!”, “Ich moechte leichen Amerikaner!” Alfred ordered “Retreat! Retreat! Pull back! now!” A German grenade exploded close by, Miller’s head was obliterated, his body stood still for a few seconds before falling to the ground, inert. Squad two kept firing, three Nazis fell to the ground, their uniforms thrashed by the bullets, the green splattered with red, “Sein verwundet!” Alfred took O’Brien, who was limping, his right foot missing, by the arm and pulled him away into the forest. Squad two retreated firing from the other side. The M42 was like a dragon breathing on their necks, their fangs wide open throwing flames at their backs.

They reached the trench breathless. A few seconds later Private Green arrived, he was bleeding from his right side. “Where are the others?” Alfred asked. Green started to cry incontrollable “They are dead, sir, all dead...! Fields, Nixon, Crawford, Castillo all dead!” From squad one no one else returned. He was down to three men, including him, two of which were seriously wounded. “I’m no hero” he thought “I can’t even take care of my men”.

“Thrown in the dirt, there are many men vomiting their lungs out, they shudder prisoners of the tremors of death, we the unharmed remain in our positions, wearing no masks, we bless the rum they offer us, with eyes injected in blood we scrutinize the front lines: the poplars are disappeared, our bayonets lost their luster” Walking on his toes Alfred approached the drawer, he pulled it out slowly as to not to wake up a newborn. His mother was next to him taking a nap on her rocking chair. The temperature was 96 degrees and humid, the vertical sunrays of Bluefileds midday were like a hot press grilling everything down. He took two, five, ten cents and left the rest intact. As he was pushing the drawer in a customer came in “Good afternoon Mrs. Leticia!” It was Andy Bowie, the electrician whom Leticia had admonished to do some handyman work. Leticia opened her eyes and saw Alfred, he was caught in fraganti. She said nothing, she stood up, took Alfred by the right ear, he let the coins go, they started to fall, he saw their sparkle in the distance, he saw the small table made of poplar wood pass by, he saw the kitchen and the wooden fire live, he saw his mother move away the stew that was brewing, he saw Leticia hold his right hand by the wrist, he saw his hand forced on the red hot coals. “That will show you!” He never took money from the drawer again. He never touched money with that hand again.

Night fell again and the trench seemed like the most solitary place on Earth. It was a dark cell in the openness of the universe, it was a capsule fired to the moon above, it was a coffin closing in on them, American soldiers in a strange land, on him, a poor boy from Bluefields who would die an unknown soldier. “O’Brien is dead, sir” came Miller’s voice from his left in the dark “I guess the tourniquet didn’t work, uh?” He turned to his right “Green, are you holding up?” But Green did not answer. “We need to go back and look for the other platoons, Miller” decided Alfred like a shot in the dark, “We are done here, this is not our war anymore, the Nazis can have their country, their empire, I’m leaving this stupid war”, but Miller only smiled. Alfred fell asleep.

The hour was undefined, it is that time at which it could be dawn or it could be dusk. “Sir, I found something you’d like” whispered Miller on his ear “Follow me, this way”. He took his rifle. The black forest seemed an enchanted place, like the ones described in the brothers Grimm stories he used to read in school. Forests that are dark but the moon illuminates your path, branches that appear menacing, but you talk to them and they are friendly. They came to an opening in the cloud of trees and saw a tall majestic concrete structure. Thick slabs upon thick slabs, the upper smaller than the lower, like a pyramid. There were stairs hidden behind the slabs to both sides. They merged into a central stair that had over twenty steps. At the end of the stair and on top of the last slab there was a temple similar to the Parthenon he had seen also in books at school. It had nine columns in the Doric style, forty feet in height, supporting a frontispiece with a frieze decorated with human figures. On top of the columns there was a sloped roof. The temple was surrounded by a colonnade. They walked the long corridors and counted nine columns in the front and the back and nineteen on each of the long sides. The front entrance was open, two wooden doors, twelve feet high and four feet wide each, heavily adorned with figures, flowers, and all sort of animals. They entered a gallery that was forty feet wide and eighty feet long, it had a black and white marble floor, the walls were also marble but pink in color. The walls were fifteen feet high and ended in a white marble frontispiece that supported a second floor open to the one below. The roof was pitched supported by gigantic wood trusses. A skylight, fifteen feet wide and twenty feet long let in a magical light that allowed seeing everything inside. All the walls in both floors were adorned with white plaques and busts in marble.
“Sir, look here!” Miller called pointing to a plaque

Hermann (18 BC/17 BC - AD 21) chieftain of the Cherusci, who defeated a Roman army in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest.

“What is this place?” asked Alfred amazed by the magnificence and strangeness of the temple. “Look at this one” called Miller

Alaric I (370 AD) King of the Visigoths from 395–410 and the first Germanic leader to take the city of Rome.

“This appears to be some kind of gallery of personalities. Not all are German, though” continued Alfred curious, this one in Hungarian

Heilige Elisabeth von Ungarn (July 7, 1207 – November 17, 1231) German Catholic saint.

“Willkommen!” they heard a voice behind them. Both turned startled aiming their weapons to the man who spoke. “Oh! Don’t worry, I am not armed” say the man holding his hands open palms up “My name is Ludwig, and I am the keeper of this palace. We have not had any visitors for quite some time. I hear rumors about a great war being fought out there?” He continued not allowing opportunity for a response “Wie schade! Europe has been at war since… well, forever! This palace is a reminder to humanity that the greatness of men and women should be beyond power, war and destruction. You will find many warriors in here. But they had war as their mission”. Alfred asked “You mean to tell me you know nothing about the war?” “I mean to tell you” Ludwig said “that I know way too much about war. That is the reason I built this place”. “I thought you were just a keeper”, asked Alfred. “A keeper, a builder it is the same. Let’s say this is my challenge to conventional reality and values, including the war outside”. Alfred was still puzzled “The war doesn’t come inside?” “The war outside is not relevant inside, it is not relevant in my mind, in my reality. It should not be in yours either” My mission is to not let the war come I. What is your mission?” Ludwig asked. “My mission is to capture Munich” Alfred responded quickly. “But the more I think about it, the more I hate this mission. Why should man kill man? Why should I put a halt to Hitler? Germans should do that themselves!” “You mean Muenchen? I don’t think you are looking far enough, Let me show something” Ludwig started to walk away followed by Alfred. Miller was close behind. The busts and plaques were countless, the diversity of names dizzying: Alboin, King of the Lombards, Beda Venerabilis, monk and scholar, Eginhard, historian, Veleda, prophetess of the Batavian rebellion. There were too many to keep up. Ludwig van Beethoven, composer, Erasmus of Rotterdam, humanist, Anthony van Dyck, Flemish painter, Immanuel Kant, philosopher, the busts went on. They arrived to a sort of workshop that contained different tools for sculpting and several blocks of marble, some intact, other half worked on, a face emerging here, a nose there, an eye here. “This is where we create the next busts and plaques. We all vote every year to add someone or something. Some years there is nothing or no one of value, so we wait another year. We have not added anything for a few years. We are afraid we will have to add a few names after your war is over. You see men and women of all trades here, philosophers, writers, scientists, saints, monks, bishops, kings, and warriors, many, many warriors. But for them war is revolt against the establishment, against Roman occupation or some other despot, not necessarily a means to power and control, but a means to freedom. If you read the lives of these men and women you will find out that these warriors are mystics, and these mystics are warriors. All wars are stupid, yes, but some wars can only be stopped by other wars. You have to fight for the spiritual values you believe in. Do not be afraid to fight fire with fire. Do not waste your time playing other realities, build your own”. Alfred saw a plaque half made, the name Widerstand was fully engraved on it “German Resistance? Against Hitler?” he asked “How do you know…?” Ludwig put his index finger to his lips “Don’t ask too much, I am not allowed to discuss with you any further. Find your mission and carry on. It may be a bloody mission, but it is needed. Remember what your admired poet said: peace is a porcelain doll that men broke to play with cannons and airplanes, submarines and tanks. Peace is a game, war another game. Men will make them another doll to brake when they get tired of peace. Millions of Germans have died fighting Hitler. They need your help, not just French, Jews, Polish, and Russian, Germans too. It is getting late. It is time for you to go back. You should leave Miller behind too, I can use a hand here” Ludwig asked.

It was a beautiful morning despite the mud and the drizzling rain. The sky was painted with light blue colors and a rainbow covered half of the firmament. “The whole world must be feeling what I feel now” the reel came back “I have seen the sky! Isn’t it simple the secret of art? What a discovery, to give yourself to the heat until burning up, that is the secret of mysticism”. He readied his weapon, adjusted his jacket and helm. He bid farewell to the fallen in the mud and gave them a military salute. Then he stood, got out of the trench, and initiated the march towards the hill.

Saturday, February 14, 2009

Windows Live Hotmail

Navidad 2008 en casa de Manny, Danibel. Mi papa de visita, con su pelo blanco. Windows Live Hotmail

Saturday, January 3, 2009

Back in Dallas

I had a great time in Miami. Visits from Danibel and Manny and Kristel and Alex, and my visit to Reima and Alfie, gave a very special meaning to the end of 2008.

To top it off, my Dad, Adolfo, spent two whole weeks with us visiting from Nicaragua. He taught me to make basic electrical installations [light switches for simple and 3-way lights].

This time around I wasn't able to see my good friends the Schiebels or the Velezes, so that was not good. Next time.

We spent the 24th at Manny and Danibel's and the 31st at Luis and Maria Helena's and then at Alcides and Nubia's.

My youngest brother in law, Ivo Richard, also visited and it was very educational for me as a son, brother, and human being to see and talk to him.

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