firstroad

meikuree

Why did his mind fly uneasily to that void, as if it were the sole reason why life was not thoroughly joyous to him? I suppose it is the way with all men and women who reach middle age without the clear perception that life never can be thoroughly joyous: under the vague dullness of the grey hours, dissatisfaction seeks a definite object, and finds it in the privation of an untried good.

The same uniform for twelve years. A white skirt, blue collar, blue belt, blue hem. A dark, no-nonsense kind of blue. White as snowfall in Eden. You washed it every single day, made sure you ate in small bites, always wore an extra pad so none of the blood could seep through. You began wearing that dress at the age of six, your skin haunted by the British flag, so you could be Chinese with English characteristics. Each time you wore it, you shut your body up. Some girls wore theirs short, discoloured, tight. Head Girl, you reported them to the Office of the Headmistress for inappropriate behaviour, kept your dress at just the right length. Most mornings you see the face of a boy in the mirror. You expect to fall in love with him. Meanwhile, your fingers brush the wrist of another girl as you jostle into the assembly hall, and you understand that sin was never meant to be easy, only sweet. What memory might light up the pond you sat beside in dreams, eyeing so much depth it would be years before you dared? What curvature of tongue might you taste, as if another’s breath were blessing? One night, you find yourself kneeling beside the pond. You dream. A voice says: Hell is not other people. You slip into the blue water, stripped of the glowing dress you wore for thousands of days.

An odourless room is not necessarily without trauma. We must interrogate the walls. My skin is yellow because it must. Love is kind because it must. Admit it, aloud.

queenlua

When I tried to think whom I spent time with before I became friendly with Sensei, no one came to mind.

I had been alone. I rode the bus alone, I walked around the city alone, I did my shopping alone, and I drank alone. And even when I was with Sensei now, I didn’t feel any different from when I did these things on my own. It seemed, then, that it didn’t really matter whether or not I was with Sensei, but the truth was, doing these things with him made me feel proper. “Proper” is perhaps a strange way to put it. It was more like the way I felt about leaving on the obi, the extra band that sometimes came with a dust jacket, after I had bought a book, rather than throwing it away. Sensei would probably be angry if he knew I was comparing him to the band on a dust jacket.

那么在与老师接近之前，又是和谁在一起的呢？我寻思着，却总也想不起来。

是独自一人。独自一人乘公共汽车，独自一人行走在街头，独自一人购物，独自一人喝酒。与老师一起的时候也与从前独来独往时一样，心绪毫无变化。既然如此，似乎不必非与老师在一起，然而，却觉得在一起的时候似乎更为正常。说正常，其实也挺奇妙。也许不妨说，这种心情就好像不把新买的书的腰封取下，而是存放起来。如果知道将他比作书籍的腰封，老师也许会发怒吧。

“什么巨人队，是他妈的浑蛋！”

我说着，将老师斟的酒一滴不剩地泼在空盘子里。

“浑蛋之类，哪里是妙龄女郎该说的话呢？”

老师用稳重镇定的声音回答。腰板比平素挺得更直，喝干了杯里的酒。

“什么妙龄女郎！我可不是。”

“那我可失礼了。”

“The Giants, they’re all fuckers,” I said, spilling the entire cup of saké that Sensei had poured me onto an empty plate.

“‘Fuckers’?! Such language from a young lady!” Sensei replied, having regained his perfect composure. He stood up even straighter than usual and drained his cup.

“I am not a young lady.”

“Pardon me.”

‘You were so right not to publish your plays, they were nothing, nothing, froth, but at least they didn’t pretend to be anything else. Now you’re offended, vanity, vanity. Yes, I hate the theatre.’ Perry meant the London West End theatre. ‘Lies, lies, almost all art is lies. Hell itself it turns to favour and to prettiness. Muck. Real suffering is – is – Christ, I’m drunk – it’s so – different. Oh Charles, if you could see my native city – And that spitting bitch – How can human beings live like that, how can they do it to each other? If we could only keep our mouths shut. Drama, tragedy, belong to the stage, not to life, that’s the trouble. It’s the soul that’s missing. All art disfigures life, misrepresents it, theatre most of all because it seems so like, you see real walking and talking people. God! How is it when you turn on the radio you can always tell if it’s an actor talking? It’s the vulgarity, the vulgarity, the theatre is the temple of vulgarity.

Hartley made a permanent metaphysical crisis of my life by refusing me for moral reasons. Did this lead me to make immorality my mask? Such pompous speculations are of course a kind of nonsense and I surprise myself by writing them down. What were Hartley’s ‘reasons’? I shall never know. It is possible that some demonic sense of a surrender of innocence entered into my affair with Clement, as if I were saying to Hartley: You did not trust me. Well, I will show you, now and forever after, how right you were! Perhaps all my love affairs have been vicious attempts to show Hartley that she was right after all. But she was only right because she left me.

What, then, is it in Cavafy’s poems that survives translation and excites? Something I can only call, most inadequately, a tone of voice, a personal speech. I have read translations of Cavafy made by many different hands, but every one of them was immediately recognizable as a poem by Cavafy; nobody else could possibly have written it. Reading any poem of his, I feel: “This reveals a person with a unique perspective on the world.”

You said: “I’ll go to another country, go to another shore,
find another city better than this one.
Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong
and my heart lies buried like something dead.
How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?
Wherever I turn, wherever I look,
I see the black ruins of my life, here,
where I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally.”

You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore.
This city will always pursue you.
You’ll walk the same streets, grow old
in the same neighborhoods, turn gray in these same houses.
You’ll always end up in this city. Don’t hope for things elsewhere:
there’s no ship for you, there’s no road.
Now that you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner,
you’ve destroyed it everywhere in the world.

I think these criticisms and the defenses of books that often follow can all be boiled down to a simple question: What is a feminist novel?

It’s an interesting question, but what I find more compelling are the books that sit at the center of this discourse because, in my experience, these books are typically authored by women. Men, I’ve noticed, are very noticeably absent from these discussions. Even when men write compelling narratives centering on women, stories that grapple with feminist themes, I notice that their books are very rarely examined with the same rigor.

I want to be clear: This is not the same as saying that men’s books aren’t deemed misogynistic. That’s not true at all. If you spend even a little time online in bookish spaces, you’ll find a number of novels authored by men that have been labeled sexist, reductive, or otherwise offensive. The Bechdel test is very often applied to the work of male writers to assess how “feminist” they are or are not. But, in my experience, the tone is different. It’s almost as though men are not expected to write feminist novels, so when they fall short of the label (even when they’re not intending to) the response is different, somehow muted. Their own shortcomings aren’t weighed against them as heavily in what seems to be a kind of shoulder-shrugging, “boys will be boys” response.

Gansey despised raising his voice (in his head, his mother said, People shout when they don’t have the vocabulary to whisper), but he heard it happening despite himself and so, with effort, he kept his voice even. “Not like this. At least you have a place to go. ‘End of the world’ … What is your problem, Adam? I mean, is there something about my place that’s too repugnant for you to imagine living there? Why is it that everything kind I do is pity to you? Everything is charity. Well, here it is: I’m sick of tiptoeing around your principles.”

“God, I’m sick of your condescension, Gansey,” Adam said. “Don’t try to make me feel stupid. Who whips out repugnant? Don’t pretend you’re not trying to make me feel stupid.”

“This is the way I talk. I’m sorry your father never taught you the meaning of repugnant. He was too busy smashing your head against the wall of your trailer while you apologized for being alive.”

The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to shoot me was the same day the milkman died.

Seemingly, the bishop found it easier to speak with the Sami on his own, and only when discussions were conducted with them in the presence of the pastor too did the mood turn to one of resentment and confrontation. How could language, in all its plasticity, become so stiff and unbending, as hard as a wall? What part of us made it so? How did I come across in this respect? What walls held me captive, and what did they prevent me from seeing?

A man from some evangelical center over on the west coast gave a talk about a bible that had been published in the United States, in which they’d tried to remove every difficult word, every hint of contradiction or shadow of ambiguity.

It had been a huge success.

It was more the feeling that I was so alone with it, alone within it. Alone in something that was so important to me. That was the reason for my despair, I’d felt utterly alone. That was what she hadn’t seen.

I’d gone to her, only for her to wave me away, not wanting my despair, offering me instead a different aspect on things, which I’d then tried to take on board, dog-paddling towards it, the platform she could give me, the space in which I could be with her. It was her precondition for our being together, that I accepted what she was offering me as a gift. Or tried to. And at the same time I felt she was letting both herself and me down.

That was how I’d thought of it afterwards, that evening. But I could see now that I hadn’t understood. I’d thought she was in control of her life, had found her equilibrium, was secure with herself. Only now, afterwards, it seemed merely to be a strategy, a wobbly raft not strong enough to bear even her on her own. And then I’d turned up to make things worse. Clumsily barging in, and that hadn’t helped at all. All I’d done was drag her down still further, dragged her down and held her there as she struggled and writhed for all her life to come free. She hadn’t managed, and I hadn’t helped. That was how it was.

She had been so the wrong woman for him. Her veneer of generosity had disappeared in small ways at first: hogging the covers in bed, making too little dinner—she was tending to the athlete in him, she said, helping him control his weight. Initially, it had seemed a clumsy kindness, but it had soon revealed itself as a calculated move to keep him unsatisfied, to say, See how it feels? He had begun stashing nuts and energy bars around the house, which she invariably discovered. Eventually, he had installed a small refrigerator in the garage, fitting it with a lock. She hacked at it, leaving telltale indents of pliers and a saw, the shallow teeth marks nearly human. He could imagine her crouched like an animal gnawing at that lock.

“You have Kira to think about. It’ll change her whole life to lose you.” Pamela’s father had died suddenly of a heart attack when Pamela was twenty, and Dixon knew she blamed that death for her decision to marry him, an athlete who, unlike her dad, tended to his intake of red meat, had regular physicals, and never smoked. “Nate talked you into this, didn’t he? He’s a careless man, Dixon,” she said.

“He’s my brother.”

In dreams that night, there was Pamela on all fours in the snow, gnawing at his crampons.

But Shiloh’s scarred face? A strange feeling. Not just disliking him, but actively not helping him. Hadn’t he usually taken a suspended kid home, talked to the parents, explained what needed to be done, checked up on them? He couldn’t imagine doing that for this kid, this kid who was sure to be back in juvy in the blink of an eye. Hard head, soft behind, as Dixon’s grandmother used to say.

Herbert banged his leg softly into Dixon’s. “You had love for that boy.”

“I did.”

“Tell me something. Have doing the right thing always came easy to you?”

“I guess, maybe,” he croaked out. “Yes.”

“Ah, you know what it is,” she tsked. “How are you, Dixon? Do you recover?”

Not “have you recovered,” not a query in the past tense like all the others from well-meaning friends. Do you? Are you in the process?

We are in an uncertain year, a year of dismay like so many others we have seen. In the year in question, one recollection recurs: the unpunished death of General Franco, the unseemly death of the fascist dictator untouched by any justice. Nothing to celebrate in that death, or in the insistent memory of the death: perhaps that’s the greatest expression of the defeat of so many emancipatory struggles, the absurd triumph of the Spanish dictatorship, or of almost all dictatorships. In this uncertain year, already distant from that occurrence that’s so real it becomes a symbol, there is no hope that might pay us a visit, no confidence that it could be possible to attain the slightest dignity, or at least an effective democracy.

We are once again shut up in a constrained space, inside a Beckettian room perhaps, the room from whose walls the same voice echoes incessantly. What’s different, however, is the delirium, what’s different is the madness that is ordered here – we are surrendered to the unending recollections of a life run through with politics. The experience of militancy becomes the centre of all memories, the many mistakes made during the resistance, mistakes that are re-enacted in the present, in the friction between bodies, in the non-viability of any real contact, of any understanding.

While we wait to defend our theses in Russia, we should use the time to join the party, wouldn’t “Subdoctorate” look so nice followed by “Party member” on our visiting cards, and we mustn’t forget to buy a refrigerator and a TV set so as to have something to fill our overseas crates, not to mention some dozens of pressure cookers, and hundreds of wheel bearings to act as cushioning for the tottering goods during the three-month voyage. If there’s still time, why don’t we go on to have a baby boy, an early taste for butter and milk and a smattering of babbled Russian will mean he won’t seem such a bumpkin when he comes back at eighteen in his turn.

KA: The book has a choral perspective, in which you never hear from the protagonist in the first person—everyone else is speaking in the first person about him, but you get his experiences only in the close third person. I was also interested in this because it’s the language of hagiography; it’s how the Gospels of the New Testament are constructed. That was important to me to replicate, because depending on how you interpret a few key moments in the text, the entire novel can be read as a hagiography of an unlikely martyr-saint. I’m interested in the possibility that such martyr-saints walk among us. Talmudic Judaism believes that at any given moment, there are thirty-six saints on Earth. Thirty-five of them have a direct line to God and can hear exactly what he wants them to be doing, but there’s one who does not have access to God—who just accidentally does all the right shit, purely organically. Isn’t that the best?

BLVR: That’s amazing. I’ve never heard that before, but it’s a beautiful idea. The most unlikely person or character might secretly be that thirty-sixth saint.

KA: Exactly. And that one poor person walking among us might even be a piss-pants drunk who can’t look beyond himself to the love he receives from the world. There’s something appealing, even charming, about that. It was important to me that one could read my protagonist, Cyrus, in that light.

For weeks, I kept thinking about that tablet. Walking around the shavings, hens running from my boots, the image of that ancient stone hung in my mind. For all our advances in science—chickens that can go from egg to harvest in a month, planes to cross the world, missiles to shoot them down—we’ve always held the same obnoxious, rotten souls. Souls that have festered for millennia while science grew. How unfair, this copper delivery. How unfair, this life. My wounds are so much deeper than yours. The arrogance of victimhood. Self-pity. Suffocating.

And you want to end this book about martyrs with yourself, Orkideh had said. Did he? Cyrus wanted to sit on a park bench. He wanted to get something to eat.

Cyrus believed a hyper-focus on occasions for gratitude would make his eventual death more poignant, more valuable. When a sad-sack who hated life killed themselves, what were they really giving up? The life they hated?

meikuree

Gilles Deleuze called elegy la grande plainte, “the great complaint,” a way of saying “what is happening is too much for me.” In Iran, Ashura is a day of elegy where people fast and mourn the martyrdom of Imam Hussain, killed in 680 CE on his fifty-fifth birthday in the Battle of Karbala. A day of elegy. “What happened thirteen centuries ago is still too much for us,” Iranians say. It is in our blood, la grande plainte. Shekayat bazorg. We remember. Of course we remember.

—from BOOKOFMARTYRS.docx by Cyrus Shams

This foolishness, this over the top, sentimental gesture—misplaced, according to quite a lot of people—was without doubt a grand gesture, and a grand gesture is not a coalition of intentions cleverly conceived to serve our shamelessness, a grand gesture, I mumbled, a grand gesture might also be a failed gesture, history easily demonstrates this, at least in that it only records the successful gestures, fixing them in capital letters when one might rather investigate the possibility that the meaning of things and of lives—I mean the living, yes, the living—can only be written in lower case and must perhaps even be scratched out. Who would dare to claim that an individual failure cancels out the overall idea? Is it the case, though this is just an example, is it the case that the very idea of writing is rendered ridiculous because someone whom one thought was a writer failed to erect a small monument in words to Pippa Bacca?

Weeks after her death I came to the garden window

to marvel at sudden pale feathers catching, scattering

past the rainy glass. I looked for magic everywhere.

Signs from the afterlife that I was, indeed, distinct.

Beneath the talon of a red-tailed hawk a pigeon

moved briefly until it didn’t. The hawk stripped

the common bird, piercing its thick neck. Beak probing body

until I could see the blood from where I stood inside.

This could happen, naturally enough, even in Brooklyn.

This could happen whether or not my mother was dead.

I didn’t eat for weeks because it felt wrong to want bread & milk.

The hawk’s face turning red, beautiful as it plucked & picked

its silver-white prey apart. It wasn’t magic, but hungrily, I watched.

As if I didn’t know memory could devour corpses

caught alive in midair. I opened the window,

knelt on the fire escape. I was the prey

& hawk. This was finally myself swallowing

those small, common parts of me. Tearing all of that away

into strips, my breast open to the bone. I saw myself

torn apart, tearing & tearing at the beautiful face,

the throat beneath my claw. My grieving face red

with being exactly what I knew myself to be.