New First Unexpected

THE PARTY GAG

 

(Photograph by Ina Jang for The New Yorker)

 

A recent issue of The New Yorker carried Hye-young Pyun's "Caring for Plants," a short story about a man, Oghi, who had lost his wife, as well as the use of his own legs, mouth, and the ability to go to the bathroom by himself in a terrible car accident. After being released from the hospital, he returns to his home and his wife's beloved garden with a home healthcare worker who isn't particularly nice to him. She does the bare minimum to keep him alive but goes over and above when it comes to stealing his late wife's jewelry, drinking his booze, and laughing at his damaged penis and its inability to urinate without assistance and more. He tries to speak up for himself, to ask for -- to demand -- help, if not respect, but his words, while clear in his mind, come across only as moans and groans, as though he is in constant pain, which isn't all wrong. But also like he isn't able to think for himself, which is absolutely wrong.

Eventually, the cruelly indifferent caretaker is fired by his mother-in-law, a widow who blames him for her daughter's death. The caretaker's position is terminated in an explosive argument where Oghi's mother-in-law is able to insult and humiliate him while attacking the caregiver:

 

"Oghi lay there in bed and listened to the two women. What shocked him more than the caregiver's calling him a cripple was hearing his mother-in-law echo the word when she yelled at the caregiver that her life would never amount to anything more than wiping the asses of cripples."

Reading "Caring for Plants" reminded me of an incident that had occurred just a few days earlier. One that I had tried to put out of my mind, and continue to think about. My wife and I were at a fun, casual birthday party. While Jimmy Buffet seemed to be playing on repeat throughout the day, the conversation somehow turned not toward lost shakers of salt but to genetic differences. We had just attended a conference about a rare genetic syndrome that our daughter was recently diagnosed with and we were talking about all the fun she had had and the friends who shared this same genetic difference she had made there. My wife had just said that there are probably millions of people walking around with genetic differences that either go undiagnosed as such or that don't present any issues that bring them to anyone's attention. At that moment, one woman started to make jerky movements, and pretended to groan and act otherwise inarticulate as she made a "funny" face and lolled her tongue out of her mouth. The crude joke earned a couple of chuckles, but my wife and I ignored it, as we were at a party and didn't want to start something that would ruin what had otherwise been a good time.

I regret that. This guest had arrived at the party with gifts for our daughter, photographed her, hugged her, even professed her love for her, just a few hours before portraying people with genetic differences as groaning, drooling, inarticulate buffoons -- as party gags. In that moment, like Oghi's physical therapists and doctors,  I failed my daughter and all of the bright and beautiful friends she had made at that conference, as well as all of the amazing parents and caretakers of all the kids and people we know -- and don't know -- who have genetic, neurological or other special needs or disabilities, only to preserve propriety at a birthday party by turning a blind eye to a willfully inarticulate clown who chose to express her understanding of genetics and disability through groans, drool, and jerky movements, while in the background Jimmy Buffet went on and on about drinking himself into oblivion.

PORTRAIT IN A DINER (FROM PHOTOGRAPHS THAT I DON'T REMEMBER)

 

 

Recently, my friend Francesca sent me about a dozen photographs that she had taken of me about as many years ago. One stand-out shows me sitting with my arms crossed on the counter of a fancy diner in the Meat-Packing District. My eyes are soulful, my skin looks good, not much gray hair yet. I'm slim, and I'm wearing a serene, almost wise expression on my face. She's an excellent photographer and it's a very good portrait though it probably seemed more like a snapshot at the time, and, one that I wouldn't mind seeing on the back of a book. In short, I look great, or about as great as I could hope for. Problem is, that's not how I remember myself.

 

I have always looked back to the time these photographs were taken as pretty much the most miserable period of my life. Insomniac, unemployed, and lonely, I was living in a terrible apartment-share in the wake of a breakup. I had just quit a Ph.D. program, had lost just about all of my possessions in a sewage flood, and was drinking heavily. In fact, rather than going toward rebuilding my life, every nickel I found went to cheap wine, which I would drink in my sad little room while watching a small, staticky T.V. to avoid my roommates and to try to sleep for a couple of hours. I can tell you exactly what happened on every episode of every sit-com I watched during those nights, but I can't remember the guy in Francesca's photographs.

 

On the day Francesca, a free-spirited Italian who roamed the streets of Manhattan with her ever-present camera, took the picture of me in the diner, I was anxious, a little depressed, and more than a little hungover. We had been walking around the West Side for hours and had stopped in this place for lunch. I only wanted to get a coffee because I needed to reserve my meager funds for my evening wine. But Francesca wouldn't hear it, and told me so. "What for? You'll buy a bottle of wine tonight and drink it all alone in your room? It won't even taste good," she barked. I hadn't told her my plans for the money, but she saw right through me. "Isn't it better to live life?" she continued. "To talk with a woman in this pleasant diner? To have good coffee and food?" And she was right. In the photo, this is what it looks like I'm doing: living life, a good, peaceful life out in New York City, which is about as good as it gets. There is nothing in this picture that betrays the bloated nervous wreck that I recall from this time. It turns out that I didn't drink wine that night. In fact, I went home and slept the night through for the first time in months -- Maybe because of all the walking we had done that day, or a few weeks of sleepless nights had caught up with me. Now I remember waking up a bit later than usual the next day, going for a run along the West Side Highway and the Hudson River down to Battery Park and reading The Times in the sun on a bench near the water. Not the typical morning I remember from this time of my life. Then again, I can't honestly say that I remember many mornings from back then.

 

Doing the math, I'd say that this dark period couldn't have lasted more than five months or so. I moved into the crappy, yet very cheap apartment in about mid-September, after spending a lost summer with my brother and his girlfriend in Los Angeles, and moved out toward the end of January. By December I had started freelancing as a copy editor for a series of magazines. By February, I had moved to Brooklyn and had started a fulltime job as a writer and editor for a website. In less than two years, I'd be dating the woman I would marry, I'd publish a book of translations, and then another, and then we'd have a beautiful daughter together. But until I saw that photograph, I wouldn't have understood how brief this period was or how quickly things would change. How could I  know that I was already coming out of my stupor. Or maybe it was only at the moment that this picture was taken that I started to get my act together. Or maybe my act hadn't altogether fallen apart in the first place. Or maybe one can never make such an assessment.

 

LYING TO PRIESTS (OR THE TROUBLE WITH NUNS)

 

"It makes absolutely no difference whether gods and devils exist or not. The secret ambition of every true poem is to ask about them even as it acknowledges their absence." —Charles Simic ("Charles the Obscure")

When 80-year-old Cecilia Giménez set out to restore Elías García Martínez's beloved 19th century ecce homo fresco of Jesus, she embarked from a position of pure devotion. The fresco, which resided in a church near her home in Borja, Spain, had deteriorated to such a degree that she felt compelled to step in. Senora Giménez is not a professional. She was spiritually moved to take up the task. In a sense, the fact that the restored Jesus came out looking like a half-bearded monkey is rather beside the point. Many called it a desecration but, really, from a devotional perspective who cares what all the art historians and critics thought about her act, which seems rather like an organic development in a religious fresco's life, if you ask me.

But for my money, there's no more devotional act than translating a poem written by someone else. Unlike the Holy Spirit, who insists that you clean house before he enters and exposes himself to you, the translator willingly enters the head of the poet with the desire to learn something. He doesn't care that the head is cluttered with historical junk, family squabbles, doubts or strongly held though unpopular positions--even sins. It is the translator's pleasure to just sift around through the old boxes and dirty clothes—and with the utmost respect and no small ounce of humility. The Holy Spirit enters with the goal of bending you to his will; the translator, often a poet himself, bends himself to fit the often uncomfortable shape of the poet —and does it gladly.

While translating Osip Mandelstam from Russian, I lived in a haze like some sort of religious ecstatic. All day long the otherwise boring details of my life passed through a kind of Mandelstam filter (What would O.M. have thought of tofu? This film? Would he have been impressed by my coffee maker?). So much so that I began to think only in his terms. Is this enlightenment? Godhead? The Holy Spirit entering the heart and the head? I don't know, but translation is definitely a devotional act—even, I would argue, a poor translation done in earnest that inspires anger and dismay the world over. I reread my old translations over and over again and often find myself reentering O.M.'s long lost head—dipping in and out and finding new meaning, reassessing previous assumptions, like a rabbi engaging with his Torah or a priest with his bible. Not even reading someone else's superior translation of the same poem can keep me from returning to my own faulty efforts, worrying the words with my lips like old fingers on a Rosary bead on a Tuesday afternoon. I read my translations as compelling yet incomplete, as though there's still something meaningful to be discovered beneath the surface and my humble efforts were just a starting point. Then, maybe that means they are indeed complete. Of course the same could be said for any poem or piece of art.

Heaviness and Tenderness

There is nothing magical about twins. If you believe otherwise, you may as well believe in mermaids and centaurs. One twin sister cannot read the thoughts of the other. Nor does a stabbing pain travel psychic miles to lodge itself in the gut of the brother when his twin is killed in a drunk driving accident. A twin is merely one of two offspring produced in a single pregnancy. But on the bright side, there is no such thing as a so-called “evil twin.”

And just as one should not look for centaurs frolicking among faerie twins in a Hellenic meadow, one should not expect to lie down in that same field and wait for a Muse to show up and hand him a poem. An image may be inspired at the sight of a woman’s well-turned ankle (Homer). A meter may be borrowed from a nightingale’s song (Mandelshtam). A masterpiece may be dashed off in just the span of one feverish night (Blok). But you can bet it won’t have been dispatched from Mount Parnassus. Rather, it is the intimate pairing of experience and language that guides the poet to the poem—that binds the twin to his other. 

I am a twin—a monozygotic twin, to be more specific—and I assure you, there is nothing magical about me. Monozygotic, or identical twins, occur when a single egg is fertilized to form one zygote that then divides into two separate embryos with the same fundamental genetic material. Eventually, two separate fetuses develop. It is a random and quite non-magical event occurring in about three of every 1,000 deliveries.Yet it never ceases to capture the imagination of those not randomly selected to become twins themselves.

As one of a pair of twins, I’ve been asked everything from whether I can read my brother’s mind to whether we share orgasms when just one of us is getting lucky. To be fair, when we were young, my brother and I did look remarkably alike, and to some extent still do today. There have been times when looking at yearbook photographs that even we couldn’t tell who was who. And it didn’t help that our mother dressed us in similar clothing. Our “sameness” has caused heads to turn and has stopped people in their tracks. A neighborhood kid once even begged to allow him to present us at his class Show-and-Tell. (I still remember running away with my brother when the would-be P.T. Barnum came to fetch us for his elementary school freak show.)

While apparently captivated by our similarities, people have seemed equally obsessed with noting our differences and identifying reciprocal traits in our respective appearances or characters. By turns, I’ve been the fat twin and the thin twin; the good twin and the bad twin; the one with a girlfriend and the one without. And my brother has been labeled smarter than I am or the more artistically talented one. More imaginative observers even have tried to figure out which one of us is the straight twin and which is the gay one.We’ve been stopped by strangers and compared on the street, and we’ve been verbally maligned, even assaulted, as though one of us was Frankenstein’s monster and the other his equally gruesome double. So we found ways to differentiate ourselves. For as long as I can recall, my brother wanted to be a visual artist of some sort—a cartoonist, a printmaker, and finally a painter. While I, too, was creatively inclined, I knew that I could never become one myself; he had already claimed that path. I compromised and started writing poetry. So, as well as being the fat one or the one without a girlfriend, one of us became the artist and the other the poet—assigned roles meant to test the tether that bound us together.

 

AVANT GARDE WITHOUT BORDERS

Sophie Taeuber-Arp. Untitled (Triptych), 1918. Oil on canvas on board, three panels.  Photo courtesy of Kunsthaus Zürich, © ARS, New York/ProLitteris, Zürich.

My review of MoMA's Inventing Abstraction, 1910-1925 exhibit at BOMBLOG:

According to Gabrielle Buffet, her husband Francis Picabia invented abstract art in July 1912 on a drunken drive across France with Claude Debussy and Guillaume Apoll...inaire. Mix equal parts artist, composer, and poet in a car at the dawn of the modern age, let it bump around for a while, then throw the doors wide, and out pours a brand new cocktail of color, space, and time.
 

MIND YOUR WATCH!

Raising a flag over the Reichstag, by Yevgeny Khaldei

The original photo (left) was altered (right) by editing the watch on the soldier's right wrist.

 

I'm reading Anne Applebaum's Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956, which is utterly depressing and endlessly fascinating. Here's an interesting tidbit regarding looting by the Red Army (particularly of wristwatches) and that iconic image of the Soviet soldier raising the Hammer and Sickle above Berlin's Reichstag:

Wristwatches seemed to have almost mythical significance for Russian soldiers, who would walk around wearing half a dozen if they could. An iconic photograph of a Russian soldier raising the Soviet flag atop the Berlin Reichstag had to be touched up to remove the wristwatches from the arms of the young hero. In Budapest, the obsession with them remained part of local folklore and may have helped shape local perceptions of the Red Army. A few months after the war, a Budapest cinema showed a newsreel about the Yalta Conference. When President Roosevelet raised his arm while speaking to Stalin, several members of the audience shouted: "Mind your watch!" The same was true in Poland, where for many years Polish children would "play" Soviet soldiers by shouting: "Davai chasyi"--"Give me your watch." A beloved Polish children's television series of the late 1960s included a scene of Russian and Polish soldiers during wartime, camping out in deserted German buildings having amassed a vast collection of stolen clocks.

THE NOISE OF TIME: MAJA BAJEVIC AT THE JAMES GALLERY

In 1915, the British government issued a poster to encourage citizens to “Eat Less Bread.” Far from the early stirrings of the gluten-free movement or the rise of the Nanny State, there was more compelling interest in the idea than the promotion of a healthy lifestyle choice. With the country mobilized for war and few supply ships getting through to England--not to mention that most farmers and workers had already been conscripted into military service--it was a move to both promote food rationing and to rally a flagging, mostly female civilian populace behind an increasingly demoralizing war effort. Women and other civilians could do their share For God and Country by consuming less to make sure that the lads at the front had plenty to eat.

Of course, the poster had a less overt mission: to make people feel good about deprivation--and it worked. The messaging campaign fundamentally altered the context of the food shortages from “Give in to Germany or starve” to “We must do whatever it takes to defeat the enemy.” Civilians willingly tightened their belts and they did feel good about it, channeling the discomfort of family- and self-sacrifice into a patriotic determination that helped the Empire ride out The War to End All Wars.

STARRY NIGHT

My trip through Municipal Purgatory is chronicled over at Mr. Beller's Neighborhood: Starry Night.

This morning, when I paid a visit to a large city agency in Downtown Brooklyn--let’s call it the New York City Department of Discomfiture--it was the surly Claire who indicated with a brusque nod of her head where I should sit. And while my visit was regarding my daughter, I am glad that I did not bring her here with me.

TOO STRONG A WORD

I reviewed Tomaž Šalamun's On the Tracks of Wild Game (translated by Sonja Kravanja) for Tarpaulin Sky:

Šalamun’s poems can be playful and absurd with the language toggling at lightning speed between high and low registers–no doubt proving a translator’s nightmare for Kravanja, also the translator of Šalamun’s The Shepherd, The Hunter (Pedernal Press), which won the Columbia University Translation Prize in 1992. They’re stark and often funny, but sometimes also tender and soaring in historical gravitas. The shorter poems often suggest an immediacy that just isn’t there, luring the reader into an intense identification before suddenly shutting him out. Yet, far from being left frustrated and scratching his head on the wrong side of the door, the surprising new distance invites contemplation...

 

 

FOR THE BIRDS

In Beyonsense, Eurasian artist collective Slavs and Tatars channels its inner Zaum in a celebration of the twists of language across cultures, histories, and geographies. My review of the MoMA show for Bomb, here.