Nazi Logic

The New York Times (April 10, 2009) reports that the CIA "would decommission the secret overseas prisons where it subjected Al Qaeda prisoners to brutal interrogation methods, bringing to a symbolic close the most controversial counterterrorism program of the Bush administration."

Leon Panetta, Director of the CIA, said "agency officers who worked in the program 'should not be investigated, let alone punished' because the Justice Department under President George W. Bush had declared their actions legal."  Were there any officers who refused to work in the program?  "Work"?  I should say, Were there any officers who refused to torture? 

The Nazis also declared that torture--among other horrendous things--was legal.  After the war, they defended themselves by saying they were obeying the law.  

Alan Feldman Writes with & About His Students

A while back I wrote that most American poets were teachers but did not write poems about teaching.  I posted "Class," a poem by Linda Bamber, who is an exception.  Linda thanked me and said, 'We're supposed to act as if we always want to be somewhere else beside the classroom, but teaching is a big part of my life.'

Since that post, I've been finding more poems about the poet's life in the classroom.  Here's one by Alan Feldman, author of the collection, A Sail to Great Island.  Alan said he wrote the poem in class as the students were working on their sestinas, and that it was his practice to write along with his students.  

AGING, JOY, WATER, CHILDREN, LOVE, AND ILLNESS SESTINA

I've told them it's a good form for obsessives.  Love

for example may preoccupy you, like a long illness

or a splinter you can't extract, or a joy

so huge it's like standing next to a blimp.  They are children

in this art, circling the big square seminar table.  I'm aging,

wearing out my seat.  In recent years, they've been flowing through

here as fast as water.

Oh sometimes, if the shade is up, I see a sky as blue as water

over their heads, while their heads are bowed in writing.  I love

the quiet then in the room.  I can almost hear them aging--

something they like, still since to them it's growth, not an illness.

As I get older, they look like adults recently fashioned from the children 

in some fifth grade class, their child-faces sheer joy

as they assume their beauty and distinction.  Well, I know for them

there isn't much joy

in school, they'd all rather be in or on the water

with iPods, towels, surfboards, digging in the sand like children,

though I'm sure if I asked them they'd say they love

the course.  After they're absent they even show me little notes for  

  non-serious illnesses

like mono and strep, nothing like the grave things they'll get when

  they're really aging.

So it's fun for me because as I'm aging

they keep appearing here like bubbles out of a spring.  Earth's joy

in its own improvisation.  More Kids!  More kids!  For better or ill.

None any more necessary or unnecessary than the rest of us.  Made  from water

and a few cents worth of minerals, and full of love

for the sweet forms of each other, something that leads to the begetting

  of new children

though not just yet!  No, here their heads are bent like children

taking a spelling test, their hair hanging down like curtains so you

  can't guess their ages,

their books satchels, soda cans, candy bar wrappers, the sprawl

  of Xeroxed papers I love

to hand out (so I can know I'm giving them something--oh joy!--

even if it's only paper).  Yes they could be underwater

they're concentrating so silently, as though the illness

of distractibility has been cured for everyone forever, that illness

that drowns out all but the obvious meaning of words.

  Well, Children

aren't fooled by the obvious.  They know the words are waiting  

  like water

to be played with.  If I look up now I can see the sky is aging

into the color of blue snow.  But the windows are wide open.

  And they seem to enjoy

writing while wearing their bright coats, not bothered by cold,

  safely in love

with the winter that won't mean (for them) illness or aging

but amazing changes as the ice melts to water, and their

 thoughts turn into waves of joy

as they turn away from being children, and find their own new

  words to tell us how angry they are, how much they love.

Couscous Encore: Why Don't We Trust Our Senses?

My cousin sent me this story.  A few nights ago, at Eliot Feld's "Mandance," she "got talking to an older Jewish woman," who said she had grown up on 'her mother's cooking--spaghetti with ketchup.'  One day she was invited to have supper with the girl across the street. She watched Mrs. Russo carefully stirring the pot of tomato sauce and was fascinated.  When she went home, she told her mother how Mrs. Russo made the sauce. Her mother said, 'She doesn't know what she's doing.'"  My cousin added, in parenthesis, "And that's how mothers survive."  I would add, That's how mothers exert their authority.  Now that she could compare her mother's pasta slathered with ketchup to Mrs. Russo's dish, how long did it take the girl to realize she had been eating slop?   Not long, I hope.  

Why don't we trust the evidence of our senses?  Because we don't know any better?  The members of my painting class in Provence knew better.  We had eaten wonderful food but were fooled at the Chateau d' Arnajon.  Our teacher had arranged for us to paint on the grounds of the Chateau and then to have lunch prepared by the owners, one of whom was the seventh generation of his family to live in the Chateau.  He and his partner ran a cooking school; we looked forward to the food and paid sixty dollars each for lunch described as "gourment."   After working outside all morning on the fabulous grounds among the red poppies, clipped boxwood, and beautiful vistas, we were seated in the dining room, which was painted in rich umbers and yellows, and filled with extraordinary pottery.  We were charmed.

There were bottles of wine on the long table.  We drank.  Our host entered, carrying a large pan, which he lifted high, announcing: 'Fish from our waters.'  We ate; some said it was delicious, this dish of fish, couscous, and black olives.  I said the olives were good.  Next came a dish of fowl with couscous--the bird was not identified--in saffron sauce.  The sauce was the color of dark chocolate; there was too much saffron.  We went on praising the food.  Not John. He abruptly got out of his seat and walked out; I followed him.  'The food doesn't sit right with me,' he said.  I went back in .  We were all still under the spell.  'Look at this,' one person cooed as she discovered yet another marvelous piece of pottery.  Drunk as I was I still could not finish the stringy, overcooked fowl tasting of iodine.  There was no salad, not one vegetable.  the dessert was a bakery-bought apple tart, stale, tasteless, flabby--an insult.  The Yiddish word "kvachik" best describes it.  As for the rest of the food: leftovers!  The fish was old flaked cod. As bad as spaghetti with ketchup.  

Someone asked for milk with the coffee.  Our host served us a jug of disgusting sour milk, the kind that forces you recoil from the odor.  We woke from the spell.  'I saw him'--he of the seventh generation--'drive off while we were painting and come back with bakery boxes,' someone said.  John had been faster than any of us.  Sure he liked pottery but not enough to make him swoon, not enough to kill his palate, not enough to turn him into a fool.  'They  made approximately two thousand dollars serving us stale leftovers, sized us up as American saps, and stuffed us with couscous,' John said.  That night one of our group became ill.  'Does couscous swell up in your stomach?' she asked.

After the meal, the wine having wore off, I walked into the Chateau's garden.  The raspberries were ripe.  I ate them by the handful.  I stole them.  They were wonderful.            

Diane Churchill's Paintings: Mojacar Red

When I first met Diane Churchill at the Fundacion Valparaiso, an artists and writers colony in Mojacar, Spain, she was working small, mostly sketches.  It wasn't until we were back in the states, and I saw an exhibition of her work in New York, that I realized how much the colors of Mojacar had saturated her paintings.

There were the colors of our long walks down dirt roads, past pomegranate and fig trees, the Prussian blue of the Mediterranean, the hot sun, the reds and violets of plants floating up. But you didn't have to know Mojacar to be drawn to these colors.  Yet I liked being reminded of the place, and made to see it again, see it differently through Diane's transforming colors.  She did not paint the harsh aspects of Mojcar, which is built on a former sea bed.  The hills thrust up as if from volcanic eruptions; the roosters crow before dawn, tearing apart the violet-pink sky. What a racket!  And packs of dogs race down the dirt roads.

Diane is still working with red.  There's violet, too.  Orange and white.  

Can poets work this way?  Choose a color?  Write a suite of poems in red?  Or any other color?  I'm not sure.  Maybe one of you reading about Diane's work will try a suite of poems in a color you cannot live without.   But then, is there any color you or any of us can live without?  I would not erase one color from our palette.  

Speaking Out

In June, 1978, the day after Alexander Solzhenitsyn, gave the Harvard Class Day speech, people stood on street corners up and down Mass. Ave. in Harvard Square, talking about the speech, many of them outraged.  How dare he tell off the West and insult his hosts!  How dare he be a rude guest?  And at Harvard!  He had criticized the United States for its loss of "civil courage"; he said, "political and intellectual bureaucrats"--there were plenty in the audience--showed signs of "depression, passivity and perplexity."  Mediocrity had triumphed; the West was "in a state of spiritual exhaustion, " America in a "TV  stupor," spineless, materialistic, led by a press hungry for sensational stories.  

Had Harvard ever heard anything like this?  Their motto is Veritas, truth.  It's inscribed on the faculty club door, my friend Patricia pointed out.  "They think they own it," she said. Solzhenitsyn told them that truth had eluded them; their believing they had the truth was an illusion.

He could speak out because he had nothing to lose, you might say.  But he had plenty to lose. His reputation, speaking fees, etc.  Look what happened to Michelle Obama when in February, 2008, she said, "For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback."  Judging from the public's reaction you'd think she had committed an act of treason.  

To shift the subject slightly: why don't MFA students speak out?  Do any of them talk back to their instructors, reject their editorial comments, protect a vulnerable member of the seminar? Maybe not: their careers are at stake.  I did speak up in graduate school--not an MFA program. The references from my professors are still on file.  One of them said I was "bright but not judicious."  Those reference would not get me a job.  

I wish I had more courage and confidence.  When Flannery O' Connor turned in a novel for which she had signed a contract, and the editor gave her suggestions she believed were not in the spirit 0f her work, she walked out, broke the contract.  Luckily I have an editor who understands my work.  I respect her because she doesn't pull her punches; she speaks up.  In one go-round, she blue-penciled a description of a dream: "Creepy!"

So this morning, I'll ask for courage to shoot off my mouth.  What's to lose?  

Sex for Success

In a New Yorker profile of the young twin poets Michael and Matthew Dickman, Matthew, who like his brother has a talent for connecting with well known writers able to bestow favors, describes his meeting with the elderly Allen Ginsberg.  They talked about poetry.  And then, Matthew says, "'I sat down on his bed next to him and just told him how wonderful it had been, and thanked him.  And then I thought, This is ridiculous, and I turned in and kissed him, and we kissed for probably fifteen minutes.  And it was so sweet and wonderful, like kissing a mushy orange. '"  He found it "wonderful."  Why?  Because it was Allen Ginsberg he was kissing? Oranges are mushy when they are going rotten.  The writer and critic Hilton Als confesses he went all the way with an ancient man adept at providing entree to the publishing world for talented black writers.  It was like lying down in a grave: musty.  I was never up to making love to the aged in exchange for favors, and now that I'm older I don't have enough power to trade on--not that I would, though the young nourish the old.  There's a painting of a young woman--renaissance, I think--nourishing an old man from her breast, keeping him alive.  In my town there is a hairdresser on every block.  Most of the patrons are elderly women, who even in this economic downturn have their hair done every week.  "It's the only time anyone touches them," a friend tells me.  I don't go to hairdressers; I cut my own hair.  I'm lucky: my four-year old grandson is happy to let me take his hand.  His hand weighs so little but that small weight is a fresh pleasure that renews me.  Am I too wholesome?  Should I have been more ambitious, ambitious enough to overcome my disgust and lie down in moldering beds and kiss mushy mouthes?  I admit that I have been feasting, as we do when we gossip, on Matthew Dickman, Hilton Als, and Allen Ginsberg. If I actually do feast on flesh it will have to be on baby vegetables.  I've given up meat.

South Beach: Not All Glamor

The elevators in our modest condo broke down at least once a week.  Finally the Board decided to replace them.  We were assessed for the cost.  After months the first of the two new elevators was up and running.  It gleamed, ascended and descended without a hitch.  The day after it began operating someone took a screwdriver and pried out the buttons in the control panel.  He was caught on the security video entering the elevator, caught mooning at the camera, his pants dropped to his knees.  First he mooned; then he did damage.  The security camera had not yet been installed inside the elevator; since he was not filmed in the act of vandalism, the police said he could not be charged.  The film caught the person who entered the elevator before him.  That person said there was no damage; the person who used the elevator after the perpetrator reported the damage.  The vandal owns a unit in the building.  It's his home.  Why did he do it?  My neighbor H. blamed it on AIDS and was sure AIDS had affected his mind.  I don't believe it.  He did it out of spite.  Why he was spiteful doesn't matter.  He is like those characters in Dostoevsky who vibrate, quivering with impossible irritation, a sense of having been wronged as they do wrong, hating, confessing--wasn't his mooning a confession?  Here I am, he said, and you can stick the new elevator, the elevator you and I paid for.  He's the anti-hero of the condo.  I have more sympathy for the elderly woman notorious for feeding pigeons from her balcony, who comes down to get her mail late at night.  She never wears shoes; her peds are stuck to her feet and are marked with tide lines, as if she's dipped her feet into dirty water.  Most of the elderly pick up their mail soon after it arrives, using the occasion to gather in the lobby, which was remodeled with hard-edge chic: mirrors, everything in white and gray.  They sit and talk; they soften the austere design.