Susan M. Schultz
from Memory Cards: Simone Weil Series
1.
All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception. Italics are inversions, except where they're the rule. A woman was singing in MacArthur Park; she slung her arm around a pole as if to resist a strong wind. I noted men seated on benches beside her, tents on the other side of the park, objects placed on the sidewalk for sale across the street. The lyric is troubled when it speaks for more than one, but that’s all we are on this sidewalk. Or an umbrella. Depending on how it's lit, like her eyes or the melody Stein says is too seductive not to be avoided. At the airport, the man's shirt read: “Shredding a / tidal wave of / whiskey on a surfboard / made of / don't care.” He kept leaping to his feet to dance, snapping fingers as he threw one arm across his body. He talked to no one listening, said he was moving back after 38 years, 15 in L.A. I thought him the mythological homeless man put on a plane to Honolulu. After all, his carry-on was a tent. But he muttered something about Nanakuli. His gray hair matted, standard black glasses framed his dark crossed eyes. As we landed, his body surged in waves, arm thrown out, fingers snapping faster and faster. The flight attendant called him brother.
--11 April 2016
31.
The state of conformity is an imitation of grace. If wind comes from uneven heating of the earth, it doesn't conform to this morning's rain, palms' slight movement more an ache than an action. Nothing is more difficult than doing the same. It takes a cordon to raise an ethical village. They take the must off of must, the hood out of should. There's no fan above the stove, just the sweet vog of knowing right. Let speech fall trippingly from your tongue, but make certain it doesn't trip on words oozing like over-ripe guava. Such a slight shift from we-speak-for to we-speak-as, from your hurt to our malaise. It's liberation oligarchy, this imposition of standards on the rest of us, our feet in the mud. In the story, a man who worked in a windowed basement fell in love with two feet that walked at his eyes' level. He could tell them by the arc of bone on one big toe. When he grew rich and found the walker of these feet, she turned out to be a prostitute. Oh good reader, he married her!
--31 May 2016
32.
There are certain things which cause no suffering whatever by themselves, but make us suffer as signs. Today's exclusive offer is to “Save Your Memories Before They Fade Away.” On his birthday I remember Allen Ginsberg: we were shoulder to shoulder to window in an airport van when he asked what I'd talked about. (Hart Crane.) “I have my students read 'Atlantis,' out loud,” he said, “because nothing so resembles the movements of the mouth during cock-sucking.” We drove into rural Maine and stopped so he could kiss a friend on the lips. This also could be last. My friend says her husband is losing time when he sings; he's still on key, but not on the beat. Tempo fugit. It's the blur note, the one that makes us see time like a woman walking after her stroke, one leg swaying outward like a canoe paddle, the other pumping straight. At a certain age, we agree, we say “after I die” as if it's true. Our kids don't like that. It was my mother's retirement plan, the car left on in the garage. I'm gonna tell you how it's gonna be. A love that's love will fade away.
--for Tiff Holland
--3 June 2016
33.
The ticking of a clock has no rhythm. It is defined by the pauses. A ring is not round, but square. We puncture time with our presence, then squat on a corner stool. One man leans over to tend the cuts above our eye, another to scream instructions in our ear. You want to talk to who brought you here, my son says, not to someone who doesn't know you. Intimacy is of violence mostly. He's so well armed, he can’t take the bus to AirSoft. Pores over pictures of pistols and automatic weapons (fake, of course) then puts on his camo and laces up his boots. Needs $15 to pay for the fantasy of killing his friends. I want to punch him in the face, Trump says of a protester. It's all part of the game, says the ballplayer who cold-cocked Jose Bautista. Only the man of violence can refuse to kill. A bell keeps tolling, but not for Ali. Attend to the blank canvas where his feet once danced.
--4 June 2016
34.
We should not think about. When I asked my mother to apologize, she said she'd meant it then. As if then were a universe. As if to apologize now (which is now then) were to deny a truth set in amber. As if that memory were a precious thing, not in its feeling, but as it existed for us both then. Memory isn’t what I think about, but what I think around. Satellites flicker like stars, but they move; sight divorced from touch, detached. A bearded man in black top hat goes kite surfing off Kailua Beach. There's wit in time's layering, so long as you're the kite.
--5 June 2016
35.
Look for examples (there are many such). Imagine a poetry of pure example: the woman who'd camped at a covered bus stop in Kāne'ohe is gone, along with her blue tarp and shopping cart: the homeless man with an awkward limp comes toward me at Long's, his beard neatly trimmed beneath his hoodie: a young cat named Kaya resides in a small condo at Petco: our two girls go to the beach to search for the tree that bends out over the water: a golden retriever named Harry retrieves a green tennis ball from the ocean; I and a stranger take turns throwing it back in, I with my left, she with her right: Donald Trump says Muslims and Mexicans are out to get him: my father-in-law reads a book called Rage for Order: our black and white cat has been lethargic since June 2: I'm waiting for help with the rectal thermometer. A plastic bag full of old clothes and books sits in the living room.
--6 June 2016
36.
Difficulty in understanding things that are evident. Evidence of relation: head, shoulders, knees and toes. “I can just SEE their father and mother” is the moment of my erasure. The painting in that living room is of a girl on a bed. Her arm thrown over her head, we cannot see her face. She has hidden her inheritance from us, abstracted herself as feeling. Despair is an orange brush stroke on the sheets. It only self-resembles. To differ is to move, to refuse the frames. The scene of non-recognition proves less popular than reunion of mother and child. My mother didn't know me; she was Milarepa's pot.
--8 June 2016
37.
To explain suffering is to console it; therefore it must not be explained. The word “integration” was all telling and no showing. “Ruminate” was easier, as I do it so well. “The tendency to negatively ruminate is a stable constant over time and serves as a significant risk factor for clinical depression.” Which came first, the ruminator or her egg? My kids egg me on all the time, trying to get my goat. But I close the door on them, the better to chew my cud. It's the engine of delivery that's acid, not what I pull from its assembly line. Sangha, at 16, imagines what he'd say to younger Sangha if they met. A mirror that doesn't match, self to self-image. The historian who spends his long hours in another century can hardly imagine himself at breakfast. At Kualoa Beach Park a woman asked if he was adopted, and I said yes. So was she, Hawaiian from the mainland. Today he learned how to shift into first and second gear, and then parked in reverse.
--9 June 2016
38.
Life is an ersatz form of salvation. The dean responded to the mother of a distressed student as if he were answering a complaint about pot-holes. If only he'd put the last paragraph first; if only his grammar were better; if only he'd avoided the verb “to impact.” Would his prose be clear as the edge of a bubble my daughter blows? With a rainbow smudge, as if aesthetics compensated for cruelty? My coffee comes of acorns, but I taste Columbian. My flour tastes of soy, but that's my personal pronoun. I'm grateful for what tricks me to attention. The gash of purple flower-light against the Ko'olau, the fading coos of doves in fugue with a shama thrush--these are a true imagining. I cannot pare my senses down to none. A candlestick found in the garden means someone paid attention. Detectives always share the guilt.
--10 June 2016
39.
We read, but also we are read by, others. I made my appointment with the head doctor at a hospital in the woods. I told my story, not as I wanted to, but according to his questions. He said I was “a troubled young woman.” I needed to figure things out, or this would keep happening. Repetition as another skinny dip in the acid bath. “Did you ever go skinny dipping?” my daughter asks. I suspect I did, but don't remember. That's something you would remember, she says. What I recall is that adrenaline is an engine that burns the literal heart. He had me down as story: beginning, middle, and catastrophic end. During yesterday's meditation, I untied laces of the knot that pushed against the top wall of my skull. I unlaced and unlaced, but it didn't come undone. In the other doctor's office, I sat for half an hour at a time, finding no words amid my words' chaos. “You just needed someone to sit with you,” that doctor said.
--11 June 2016
40.
Human life is impossible. They're investigating motivation, as if the precise wording of his intention were key. When she returns to their apartment, his wife wears a #84 hoodie and a wedding ring; their toddler waits in the back of a car. The arc of our grief has flat-lined. There are too many details to make a poem of, no abstraction sturdy enough to rein them in. We bring survivors out in their hospital beds to speak to reporters. We put up photos of the dead and we read their names, their ages. We find stories to tell about them, weeping friends to put on camera. Soul's skin closes against the murky run-off of our anger and sadness whose pause button has broken. What is there to write? What petitions can we sign? The photo of a doctor's track shoes filthy with blood stains appears on social media. The toddler, nested between his smiling parents, has been blurred out for his protection.
--14 June 2016
41.
Humility is a purification through the elimination in oneself of imaginary good. Where “I love our protesters” means exactly opposite. Emerson's eyeball grows bulbous with anger. A murderer preens before mirrors, then captures himself on his phone. We no longer see through our eyes. They've been taken, arranged along paths in a garden: all gaze and no refraction. Eye walls. There's blood in the stalls, blood under the sinks, blood by the bar, blood pulsing in our ears. We want to know his motive. But meaning has no purchase now. You can't buy it on-line without a license. My life had stood. And hers, and his. We've outsourced death's solitude. They-died-together is as good as it gets.
--15 June 2016
1.
All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception. Italics are inversions, except where they're the rule. A woman was singing in MacArthur Park; she slung her arm around a pole as if to resist a strong wind. I noted men seated on benches beside her, tents on the other side of the park, objects placed on the sidewalk for sale across the street. The lyric is troubled when it speaks for more than one, but that’s all we are on this sidewalk. Or an umbrella. Depending on how it's lit, like her eyes or the melody Stein says is too seductive not to be avoided. At the airport, the man's shirt read: “Shredding a / tidal wave of / whiskey on a surfboard / made of / don't care.” He kept leaping to his feet to dance, snapping fingers as he threw one arm across his body. He talked to no one listening, said he was moving back after 38 years, 15 in L.A. I thought him the mythological homeless man put on a plane to Honolulu. After all, his carry-on was a tent. But he muttered something about Nanakuli. His gray hair matted, standard black glasses framed his dark crossed eyes. As we landed, his body surged in waves, arm thrown out, fingers snapping faster and faster. The flight attendant called him brother.
--11 April 2016
31.
The state of conformity is an imitation of grace. If wind comes from uneven heating of the earth, it doesn't conform to this morning's rain, palms' slight movement more an ache than an action. Nothing is more difficult than doing the same. It takes a cordon to raise an ethical village. They take the must off of must, the hood out of should. There's no fan above the stove, just the sweet vog of knowing right. Let speech fall trippingly from your tongue, but make certain it doesn't trip on words oozing like over-ripe guava. Such a slight shift from we-speak-for to we-speak-as, from your hurt to our malaise. It's liberation oligarchy, this imposition of standards on the rest of us, our feet in the mud. In the story, a man who worked in a windowed basement fell in love with two feet that walked at his eyes' level. He could tell them by the arc of bone on one big toe. When he grew rich and found the walker of these feet, she turned out to be a prostitute. Oh good reader, he married her!
--31 May 2016
32.
There are certain things which cause no suffering whatever by themselves, but make us suffer as signs. Today's exclusive offer is to “Save Your Memories Before They Fade Away.” On his birthday I remember Allen Ginsberg: we were shoulder to shoulder to window in an airport van when he asked what I'd talked about. (Hart Crane.) “I have my students read 'Atlantis,' out loud,” he said, “because nothing so resembles the movements of the mouth during cock-sucking.” We drove into rural Maine and stopped so he could kiss a friend on the lips. This also could be last. My friend says her husband is losing time when he sings; he's still on key, but not on the beat. Tempo fugit. It's the blur note, the one that makes us see time like a woman walking after her stroke, one leg swaying outward like a canoe paddle, the other pumping straight. At a certain age, we agree, we say “after I die” as if it's true. Our kids don't like that. It was my mother's retirement plan, the car left on in the garage. I'm gonna tell you how it's gonna be. A love that's love will fade away.
--for Tiff Holland
--3 June 2016
33.
The ticking of a clock has no rhythm. It is defined by the pauses. A ring is not round, but square. We puncture time with our presence, then squat on a corner stool. One man leans over to tend the cuts above our eye, another to scream instructions in our ear. You want to talk to who brought you here, my son says, not to someone who doesn't know you. Intimacy is of violence mostly. He's so well armed, he can’t take the bus to AirSoft. Pores over pictures of pistols and automatic weapons (fake, of course) then puts on his camo and laces up his boots. Needs $15 to pay for the fantasy of killing his friends. I want to punch him in the face, Trump says of a protester. It's all part of the game, says the ballplayer who cold-cocked Jose Bautista. Only the man of violence can refuse to kill. A bell keeps tolling, but not for Ali. Attend to the blank canvas where his feet once danced.
--4 June 2016
34.
We should not think about. When I asked my mother to apologize, she said she'd meant it then. As if then were a universe. As if to apologize now (which is now then) were to deny a truth set in amber. As if that memory were a precious thing, not in its feeling, but as it existed for us both then. Memory isn’t what I think about, but what I think around. Satellites flicker like stars, but they move; sight divorced from touch, detached. A bearded man in black top hat goes kite surfing off Kailua Beach. There's wit in time's layering, so long as you're the kite.
--5 June 2016
35.
Look for examples (there are many such). Imagine a poetry of pure example: the woman who'd camped at a covered bus stop in Kāne'ohe is gone, along with her blue tarp and shopping cart: the homeless man with an awkward limp comes toward me at Long's, his beard neatly trimmed beneath his hoodie: a young cat named Kaya resides in a small condo at Petco: our two girls go to the beach to search for the tree that bends out over the water: a golden retriever named Harry retrieves a green tennis ball from the ocean; I and a stranger take turns throwing it back in, I with my left, she with her right: Donald Trump says Muslims and Mexicans are out to get him: my father-in-law reads a book called Rage for Order: our black and white cat has been lethargic since June 2: I'm waiting for help with the rectal thermometer. A plastic bag full of old clothes and books sits in the living room.
--6 June 2016
36.
Difficulty in understanding things that are evident. Evidence of relation: head, shoulders, knees and toes. “I can just SEE their father and mother” is the moment of my erasure. The painting in that living room is of a girl on a bed. Her arm thrown over her head, we cannot see her face. She has hidden her inheritance from us, abstracted herself as feeling. Despair is an orange brush stroke on the sheets. It only self-resembles. To differ is to move, to refuse the frames. The scene of non-recognition proves less popular than reunion of mother and child. My mother didn't know me; she was Milarepa's pot.
--8 June 2016
37.
To explain suffering is to console it; therefore it must not be explained. The word “integration” was all telling and no showing. “Ruminate” was easier, as I do it so well. “The tendency to negatively ruminate is a stable constant over time and serves as a significant risk factor for clinical depression.” Which came first, the ruminator or her egg? My kids egg me on all the time, trying to get my goat. But I close the door on them, the better to chew my cud. It's the engine of delivery that's acid, not what I pull from its assembly line. Sangha, at 16, imagines what he'd say to younger Sangha if they met. A mirror that doesn't match, self to self-image. The historian who spends his long hours in another century can hardly imagine himself at breakfast. At Kualoa Beach Park a woman asked if he was adopted, and I said yes. So was she, Hawaiian from the mainland. Today he learned how to shift into first and second gear, and then parked in reverse.
--9 June 2016
38.
Life is an ersatz form of salvation. The dean responded to the mother of a distressed student as if he were answering a complaint about pot-holes. If only he'd put the last paragraph first; if only his grammar were better; if only he'd avoided the verb “to impact.” Would his prose be clear as the edge of a bubble my daughter blows? With a rainbow smudge, as if aesthetics compensated for cruelty? My coffee comes of acorns, but I taste Columbian. My flour tastes of soy, but that's my personal pronoun. I'm grateful for what tricks me to attention. The gash of purple flower-light against the Ko'olau, the fading coos of doves in fugue with a shama thrush--these are a true imagining. I cannot pare my senses down to none. A candlestick found in the garden means someone paid attention. Detectives always share the guilt.
--10 June 2016
39.
We read, but also we are read by, others. I made my appointment with the head doctor at a hospital in the woods. I told my story, not as I wanted to, but according to his questions. He said I was “a troubled young woman.” I needed to figure things out, or this would keep happening. Repetition as another skinny dip in the acid bath. “Did you ever go skinny dipping?” my daughter asks. I suspect I did, but don't remember. That's something you would remember, she says. What I recall is that adrenaline is an engine that burns the literal heart. He had me down as story: beginning, middle, and catastrophic end. During yesterday's meditation, I untied laces of the knot that pushed against the top wall of my skull. I unlaced and unlaced, but it didn't come undone. In the other doctor's office, I sat for half an hour at a time, finding no words amid my words' chaos. “You just needed someone to sit with you,” that doctor said.
--11 June 2016
40.
Human life is impossible. They're investigating motivation, as if the precise wording of his intention were key. When she returns to their apartment, his wife wears a #84 hoodie and a wedding ring; their toddler waits in the back of a car. The arc of our grief has flat-lined. There are too many details to make a poem of, no abstraction sturdy enough to rein them in. We bring survivors out in their hospital beds to speak to reporters. We put up photos of the dead and we read their names, their ages. We find stories to tell about them, weeping friends to put on camera. Soul's skin closes against the murky run-off of our anger and sadness whose pause button has broken. What is there to write? What petitions can we sign? The photo of a doctor's track shoes filthy with blood stains appears on social media. The toddler, nested between his smiling parents, has been blurred out for his protection.
--14 June 2016
41.
Humility is a purification through the elimination in oneself of imaginary good. Where “I love our protesters” means exactly opposite. Emerson's eyeball grows bulbous with anger. A murderer preens before mirrors, then captures himself on his phone. We no longer see through our eyes. They've been taken, arranged along paths in a garden: all gaze and no refraction. Eye walls. There's blood in the stalls, blood under the sinks, blood by the bar, blood pulsing in our ears. We want to know his motive. But meaning has no purchase now. You can't buy it on-line without a license. My life had stood. And hers, and his. We've outsourced death's solitude. They-died-together is as good as it gets.
--15 June 2016