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Hamilton Stone Review #31
Fall 2014
Nonfiction
Reamy Jansen, Nonfiction Editor

 

Reamy Jansen has been nonfiction editor since 2010. He writes poetry (Two Ways of Not Hearing, Finishing Line Press2012) and nonfiction, including a memoir, Available Light, Recollections and Reflections of a Son, Hamilton Stone Editions, 2010. His book is also available as an e-book.

 

Edward Myers
The Cheerful Reaper

 

There was never a sound beside the wood but one,!

And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground.

—Robert Frost, "Mowing"

 

Of our ten acres in Vermont, five are forest, land that flies on its own woodsy autopilot. The other five are a meadow left over from the original farm's fields, and these require more attention. The question is what kind of attention. Our immediate predecessors in owning this property, Paul and Doris, viewed this expanse as a huge, rolling lawn and mowed it from May through October, a task that apparently kept Paul in the seat of his Husqvarna for many hours day after day.

Early on during our ownership, my wife and I decide that we will mow only a half-acre that surrounds the house; the rest of the meadow we will let grow wild. So far so good: less work, less use of fuel, more ecological variety, and a bigger habitat for wildlife. Yet even meadows need occasional grooming. Neighbors warn Edith and me early on that if we don't mow once a year, saplings will spring up, trees will grow, and our open land will gradually revert to forest. During our first autumn on Hyland Hill we hire a local contractor to "bush hog" the hillside. This task involves a tractor towing an agricultural mower. The cost: $300. The result: grass, weeds, saplings, and wildflowers laid low.

 

The following summer, my brother-in-law Geoff notices a rusty old scythe hanging in the front shed—one of many tools that Doris and Paul left us when they moved out. "That's an American scythe," Geoff tells me, and he points out the dull blade and the ungainly aluminum handle (which I later learn is called a snath). Geoff goes on to say: "Someone told me that these American scythes are almost useless. They're heavy and tiring to use, and the blades aren't very sharp. The good ones are Austrian—lighter and much sharper." These comments catch my attention but prompt no action at the time. A few weeks later, though, an article about scythes appears in—of all places—The Wall Street Journal. "Who Needs a WeedWacker When You Can Use a Scythe?" describes the ancient tool and its contemporary renaissance. "While Americans persist in cutting grass with labor-saving devices," Barry Newman writes, "faithful scythers believe their old tool has plenty of life left in it. U.S. scythe sales are nearing 10,000 a year now. . . . Predictably, scythe buyers are small, green farmers; unpredictably, they are also city folk and suburbanites." [Note 1.] Intrigued, I visit the Web site for the Marugg Company, a Tennessee-based husband-and-wife enterprise that Newman has mentioned in his article. This firm, founded by Swiss immigrants in 1873, is one of three main American sources for scythes. Most of the products they feature are made by Schrockenfux, an Austrian manufacturer founded in 1540. A helpful conversation with Amy Wilson, one of the Marugg Company's owners, leads to my ordering the first of two scythes that I purchase that summer. On receiving my order a week later, I try out the tool in our meadow. I am instantly thrilled with the experience—both the "feel" of the scythe and its elegant efficiency in cutting grass and weeds. Edith is skeptical at first but soon feels a similar delight. Within a few days we start working in the fields together—good outdoor exercise that becomes our equivalent of going for a daily run.

 

The scythe is essentially a sabre on a stick. Excepting the chain saw and the axe, no tool I've used seems more dangerous. It has a dark reputation, too, since most people know the scythe only as the Grim Reaper's harvest implement.

The bad rep is unfortunate. Just about any tool is dangerous if misused. Surely the most lethal device in our midst is the most utilized, most beloved, and most romanticized—the auto. (Given the statistics on how we die in the modern era, the up-to-date icon for Death should be the Grim Driver: a skeleton behind the wheel of an SUV.) Yes, the scythe is dangerous. But its nature, its modus, and its consequences aren't negative; on the contrary, civilization almost literally sprang from its blade. With a pedigree dating back to the pre-Neolithic sickle, the scythe made agriculture so much more efficient that it transformed the preindustrial world from the Fertile Crescent outward. Never mind the Grim Reaper's ghastly harvest: the scythe in human hands was the giver of life.

Something else is positive about the scythe. Unlike the chain saw, the SkilSaw, the Sawzall, the WeedWacker, the hedge trimmer, the push mower, the ride-on mower, the leaf blower, the snow thrower, the lawn edger, and all the other strident gas- and electric-powered machines that have replaced so many traditional hand tools, the scythe needs no fuel and makes no awful noise. It has an ancient, venerable feel to it, and not just because this implement is nearly silent. The scythe runs on human energy and certainly requires some effort, but it's surprisingly easy to use and repays the user with satisfaction and a sense of wellbeing. Now, having acquired our scythes, Edith and I must learn to use them. There's no one around to train us—no relatives or neighbors to demonstrate the basics, as would have been true throughout much of the world over the past two thousand years, or to coach us as we refine our skills. Paintings from the medieval and renaissance eras show men, women, and children working together in the fields; knowledge of using these tools must have been almost universal. But Edith and I have no elders, siblings, or neighbors to show us the way. How are we going to learn?

Typical for us as writers, our first recourse is to buy some books. The best of the lot is David Tresemer's The Scythe Book: Mowing Hay, Cutting Weeds, and Harvesting Small Grains with Hand Tools. [Note 2.] This manual provides exactly what the title and subtitle promise. Particularly helpful are several chapters on the proper technique for mowing. Tresemer is reassuring from the start. "Mowing should be comfortable, not too strenuous, not . . . tiring. If it is exhausting, it is wrongly done. . . . At its best, the stroke does not have to be stopped. It is initiated with just enough energy that the last of the grass is cut and thrown to the windrow [that is, a row of mowed-down stalks] as the momentum of the stroke is reduced to zero; the leftover energy is comfortably stored in the tendons to power the recovery back to the right." But instructions like these, even if precise, can be difficult to translate into action out there in the meadow.

Soon I resort to a standard contemporary gambit for learning a new skill: watching YouTube videos. I'm not surprised that scything videos are available, since videos about anything and everything are present on the Web, but the number and variety is bizarre. Options include "Scything," "Scything with Susan," "Lawn Scything," "Scything and Wind-rowing Hay in Scotland," "West Country Scythe Festival 2010," "Polish Peat Bog Scything Competition". . . The list goes on and on. Typical of YouTube, many of these clips are amusing but short on substance—the scything equivalent of cute-cat videos. Some, however, prove to be useful. "How to Scythe," for instance, demonstrates and describes basic techniques so well that I acquire my first really effective "feel" for the tool. "Scything and Wind-rowing Hay in Scotland" helps me refine my stance and stroke (and, while I'm at it, my Scottish brogue as well). "Martin Kebblewhite Teaching Scything" presents an expert's useful tips on multiple issues, among them the proper approach to peening, the tricky technique for periodically hammering the blade before honing it with a whetstone.

Edith and I experiment with the techniques we acquire, and soon each of us develops an individual style for how to use the tool. Edith's preference for mowing hay with a grass scythe leads to a graceful, rhythmic sweep. My task— trimming weeds and saplings with the brush scythe—requires shorter, more aggressive strokes. Over the next few months we hone our skills as well as the blades.

 

* * *

A question keeps nagging at me: who are our fellow scythers? Given the mechanization of agriculture in Vermont and throughout most of the world, who else is mowing with these ancient tools? To find out, I call Amy Wilson, co-owner of the Marugg Company. "I used to be able to pinpoint exactly who our customers are," she tells me, "but in the past four years or so, our typical customer has changed a lot. We used to get mostly people in the homesteading movement—people who want to go back to the land. We also get a lot of Amish or Mennonites. But around the end of 2007 and the beginning of 2008, things started to change. We got a lot more calls of people who lived in urban areas, people with community gardens. We had people who didn't want to use their mowers in urban areas because of higher gas prices, or else they wanted to use scything as a form of exercise. So it's changed to being just about anybody and everybody. But we still have a stronger following among the green communities—the back-to-the-land folks." The traditional customers, she says, are generally in places like Bucks County, Pennsylvania; in Amish and Mennonite regions of Ohio; and in other parts of the Midwest. The newer customers, including the urban gardeners, "could be anywhere."

After some further discussion, Amy mentions another kind of customer. "I don't know any other way to say this," she says, "but we get a lot of end-of-the-worlders—your doomsday prepares. I have no problem with that at all. Those people can live their life as they want. And they want a lot of references for other tools—'Do you know where I can get this? Do you know where I can get that?' Anything manual. There are some who don't want just one type of blade; they want just about every type of blade that we have. I know when they call I'm going to be on the phone for a very long time."

 

Where do Edith and I fit into this picture? We aren't Amish or Old Order Mennonites. Nor are we back-to-the-landers, homesteaders, urban gardeners, or doomsday prepares. We're just a couple of arts sixty-something former urbanites who love our meadow and want to keep it healthy.

 

Being such a crucial and common tool, the scythe and its ancestor, the sickle, have shown up frequently in poetry throughout the world. Among the surviving instances are many verses in the Bible, such as Joel 3:13—"Swing the sickle, for the harvest is ripe" and Revelation 14:18—"And another angel came out from the altar, which had power over fire; and cried with a loud cry to him that had the sharp sickle, saying, Thrust in thy sharp sickle, and gather the clusters of the vine of the earth; for her grapes are fully ripe." However, much more recent literature includes the scythe as a subject. One example is "Salivates," ("Mowing Song,") by an Icelandic poet, Jonas Hellgrammites, published in 1844. [Note 3.]

 

           Mowing Song

 

Swishing, stripping, slashing,

slowly he goes mowing,

scythe-blade lashing lithely,

lethally beneath him.

Gallant flowers are falling,

fate betrays the daisies.

Iron edge is tireless;

under him, earth thunders.

"Let's be glad!" the little

lamb bleats out and gambols,

"glad that when the winter

wakens, and they take me from

its dread and deadly

dangers to the manger,

loads of luscious fodder

lie there sweet and drying!"

Slashing, stripping, swashing,

sweeping, he goes reaping,

scythe is swishing blithely.

Slow, behind the mower,

walks a woman raking –

watch your distance, mistress!

not too near me, darling – near

my vicious whishing!

All the flowers have fallen,

fairest grasses perish:

life is brief, aborted

by the ripper's stripping.

Haft is humming softly,

hefted firmly, deftly;

iron edge is tireless;

under him, earth thunders.

With its heavily accented alliterations and its unblinking acceptance of mortality, "Mowing Song" sounds as if it could have been composed by the author of Belief, the Scandinavian epic that marked the start of Old English poetry. A strong Norse vigor, a barely constrained Viking harshness, powers this poem. The grass and the flowers fall before the mower's blade; the woman raking hay nearby is in peril; the earth itself resonates to his powerful strokes. Even the lamb, which would seem to be a symbol of life, will surely suffer harsh consequences from the scythe's work, since the "luscious fodder" he craves will leave him fattened for autumn slaughter. Hellgrammites's mower may be a strong, vibrant farmer, but he bears a disquieting resemblance to the Grim Reaper himself.

By contrast, Robert Frost's "Mowing," presents someone wielding a far subtler, far less aggressive implement. [Note 4.]

 

                                 Mowing

 

There was never a sound beside the wood but one,

And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground.

What was it it whispered? I knew not well myself;

Perhaps it was something about the heat of the sun,

Something, perhaps, about the lack of sound—

And that was why it whispered and did not speak.

It was no dream of the gift of idle hours,

Or easy gold at the hand of fay or elf:

Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak

To the earnest love that laid the swale in rows,

Not without feeble-pointed spikes of flowers

(Pale orchises), and scared a bright green snake.

The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.

My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make.

 

In addition to its dense beauty, this sonnet is not only one of Frost's finest meditations on manual work—a recurrent subject—but also a richly considered statement about what the late scholar Richard Poirier calls "the work of knowing." The mower, scything his meadow, listens to the sound the blade makes and ponders what it says. He rejects out of hand the notion that the scythe speaks of something dreamy ("the gift of idle hours") or supernatural ("easy gold at the hand of fay or elf"); instead, the substance of work itself—as well as the imaginative engagement with the ordinary world that work implies— is sufficient reward. Poirier writes:

 

By laboring in the field, where he meets with feeble flowers and bright snakes, he has shown what it means to "make hay while the sun shines"; he has shown, also, that the very process of knowing what he is up to constitutes the "making" of the poem; and he can leave the "hay" to "make" what it will of whatever it can. . . .

When the sonnet arrives at the conviction that "Anything more than the truth would seem too weak," it arrives at an oxymoron. And this is one evidence that the "truth" . . . which is promised for the sestet, far from being denuded of poetic and intellectual tradition to which the whole poem responds, will instead transcend these. . . . The speaker has the satisfaction not in the results of his labor but in the labor itself, and his earnestness, in every sense of the word just mentioned, is communicated both in the grammatical simplicity of his declaration and in its open ended myths. "The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows." [Note 5.]

 

What does "Mowing" tell me about the task of scything? Essentially it says what I've already sensed during my early efforts with the tool, though Frost always puts the matter more subtly than I can grasp: that the "thusness" of such work offers deep, though often intangible, even imperceptible, satisfactions.

 

One summer day, our across-the-road neighbor, Lenny, drives by and, spotting Edith and me in our front yard, backs up his truck and pulls over. We chat about the weather, our gardens, and his hunting trips. Then, as we discuss some changes we're making to the property, he suddenly grows animated, almost giddy. "And weren't you guys actually—?" He interrupts himself, then blurts, "The other day I said to my wife: 'I drove past Edith and Ed's place, and you know what? They were actually scything!" He couldn't have sounded more astonished if he'd said, "They were dancing naked on the roof!" This comment confirms what Edith and I have suspected: that our use of scythes will make us the laughing stock of the area. What will those crazy Flatlanders do next! I respond to Lenny's remarks by explaining that we like to try out these traditional farm tools because they give us a glimpse of our ancestors' lives. He smiles patiently. I could say more, of course—could explain how easy a good scythe is to use, how graceful in cutting the grass, how efficient in grooming the meadow, how pleasurable in making hard work easy, how exhilarating, how entrancing, how meditative. I hold back. Explanations will get us nowhere. At a time when people consider the noisy, smelly, gas-wasting WeedWacker a sensible device, waxing poetical about our Austrian scythes won't work in our favor.

 

Oddly enough, it's Leo Tolstoy who teaches Edith and me what we need to know. In Part III of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy describes how the wealthy landowner Konstantin Dmitrievich Levin participates in the autumn harvest. Just as Tolstoy himself labored among the peasants at Yasnaya Polyana, his family estate, Levin joins the peasants mowing hay on his own property; and during that days-long communal effort, he finds himself working with an older, experienced mower and a younger, less experienced one. The harvest passages from Anna Karenina provide the fullest, richest description in literature of scything as a sensory experience. [Note 6.]

 

After lunch Levin was not in the same place in the string of mowers as before, but stood between the old man who had accosted him jocosely, and now invited him to be his neighbor, and a young peasant, who had only been married in the autumn, and who was mowing this summer for the first time.

Levin immediately notices the older peasant's efficiency and economy of motion:

The old man, holding himself erect, moved in front, with his feet turned out, taking long, regular strides, and with a precise and regular action which seemed to cost him no more effort than swinging one's arms in walking, as though it were in play, he laid down the high, even row of grass. It was as though it were not he but the sharp scythe of itself swishing through the juicy grass.

By contrast, the younger peasant works harder but less effectively:

Behind Levin came the lad Mishka. His pretty, boyish face, with a twist of fresh grass bound round his hair, was working with effort; but whenever anyone looked at him he smiled. He would clearly have died sooner than own it was hard work for him.

Somehow Levin reaches a compromise between these two states of skill and grace; and as the work proceeds, he manages to attain a rhythm that makes the work easy and almost automatic.

 

Levin kept between them. In the very heat of the day the mowing did not seem such hard work to him. The perspiration with which he was drenched cooled him, while the sun, that burned his back, his head, and his arms, bare to the elbow, gave a vigor and dogged energy to his labor; and more and more often now came those moments of unconsciousness, when it was possible not to think what one was doing. The scythe cut of itself. These were happy moments. . . . The longer Levin mowed, the oftener he felt the moments of unconsciousness in which it seemed not his hands that swung the scythe, but the scythe mowing of itself, a body full of life and consciousness of its own, and as though by magic, without thinking of it, the work turned out regular and well-finished of itself. These were the most blissful moments.

 

This state of being—familiar to athletes, artists, meditators, and lovers—is flow. The doer and the act he or she performs are one and the same. It's a state not just of efficient work but of mindfulness, of fully and deeply inhabiting the present moment. "Levin did not notice how time was passing. If he had been asked how long he had been working he would have said half an hour—and it was getting on for dinner time."

 

The sun sank behind the forest. The dew was falling by now; the mowers were in the sun only on the hillside, but below, where a mist was rising, and on the opposite side, they mowed into the fresh, dewy shade. The work went rapidly. The grass cut with a juicy sound, and was at once laid in high, fragrant rows. The mowers from all sides, brought closer together in the short row, kept urging one another on to the sound of jingling dipper and clanging scythes, and the hiss of the whetstones sharpening them, and good-humored shouts.

 

* * *

 

So there you have it. Wielding the scythe properly, you get a good fullbody workout, a flow state, a bonding experience with your fellows, hours of sensory delight, and communion with nature. You get hay or wheat, too, while you're at it. You aren't grim at all as you reap, you're cheerful—and rightly so.

The scythe bestows not death but life.

Edith and I have no peasants toiling on our property, so we can't partake of the communal experience that Levin enjoys in the fields. We are our own serfs. We enjoy the work, however, and we revel in collaborating on this task. In September of that first year of scything, we hand-mow our entire meadow. We then wheel many barrows piled high with cut grass into our big vegetable garden to use as mulch. The rest of the hay lies mounded across the hillside where, once the heavy frosts arrive in October, the windrows look as white and as glittery as snowdrifts. All winter the old grass withers and deteriorates beneath the real snow—so much the better to nurture the new grass that will spring forth in April.

 

Notes:

[1] Newman, Barry. "Who Needs a WeedWacker When You Can Use a Scythe?" The Wall Street Journal Online. June 29, 2012. Source:

 

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304782404577490583379647566. html

 

[2] Tresemer, David. The Scythe Book: Mowing Hay, Cutting Weeds, and Harvesting Small Grains with Hand Tools. Chambersburg, Penn.: Alan C. Hood & Company, Inc., 1981, 1996.]

 

[3] Hallgrímsson, Jónas. "Mowing Song" ("Sláttuvísa"). Source:

 

http://www.library.wisc.edu/etext/jonas/Slattu/Slattu.html Archivist's notes: "JS 129 fol., where it is entitled "Sláttuvísa" (facsimile KJH152- 3), and KG31bV, where it is entitled "Sláttuvísa!" Translator is unknown.

 

[4] Frost, Robert. "Mowing" in The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. New York: Holt, Rhinehart and Winston, 1969.

 

[5] Poirier, Richard. Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1977, 1990.

 

[6] Tolstoy, Leo. Anna Karenina (Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, translators). New York: Penguin Classics, 2004.

 

 

 

 

Diane Payne
Warped Optimism

After making the one hundred mile drive with my daughter for the Breast MRI appointment, she takes off to meet an old friend who is a medical student at the hospital.  “Oh, no, is this going to be a Grey’s Anatomy booty call?”  She ignores me and takes off to have way more fun than I will during my 90-minute appointment.  She gets a booty call.  I get a booby call.  I’m already feeling like a curmudgeon about this MRI.

I’ve been coming to this clinic for years.  They know my high-risk history.  I was there two weeks ago for a mammogram.  I’m not a stranger.  They have my medical records in their hands, yet, just as someone is squeezing my breast for a mammogram or injecting me with the dye for the MRI, they always ask:  “Who in your family has had breast cancer?”

Seriously, you don’t know?  And when they ask the age of my mother when she first learned that she had breast cancer, and I say 30, they always shake their heads, cluck a bit, and sigh.  When I report my sister is now cancer-free, they seem a bit more relieved. “Ooh, aunts and cousins too.  You’re lucky you haven’t had a biopsy.”  I feel like they’re going to say yet, but they control themselves. 

Doomsayers.

Standing there with my breasts flopping, we could talk about anything. I’d be game to discuss hairballs, toothpaste, bad cheese, or Brad Pitt (not Angelina Jolie).   I don’t want to talk about my long list of relatives who’ve had breast cancer. Shirtless, I want to walk down the hallway, sagging breasts flopping merrily as I leave their clinic.  “I don’t need to be here,” I imagine myself saying as my parting words.

Instead, I get to shove my breasts down a couple of holes, and am warned not to move or I’ll have to do the MRI all over again.  This technician doesn’t even ask me what music I want to hear.  She just shoves the large headphones on and walks away. I have to ask her for the plastic ball to squeeze.  “Just incase I feel claustrophobic.”

She shakes her head no.  “You’re a pro at this.  You’ve been coming here, since,” she looks at the report, the report that lists all those relatives also, “since 2006.  Wow, sometimes twice in a year.”  She hands me the ball and shakes her head again.

 No, I won’t be claustrophobic?  No, don’t you dare squeeze that ball.

Why do I bother informing them that I am claustrophobic?

“It will only be twelve minutes of actual screening before I return with the dye.”

Only?  Twelve minutes of listening to the pneumatic drill.  What about all the minutes before getting the scan positioned correctly? How do those minutes count?

I resign myself to the MRI and immediately find myself in panic mode.  I am over-reacting.  I know this, but can’t calm myself.  She doesn’t turn on any music.  She looks like a country western person.  What if she’s Christian rock?  I want to squeeze the ball, but don’t want to face any more time here.  I can feel my heart beating rapidly.  I’ve done this before, I can do it again.  I am being an asshole.  I think of assholes at work to distract myself.  Thinking of them depresses me.  This is not a good time to suffer from depression.

 My heart continues beating way too fast.  Maybe I’m having a heart attack. I can’t think about my heart.  Instead I think of a lover who named his dick Harry.  The scan begins and the loud noise starts to comfort me in an oddly unnatural way.  It’s so loud I can’t think of my poor heart pounding rapidly against the machine. I wonder why men are so stupid as to give their dicks names. Dickhead is the perfect word to describe these men.  I can’t imagine naming my vagina Sally.  Sally’s horny. Sally’s sweating.  Sally’s lonely.  Sally doesn’t miss Harry.

A cancer thought happens.  I don’t want to think about losing my hair.  In the past, I’ve made these weird deals with myself that I won’t color my hair again if I lose it to chemo.  Once it grows back, that’s it.  The chemo, ragged grey.  No more henna.

I don’t want to think those fucked-up cancer thoughts.  I’m an optimist.  Albeit a grumpy one.  Overly happy optimistic people piss me off.  Everything is pissing me off in this damn machine.

I think about my daughter being on a booty call.  I miss being young.   In this depressing hole, I’m supposed to think, but at least I’m alive.  At least it’s not called the Cancer Clinic.  Or is it?  Maybe I’ve been coming here for years and just thinking it’s called Breast Clinic.  Maybe it’s Breast Cancer Clinic.  How do I overlook these crucial details?

My heart.  I must quit thinking these thoughts.

When I told her my daughter how much this MRI would cost me, she said not to do it.  “We could fly to a beach for that money.”

Yes, a beach would be a much more useful way to spend money than sitting in this damn MRI.  Siting on a beach or in the MRI?  What is wrong with me?  I have choices.  No, I’m guilted into taking this precautionary MRI.  Again and again and again.  “If we catch it early, you’ll be so much better off, “ the radiologist said after recommending this MRI.

They’re so upbeat in this joint.

A few weeks ago they had their bright pink ribbon Christmas tree standing in the office.  One year I was there while someone put the tree up.  A pink ribbon tree in the Breast Clinic.  Isn’t that a bit much?   I felt more and more depressed with each pink ribbon ornament she placed on the tree. We don’t want to think about cancer while we are in the hospital for our appointment with the Breast Clinic. Humor us.  How about a glass of holiday sparkly while we are waiting to see the doctor? How about an upbeat tree with no awareness message?  Can’t we have a normal tree like normal people?  I would never be a friend with anyone who had a pink ribbon Christmas tree set up in her house. 

Humorless staff.

I was defensive with the radiologist after the second round of mammograms and the ultrasound in one month, and had said it seemed a bit unnecessary to have the MRI since both sets of mammograms and the ultrasound had all been deemed benign, nothing suspicious.  “It’s what we may be missing,” he said, leaning over me while I sat there in the dressing room, basically unclothed. 

Doomsayer.

The noise stops and the technician arrives to inject the dye.         

“You’re doing great,” she says.   “Just twelve more minutes.”

“The headphones are driving me crazy.”           

“Don’t move,” she scolds, ”or you’ll have to come back again.”           

The twelve minutes is never really twelve minutes. I obsess over how long the twelve minutes really are, the twelve minutes they actually count. My heart starts pounding. I want to pull the headphones off and squeeze the plastic ball.  Let her comfort me while I’m having my claustrophobic crisis.  She doesn’t seem the comforting type. 

I regret eating that large slice of olive pizza at Whole Foods right before this appointment.   My head is supposed to be shoved facedown in this foam pad, as if I’m having a massage, but my nose has to be free for air or I believe I can’t breathe and I will start to panic. Why can’t I be more normal?  At least I don’t have a pink ribbon Christmas tree.  I wonder what would happen if I puked down that hole designed for my resting face.  I wonder how many people have barfed doing a breast MRI. Wonder if some people are so panicky that they have someone sitting in this radiation room, screaming assuring shit at them while the scan takes place.

And then it’s over. 

My daughter is punctual.  Her face is flushed.  She’s had a much better ninety minutes than me.

At least I’m alive, I think.  The Breast Clinic has warped me.

Screw that perverse thinking.  I want a booty call.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fred Skolnik
My Kafka

I am moved by the lives of lonely men. I mean men without women who lived inside themselves at the price of a great renunciation. I think of Spinoza and Kierkegaard. I think of Nietzsche. But of all those who threw the world  away I think most of all of Kafka, for it is in him that I recognize what was perhaps the extreme possibility of my own life, the life I did not choose, or could not choose.

   I find him not in his fiction but in his letters and diaries. Of the letters, the ones to Felice Bauer, referred to only as F. or F.B. in the diaries and to whom Kafka was twice engaged, reveal the anguish of his inner struggle most fully. Later there would be connections with Milena Jesenská and Dora Dymant, but these belong to the final period when all hope of ordinary happiness had been lost. It was Felice who played the role of Kierkegaard's Regine and might have saved him from his loneliness, but then he would not have been Kafka.

   The diary entry for August 16, 1912 describes their first meeting: "When I arrived at Brod's on August 13 she was sitting at the table, looking to me like a housemaid. I was not in the least bit curious about who she was, immediately taking her to be just another part of the scenery. Bony, empty face that wore its emptiness openly. Bare throat. Casual blouse. Looked very domestic though, as it turned out, she really wasn't. (I alienate myself from her a little by examining her so closely….)" Five weeks later he wrote the first of over 500 letters to her ("In the likelihood that you no longer have even the slightest recollection of me, allow me to introduce myself again: my name is Franz Kafka …").  She was 24 at the time, employed in an executive position by a Berlin dictaphone maker, "a happy, healthy, self-confident girl," forthright and efficient. Kafka was 29, a doctor of law working at the Worker's Accident Insurance Institute in Prague, where he would remain until nearly the end of his life, and still living at home. He had also begun publishing his sketches and stories and in December would publish his first book, a small collection called Betrachtung (Meditation). In his literary circle, of which his friend Max Brod was a part, there was also much talk about Palestine and on that same night Kafka had even invited Felice to join him on a trip there. In the meantime he wrote his letters, explaining himself at length, and by November 1912 they were writing in terms of love, though they only saw each other again in Berlin toward the end of March of the following year.

   What Kafka explained to Felice, and later to her family, was his dedication to literature and his inability to live a normal life. He was, in his own words, timid, shy, self-conscious, "unfit for any human relationships," "ill at ease among people," "peevish, miserable, silent, discontented and sickly," "taciturn, unsociable, morose, selfish, a hypochondriac, and actually in poor health." In his diary he wrote of "the joy of imagining a knife twisting in my heart." He also wrote, somewhat ironically, that his mother considered him a healthy young man who suffered a little from the notion that he was ill, which would pass in time, especially if he married and had children, as would his exaggerated devotion to literature. Writing, however – his talent for portraying his "dreamlike inner life" and "the tremendous world" he had in his head – was, as he told Felice, the only thing that made his inner existence possible and gave him the right to live: "The desire to renounce the greatest human happiness for the sake of writing keeps cutting every muscle in my body." To Felice's father too he  would explain the meaning of writing for him: "My whole being is directed toward literature; I have followed this direction unswervingly until my 30th year, and the moment I abandon it I cease to live. Everything I am, and am not, is a result of this." Writing, he had noted in his diary, used up all his energy, leaving him empty for other pursuits like "sex, eating, drinking, philosophical reflection, and above all music." To Felice he also described his regimen: 8 a.m to 2 or 2:30 at the insurance office in work he hated; lunch till 3 or 3:30; sleep till 7:30; 10 minutes of exercise, "naked at the open window," then an hour's walk, dinner, and writing from 10 or later until 1, 2 or 3 o'clock and "once even until 6 in the morning."

   This last session produced "The Judgment," his first major work, in one sitting, nine days after meeting Felice. It is a story about the relationship between an aging father and his recently engaged son, who has taken over the flourishing family business, and a friend of the son's, stuck in a failed business venture abroad, whom the father favors, cursing the son in a deranged tirade and "sentencing" him to die by drowning, a "judgment" that the son promptly carries out. The story has been interpreted in many ways. Kafka himself asserted to Felice (June 2, 1913) that he could not find any coherent meaning in the story, "nor can I explain anything in it," noting only some "strange things," for example, that the name of the fiancée in the story, Frieda, had the same initial and the same number of letters as Felice and that the feld ("field") of the fiancée's last name, Brandenfeld, was related to Felice's last name, Bauer ("farmer"). However, a week later he wrote to her:

 

            The friend is hardly a real person, perhaps he is more whatever the father and

            Georg [the son] have in common. The story may be a journey around father

            and son, and the friend's changing shape may be a change in perspective in

            the relationship between father and son. But I am not quite sure of this either.

  

    Months before (Feb. 11) he had also noted in his diary that it is the father that dominates the relationship and "uses the common bond of the friend to set himself up as Georg's antagonist." Kafka had written the story spontaneously, almost in a trance, and certainly it echoed his troubled relationship with his domineering and insensitive father ("You are all strangers to me," he had told his mother), so that the friend may even be seen as a kind of alter ego and the judgment as an expression of the father's contempt for Georg, almost consigning him back to the amniotic fluid of the womb where he might never have been born. This was the idea of his father that Kafka bore within him.

   The story also echoed his feelings about Felice, whom he now proceeded to pursue obsessively, writing to her once or twice a day, reproaching her if she did not reply immediately and "trembling with joy like a lunatic" when he received a letter from her. It is, however, a measure of his integrity, or fear of marriage, or both, that he represented himself to her as he was, warned her in fact, while at the same time declaring his love. "If I arrived in person," he wrote in November, "you would find me insufferable…. My mode of life … would seem to you crazy and intolerable." But at the same time: "Please don't turn your back on me, for all that, nor try to improve me in this respect, but tolerate me in a kindly way across this great distance." And again (Jan. 19, 1913): "You will never get unadulterated happiness from me; only as much unadulterated suffering as one could wish for; and yet – don't send me away," and in early March: "How can you, if you are in your right mind, continue to stay with me? … after all, you are a girl, and want a man, not a flabby worm …"

   Their meeting in Berlin later in March did not go well, for each of them was now confronting the reality of the idealized other person for the first time. It is understandable why Kafka should have been attracted to a healthy woman like Felice. He had in fact confessed in his diary to his yearning for the happiness of having a wife and children. It may be less understandable why Felice should have been attracted to Kafka, given his warnings and the manner in which he represented himself. Nonetheless she had declared her love for him and asserted that "we belong together unconditionally" (Jan. 1, 1913) and later that he had become "indispensable" to her. Kafka himself would later speculate about her feelings for him, offering her three possibilities to explain why she persisted in their relationship: compassion for his sorry state; disbelief in what he wrote about himself; and lack of understanding of his "wretched personality" or a "terrible misapprehension" that he might turn into a "useful human being with whom a steady, calm, lively relationship would be possible." Felice did occasionally deflect his complaints, even somewhat impatiently – "I don't believe them, and you don't either" – avowing too, when they were contemplating marriage, that she would get used to him.      

   It is, however, really pointless to speculate why an uncomplicated and level-headed young woman like Felice Bauer was attracted to someone like Kafka, whose problematic and even adolescent personality, or "pathological sensitivity," as Max Brod wrote to her, shines through in every letter he wrote, especially when an expected letter from her did not arrive. The connection between them, like all romantic connections, was not rational. One must also take her at her word when she asserts that she did not take altogether seriously Kafka's picture of what marriage to him would be like, for it must have struck her as impossibly exaggerated, like his physical complaints, and in any case she must have felt capable of modifying his behavior and harnessing him to the conventions of bourgeois life, along with a woman's impulse to nurture and heal.  

   In this period Kafka wrote The Metamorphosis and was working on Amerika, publishing the first chapter, "The Stoker," in May. In May too he saw Felice again and by June was pressing her to marry him, though assuring her that she might meet "distinguished, well-dressed, vigorous, healthy, amusing young men – that is to say, men with whom, if I were to be confronted with them for comparison, I would simply have to do away with myself." He also continued to paint a very bleak picture of the "monastic existence" that marriage to him would entail, in effect taking away with one hand what he was offering with the other:

 

            But what, dearest Felice, have you to say to the kind of married life in which

            the husband, at any rate for several months in the year, returns from the office

            at 2:30 or 3, eats, lies down, sleeps until 7 or 8, hurriedly has his supper, takes

            an hour's walk, and then starts writing, and writes till 1 or 2. Could you really

            stand that? To know nothing about your husband except that he is sitting in

            his room writing? (June 21, 1913)

 

   He could not live without her, he declared, nor with her. "Through marriage," he wrote, "… I shall perish," and in his diary (July 21, 1913) made a "Summary of all the arguments for and against marriage." Of these, one paragraph was for marriage ("Inability to endure life alone") and six against, including the need "to be alone a great deal," hatred of "everything that does not relate to literature," and "fear of the connection, of passing into the other. Then I'll never be alone again." Nonetheless, three more visits to Berlin followed, with Grete Bloch, a friend of Felice's, now acting as a go-between, given Kafka's misgivings and Felice's own growing doubts and the awkwardness and inconclusiveness of their meetings and correspondence. Finally, in April 1914, somewhat reconciled, they were unofficially engaged, for despite everything Felice was apparently "prepared to risk it," as Kafka had noted in July 1913.

   In early May, Felice was in Prague apartment hunting and there was immediately disagreement about the furnishings, for Felice clearly wanted a bourgeois home, selecting heavy pieces in Berlin that Kafka saw as "tombstones." Nonetheless, at the beginning of June, Kafka's family was in Berlin for the official engagement. "Was tied hand and foot like a criminal," he wrote in his diary:

 

            Had they sat me down in a corner bound in real chains, placed policemen

            in front of me, and let me look on simply like that, it could not have been

            worse. And that was my engagement; everybody made an effort to bring

            me to life, and when they couldn’t, to put up with me as I was. F. least of

            all, of course, with complete justification, for she suffered the most.

 

In July, however, the engagement was broken off at a formal conference, or "tribunal," at the Askanische Hof hotel in Berlin, where Felice "patted her hair, wiped her nose, yawned … and said very studied, hostile things." Grete Bloch was present too, to whom Kafka had written in a manner "almost discrediting" Felice, and this too was put into evidence. Kafka refused to defend himself, said nothing one way or the other in fact, withdrawing into his shell.

   In August the War broke out, which affected Kafka marginally as he was exempt from service in his semi-government position, though his two brothers-in-law were at the front. In August, too, Kafka was already working on The Trial. In 1914 he also wrote "In the Penal Colony" and "The Giant Mole." Though Kafka was not writing so much about the world as about his own condition in the world, and specifically his alienation from it – Gregor Samsa and the Hunger Artist are Kafka – the world he did write about – the world as an idea rather than a reality – was one that refused to yield a meaning and it is this world that has spoken to his readers. Ultimately, in his imagination and intelligence Kafka was greater than his life, and therefore his art transcends it and belongs to anyone who seeks what cannot be found.

   The connection with Felice was resumed a few months later in letters that were now considerably calmer than the ones that had preceded them. The following January they met in Bodenbach. In May they were in Switzerland (together with Grete Bloch) and in June in Carlsbad, though he had told her: "I am in conflict only with myself, and for both our sakes I must on no account drag you with me into this conflict" (Apr. 5, 1915). Apparently, however, Felice was pressing to renew the relationship, and in early July 1916 they were together in Marienbad for ten days, in adjoining rooms with a connecting door, and presumably were physically intimate for the first time.

 

            The hardships of living together. Forced upon us by strangeness, pity, lust,

            cowardice, vanity, and only deep down, perhaps, a thin little stream worthy of

            the name of love, impossible to seek out, flashing once in the moment of a

            moment.

           

Receive me into your arms, they are the depths, receive me into the depths.

           

Take me, take me, web of folly and pain. (Diaries, July 3, 6)

 

   Here too, in his diary, he wrote that he had never been intimate (vertraut) with anyone except for an older woman in Zuckmantel on summer vacations in 1905 and 1906 and a young "Swiss girl" at a sanitarium in Riva, Austria, where he had stayed in Sept.-Oct. 1913, in one of his cooling-off periods with Felice, and about whom he later told her, though it is not simple to determine the nature of these relationships or the degree of intimacy they involved. Grete Bloch too apparently made a claim to such intimacy in a letter to a friend in 1940, suggesting that she had had an illegitimate child by Kafka in around 1914 (who died seven years later), but nothing in Kafka's letters to her indicates such a relationship. What Kafka does state explicitly, in a letter to Milena Jesenská, is that he lost his virginity at the age of 20 to a shopgirl moonlighting as a prostitute, and in his diaries there are references to other prostitutes as well. His attitude to his own body and to the sex act in general was one of revulsion. ("The fear does not refer to me alone," Milena would write to Max Brod, "but to everything that lives without shame, such as the flesh, for example. The flesh is too exposed; he cannot bear to see it.")

   From Marienbad, Kafka and Felice wrote a joint letter to her mother, reaffirming their vows as it were, and there now followed a period of apparent harmony and even a more sober approach to their relationship. To Max Brod, Kafka wrote:

 

            Our agreement is, briefly, to get married soon after the end of the war, to take

            two or three rooms in a Berlin suburb, each of us providing for his or her

            domestic needs. F. will continue to work as heretofore, and I, well, I can't

            tell yet … Nonetheless – the situation is calm, definite, and thus it has real

            possibilities …

 

Elias Canetti, in his searching study of the letters to Felice (Kafka's Other Trial), sees this period as representing a reversal of their roles. Rather than resisting Felice, Kafka now undertook to remake her, to wean her from her bourgeois ideas, "to take the furniture out of her," as Canetti puts it, and thereby turn her into a more suitable companion. In particular, he urged her to become involved in the Jewish People's Home in Berlin as a volunteer, which she promptly did. But Felice still had a mind of her own and when they met again, four months later in Munich, they had another fight, in some pastry shop, where she accused him of selfishness. None of their correspondence in the first eight months of 1917 has survived but in July 1917 their second engagement was formally announced and there was some more apartment hunting. Canetti speculates that they must have had still another falling out when they traveled to Hungary together to visit Felice's sister later in the month, for Kafka left her there and returned home alone. From this point on, it is clear that he was looking to terminate the connection, which he did at the end of the year after he was diagnosed with tuberculosis in both lungs, though the illness can only be seen as a pretext. "I do not believe," he had written to her in October 1916, "that the battle for any woman in any fairy tale has ever been fought harder and more desperately than the battle for you within myself …"

   Kafka died in 1924, thinking to settle in Tel Aviv and open a restaurant with Dora Dymant, who shared the last year of his life. Felice married a prosperous Berlin businessman in 1919 and, unlike Kafka's three sisters, she and her husband and their two children escaped the Holocaust, having moved to Switzerland in 1931 and emigrating to the United States in 1936. In 1955 she sold Kafka's letters to Schocken Books. Her own letters to Kafka have apparently not survived.

   The manner in which Kafka perceived and acted in the world was conditioned in the same way as it is in all of us. It was rooted to a great extent in his relationship to his parents, in whatever traumas this and other experiences might have involved, and in the way he responded to these experiences, which was itself a function of temperament, intelligence, and everything else that was in him at a given moment. All of this was funneled into his relationship with Felice, so that it can be seen rationally as the outgrowth of his own understanding of himself or pathologically from an oedipal or some other Freudian point of view (which few critics and biographers have been able to resist imposing on his life and writings). Clearly the Kafka who consciously repudiates ordinary happiness in the name of literature will strike one as a more noble figure than the Kafka who is neurotically incapable of achieving real intimacy with a woman. In each case there is an inner struggle. In the first case the neurosis is the ground upon which Kafka's rationalizations are constructed. He weighs the options and understands the consequences of each. He refuses to surrender his art to his love. In the second case he acts blindly. Every word he writes or speaks to Felice is the product of conflicting emotions that he cannot control or resolve. The words, thoughts, feelings flow from him spontaneously though rationalized in the act of communicating them. Both of these Kafkas of course existed at one and the same time, and that is the case with all of us, for all of us contend consciously with the impulses that present themselves to us, sometimes surrendering to them, sometimes overcoming them. How, precisely, the will is exercised is a question that cannot really be answered. Perhaps it may be said that the loudest voice prevails. Each relevant neuron with its particular baggage casts its vote and the ayes or the nays have it, figuratively speaking, of course.

   Kafka pursued Felice because he dreamed of some ideal state where he could live harmoniously with a woman and experience conventional happiness. At his most optimistic he envisaged a connection where Felice somehow accommodated herself to him, making herself available when he was ready to receive her while at all other times he stuck to his routine, including the writing, as if she was not there. In more sober moments he realized that such a marriage was impossible and would demand modifications in his way of life that he believed would destroy him. Therefore he chose literature, which is to say he chose to remain himself and relinquish the dream of happiness.

   When I say that I recognize in Kafka the extreme possibility of my own life, I do not mean to imply that I share his genius, or his anguish, though I too have always lived best inside myself. What I mean is that I saw the precipice and I saw the abyss. It may be that I was very far from the edge, that I recoiled from it with dread, but certainly I internalized and assimilated the possibility of not having a world and made it part of my consciousness, and it is this that gave me the horizon against which I write and draws me to the lives of men like Kafka. At the same, however, it never really occurred to me to relinquish the idea of  conventional happiness in the name of literature, though writing was at the center of my life too. I also have no regrets. Some may attribute this to a lack of seriousness or a lack of character. It did not occur to me that marriage might stand in the way of writing or that writing might stand in the way of marriage, but if I take the extreme case, Kafka's case, I am not convinced, in my own case, that it would have made any difference, that bachelorhood, to put it simply, would have enabled me to flourish as a writer, and then it would have been for nothing, so to speak, and ironically this was what Kafka himself might have been forced to conclude, as he was dissatisfied with most of what he wrote, though the world thought otherwise. Kafka of course believed that it was in him to produce something truly great that reflected everything that was in him and insisted that he could only do so in complete isolation. It is hard to know if he was right. Though it is difficult to imagine such a thing, it is tempting to suggest that The Trial and The Castle might have come to him in any case, forced themselves upon him just as "The Judgment" had and that he would have been compelled to write the two novels even surrounded by heavy Berlin furniture and with Felice's occasional or frequent nagging.

   It is true, at the same time, that specific events or experiences inspired his work, and just as meeting Felice had moved him to write "The Judgment," breaking off the engagement with her must have given him the premise and the impetus for The Trial. At the Askanische Hof inquisition, Kafka's culpability had been spelled out very clearly, he understood what he was being accused of perfectly well and chose not to defend himself, whereas the charges against Joseph K. in The Trial are unspecified, so that here again Kafka transcended his life, giving it a universal dimension, for in The Trial Joseph K.'s guilt may be said to reside in his existence as such, touching upon his very right to exist, and it is possible for the reader to understand, beyond the scope of the novel, that an existence must pursue its own truth and create its own value in a universe that for all intents and purposes is devoid of meaning.

   A human life, like a musical score, is written in a key, and it is this key that underlies it through all the variations it encompasses. In his life Kafka exhibits a broad and complex range of responses, which, when projected into his art, often defy interpretation, but always underlying this life is the most basic of all human instincts – the will to preserve the integrity of his own being. For most of us, this instinct operates on many levels and is able to accommodate itself to a great variety of circumstances. For Kafka, in the face of an impenetrable world and his own crippled psyche, which blocked every conventional horizon, it was reduced to the single dimension of his existence as an artist, the artist as mole, turned inward, with everything that was not art seen as a threat, whether it took the shape of bourgeois furniture or intimacy with a woman.

   But there was more subtlety, and more anguish, in Kafka than most of us can imagine, for though there is no meaning to things other than what is in ourselves, both Kafka and Joseph K. continued to pursue what was outside themselves, whether it was an unknown God or perfect justice or some underlying universal truth or harmony, something sensed but never grasped, and this too gives meaning to a life, even if it is never found.

 

 

 

 

 

Mike Ekunno
The Underdogs are Coming    

My friend and mentor, Prof Graham Mort, had been in South Africa and attended a reading in some Black community over which he enthused with pictures on social media with a view to publicizing the team’s good works within a deprived neighborhood. I quickly alerted him to the prospects of his good being evil spoken of by exoticism’s denizens. Not that most emotionally stable people would feel hurt or condescended to by admiration, but what do we know. The period zeitgeist favors underdogs in ascendancy. And have these canines been lapping it all up!

There couldn’t therefore be a better time in history than now in which to be the underdog. The Black race is set to overawe anyone who references her, be it for good or ill. The same-sex marriage lobby is on a global overdrive with feminism on a super-charged bitchiness. Never in history has the mainstreaming of marginal or minority ideologies and groups been willingly championed by the self-same majority who stood to lose by that ascendancy. Everywhere, un-empowered and disempowered groups are having their causes championed gratuitously by lords of the mainstream.

The 1960s’ Black and Proud Movement must be feeling over-realized the way Black has morphed from despised to gawked. But just when its inheritors should be rolling out the drums, they’d rather unsheathe swords at those who they accuse of exoticizing Black.  It increasingly appears that “Thanks, you’re welcome”, has become a piece of anachronism as far as proper response for race-related compliments goes. And you wonder just how far admiration can go. Lupita Nyong’o  is the latest poster girl of both the complexion and the race. But a certain inexorable lot would have the world believe the West’s obsession is down to condescension and exoticism, the kind of admiration reserved for premium breeds in Western cultures. All this makes comfort in one’s skin highly nuanced. Its literal capacity has subverted and substituted the metaphorical one.

Meanwhile, nobody should be deceived as to the consensus among Black Africans on the pecking order for black shades. From chocolate brown to charcoal black, the shades of black on the continent and in the Diaspora are a kaleidoscope. But the hue paraded by the peoples of the Horn of Africa seems to be the West’s preference. The creamy hue of their complexion coupled with aquiline features give the Ethiopian and Somalian beauty an edge over her other sub-Saharan sisters. So says Western pundits for which they are vilified by the peoples of their admiration no less. Safy-Hallan Farah discusses this “acceptable blackness” in her Poetic Justice: Drake and East African Girls. So next time you listen to A Whiter Shade of Pale, know ye that Africa has her blacker shades of dark.

It’d be tolerable if all the grumpiness of the Black race were only about skin tone. The hyper-sensitivity and self-consciousness displayed by my race spurred by an indulgent media is sickening and bothers on the psychotic. The racial slur industry has grown from the media to European football and since there aint enough diversity on US basketball courts to feed it, it has poached from the game’s boardroom instead. How do grown sportsmen in an emotive contact sport disintegrate and snivel all because somebody made monkey sounds? How do you accept being the target of whole shoppers’ shut nostrils in the market place if you know you’re not stinking? And if you are, grouching about how other people choose to keep out odor wouldn’t change anything.

So gloating over Donald Sterling’s loss and having Black brothers and sisters line up to buy over The Clippers is no comeuppance for Sterling. It is pure sadism. No man should be made to suffer so much for opinions he holds and canvasses in private. Racial slurs are bandied all the time, let’s get that clear. And by both top dogs and underdogs. It should be sufficient that one is sensitive to social correctness in not ventilating one’s prejudices openly. The ability to censor our thoughts is enough burden and nobody should be punished for their thoughts. Sterling was secretly recorded and could have been baited. Why are racial slurs only so when hurled by ‘others’? Why would Oprah Winfrey’s ‘Negroes in the house!’ and Mohammed Ali’s well-known racial slurs against late Joe Frazier be overlooked, deservedly, if you ask me? It is because we all recognize subconsciously that what is at stake is not so much racial hatred as light-hearted banter. That is why when it comes to Black-on-Black, we all look the other way and dismiss potential racial slurs as the banters they truly are.

The constricting of personal space which Mr Sterling’s saga symbolizes is a dangerous route. The media allowed social propriety ride roughshod over the First Amendment on Sterlingate. And that is talking about the first amendment to the US Constitution.  It’s a shame that the Black race should be the assumed victim of Sterling’s obiter  dictum and  the default beneficiary of the ensuing  travesty.  No disadvantaged group should agree to be pandered to by having the normative bar lowered because sooner, that lowering will also be used to work injustice on its genuine cause.

But this is not about Donald Sterling and racial slurs. It is not even about the Black race’s entitlement. It is about the ascendancy of the underdog. The underdogs are coming. And they are not pretending to charity in the manner of the top dogs they are displacing. They are strident, ruthless and inexorable. They take no prisoners. It is scary, the despotism of it all. Who has not noticed the rampaging ways of the same-sex lobby with many flourishing careers in rubble after an anti-homosexual quip? How about the not-so-covert censure of faith and free speech wrought by homosexual sympathizers? In the US state of Colorado, Jack Phillips declined to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple who promptly complained to the Colorado Civil Rights Commission. The baker was found guilty by the administrative judge and ordered to not refuse any such future order or risk jail. An Indianapolis, US, bakery was luckier. The spurned same-sex clients only took to social media but took their order elsewhere. Now, William Congreve should have seen the fury of a scorned man. But your thoughts roam: where and at what else are they going to strike next? What other freedom are they going to chip away at while the majority acts too civilized? Are they next going to decree that the rest of us keeps smiling while passing by every gay and every lesbian? Or that objecting clergy must wed same-sex couples or be committed for discrimination? One of the major canons of the free market is the concept of free entry and free exit. But here we are in capitalism’s El Dorado being told that we can use the force of law to compel an unwilling seller to sell to an entitled buyer. What else are we not going to be forcing him to do?

A homogenizing world wants to wipe out discrimination. But discrimination is not small pox or polio. It is bound up with the very concept of variety and otherness in nature. Nature itself is the discriminator-in-chief in the way we are not all female or male, all White or Black or equally smart. The primary colors are not single. They are all of seven and variegated. If colors were human, could blue be seen complaining that it has been discriminated against by reason of its blueness? The five fingers are  un-equal, my people would say. There is a personal remit to discrimination which is preference. And preference is not bad in itself. In the pseudo-wisdom of the times, nature could be accused of   having discriminated against us by causing us to be born as male or female without consultation. But no one does anything about being disadvantaged by nature’s magisterial ways except those who find their lot stuck in gender’s median.  Guys cannot be seen screaming discrimination at the membership of a sorority because the selection criterion is natural and objective. In the same way, underdogs should not push for a one-size-fits-all preference-free world. Instead, they should strive to ensure that discrimination is not institutionalized in the things commonly owned. Preference or prerogative caters to personal space like trespass.  That was what Donald Sterling and those conscientious-objector bakers expressed. It cannot and should not be legislated about nor can it be wished away.  The abolitionist should rather aim at that variety of discrimination in institutions of state based on subjective criteria.

 

 

 

 

 

Max Bakke
Fired  

I’m standing over the picnic table with my cousin, squirting mustard onto hotdogs. His daughters have their noses buried in a pair of iPads. Earlier he was pushing some Christian rock on me and asking me to come visit. All things easily deflected. But soon enough, he comes out with it.

“So what are you up to, lately? Still working at that magazine?” he asked.

I knew it was coming. Every event I’ve been to in the four months since I was fired from my job always ends up with me, standing next to someone I don’t want to talk to, struggling to come up with the politest, most delicate way of saying that I’m not really doing anything.

“No. They fired me,” I responded.

“That’s too bad,” he said. “Things’ll get better.”

End of conversation.

For the first few months, after I was fired, I rarely said the word. Only to my closest friends, or former co-workers who’d also “gotten the ax.” I was embarrassed, ashamed, felt like I was a failure. I thought it’d be crazy to admit that I’d failed at something to the rest of the world. So when people would ask me what happened, or what I was doing with myself, I’d say things like “it didn’t work out,” “it wasn’t a good fit,” or, “I’m figuring stuff out.”

But I haven’t figured anything out. Aside from discovering that the months since I lost my job has been an upsetting and confusing period of my life. And there’s no end in sight.

I assumed this break would be therapeutic, no more dragging myself each day to a job I hated. I would have plenty of time to do things that I wanted, mainly read, work out, and take a few classes. I figured since my long-term plan was to start grad school full time in the spring, I could take this time as much-need R&R. I needed a break from the people that fired me. They were such a drag.

Now I’m several months into this “funemployment”; I remain unrefreshed. I’m anxious, worried about money and tired. Tired of being bored, tired of doing nothing, and most of all, tired of lying.

I lie all the time. I lie to my friends, my family, my girlfriend, and complete strangers. I’m also lying to myself. All those euphemisms we use for getting fired are just lies. All code for “the place I used to work doesn’t want me to work there anymore.” And I’ve used them all. That’s not where my lying stops.

Whenever I’m asked how the job search is going, my answer is always “fine.” I can’t bring myself to tell people that, at this point, finding full time employment is just as likely as me convincing my girlfriend that the porn she found on her computer isn’t mine.

When I first lost my job, (there I go again! It’s not lost. It still exists—I’m just not doing it.) Anyway, people were supportive At first, former co-workers would call or text, friends would drive down to get lunch. When weeks become months, and I still didn’t have much to talk about besides decades-old insights on The Sopranos or the Crate & Barrel furniture I put together, friends stop coming around as much.

Because if you don’t have work to talk about, people don’t want to talk to you. Talking about work, or better yet, complaining about work, is universal. People love to whine about a job they hate, but they love even more hearing that someone else hates their job just as much. If you don’t have a job to hate, there’s something wrong with you. You’re a broken toy, a rudderless boat, a punctured sex doll. Maybe not that last one.

That’s been the worst part about getting fired. As much as I tried to avoid it, it’s difficult to not absorb some identity from being at the same place five days a week. When it’s gone, taken away, the routine is taken away as well. And it’s a struggle to find ways to fill that time. There’s only so much working out, reading and watching “HBO Go” to fill the day. At some point, interaction with people who don’t live in a tiny screen is crucial, as is a day when I’m not angry all the time.

Did I mention I also lie on job applications? I do.

 “Have you ever been fired from a job, or asked to resign from a position to avoid termination?” Nope, not me.

“Can we contact your former employer?” That depends.

All the job sites say that’s the worst thing to do. “Everyone’s been fired from a job,” they write. “People understand.” Sure, they understand if you’ve been downsized, or your job was eliminated, or your department slashed its budget. I’m also pretty sure people don’t understand being told that you, and what you contributed to your job, aren’t wanted anymore. Each rejection builds into the other, so the second I fire off a resume, I’m preparing myself for the inevitable silence that comes from rejection. I’m embarrassed if a day goes by without sending an application. I pretend that I’m searching harder than I am. More lies.

I also lie to my girlfriend about how much time I spend training the dog we adopted this year.  I’m not stoked about it, even if it is necessary. I hoped that I wouldn’t have to. I had actually planned to show her what a great dog trainer I had become. Days would be spent training Rosie, hitting the gym, and then writing, laptop stretched across my legs, Rosie sleeping at my feet. When my girlfriend came home, I hoped she’d see the image of this puppy, sitting peacefully and waiting for her master. In the end, I found myself hiding in my car in my driveway, listening to podcasts, afraid to go inside and deal with a barking dog every afternoon.

That’s when I figured enough was enough. Since I couldn’t force anyone to hire me, or come down to see me, I resolved to do one of the few things I could.

I’ve stopped lying.

I got fired. And if I’m going to move on, I need to accept that it was just as much my fault as it was theirs. OK, maybe more my fault than theirs. They were , after all, paying me to do stuff that they wanted, not stuff that I wanted to do. Noted.

I could’ve been more engaged in the stories we did. I didn’t have to rush out to the gym when the whistle blew at the end of the day. I could’ve shut my mouth when I thought people, including me, were being bullied. I was given a chance to change the way I looked at the work, and the people I worked with. I chose not to; not surprisingly, management decided that my contributions did not counterbalance the baggage that I brought with me. Go figure.

The hope is that soon enough the rage fantasies of throwing my former boss out of his office window will subside and I will be able to enjoy the fresh start I’ve been desperately craving.

I hated the job for a long time, truth be told, and had wanted to leave For a while. I just hoped that it’d ultimately be on my terms, not theirs. When I told people I wrote about professional wrestling for a living, they looked at me as if it was Hustler. Hustler has better pictures, I thought. The fact that I didn’t get to make the choice to leave doesn’t have to overwhelm the great feelings I get from not being there anymore. There are no more long nights, no more traffic going to work and best of all, no more bullshit.

I ALSO don’t have to be embarrassed when I tell people what do. Nor do I need to qualify to anyone else why I’m happy. I don’t have to sit through conversations with my born-again cousin. I can do anything I want. I have time to figure out what that is.

That felt good. Now, anybody out there hiring?

 

 

 

 

 

Amber Wildes
Coal

When I was 16 I picked up a best friend from the airport. I was jealous of her but loved her dearly. The night before I had a dream I had rice in my brain. The rice made everything sticky. I would pull clumps of it out of my ears and stare at it buried beneath my fingernails. The deeper I went the more the white lumps multiplied. I felt like a miner. The rice kernels were hot pieces of tiny, thought coals on my edges of my fingertips.

This morning I took a bag of trash out to my trash bin. There were hundreds of white maggots climbing up the black walls of the can. A few of the tiny creatures were getting carried away by ants. Others were being wound up in webs of spiders that had formed an eager circle around this trash womb. Disgusted and afraid I threw my trash bag in, slammed the lid shut and watched a waterfall of shimmering bodies cascade out of the lid to the floor.

Some time ago now I was in a fight. I was drunk and angry. I ended up getting thrown against a couch. I was pushed. I fell. It would have been harmless but the back of my neck hit the armrest. For a few seconds I was paralyzed. I stared at the ceiling. I didn't speak again all night. I spoke again in the morning. I could not remember what I was so mad about. I just remember staring at the stucco and wondering how difficult it would be to make it completely crumble.

Last night I read the news and there were reports of hundreds of people dying because of a new war that is fueled by an ancient anger that will never end. Hospitals are not safe. Everyone is pointing fingers. All the people have all the opinions. The blood of children looks like syrup in photographs, sticky and unreal. From space the war looks like fireworks. An astronaut took a photograph from the heavens. From space he sent it back to our delicate earth.

I use bug killer on the outside of the trashcan. I'm eight months pregnant so this is a stupid thing to do. I do it anyway. Now it is not just maggots falling down the side of the trashcan. It is also dripping, toxic bug killer liquid. The baby maggots writhe in the death puddles at the base of the can.

Some people believe it is wrong to step on bugs. Other people believe it is wrong to not kill a woman who has dishonored you. People justify pain whether they inflict it or wallow in it.

I killed hundreds of maggots this morning.

When I found out I was pregnant I was terrified. As I stared at the two red lines on my third pregnancy test I thought about getting rid of the baby. I could not feel her yet anyway. I could not physically feel her yet.

A month later, in my kitchen, I felt this overwhelming protectiveness over the tiny presence making a home in my body. I thought to myself: you must keep her safe. You must make sure her heart is never broken. I gasped or made some kind of sound. It was probably more likely a whimper. I felt foolish and out of control.

I was enamored with Kundalini yoga five years ago. I did kriyas everyday. Then someone told me Yogi Bhajan died at the age of seventy-five. His giant heart failed him. His heart meditations are still my favorite. Some of my teachers would refer to them as heart medications.

When I was 18 or 19 I had a young man look at me and tell me touching me was sacred. Later that night I lost him in the woods. It was raining. I sat in my upstairs bedroom listening to the sound of the droplets, alone, trying to understand what he meant. Last year my father found a love letter from him hidden at the bottom of a cardboard box. I laughed when I read it. We are both so different now.

I have gestational diabetes. I'm starting to have tiny scabs on my fingers. I stab right beside the nail then milk the blood until there is a pool that is full enough to measure the sweetness of my blood.

Years ago in the aftermath of the end of a long engagement I was sitting on some concrete steps with people I barely knew. I meant to add something trivial to the conversation but instead I said, "I'm so lonely." It slipped out of my mouth. My face went red. Thankfully, one of the girls started telling a story about how she left the new Harry Potter book in a public bathroom and she just couldn't believe it because she would just die if someone stole it. That same girl went on to marry my ex-fiancee two years later. In that moment though, alongside a sense of relief, I lost all interest in that series of books.

That same summer I took three college courses: 20th Century French History, A Visual History of the Holocaust and the Ethics of Killing. I had to stop feeling sorry for myself. When I was not studying I would jog through trails around campus and imagine getting kidnapped and killed. I'd turn my music up really loudly as I ran so I wouldn't notice if someone snuck up behind me.

When I wasn't in class, studying, working or running I would pour myself bottles of cheap red wine and smoke cigarettes on my balcony while staring at my neighbor who lived in the campus apartment across the courtyard from mine. He always came home late and watched TV alone for fifteen minutes. I had zero interest in knowing what his face looked like, what his name was, or why he always ate so late at night. I just wanted to watch his shadow darken the space behind his head while colors flashed across his body.

After moving hundreds of miles away from that apartment I returned for a few days to finish up finals. The whole space was a morgue of dead memories. Each corner. Each light switch. Every single piece of furniture. I got high on vicodin and danced around the ghosts of those rooms. I woke up the next morning, felt fifteen years older and cleaned the kitchen. I took a picture of myself and thought this is probably what I will look like when I am old, when I am 30.

I am thirty-three now.

I have always chosen to fall in love. There are magical moments when everything is whisky and butterflies, floating, heart-stopping infatuation. In the end though, I've always thought I can love this person. Consciously. I have looked at someone and thought yes, I love you. Thankfully, I can take my heart back, if I choose, even if it takes years to bring the pieces back together. All of the pieces always belong to me. They just wait, floating around my history, waiting for me to claim them.

I read a poem once where someone described the birth of their son as a "backdraft", something explosive, violent and all consuming. A birth as something you cannot take back because it affects your soul like flames that cause third degree, forever burns on your skin.

I've never been caught in a fire. But I've burned my hair more often than other people.

I live on the North East Side of Los Angeles. Around Independence Day fireworks go off with the frequency of traffic honks on one of our numerous freeways. I jump when I hear the crack bang near me. But I have nothing to be afraid of. It's a war zone of celebration.

I was once in a philosophy class that spoke about the illusion of free will and the realities of causation. The idea that choice is a fabrication that does not really exist. Sometimes I'll walk down a path to an open fork in the road but more often there will be hot coals and demons paving one side and kittens, flowers, sunshine and unicorns populating the other and everything that has happened to me before that moment will choose for me where I step. That choice will always have been. The past and the future having zero and complete influence over that single, immutable moment as it becomes what it is, as it becomes what it always was.

Every night I sleep on my left side. I cradle my expanding belly. I pray. I pray for the baby bugs I killed this morning, for the wars I don't have time to care about and for the separate heart beating with its own unique rhythm inside my uterus.

Every morning my hands are swollen but they look too small. They feel cold even though it is summer. Knuckles expanding like ornaments on tiny branches. I open my hands. I make a fist. I open my hands again. I close them. I open my palms again.