BLOCKQUOTE.org

Could you do this?

Overcast, ninety degrees, wetness, garbage slow-cooking in black bins, light gusts lifting the odors from every alley to every sidewalk in the city. Bodies laboring to move from shade to shade, legs exposed, breasts exposed, shirtless joggers in a thick sweat sheen, eyes showing no sign of thought, a heaviness, no stamina for the social graces that carry the burden of sharing space with three million people. Everywhere you go, somebody’s already there.

Then evening, and a walk up to Miko’s. I order the smallest size, lime. “It’s ninety four degrees,” the clerk grunts, “are you sure you don’t want the bigger?” I say I’ll be fine.

Another half mile to the column. I and my ice settle on the base, looking south at the traffic on Humboldt Boulevard. The air is calmer, cooler. I reflect on the prior week. Worse things have happened, much worse. You know you’ve been through worse. The ice gone, I rest my elbows on the granite. Maybe I’ll see the stars. Always a chance.

Footsteps, a boy running my way, and he speaks: “It’s hot!”

“It is!” I reply. It is exactly this abrupt. “It’s cooled down some.”

“Yeah. Could you do this?” And he jumps off the base. Then he’s back on the base. “Hey, could you do … this?” He does it again, sideways. I say I could. In two seconds he’s up hugging the column, “Could you do this?” Then jumps off. Back up. “But could you do this?” And he jumps again. Then back up, sideways this time, then jumps, then back up, facing forward, “Could you do this?” Jumps.

It goes on like this for ten minutes. He tries the base forward, sideways, backward, one eye covered (“Hey now,” I advise), both eyes covered (he slips, stumbles), then one eye shut (he glows with pride). Done with the base, now off the column. “Could you do this?” He climbs a light pole and flies to the ground. Up again, higher. “Could you do this?” I point out that he’s got better shoes than I do. “But could you do this?” These are skater tricks. He needs a skateboard, I think. He’ll have a skateboard. He needs an audience.

I tell him I’ve got to get going. He contends with me. “Why?” “I’m done with my ice.” “Why?” “Because I ate it.” “Why?”

When I leave he follows. I take the steps. “Could you do this?” He bounds down the granite rail. The next instant, he’s accosting a young couple laying in the grass. I hear a laugh and look: he’s grinding his head into the grass.

Down I walk to California Avenue. A woman, walking opposite, makes a face of pure annoyance. Her face says, Ugh, another person, looking at me. The facial expression is familiar, I know what it means. But, This city is public, I think, and being looked at is part of the deal. You can always leave.

And then, So can I. And, Someday, I tell myself, I will.

At California I wait for the green light. Before the light changes a bus crosses Milwaukee and comes within a foot of my body, stops, idles, coughing exhaust on my chest, pulsing heat. On the sidewalk a man bikes up to another man and the other man asks if the man on the bike is looking for a fight, is he looking for a fight. He isn’t. The man shakes his head and grumbles.

A bike ride home. Unlock door one, up the stairs, unlock door two. The air conditioning switches on, that and no other noise, every light off. For the first time in years I live alone. I strip to almost nothing, the air falling cool from the overhead vents onto my head, my back, my legs; no one to see, no one to placate, no one to tiptoe around, at last.

Honkies

“Is there cream in the guacamole?”

“No. Who’d put cream in guacamole?”

“…”

“I’ll tell you who. Honkies. That’s who.”

Vita Excolatur

Things held near my face by students and staff of the University of Chicago on the morning #2 Hyde Park Express from the Loop.

• A medium-size cup of Intelligentsia coffee, which to judge by the sipping behavior of its drinker was too hot to ingest, its liquid heft responding to the vehicle’s suspension system in the air above my forehead. Redeemed only, and only a little, by the aromatic quality of the roast.
• An iPad 3G, sucking live internet to its five radiating antennae.
• A thick double-sided comb bound Booth School textbook read with singlemindedness and anxiety by a young and smartly dressed student at the level of my right eye and no more than three inches away.

Embrace

In the first months of 2006 I started letting go of the way of seeing and thinking that led me to write poems. When I lived alone in slower places I’d take long walks, turning phrases over until I liked how they sounded. At the end of 2005 I left those slower places for Chicago.

My first months in the city riled me up. I started asking the social, historical, and subjective questions that I hadn’t then considered to any great extent but that have occupied me since. The new questions relate to interpretation, authority, power, aesthetics, affect, irony. With them came the idea that prose was a sounder medium than verse for addressing them.

“Embrace” is the last poem I wrote and revised. It gives some sense of the direction my thoughts had started to take. More than that, I think it shows the mode of thinking I was giving up. From January, 2006.

When dusk detains whole days try
shaking want for warm arms. When
fog think how it doesn’t hold
you like it holds a city,
think how you interrupt them
hankering, chased to wishing
the city could embrace. Know
Chicago might oblige just
slight enough to discourage
you expecting something more.

Oh, bloody hell.

The man knows of which he speaks.

If, say, at a social gathering an attractive, gracious and clever woman — in whose company you have shown grace and cleverness — subtly indicates her interest in knowing you better, pause to let your mind run roughshod over the landscape of anecdote and memory in a holy quest for ways to fuck this up. Once this interval (in and of itself an adequate way to fuck this up) passes, enjoy more cocktails and pain.

Dean Allen, long, long ago

Why you weren't consulted.

If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me some good, I should run for my life.

Henry David Thoreau

People ask how grad school’s going. I’m at the point of writing my master’s thesis, so I tell them that I’m at the point of writing my thesis.

Then they ask what I’m writing. When I tell them what I’m writing, they get excited and say, “That’s great! You know, it reminds me of this other thing. You should write about this other thing!” I wince, and augment my wince with a smile, and reply that people tend to get excited about the topic and go on to suggest other topics.

I say I’m grateful for the suggestions, but I’ve got a lot of work ahead of me, and I simply need to stick with what I’ve got. I say that they’re good suggestions, but I’ve already given myself a lot to write about. And given the deadline for writing, I simply need to write what I’ve decided to write about.

What’s more, I tell them that I’m writing in a way that allows me some more latitude than would a straightforward academic paper, that I’m writing a small collection of essays, and that I’ve chosen to write in this way because I think my topic can be best explained in this form. Still, that leaves me a lot of writing. And not a whole lot of time to write.

When I say I’m writing essays, people get all sorts of ideas that they suggest to me. Now, essays are not what they’re expecting — they’re expecting a straightforward academic paper — and this unexpected news excites them.

They ask how many essays I plan to write. I reply with the number I’ve sketched out so far. The number never sounds right to them. Some say I should write more essays. Others say that it sounds like I’m really talking about one essay — though they concede that I’ve said I’m talking about many essays — and then they say it would be best if I write the whole thing as a straightforward academic paper instead of as essays.

Then I tell them that when I’ve actually written the essays, I’d be happy to get their feedback. But since they’re still unwritten, there’s nothing really to get feedback on.

This last thing is a mistake to say; I come to regret saying anything. It upsets people when I refuse their help before I’ve even written something for them to help with. Everyone seems really excited to help.

In Absentia

I want what things might
bind you to memory, like
the joints could hold, like

these clear afternoons
leaves glow against the heavens
golden, red, few green

the strengthening wind
reminiscent of our walk
around Galena

you were still living
close enough to see the same
leaves changed and falling

when the four of us
met, knowing you near without
asking you along

(August, 2005)

Where we are all more or less the same, the need to manufacture difference, to create and stigmatize “others,” may become a temptation, one easily susceptible to political exploitation. The psycho-sociological, possibly even biological mechanisms of mimetic rivalry, aggression, and a death drive, visible in larger groups and nations, may well first emerge in small disaffected factions and cells that can seem to constitute themselves out of the blue, parting ways with the familial, parental, and religious-cultural environments into which they had heretofore blended, gray on gray.

Hent De Vries's introduction to Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World

Already an incredibly interesting book.