Read Introductory Chapter of American Canopy; Walked on treadmill; Slept most of day; A date; Self Loathing; Bread; The life cycle of a meal; Opportunity and intent: a field of possibility in Philadelphia; Doom approaches (fascist march saturday); Home restoration; In conversation with life: potted plants, a cat, and resistance to daily routine; Leading with joy: a possible approach to replace failed attempts to lead with theory; “Anna O”, a shadow of Bertha Pappenheim, Helena Karminsky, and the Reichsvertretung
I took myself downstairs to read. Shut off laptop, turned over my phone (can we call these objects ours, which weigh so heavily), and began my act of disciplined study with an escape. Often in order to begin a new activity, successfully, my initiatory moment is not a settlement into familiar space, but an intentioned movement away from familiar spaces, which have been polluted by habits of inattention and ease, towards unfamiliar space. There’s something of a perverse narrative in this, a manifest destiny of footsteps, a feeling of freedom only in the wild and unclaimed spaces of dusty basement corners, neglected tables, unvisited bars.
I have, in the past weeks, taken up a renewed effort to the cleaning and repair of parts of my mother’s – and my childhood and now again – home. The basement has been for years a repository of neglected items and of the genius of neglect itself. So I have demolished the piles, sorted tools, cleaned and dusted the floor and every surface, and begun to set up a workplace from which to stage attacks on the rest of the house – a nascent woodshop and toolshed emerges. In my childhood in the few years between the family move into this house, and my father’s move out of it, he had set up a woodshop here, and most of the tools remain from those days – were they his, his parents, my mother’s parents? Some predate him but I am sure when I hold some of these tools that I do not grasp their stories. I have begun to learn to restore tools – the chisels and bench planes, the surfaces, and to set up new tools – a mitre saw- and with these to cut and shape boards to replace those damaged by water and time in the upstairs hall. The old hall is becoming a new space, partly itself, holding the history of my and my parents’ lives, and the previous owners the Muellers of whom I know little, who covered the oak boards with a shaggy brown and eventually filthy always ugly, in my eyes, though perhaps as a child I could still explore the synthetic fibres as a forest of imagined life – or perhaps this imagination is imposed now? I know my elbows rested in the carpet of the hall, taking up its imprint in my skin, as I snuck the light to read in late hours when I was meant to be sleeping but could hear too loudly the pulse in my own ears. So partly the hall is an aging place, and partly it is becoming a new space, taking on a life which is its own and which is mine, as I impart my sense of its destiny – what do I see? Warm red light and the smell of earth, in the finished floor. a smoothness and firm but yielding coolness in the feel of the boards underfoot.. a unity of small boards making one connecting artery pumping people in and out of the rooms, off and onto the stairs.
I don’t know where this new wood comes from. It arrives in a car, in small bundles, my mother picks it up, at my request, from a store she found (name?) where she converses with a man (name?) who offers advice. I’ve not yet called him to ask questions. I enjoy learning by touch and failure. And I find anxiety in the uncertainty of asking questions by phone. Eventually. When my questions are specific enough, yet can not be answered by own logic, then I will ask.
So board by board, the floor becomes itself and becomes me. What might my mother imagine it to be? What is the meaning of that hall, that floor, to her? What did it once mean to my father, to the residents who hid it, to the builders who I gradually come to understand, as I negotiate with their work. And to the trees… So many decades later, new boards placed among the old, these boards may have been born on different continents. All of them old and new, were stolen. Wood never dies, but the trees are no longer.
I traveled to the basement tonight. I called light down from the flourescent fixture, power through earth, through the blood of generations, the slow work of life and time burning down, and under that light I plugged in the inherited treadmill, hauled home from friends who found no use for it, to lie dusty and dismantled in the basement for years until last month. I plugged it in, turned it on, set the incline high as it would go, and began to climb. And read. I set myself to keeping the words in my head, letting the words from the page speak louder than the words of my memory or my wandering voices. Language is a wondrous thing, and a terrible thing, a fire which burns, where we will and where we will not have it.
Terrible language is coming to the streets on Saturday…
I set my feet to walking, measured steps, even paced, rolling from heel to toe, pressuring the inner and outer bones, opening wide and closing narrow the gates of my knees and hips, sinking my upper weight into the arch of my structure, opening and dropping my EVER CONSTRICTING PYTHON JAW, breathing deep and slow, holding my shoulders down, opening my heart, keeping my chest up, and reading.
At times I set the pace of the treadmill to its lowest, and rested my hands under the support bar, trying to keep a steady upward pressure on the frame rising from my feet. Lifting the world. At times I set the pace nearly too fast to keep up without running, striving to measure and calm the impact of each step so that the book would not shake, the pages not turn, the words not jump. Always a conversation with my body – rarely a conversation in which I listen without judgement. Demanding.
And I began to read American Canopy, a book I borrowed from Megan too many years ago and have long refused to return – sensing an urgency in the pages, wanting to read it, but never beginning.
The history of the Americas as told by its trees. Its going to be a horror story. A tragedy. The introduction doesn’t pretend otherwise. It begins with the pointless senseless murder of Prometheus. “For study”. Studied out of existence. Schliemann studied troy out of existence. WE study whole people out of existence. A strange knowledge which requires death. There’s a truth in that horror. After all, only hindsight lets us see. When we are living, conversing, cooperating, we are not seeing. We are being. A lesson for the stage. If we never stop to ask how we’re doing, we must at least be succeeding at the doing of it. The counterargument comes I suppose in philosophy and the asking of what we should be doing, the idea that only in asking can we find the good, and cease the evil. It doesn’t feel these days like that’s working. But then that too comes of looking back. Killing the moment.
American Canopy begins in colonization. After the Promethean preface, it doesn’t begin in earnest even on the shores of this place, but in Europe. I’m less than 30 pages in but already I hear loudly in this narrative the absence of the peoples who grew here with these trees. History is the trail of destruction left by the children of the killers. This is shaping to be a beautiful book, but already I’m wishing for another book. For another kind of storytelling. A story of the places we are, not the places we’ve burned. Are they separable?
It’s going to be a story of the reshaping of the landscape, and the settling peoples – of the ways the use of trees made those people what we are. I am what trees have been here, says this story. There is still chestnut in me, though I live without them.
Ash, Elm, Chestnut….. the trees of even my youth are not the trees of my younger friends. And I grew up in a dessicated wasteland. Every forest I have known is the new growth pushing up out of the ashes and dust of the old.
I am part a child of the sassafrass in front of my house. Part its child part its brother. It came to this house with me when I was 8. It’s outgrown me now. For sure it knows more than I do about this neighborhood.
I’m a child too of refugees, of the pogroms and holocausts which preceded my birth. The nuclear flash of the industrial wars of the 20th century left shadows everywhere, of the life before it. The children who grew up in the afterglow, they were my parents generation, and their stories and my own memories are too tangled to unskein. The rebbe of my shul spoke mostly yiddish, and was buried in Israel, not here, not Europe… he died belonging nowhere. He sure as fuck didn’t belong in Israel. He lived, I thought, belonging to this neighborhood. But no one from that shul stayed here. They passed through this place. The elders of Bnai Jacob carried lives, their own and their tangled memories, from before that flash of death. A different Europe. Whatever that world was or wasn’t, it’s echo, it’s shadow, it’s very present absence, is so specifically felt in me that I could never have grown up whole. Or if not unwhole then not unified. A tree, which is whole, and which has its trunk merging round a boulder. Or with a hollow at its base.
Today the name of ANNA O flashed on a screen. Twitter probably, or maybe part of a skimmed article. I thought at once “who was she, when Freud wasn’t looking at her”. I went and found her, and her life rang through me resonating in the place of that hollow.
Bertha Pappenheim, who Freud and Breuer regarded and prodded without understanding. Who we remember through their stories, but who lived her own. Her illness, which now that she’s dead we can see in hindsight, we question whether twas psychological at all – was a brief chapter in her life. She wrote her own stories. Loved her own loves. Saved and cared for lives. Worked with a generation of women who were themselves, who fought and loved and died, who remembered their own memories and remembered the stories of their places and their people and who were murdered.
Genocide is a fire which language fuels. What good is language at all, I despair.
I’d rather hear Hannah Karminki, hear Bertha Pappenheim, than hear Freud. And if Freud et all did have something of use and worth, if their narratives were worthy though in their conversations they demanded more than they listened, listened with the goal of retelling, still, I’d rather their voices than the voices of death, the jeering nonvoice, L’engles, unnaming, of the fucks who are coming on Saturday. A fascist march in philadelphia, on market street.
Colonial Brazil has joined the globalizing right, and is gearing up to renew its war, its campaign of obliteration of its indigineous life – Brazil can not cut down the trees until it cuts down its people. They live together and will die together, they and then us all.
From my childhood to the childhood of those living now, forests have fallen. Trees have been unnamed. The biodiversity of this planet has fallen by variously reported percentages, the most conservative of those devastating. The biodensity of an acre of air has fallen by more than half. Every insect lives in the shadow of the flash which killed the generations before it.
We are living in the flash itself. The burning of us all.
Who will live in our shadows
I’ve been sleeping a lot. Partly the coming on of winter. Partly a lack of economic means to undertake much outside these walls. Partly ennui. Partly just listening to my body’s calls for sleep.
Yesterday I worked a long day on the hallway floor, on learning to precisely cut 1/4″ to 1/2″ strips from 2″ boards, for filling edges – without breaking said boards in the process. Chisel, plane, sandpaper, saw, mitre box, clamps… “It takes a lot of men to make a gun… hundreds… many men to make a gun” so too any tool. So, many times many to make many tools, to make the moments of my learning in the basement of this sinking settling house, to make a quarter inch strip of oak, a directed precise splinter of a tree, to cleanly shape a hallway into the center of a dream of a home. The place where dreams of flying off the stairs begin.
Today I woke at 8am, but grew tired after eating a breakfast of grits and eggs. Lay down again. Slept really the entirety of the day, with brief breaks only. The sofa was my home today.
From this sedentary cushioned castle, I made battle plans for coming days. I’ve been invited out into the world- to “hang out”, by a recently made aquaintance. All the mystery of new meetings, and the vanity of being noticed and inquired after, by someone who caught my interest too. A person I perceive to be capable, collected and sharp witted- and so my feelings of interest immediately gave way to self loathing and self doubt- at once I gazed on myself. Ceased to be. Killed myself, pinned myself (“my necktie rich and modest, but asserted by…”) for study. Found myself a wanting specimen. Eventually let go the satisfying indulgence of narrating myself as villain and victim both in a frankly structurally dubious tale, and set myself to the business of wonder – what has the world to offer in the way of adventure.
Various movies. Been a while since any film caught my interest but now there’s a Coen film, and a few about which I know little but which carry an actor I admire or a theme that excites me or a visual that catches my eye. Roma – I still have some hope of Cuaron though Gravity was an apalling wallow in racist misogyny… 2001 in IMAX (“it takes a lot of aeons to fuel a 2 hr experience of seeing a film VERY LARGE AND BRIGHT”) … something with Richard E Grant looking rather Withnail in the promotional imagery, a Buster Keaton documentary which would give a chance to see some Keaton action sequences on a large screen…
A few plays – Glacuum’s greek themed war thing at Azuka, I’m vague not dismissively but out of ignorance, but what I can vaguely glean of it seems like it’ll excite my critical capacities if not my pleasure centers… Salt Paper Ketchup, a story of gentrification resistance in Point Breeze which I first saw performed displaced in trenton and now am curious to see performed displaced in center city – so far as I know there’s no intent to perform it in or for an audience of its subject characters but I’d like to find the truth of that… a student dance showcase at UPenn… a Curtis Opera performance of Sweeney Todd.. a few other this’s and thats’s. More than can be seen, certainly more than can be consumed, indubitable more than can be engaged and conversed with either with an accepting or a demanding ear.
And running through the hustle and bustle, a beast of demon misery slithering nearer.
The Wilma will be doing Romeo in a month – their first shakespeare since Hamlet?
I’m due to schedule an outing to NY to see Joel Grey’s yiddish Fiddler – Joel Grey born of Mickey Katz, Fiddler the american echo of the European bustle before the flash…
I’m due to schedule an outing to DC in December to see An Inspector Calls with a friend who worked dramaturging The Just: Camus’ French post war play about Russian prerevolutionary fervor, a bottle drama about the lighting of a fuse… he’d suggested An Inspector Calls as a worthy future project and my reading of it on the page was – actually I don’t recall but vaguely my reaction, but it was negative and dismissive, and when I said so his reread left him in agreement – so we’re curious to see this thing he’d had nostalgic hope for, being produced again and now after all, to see what merit other eyes find and make in the telling. We’ll be the audience that a story is told to, though it remains always to find if one is the audiencd a story is told for.
This weekend, what time I can find to see and hear any of these local productions or any of the films, will be time found between managing the Panorama Collective space for a rental by a local stage combat designer and teacher, for a class in the narrative violence of ProWrestling. I was intending to both manage the space and to participate in the class. Now I hope to make the space ready and safe, and then to use my time for some of these other pursuits, remaining on call should the class have any issue.
But.
The damn fascist march.
Saturday Nov 17.
What can I do. What should I do.
Is my presence in opposition meaningful if it is presence without direct action? I spend much time conversing with the question of performative opposition – the rituals of denouncement in marches and vigils feel too often to me like a toothless growl – and the enemy is on to the charade. I have an impulse toward rash action – which is useless, suicidal, itself more ritual than real, the throwing of a pebble at the sea…
“though success can never justify an evil deed or the use of questionable means it is not an ethically neutral thing”.
“If the assassination could trammel up the consequence and catch with (their) surcease success…”
Sigh.
There is a problem, a great crux in the movement of life’s tragic flow, in the responsibility born of awareness. We are responsible for disposing properly of the rubbish which drifts on the wind into our face, but not of the identical rubbish which is blown over our heads without our ever seeing it. We are responsible for broadening and shaping our awareness so that our inaction may not be excused by ignorance, but once aware we are burdened forever with a sense of responsibility which extends beyond our capacity to act.
“It is not your responsibility to finish the work of perfecting the world, but you are not free to desist from it either.”
Living in this house I am learning to build it toward its perfect sense of itself (until such time as the devastating cost of its very existence outweighs its right to mar the perfection of the land on which it squats) . But to do so I must learn the use of tools, converse with the spirit and history of the building and the land, interrogate and be interrogated by the new wood I bring in, the old wood which nourished my youth. I must leave bed, I must ask questions, I must experiment and fail, I must commit to the mysterious equation of life which time and matter and story compose…
So to building some corner of society toward its perfect being. (there’s a lot of platonism in tikun olam eh? hrrmph, maybe take some time to interrogate even that) there too must I learn, ask, stumble, in order to progress. But the light is harsher, the dark darker, the consequence of error more dire. To do nothing is to let evil thrive, to do anything is to act rashly. On saturday I will go to the place where the rubbish is blown, where the world is less perfect, where the story is untold, where wood and words may be weapons or tools…
I’ll listen. If so called I’ll act or speak, or shy from so doing. Perhaps I’ll ask more often in my life “What would Bertha Pappenheim do””
Camus writes of the sisyphean labor. Decades before Camus’ work begins, Bertha Pappenheim publishes “sisyphus-arbeit” as an account of her labor against sex trafficking. Sisyphus, argued Camus, persisted not in spite of the impossibility of success, but in anticipation of that impossibility.
Unending participation in the struggle. A voice in the chorus. A conversation with the universe.
“Weh’dem, dessen Gewissen shläft”
*as I struggle to make a narrative connection between my fascinations, in this case between my ongoing fascination with the life, silencing and murder by the Stalinist regime of Vesvolod Meyerhold and the life, silencing and murder of Pappenheim’s circle (Pappenehim herself avoided the same fate only by dying first of cancer, she was however tried in absentia due to her ill health by the nazis – that trial alone fodder for a play), I find myself with the stray thought that the moment into which I was born, a moment which I came of age believing was a precarious new moment of enlightenment, was in fact a dark age – that the erasure by genocide and by war of millions across the globe through the entirety of the 20th century was such a silencing and eclipsing of knowledge and culture that nothing we paint as technological or social progress can be seen as aught but candlelight in a cave, flickering in a wind howling with the uncomprehensible voices of the dead. My best attempt at self consolation is not that this is an erroneous perception but that it is so in all times, and we must make the best of that light, and do our best to glean song from the wails
philopoetica 