For Reasons Unknown to Me

One of my favourite photos.

After Smilla's Sense of Snow

I gave up reading Scandinavian mysteries a while ago, after the Dragon Tattoo trilogy, after some Kurt Wallender, after some Edward Åke, after opening and closing a Nesbø, after reading a couple more I have very much forgotten; and the reason I stopped was that I could no longer read descriptions of tortured and dismembered women.

At first it seemed to me a tic, a trope, lazy shorthand for this criminal is a real badass, you can see how much of a badass he is from page one, if not paragraph one, and how anything the detective might do in the detecting of him is absolvable because he is such as badass badass.

But the repetition was striking me like a blow.

After assuming that it was an overworked and self-absolving trope, and after ignoring it for several years, I found the news from the news sources beginning to filter through to some other level of my awareness.

In the light of voter suppression, rape culture, fundamentalist patriarchal religions of all theologies (including the armed forces of the first world) becoming more heavily armed, more insistent, and bloodier in their insistence; in the light of global warming and its causes, I came to see that Thomas Harris and Michael Connolly and the Scandinavians are right. The torture and dismemberment of the feminine is the signature crime of the age.

Security

An errand yesterday at the Social Security office downtown. Was very apprehensive about this trip for some reason, expecting squalor and tedium and Byzantine office layouts – I remember the old social Security office in inner NE, near the house we lived in fifteen years ago. It was dismaying in a squalid way: old wooden chairs along the wall in a certain disarray, the waiting people disabled, older, whiter, swollen with diabetes, wrapped in bandages, confined to wheelchairs, or just ill; the minority poor with less obvious ailments, all needing far more than any office was offering. There was an undertone of common suffering, a small, palpable buzz of people who may not have seen each other before or for a while, but who could see & knew each others' conditions.

Yesterday's office was worn but clean, had airport-type security (minus the full-body scanner & taking off your shoes) with surveillance camera & monitor up in the corner of the ceiling. The wall facing the entrance was taken up with a huge TV screen with notices in many languages and a row of call-numbers for those waiting, who, by and large, were younger than I expected, and more of colour than not. Those who sat on the side-bench that ran the length of the waiting area - seats larger & softer, with better-angled backs - tended to be older and whiter; they sat with their backs to the wall, leaving the more obvious minorities under two sets of surveillance. The more obvious minorities sat in the pre-arranged, ordered rows of single plastic chairs facing the big TV, heads down, eyes on phones. The SoSec clerks sat on the other side of the room behind single, separate, (bullet-proof?) glass windows behind a half-glass walkway and wall, occasionally calling the next number. There were three armed guards. The room was silent.

The Bookstore Opens

And Speaking of Asia

I gave up on the CIA just over half-way through, just after Beirut in 1983. It was like dragging myself through dust and barbed wire. The writing was good. But the subject - the criminally insane incompetence, the smugness, the politicrats' projections of their own violent madness - and the prospect of the weeks and weeks I would need to finish the account, were destroying the only heart I have.  

 - Legacy of Ashes, Tim Weiner, Doubleday, New York, c2007. 

"It was early April and a warm rain pattered out of the sky. It polished the avenues to brilliant green, stirred stagnant ponds in the wells of numberless flat-blocks and hatched a swarm of pink umbrellas above the women. Whenever a wind blew, it seeped through the frames of my hotel window.

But little else entered the hotel. It was a parody of the self defeated Soviet world which had built it. It reeled across the sky in a cliff of balconies and porticoes. But inside everything fell to bits."

Who can resist writing like that - simultaneously evocative and incisive, subtle and energetic, open to all the winds that blow - the lovely sharp eyes, the fluent translation of blood and bone awareness? 

 - The Lost Heart of Asia, Colin Thubron, HarperCollins, New York, 1994.

Later:
Some of the book is dry and hard as the land and poverty it describes. And then Thubron realizes the jeep is running along the old bed of the Amu Dariya, cliffs layered and smoothed by the immense flow of old water, and that image stays with you. You run the eyes of your mind along that long striped stone the way you rub the side of your thumb along the small still lake of the glass on your watch-face. It soothes you. And you need soothing; you're afraid again that you're bleeding out into futility in your cubicle.

Later still:
The book ends at the easternmost point of Kyrgzstan with snow-capped peaks “hanging in nothing,” the Tien Shan mountains narrowing, funnelling the traveller to China. Thubron says that Tamerlane came this way. Above the open mouth of a long-pillaged burial mound for some Scythian or Turkic chieftain stands a slope of many thousands of coloured stones, some of ochre, some grey. Local legend has it that on his way to China, Tamerlane had each man of his army place a stone on the slope and, as they retreated, had each man remove one. He describes these remaining stones as a memorial “to waste, by the wasted.”

It's his ability to unite past, present, landscape and emotional perceptiveness into moments of lighting revelation that makes his writing so rewarding.

Siberia next.... I remember the Russia of the Cold War: dark and evil twin to the United States, threat, enemy, enigma; producer of great literature, ballet, music, art; prison empire. So I'm happy enough to follow Thubron to post-Soviet Siberia – the unimaginable weight of the sky – and to find people making sense of rubble, repairing, moving away or failing to outmanoeuvre destruction. (Knowing the shape of reality, needing precise and illuminating description that is also analysis.)

Later again:  

All through Siberia Thubron finds collapse: Communism, the economy, the basis of its past (the landscape, lichen poisoned by acid rain, the retreat of the reindeer, old lives impossible to resume); finds Dostoievskian types, stereotypes, orthodoxy and the Middle Ages ready to rise from the weeds; roses planted in a restored monastery to memorialize the dead and metaphorically represent them, still, in a gentled landscape and new consciousness; Old Believers losing their young to the internet and the cities. He finds the rotting infrastructure of the gulag, the never-ending dimensions of the ruin created by Stalin and his successors. He always, insistently, goes where people tell him he shouldn't or can't.

Everyone asks him why he is there. It seems the only answer is that he has to see, to the furthest the extremity of what can be seen.

He ends the book a stone's throw from the Arctic Circle, at Magadan, a city near one of the most infamous of the camps, Butugychag. He especially has to see this camp: apart from its reputation and history, it will be bulldozed soon. The camp will disappear as surely as its prisoners. Erasure will be erased, as though that will suspend the radioactivity in the area, the ecological ruination of Stalinism, the displacement and destruction of populations, the mechanics of society, chemistry, time.

The iron frame of the camp gates stands redundant in the debris of its towers. Beneath the snow our feet snag on objects we only guess at, and drag up barbed wire. Rusted machinery pokes above the surface. Beyond, we stumble through the wrecks of barracks and prison cells. In the roofless rooms the guards' benches are still in place, with a range of hooks for their coats. The snow lies on platform beds in hard, crystalline piles. A pair of boots is discarded by a stove. Everything emits a hand-to-mouth rusticity and squalor, Skeletal iron doors still swing on isolation cells a few feet square. The slots survive where the prisoners' gruel was pushed through, and the barred windows remain intact, and the stove in the guards' sauna.

It was the same through much of Kolyma. The prisoners lived and died in tents. Despairingly they pressed insulating moss and peat between the thin layers of canvas, sprinkled them with sawdust, and stacked boards outside. Inside was a single cast-iron stove.

And now gently, insistently, the snow is falling. It drifts over the low stumps and covers the buildings with its pale indifference. It floats through the roofless passages, the guard chambers, the rooms of administration, of neglect, of boredom. It fills the valley with a sick translucence.

Yuri goes on kicking at the tent foundations, then looks up at me. “You know, my grandfather was a village postman, who spent years in the camps for making a joke about Stalin.” (pp. 276-277)

In Siberia, Colin Thubron, HarperCollins, New York, 1999.

Here, and in The Lost Heart of Asia, Thubron sees such reduction in the basic possibility of life, in its necessary foundations (soil, water, food, workable occupations) that it's hard to know how he bears it. 

I can only imagine it's the exquisite precision of his writing, and the occasional moment of hope he witnesses, that make it possible. Those, and the fact that he brings them to us for our contemplation, also, and so, perhaps, to a cure.

Evening on the Edge of the Arafura Sea

Where it meets Darwin, and Australia looks out to Asia.

And Now for the Diamonds

The Stars Like Sand, a book of Australian SF alternative history, speculative, or otherwise non-mainstream verse, edited by P. S. Cottier and Tim Jones, is here -

i.e., is now on my bookshelf -

It contains Les Murray, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Dorothy Porter, John Shaw Neilson, S.K. Kelen, Philip Salom, Les Wicks, Dorothy Hewett, and me

- & I can't help smiling.

& so my thanks to the editors & conceivers & pushers & doers of this project. Nothing like this is easy.

The Legacy of Ashes

I'm up to the Bay of Pigs, or between a quarter and a third of the way through, Legacy of ashes : the history of the CIA.*

The CIA was deeply lunatic from the git-go. (James Jesus Angleton was a champion alcoholic who shared his operational details beforehand with Kim Philby. For example.)

As always, I'm at a loss. Which aspect of the tale renders me speechless? The epic criminality or the epic incompetence? The kabuki nature of the the Cold War or its hundreds of thousands of real murders?

The one thing that comes reeking off the pages is that every one of these CIA planner-motherfuckers - before or after lunch or electroshock - operated with a sense of impunity.

===

*Legacy of ashes : the history of the CIA / Tim Weiner, Doubleday, New York, 2007.

New Links

In Other Words Merida has become The Merida Review. Merida is a mixture of essays, images, fiction, and poems, some translated, some appearing bilingually in English and Spanish. Over the last eighteen months or so, the editor, Cher Bibler, has been kind enough to publish some of my work.

The 100-year Photo Archive and several other long-term projects and obligations will be finished soon, and I'll be freer than I have been for over ten years. I'll be able to try new things, do new things, do different and more frequent things, with fewer time & conceptual constraints. And that, say my poor narrow shoulders, is a good thing.

Meanwhile, Merida's transition has changed the old links. These are the new links.

Fiction:
The True Death of Agamemnon
Stephen and the Others
Woman Squared

Poems:
Death Poems
Some of the Crucifixes

Writing

Reading

The Tercel, August 1985-February 2014

And so the car has.

It's running very rough, they said. They said they had no problem with shifting, so that might be clutch issues. They replaced a spark plug and found it made no difference. They suspect the chugging/choking on acceleration may mean it needs new carburettor parts, but they can't get parts for it now. Nor even a new carburettor. There's [something] going on with the right rear throttle, it's been leaking gas, that's why the spark plug was all gunked and carbonned up; it needs a new engine, Even then they couldn't say how long it would run –

And so the small & faithful car.

It was a piece of the Pilbara, imported whole from Japan in 1985 when Lang Hancock was selling the haematite percentage of whatever he looked at. I drove it to work and the laundromat and wherever we needed to go: the years we lived in L.A. it took both cats to the vet every time they had to go, took us to Dangerous Visions and A Change of Hobbit on Saturday afternoons, to San Diego to SF conventions, to LosCon every Thanksgiving; here it's taken the cats to the vet, my husband to hospital and home again –

Some asshole of an off-duty sheriff collided with it in 1987; the paint under the window from that repair started to peel, in layers, a couple of winters ago. I've been trying to keep the mould from settling into those jagged, layered edges. It's supposed to rain again over the next few days. I was hoping the rain would dissolve the goose-droppings that appeared on the roof and windows last week.

Moving up to Portland. At the border the road-surface changed: much rougher. My first gig was in Beaverton & surrounds, a set of jobs so miserable I considered a small twist of the wheel from the top course of the Marquam Bridge. Except I couldn't do that to the faithful blue. It was its faithfulness that was heartbreaking.

Because I was using the so-called Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway a family of rattles came to live in the hatch-back door. They stayed while I drove to Lake Oswego for one job and to Fairview for another. They're there still, along with the scattered star-pits from stones hitting the windshield.

A kindly mechanic recommended slightly larger tyres. The window- and door-seals opened. The inside got wet in rain, and then car-washes, designed to deal with vast SUVs, became too brutal for it. I took to washing it by hand, once or twice a year. By then a little gentle pot-scrubber was needed to restore its cheerful heart. The petrol-gauge stopped working; I've run and filled it on the trip-meter since 1997; the heater/cooler fan only runs on settings 3 and 4. But the heater worked well, breathing a cave of clarity at the window-line so I could crouch behind the wheel and peer above the dash-board on winter nights (ice, snow) just enough to start the interminable commute again... The hydraulics for the hatch-back stopped working; the lining of the interior roof sagged; the interior plastic moulding above the window became brittle and broke and dropped unexpectedly; over the last two years I put small pieces of the car into the rubbish-bin on my way through the garage when I got in of an evening.

In its old age our commute shrank to 6 miles. It was the parking lot that was the danger – a long stave of scrapes down the driver's door – clearly from an SUV, the scrape clearly from a bumper-bar, that high... I was horrified and frightened and furious; the door would start rusting this winter. So, because the street was clearly, actually safer, I parked there. Someone must have left some sort of metal container on the hood at some point, waiting to drag it into the trunk of the vehicle parked in front of me; they scored the paint when they dragged the metal thing away. The street was also where the car acquired the goose-droppings.

I'm meeting friends for lunch, and there's some urgent mail for the Post Office. There's no other way to get to lunch and the Post Office easily and now.

On the way to the garage on Wednesday the car choked a couple of times while semi-trailers bore down on us from several directions. That was a very vivid experience.

I'll drive it to work today. I'll come home and take the 2003 Thomas Guide out of the pocket in the seat-cover that looks as though goats have been at it – we bought those in 2002, the day of the Gobshite launch at Looking Glass Books, when Looking Glass was still downtown, at Taylor and 3rd, opposite the lot that hosted Daniel Duford's vandalized sculpture a couple of weeks later.

I'll take the hand-drawn maps out of the glove-box, (Ann's house, Barbara's, Grace's). I'll call the insurance company and take the keys off the key-rings: the spare, my husband's, and then mine.

There was some samurai wisdom I read somewhere or other once, which said, approximately: when one is confronted by an overwhelming force, one will be overwhelmed.

The universe is an overwhelming force.

Update: June 8:
But it sold well at auction, much better than I'd hoped. So instead of wondering if it felt abandoned, cut off from its people for no reason, cast out among strangers (carefully not thinking of a cube of scrap metal on its way cross the sea, the splintering, the crunching, tinkling/shattering/grinding), now I can smile because it will be refurbished, restored, re-created by someone who appreciates its stout heart, its patience, its loyalty.