Gloria Frym

Sense

Some people don’t know what needs to be done. Perhaps they can’t sense what needs to be done. Montaigne says that it is only through the senses that we know. Such people who don’t sense what needs to be done don’t do the thing that needs doing and avoid knowing about it. There are others who know what needs to be done, always know. They sense the needing, such as the dirty metal ring staining the wood floor that the base of the old pole lamp has made over time until one day, though previously unseen, the etching of metal on wood is visible. As if carved. Greasy, even. Though it’s not. It’s solid. If it were greasy, well. The viewer of this ring, reclining in a recliner some five feet away, gets up and repositions the old pole lamp so that it once again covers its own orbit. The viewer is just too tired to make a fuss; and besides, he rationalizes, who cares, I’m old, I’m busy, I’m young, I have better things to do. One who sees clearly could be deemed responsible for remedying the situation, the needing that something should be done to remove the dirty metal ring from the wood floor and prevent the base of the lamp from carving further scars on the living wood. After all, rust never dies, just goes deeper. Living wood, haven’t you heard the floorboards speak, the entire frame speak at night? But, and after imagining several possible solutions or not, probably not, the reclining one takes the nap he had started before interrupted by the unsightly circle eating into the pale oak floor.

Faced with such knowledge, other people know what needs to be done, imagine it, and do it. Their first attempts may fail. He thought he could simply spray a cleaning solvent on the floor to eliminate the grease. However, the stain is not grease. The second attempt is floor polish. He rubs it in well. But the stain does not disappear. Then he cuts out a circle of carpet pad from a nearby rug and places it under the lamp base. This he is sure will prevent the stain from spreading. However, he is in a hurry, his thoughts have already leapt beyond his perceptions, he takes no measurements of the carpet pad, just cuts out a jagged circle smaller than the diameter. When he places the scrappy pad under the lamp base it wobbles. He makes a mental note to do it again more carefully, with exact measurements. But he doesn’t. He forgets. Time passes. Seasons change. He moves to Portland
or Sweden to throw pots.

Another member of the family, or occupant of the household (whose precise roles shall remain unnamed for anonymity, to avoid stereotypic gender assumptions), notices the circle made by the lamp. Didn’t M buy that for $15, so long ago, at a flea market or garage sale in the last century, when such events offered the contents of a garage or grandmother’s castoffs collecting nothing but dust and spiders in an unventilated attic, or the recently acquired products of a journey to a country that produced tribal textiles, basketry, beadwork, etc. At the very least, the material remains of a marriage the former wife of which sits on a folding chair next to her youngest child who beckons other children his age to visit his collection of miniature action heroes. “Two for $5,” he says shyly, to the first looker.

This member of the family or the household endowed with historical memory unplugs their earphones, whips out their self-retracting tape measure, and measures the diameter of the stain. My Business is Circumference, they recall with a smile, and note the dimension. The next day they visit a hardware emporium. Such places, with names like Passed Time, Time on My Side, Kingfisher, Do It Best, Bricorama, carry everything one can imagine for home improvement, which, in a country of dreams, is practically self-improvement. They ask for a piece of felt cut to a specific size. A clerk behind the counter cheerfully inquires as to the “color of the felt.” “It doesn’t matter,” they—the person who knows what needs to be done—reply. “What sort of glue do you recommend for adhering felt to ah . . . .old metal?” The cheerful clerk senses hesitation, knows it through her senses of course. “Brass?” she offers. “Oh yes, that’s it, or it’s pot metal that looks like old brass.” The clerk leads the person who knows what needs to be done to the appropriate aisle of the store, embarks upon an explanation of glues, which stick to what and for how long, the price of each, and though the person who knows what needs to be done—this has become a bulky assignation we could acronym to TPWKWNTBD, which hasn’t a single vowel and seems impossible to pronounce, not unlike the Hebrew alphabet, which also relies strictly on consonants, so we’d better shorten it to TPW, perhaps a bit corporate, something one would notice on the side of a truck in traffic, akin to the menacing CVS or KGB or PMS—enjoys details and specifics, is tiring of glues, though finds the expertise and bright visage of the clerk suddenly enchanting.

They both blurt out nearly simultaneously a similar thought: Why don’t you/I bring in the lamp! TPW knows by now that the lamp is brass but wants to 1) get the job done right? 2) see the cheerful clerk again? Who knows and who cares about this part! TPW rushes home, etc. The lamp is brass of course, and so TPW returns to the hardware emporium to purchase both the perfectly cut circle of felt and the appropriate glue. Whatever happens next is collateral, and though may well be the story that begins the rest of two lives—that has nothing or everything to do with the simple observation which began this rumination. We can establish, however, a “bond” between TPW and the job they set out to accomplish. We’re done now.

Recycle

One transgression against the self may beget another. This is evident in persons on strict diets who take a second piece of cake then a third, deceiving only themselves. She threw the book into the recycle, she said, for its own good. Of course I’m against censorship, she insisted, but this piece of shit was remaindered and anyway, it was a galley proof. The late author was a famous experimentalist but these narratives were the awful mean-spirited dregs of his late life, good for nothing but the dump. He said nasty things about the physiognomy of old people. He reviled the few friends he had left. However, the guilt of throwing away a book nagged at her. It burns me, she said, that the book was even published. She had no such guilt about another book on gems and precious stones which arrived in her mailbox without her having ordered it. It was nothing she was interested in, so she put it in the bathroom where it sat for years, along with 501 Slovokian Verbs, until she finally dumped both into the recycle.

When she was a child, her father taught her never to desecrate books, never to write in them, fold their pages down, break their spines—all of which she began to do once in the world on her own. First it began with pencil—checking off certain passages, even underlining them. Then as the prohibition gradually lessened in her she took up the pen and would bracket sections. In the 1950s, during the “Red Scare,” her mother, not a recipient of the same training, found a box of “Communist” books in the garage just after they’d moved into a new house. She ripped them apart and put them into the incinerator, only to be severely chastised by her husband who came from a long line of Torah scholars most of whom had died in the Holocaust. A book is a holy thing, her sad father muttered, watching the bonfire. It was the first time she ever heard him use the word holy, as he was not just a secularist but given his history, he had no use for god.

When she initially began to read what she eventually trashed, this writer had high hopes for the book and thought it might give her ideas. But the only idea that she had was to get rid of it. First she tried to leave it in a restaurant, but the waitress came running after her. Then she tried to find a trash receptacle and there was none in sight. The one thought in her mind was that no one else would or should read this book because they might get the idea that its lack of merit was ‘experimental.’ Au contraire, it was lousy writing. After all, she told me, we know good writing from bad, don’t we? The back cover said that the author worked on it until his death but she joked that it must have killed him when he finished the last word. Crossing the street against a red light with the book in her hand, she said, nearly killed her.

She was determined to rid herself of this book not just because it repulsed her. Ultimately, she felt that it tarnished the reputation of an otherwise interesting writer, and if she could, she would buy up all the copies of this now-out-of-print abomination and throw them into the recycle too.

And yet, she confided, if it was so easy to throw away something an artist had put himself into, might it not start a habit? Might she not get rid of the dreadful painting that depicted a scene out of Things Fall Apart, a black man hanging, which a student gave her in lieu of a final paper? Or the imposing portrait of an artichoke fifty times the size of the real thing as a wedding present that arrived in the mail fully framed? Would such actions precipitate a clean up of all the books and artworks and odds and ends that no longer held meaning for her, even offended her sensibility? Would she accelerate her desire to rid the world of bad writing? Would she actively seek out other books like the vigilante “book ripper” of Herne Bay, England, who targets books in a store whose proceeds go to charity, books out of sight of the cash register, particularly in the true crime section, who rips their pages in half and puts them back on the shelves? Was destroying what one deemed a bad text the gateway to further moral lapses? A future of dangerous infidelities to one’s soul? After all, it had to start somewhere.

Gloria Frym lives in Berkeley. Her most recent book is The True Patriot, a collection of proses, from Spuyten Duyvil. She is the author of short story collections, Distance No Object (City Lights Books) and How I Learned (Coffee House Press), as well as many volumes of poetry. She is professor in the Graduate Writing Program and the Writing & Literature Program at California College of the Arts.

Editors’ Notes (Posit 25)

 

Here we are in September of 2020, with millions of people sick and dying worldwide as a result of the confluence of two deadly pandemics, one biological and the other political, even as great swathes of the United States are burning or flooding, and the nation careens towards one of the most consequential elections in its history (so please, please, VOTE). So we thought you needed a little gift. Putting Posit 25 together has been a bright spot in our days, when those have sometimes seemed few and far between, and we hope it will have the same effect on you.

In times like these, when “the fires burn with bodies” (Darren Demaree, The Field Party #1) and “the carnage is everywhere” (makalani bandele, unit_84), art may be a balm, but it is no frivolity. As contributor Hiroyuki Hamada has put it: “As our world continues to be subservient to the hierarchy of money and violence, I believe the exploration of artists to perceive the world reaching beyond the framework of corporatism, colonialism and militarism continues to be a crucial part of being human.”

Each of the stellar contributors to this very special issue may be at a different stage of their trajectory – from previously unpublished (Marije Bouduin) to rising star (makalani bandele, Thaddeus Rutkowski) to celebrated master (Erica Baum, G.C. Waldrep, Hiroyuki Hamada) – but, as you will see, each and every one of them is at the top of their game.

The free-jazz-inflected musicality of makalani bandele’s prose units supplants even as it illuminates the bankrupt elitism underlying conventional distinctions between the erudite and the colloquial. Glowing with a bold and breathless energy, these prose poems are playful as well as unflinching in their engagement with the racism baked into contemporary American life, in which “the carnage is everywhere” and “people say ‘no one’ all the time, when actually they mean ‘no one white.’” Having “located this tributary about a stone’s throw away from some postmodernity,” bandele’s prose poems “vibing in a landscape of contradictions” “economize form to go faster” until their “stories are flames.”

A deep but light-handed resonance underpins Erica Baum’s celebrated series, Dog Ears. Baum’s photographs of folded-down pages from unidentifiable books tease us with what they conceal as well as reveal, tempting us to infer what we cannot decipher while frustrating the urge to uncover what they have made inaccessible. The textures and typeface in these photographs only enhance our awareness of the tactile quality of the printed page, even as they place it definitively out of reach. The artist’s loving disruption of her source materials leads the viewer beyond the urge to resolve the ambiguities created by their fragmentation to embrace the new wholes forged by her juxtapositions and syntheses. Baum thus transforms her source materials into indelible artifacts whose effect is to offer and withhold at once, giving us no choice but to accept and build upon the ambiguous and fragmentary nature of communication itself. These powerful new pieces, incorporating references to “tragedy” “prescription” “zoomed” “mask” “spectacle” “dark” “wreck” “Washington” “post office” and more, speak directly to the experience of living in a pandemic that is “getting to all of us . . . facing danger / and the not knowing”.

Celia Bland’s sensual imagery and powerful prosody forge brilliantly unpredictable connections between such apparently disparate subjects as fish and human sexuality, familial and racial identity, horse racing and gun violence, turbulent landings and the assassination of JFK. In ringing and rhythmic language, Flounder’s eponymous narrator speaks not only for the fish “drifting off in the currents,” but for any “flesh” which is “foundered,” which is “blunder.” EX considers skin to explore what is absent, unsaid, or concealed, like the ethnically revealing “sheen of my grandfather’s arms . . . beneath his starched white shirt” despite the traces it leaves on “every armrest, on every tray table, with every scratch.” like bundles of shudders explores the very notion of arousal to forge a chain of associations from one mythos of excitement to another, from the sexualized “horse opera[s] written for the adolescent girl / in the reign of RPM” to guns, both of which are “heart bursting.” Terminaire’s very title evokes both death and flight, going on to link flight turbulence and the suit Jackie Kennedy wore when her husband was assassinated, exposing the ominous threat of “this authentic turbulence– / This Dallas.”

Marije Bouduin’s debut poems celebrate the elusive power of love even as they lament its loss. Ultimately, they evoke the loneliness and isolation of being itself. In a compellingly direct yet lyrical voice, these poems take off from Plato’s theory of the bifurcated hermaphrodites to lament the limitations of connection, even while “[t]he way your hips move impulses an orchestra to form.” In these “collective econom[ies] of variables and adverbs” the poet skillfully “appl[ies] stress to the structure and see[s] what follows,” enticing the reader to “play a game of poem string by string.”

Raymond de Borja’s haunting, gripping epistolary poem to “Dear Jean” posits a “moth-eaten world” — “After Music” — proffering a historical yet alarmingly present intimacy we share as “[t]his very evening, Jean, they are ripping the square apart.” In the world of these poems as in our world, “the riot is our figure and ground.” Like the speaker in We Requested for Some Relaxing Forest Sounds, we too want to plead, “oh please disemplot, one, someone, anyone, point by point from nature…” As this poet brilliantly reveals, even in music and art, “[o]ur mind is the silent ligature between the glass, the ornamental grass, and an idea of enclosure.”

In these powerful and disturbing prose blocks from The Field Party, Darren Demaree returns to Posit with a series of short but breathlessly urgent works about the contemporary state of the United States Midwest, in which “fires burn with bodies as well as they burn with the furniture that once held the bodies” and children are raised “to not fear becoming part of that fire” in which “guns are tucked” and are “always pointed at something.” Meanwhile, Emily As We Let the Faucets Run offers a tightly coiled tribute to the understated and sometimes paradox-infused beauty of domestic intimacy, in which the fact that Emily “can erase” the narrator is “an actual gift.”

In Connor Fisher’s rich, tactile imagery of time present and past, the properties of memory and the distance between what we remember and what we are become something almost concrete, a “strange object.” Although the narrator of Autobiography III observes that “[e]ven shepherds” — whose work is calling as well as duty – “lose their sheep,” this poet’s rare and frank attention to the world he sings puts him in no such danger. An artist of the physical and tangible (“the body [which] smells a bit off,” the ewe and her “fatty, / sweet milk”), Fisher’s calling is to “join together the small pieces of whatever strange object you chose to muster up. . . an article, a partridge, the sweat built up under your arms, a child, the image of the moon in water.” In these poems, “[t]here’s always a rhythm” in which the observation that “the sun’s down” — “[l]ike all the rest” is all we know, and all we need to know.

Gloria Frym’s unique and provocative prose works function as both conceptual meditations and modern morality tales fueled by the author’s unflinching insights into human nature. In Sense, the elusive and persistent question of ‘what is to be done’ is considered from a psychological as well as moral point of view. Whereas the character who doesn’t “sense what needs to be done” and therefore doesn’t “do the thing that needs doing” remains stuck in the same vacuous and inert occupation from which he could not be bothered to budge, the proactive path of the person who knows what needs to be done leads them to a love story “that begins the rest of two lives.” In Recycle, the temptation to betray the narrator’s principles (against treating books with disrespect) gives rise to recursive rationalizations likely to become “the gateway to further moral lapses.”

Situated, by his own description, in a contemporary sociopolitical context of “corporatism, colonialism and militarism,” Hiroyuki Hamada’s imposing and mysterious sculptures are in some respects reminiscent of missiles and bullets, warships and fortresses. However, like ‘swords into ploughshares,’ the freshness and complexity of Hamada’s refined and polished conceptions incorporate these ominous elements into balanced, yet whimsical structures reminiscent of biomorphic forms and even flexible states of matter, like liquids and gels. These are painstakingly crafted sculptures of profound emotional as well as cerebral resonance, as compelling as they are serene.

Working in an extraordinary range of media, from drawing to sculpture to installation to video, Jean Jaffe draws on her interest in psychology, anthropology, literature, and cultural history to create new realities that are as recognizable as they are strange, as beautiful as they are disturbing. This enticing sampling of her output includes clips from her live-action animations of Alice in Wonderland and A Tribute to Tesla, her graceful yet distressing biomorphic sculptural chimeras, her delicate and moving drawings, her whimsical installations inspired by literature such as Remains of the Day and T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, and her disturbing reimagining of the tale of Little Red Riding Hood from the wolf’s point of view. No matter the medium or subject, Jaffe’s work is informed by a probing interest in what it means to be alive, imbuing even the most whimsical of her creations with depth and resonance.

Whether working in dry pigment or acrylic and oil, Suejin Jo creates canvases of jewel-like beauty. Working with an intensely saturated, vibrant, and harmonious if often unpredictable color palette, Jo makes use of a wealth of lines, marks, and shapes which range from the geometric to the organic. Exuding a unique combination of order and energy, Jo’s dense canvases are at once serene and immensely dynamic. With their simplicity of composition and richness of detail, these paintings variously evoke nature and artifice, water and light, land and architecture, forging a sense of connection between the viewer and the artist’s quest for the beauty and meaning of what it is to be alive in this world.

Lesle Lewis is a poet of the physical and concrete, miraculously conjoined with the whimsical, like “bottle tipsy . . . sailboat muses . . . and miracle bambinos”. In these poems, teemingly alive in image and movement, the myriad contradictions of our lives are distilled: “I turn the heat on and off a thousand times. I make anti-gravity moves,” and the myriad things of the world need no explanation or irritable reaching: “Let’s let these things be by themselves, not goose-to-goose, duck-to-duck, dog-to-dog, person-to-person, civilization-to-wild, open-to -sanctuary.” Acknowledging the universal if impossible yearning “to float in an infinite present,” Lewis wisely counsels that we “talk about this now before it’s too late and two hour wars become three hundred years.”

Thaddeus Rutkowski’s tale of an evening bicycle ride has the depth of a life cycle and the velocity of the ride itself. Its brilliant, beautifully spare, and precise description reveals the inner and outer life of a narrator physically sure of himself as he navigates city traffic on his way home, avoiding a startled pedestrian who tells him to either “get a light” or “get a life.” Although he knows he does not need the former, he is not so sure about the latter, since even at the end of his journey, “when [he] pass[es] through the last obstacle, [he] will be more or less home.” On the way, near-accidents, misunderstandings, and a police stop chip away at the rider’s spirits, building a dysphoric atmosphere that functions as a subtle commentary on contemporary life – one expressed by the graffiti he notices, declining in hopefulness from “Sarah2 Marry Me” to “sadder words” like “Entropy,” “Self-Obsession,” “Mediocrity,” “Boredom,” “Conflict,” “Revolution.”

Tony Trigilio’s ornate, surreal, and witty prosody makes virtuosic sport of narrative and the language by which it is conveyed. This is the work of “an aesthete whose sacrosanct / observance prickles the highest vanes of clamor.” And yet his pastiche worlds have much in common with our own, on levels both personal: “the desperado inside my Outlook calendar,” and cultural: “The first budgets of the twenty-first century: the poke, the nub, their neo-liberalism.” Dare we hope for a time when “the dominant social group exhausts itself” — even as conditions become more dire, and “’Spontaneity’” [is] replaced by “constraint” in ever less / disguised and indirect forms, in outright police measures”? Even in a possible future world where “[f]rugal parents from Soviet Florida bicker in fumy saloons,” as Trigilio reminds us, “[w]e should’ve known swindlers can pose as subterraneans.”

G.C. Waldrep’s chiseled and luminous ruminations on the work of Jean Dubuffet and Cy Twombly offer a glimpse of their aesthetic affinities with one another, as well as with the poet himself. A potent blend of humility and sophistication comes to mind, as does a demonstrated faith in the power of the artifact to speak for itself. By considering what Dubuffet “could have said” in painting (and titling) Exodus, Waldrep elucidates the richness of suggestion inherent in the image, even as he highlights the painter’s choices: using his notoriously pedestrian materials when he “could have crushed pearls into powder;” depicting exile and displacement when he “could have said light-bearing roof / beneath which a house crouches.” In Twombly, Waldrep’s incorporation of a haunting phrase by Friederike Mayröcker recalls the painter’s search for what he referred to as “the phrase,” and Waldrep’s spare and cryptic lines nod to Twombly’s trailing lines and indecipherable text. By deploying language even while silencing it, Waldrep’s final lines suggest, might Twombly’s inscrutable and often asemic “insatiable little gardens” enact as well as reveal culture’s propensity to “hold the tongue / by its root?” Finally, by invoking the flames lit to remind the faithful to pray for the souls of the poor, Poor Souls’ Light makes its own apt and solemn offering of faith and value to all of us so sorely in need of “secret solace” in these harrowing times.

Stay safe and well, and please VOTE as if your life depends on it — it does.

with love and hope,

Susan Lewis, Carol Ciavonne, and Bernd Sauermann