ANIMORUM MOTUS

NOT US

He had congestive heart failure with fluid in the lungs
and she had a tumorous kidney removed.
All this last month! But the thing is,
they are not us. That’s the whole thing.
They
are not us. Once this concept is grasped, the whole picture becomes
clear and makes good sense. Those four words say it all,
They are not us. It sounds simple yet it means so much.
To begin with, they
are at least twenty-three years older than us —
but that’s not the main point, that’s actually kind of a distraction
because the central essence of the matter is
THEY ARE NOT US
okay and it should just
stay that way stay that way it should
obviously I mean let’s keep I mean the lines have to be clear:

they just are not us
which seems a big mistake on their part but really it’s not their fault
it’s just —

in the hospital that’s them
and we are simply the ones who send them a soberly attractive card
saying “How awful”
so then we have sent them a card.
We sent them a card (because “How awful”) so that’s done

and there’s no reason
to think that card flies up into the night sky
and roars looping beyond sound among invisible clouds
looping in silent fury of speed till some year some day it flies down
soberly attractive and slips quietly how awful under your door my love
and my door.

 - Mark Halliday, from Jab (University of Chicago, 2002)

Team Colors

I have spent these several days past in reading and writing, with the most pleasing tranquility imaginable. You will ask, “How that can possibly be in the midst of Rome?” It was the time of celebrating the Circensian games, an entertainment for which I have not the least taste. They have no novelty, no variety to recommend them—nothing, in short, one would wish to see twice. It does the more surprise me therefore that so many thousand people should be possessed with the childish passion of desiring so often to see a parcel of horses gallop, and men standing upright in their chariots. If indeed it were the swiftness of the horses, or the skill of the men that attracted them, there might be some pretense of reason for it. But it is the dress they like; it is the dress that takes their fancy. And if, in the midst of the course and contest, the different parties were to change colors, their different partisans would change sides and instantly desert the very same men and horses whom just before they were eagerly following with their eyes, as far as they could see, and shouting out their names with all their might. Such mighty charms, such wondrous power reside in the color of a paltry tunic! And this not only with the common crowd (more contemptible than the dress they espouse), but even with serious-thinking people. When I observe such men thus insatiably fond of so silly, so low, so uninteresting, so common an entertainment, I congratulate myself on my indifference to these pleasures—and am glad to employ the leisure of this season upon my books, which others throw away upon the most idle occupations.

 - Pliny The Younger

Five Signs of Disturbance

Back in the city, she is alone most of the time. It is a large apartment that is not hers, though it is not unfamiliar either.

She spends the days by herself trying to work and sometimes looking up from her work to worry about how she will find a place to live, because she can’t stay in this apartment beyond the end of the summer. Then, in the late afternoon, she begins to think she should call someone.

She is watching everything very closely: herself, this apartment, what is outside the windows, and the weather.

There is a day of thunderstorms, with dark yellow and green light in the street, and black light in the alley. She looks into the alley and sees foam running over the concrete, washed out from the gutters by the rain. Then there is a day of high wind.

Now she stands by the door watching the doorknob. The brass doorknob is moving by itself, very slightly, turning back and forth, then jiggling. She is startled, then she hears a foot shuffle on the other side of the doorsill, and a cloth brush against the panel, and other soft noises, and realizes after a moment that this is the doorman who has come to clean the outside of the boor. But she does not go away until the doorknob stops moving.

She looks at the clock often and is aware of exactly what time it is now, and then ten minutes from now, even though she has no need to know what time it is. She also knows exactly how she is feeling, uneasy now, angry ten minutes from now. She is sick to death of knowing what she is feeling, but she can’t stop, as though if she stops watching for longer than a moment, she will disappear (wander off).

There is a bright light coming from the kitchen. She did not turn a light on there. The light is coming from the open window (it is late summer). It is morning.

On another day, the early, low sun shines on the park across the street, on the near edge of it, so that one bare trunk, and the outer leaves of the trees on the side of the grove, and whitened with sunlight as though someone has thrown a handful of gray dust over them. Behind them, darkness.

Before her as she stands at the front window looking out at the park, the plants on the windowsill have dropped some of their leaves.

She knows that if she speaks on the telephone, her voice will communicate something no one will want to listen to. And she will have trouble making herself heard.

 - Lydia Davis

On THE SEVENTH FUNCTION OF LANGUAGE

More often than not, a writer tries to bury their sources like bodies. Some dig solitary plots, and some mass graves; some are sloppy with their labors, some diligent and tidy, and some pay their yes-men to foot the shovel for them; but every book has its ghosts, no matter how far down its catacombs. On occasion, writers not only admit their leases, lifts, and thefts, but costume themselves in their cohort’s garb, announcing themselves as one with the dead. And, yet rarer still, are those who know the outcomes of their efforts, and happily raise their habits of allegiance like a flag in surrender.

On November 16th, 1977, (the real) Roland Barthes wrote in his diary, “Now, everywhere, in the street, the café, I see each individual under the aspect of ineluctably having-to-die, which is exactly what it means to be mortal.—And no less obviously, I see them as not knowing this to be so.”

 - Luc Rioual

Open Office Plan

He’d just sent the email and stepped into an Urge shower station when he received a more formal missive of his own. A gloved hand knocked twice upon the frosted shower door and vanished into the workplace abyss. Max-Tim switched off the gush midshampoo and breached the glass divide to find a letter—on official company letterhead, in an official company envelope—waiting at his feet. It was addressed to him from the Executive Director, requesting his presence in the Leather Room in twenty minutes, an obvious honor as this was by far the most exclusive and expensively furnished conference room in the entire building. His coworkers had talked it up for years, rumors mostly, he’d never been.

The envelope smelled like fertilizer.

He fetched his best band T-shirt (Nirvana, but really colorful), and his fedora which, like the most frantic comets, came back around every few years and even then people didn’t bother to look at it. The watch he affixed to his wrist had a computer on it, and the computer had a watch on it, and this ingenuity hastened his calculation of time approximately zero, a gripe of his, but everyone in the Company wore them. He headed to the Leather Room, on the topmost floor, full of admiration for himself.

A long, gold-plated hallway led to the room, whose doors were flung open, waiting for him like the jaws of a majestic, underfed lion. Max-Tim appraised instantly that this was not the “leather” of Louisa, not the bodices, tights, and boots that snapped shut and withheld everything, up to and including normal blood circulation. No, this was poacher’s leather, a hidebound paradise of conquering manhood, full of roaring fireplaces, Axe shower-gel samples, and bull-testicle trophies. The Executive Manager sat upon a massive leather throne atop which was mounted the head of a giraffe, the most accomplished surveillant of all land-roaming creatures. Was the throne bolted to the floor? Even so, how did it not fall over?

The Executive Director was a roundish man, clumsily dressed in a rumpled black suit, but his motions were deliberate, endowing him with a lithe authority, and the baby-pink V-neck peeking through his unbuttoned blazer was an outrageously self-assured touch.

“Max-Tim,” boomed the Executive Director, “so cool of you to come.”

“Your invitation was super unexpected, but in a good way.”

“That’s how I meant it. Cigar?”

Max-Tim considered his boss’s offering, which looked like some kind of Victorian tampon.

“Is it —”

“Wrapped in the finest Italian leather? Yes.”

“I didn’t know you could smoke leather.”

“Well, I wouldn’t advise it, but stick in your mouth all the same, suck on it, taste it, it gives off … incredible mouthfeel.” The Executive Director threw each word from his throat like a boxer pushing a helpless opponent around a ring. Performative, and mean.

“Very generous, thank you.”

“Cocaine?”

“Yes, please.”

“Porn noises on or off? We’ve got aural cum shots on a loop, the finest sound quality money can play.”

“Wow, this room really does have everything … Off?”

“As you wish. Now I’ll tell you outright that it’s not a promotion you’re here to discuss, but a lateral move I believe you’ll find quite interesting. We’re reassigning you to VR.”

Not what Max-Tim had been anticipating, not in the abstract or in the particulars (deep down he wanted glory—specifically, to be paid for it).

“We’ve been watching you closely,” said the Executive Director, “and I don’t think you’ll object to my pointing out that you suffer from more than a little anxiety over how you are perceived by others professionally. For instance, you’d like to be seen as more of an intellectual, or maybe preternaturally compassionate. You’re more than just brawn, and tactical analysis and good politics. We think this new assignment will allow your image to grow in the more edgy-cum-philanthropic direction that you desire.”

Max-Tim was taken aback by the Executive Director’s candor. It was true enough, he had been feeling restless, incapable of achieving the personal brand satisfaction he’d always felt on the verge of, if not owed. But he bristled at management’s apparent calculation that he wasn’t an intellectual, not yet at least. Like most people working in media, he’d long harbored two secret beliefs about himself, especially in relation to his peers. The first was that he was a radically unrepressed communist. The second, that he was smarter than everyone else, with the exception of a few unprecedented individuals already famous for their brilliance.

The Executive Director continued. “Your first assignment will be to work on one of our virtually ethical investment programs where we donate VR goggles to homeless people so they can experience what it’s like to have real estate, and safe families, and expense accounts. We give the goggles away for free, brands pay to advertise, and the hope is that seeing the life that’s passing them by will give these individuals—impoverished by the fucking system—the motivation they need to start generating higher incomes and become consumers of the companies that reinvigorated their life goals. They are the visionaries, we’re just giving them the tools to make their dreams a reality.”

“It sounds like …” Max-Tim trailing off, the words coming slow.

“Yes,” the Executive Director beckoned eagerly, with lively, expectant eyes.

“A tremendously soul-dividing task. I can hardly muster a response ironic enough to meet it,” Max-Tim managed.

“Cheers to that,” roared the Executive Director, lifting a rawhide tumbler to his lips.

 - Hannah Gold

Death Is Not The End

The 56-year-old American poet, a Nobel Laureate, a poet known in American literary circles as “the poet’s poet” or sometimes simply “the Poet,” lay outside on the deck, bare-chested, moderately overweight, in a partially reclined deck chair, in the sun, reading, half supine, moderately but not severely overweight, winner of two National Book Awards, an American Book Critics’ Circle Award, a Lament Prize, two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Prix de Rome, a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, a MacDowell Medal, and a Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award from the American Academy and National Institute of Arts and Letters, a president emeritus of PEN, a poet two separate American generations have hailed as the voice of their generation, now 56, lying in an unwet XL Speedo-brand swimsuit in an incrementally reclinable canvas deck chair on the tile deck beside the home’s pool, a poet who was among the first ten Americans to receive a “Genius Grant” from the prestigious MacArthur Foundation, one of only three American recipients of the Nobel Prize for Literature now living, 5’ 8", 181 lbs., brown/brown, hairline unevenly recessed because of the inconsistent acceptance/rejection of various Hair Augmentation Systems-brand transplants, he sat, or lay—or perhaps most accurately just reclined—in a black Speedo swimsuit by the home’s kidney-shaped pool (1), on the pool’s tile deck, in a portable deck chair whose back was now reclined four clicks to an angle of 35_ w/r/t the deck’s mosaic tile, at 10:20 A.M. on 15 May 1995, the fourth most anthologized poet in the history of American belles lettres, near an umbrella but not in the actual shade of the umbrella, reading Newsweek magazine (2), using the modest swell of his abdomen as an angled support for the magazine, also wearing thongs, one hand behind his head, the other hand out to the side and trailing on the dun-and-ocher filigree of the deck’s expensive Spanish ceramic tile, occasionally wetting a finger to turn the page, wearing prescription sunglasses whose lenses were chemically treated to darken in fractional proportion to the luminous intensity of the light to which they were exposed, wearing on the trailing hand a wristwatch of middling quality and expense, simulated rubber thongs on his feet, legs crossed at the ankle and knees slightly spread, the sky cloudless and brightening as the morning’s sun moved up and right, wetting a finger not with saliva or perspiration but with the condensation on the thin frosted glass of iced tea that rested now just on the border of his body’s shadow to the chair’s upper right and would soon have to be moved to remain in that cool shadow, tracing a finger idly down the glass’s side before bringing the slightly moist finger idly up to the page, occasionally turning the pages of the 19 September 1994 edition of Newsweek magazine, reading about American health-care reform and about US Air’s tragic Flight 427, reading a summary and favorable review of the popular nonfiction volumes Hot Zone and The Coming Plague, sometimes turning several pages in succession, skimming certain articles and summaries, an eminent American poet now four months short of his fifty-seventh birthday, a poet whom Newsweek magazine’s chief competitor, Time magazine, had once rather absurdly called “the closest thing to a genuine literary immortal now living,” his shins nearly hairless, the open umbrella’s shadow distending slightly, the thongs’ simulated rubber pebbled on both sides of the sole, the poet’s forehead dotted with perspiration, his tan deep and rich, the insides of his upper legs nearly hairless, his penis curled tightly on itself inside the tight swimsuit, his Vandyke neatly trimmed, a clean ashtray on the iron table, not drinking his iced tea, occasionally clearing his throat, at certain intervals shirting slightly in the pastel deck chair to scratch idly at the instep of one foot with the big toe of the other foot without removing his thongs or looking at either foot, seemingly intent on the magazine, the home’s blue pool to his right and the home’s thick glass sliding rear door to his oblique left, between himself and the pool a round table of white woven iron impaled at the center by a large beach umbrella whose distending shadow now nearly touches the pool, an indisputably accomplished poet, reading his magazine in his chair on his deck by his pool behind his home. The home’s pool and deck area are surrounded on three sides by a dense tangle of trees and shrubbery. The trees and shrubbery, planted years before, are densely interwoven and serve the same essential function as a privacy fence or a wall of fine stone. It is the height of spring, and the trees and shrubbery are in full leaf and are intensely green and still, and are complexly shadowed, and the sky is wholly blue and still, so that the whole enclosed tableau of pool and deck and poet and chair and trees and home’s rear facade is very still and composed and very nearly wholly silent, the gentle gurgle of the pool’s pump and drain and the occasional sound of the poet clearing his throat or turning the pages of Newsweek magazine the only sounds—not a bird, no distant lawn mowers or hedge trimmers or weed wackers, no airplanes overhead or distant muffled sounds from the pools of the homes on either side of the poet’s home, nothing but the pool’s respiration and poet’s occasional cleared throat, wholly still and enclosed, not even a hint of a breeze to stir the leaves of the trees and shrubbery, the silent living nastic enclosing flora’s motionless green vivid and inescapable and not like anything else in the world in either appearance or suggestion (3).

___________________________________________________________________________________

(1) Also the first American-born poet ever in the Nobel Prize for Literature’s distinguished 94-year history to receive it, the coveted Nobel Prize for Literature.

(2) Never the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, however: rejected thrice early in his poetry career, he had determined that something personal and/or political was afoot with the Guggenheim Fellowship committee and had decided that he’d simply be damned, starve utterly, before he would ever again hire a Graduate Assistant to fill out the tiresome triplicate Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship application and go through the tiresome contemptible farce of “objective” consideration again.

(3) That is not entirely true.

 - David Foster Wallace

A Sport and a Pastime

“September. It seems these luminous days will never end. The city, which was almost empty during August, now is filling up again. It is being replenished. The restaurants are all reopening, the shops. People are coming back from the country, the sea, from trips on roads all jammed with cars. The station is very crowded. There are children, dogs, families with old pieces of luggage bound by straps. I make my way among them. It’s like being in a tunnel. Finally I emerge onto the brilliance of the quai, beneath a roof of glass panels which seems to magnify the light.

On both sides is a long line of coaches, dark green, the paint blistering with age. I walk along reading the numbers, first and second class. It’s pleasant seeing all the plaques with the numbers printed on them. It’s like counting money. There’s a comfortable feeling of delivering myself into the care of those who run these great, somnolent trains, through the clear glass of which people are staring, as drained, as quiet as invalids…”

- James Salter