Father in his Underpants

Towards the end father could be found in the alley in his underpants holding a bouquet of items. A large screw-driver, a three foot length of black rubber tubing, a fake flower, a plastic snake made of pieces on joints so it could wiggle. He’d start conversations with some of the teens there asking if they needed legal advice. Some of them made fun of him, playing along, some of them said they actually did — they had been busted for selling weed, and didn’t know whether to take it to court or take a plea. Take a plea said my father. Nancy! Nancy! Call up the other side and see if we can keep this out of court! he’d call out. But there was no legal secretary in the alley, just the purpling evening, a few kids, his bouquet of items, an old refrigerator that the door had been removed from so nobody would get trapped in it, bits of broken glass, and the ailanthus trees.

I dreamed that I went to his office on avenue B where he presided as king for fifty years helping whoever walked in the door. He would call me sometimes and say that there were nine languages being spoken in my office right now: Spanish and English of course, and Punjabi (that was Cheney Singh who had come to the US with eight dollars and now had several buildings) several dialects of Chinese, whose speakers, crooked as ram’s horns were working out the real deal in Chinese while my Dad typed up the fake deal in English, the one for show, and Thai, and a dialect of Yemeni for which no interpreter could be found at court and the case was dismissed, and Ukrainian and Albanian and Russian and Greek and Turkish and more besides. And in my dream, as in life, he was dead and the office was a wreck — empty spaces on the walls where art from the neighborhood had once been, the furniture gone or out of place as if deposited after a flood, the man gone.

I awoke with tears in my eyes but they are tears of gratitude. We miss spaces but we miss the people who made those spaces, those places of love and safety. I am grateful to the tears. They teach me what I love by what I miss.

Standing in the alley against the purpling sky against the stand of ailanthus trees, giving legal advice to the grown children who might be teasing but might be needing advice from a father…against the sky what have you got that’s better? Says I: precious little. Not very much.

Father in his Underpants

Towards the end father could be found in the alley in his underpants holding a bouquet of items. A large screw-driver, a three foot length of black rubber tubing, a fake flower, a plastic snake made of pieces on joints so it could wiggle. He’d start conversations with some of the teens there asking if they needed legal advice. Some of them made fun of him, playing along, some of them said they actually did — they had been busted for selling weed, and didn’t know whether to take it to court or take a plea. Take a plea said my father. Nancy! Nancy! Call up the other side and see if we can keep this out of court! he’d call out. But there was no legal secretary in the alley, just the purpling evening, a few kids, his bouquet of items, an old refrigerator that the door had been removed from so nobody would get trapped in it, bits of broken glass, and the ailanthus trees.

I dreamed that I went to his office on avenue B where he presided as king for fifty years helping whoever walked in the door. He would call me sometimes and say that there were nine languages being spoken in my office right now: Spanish and English of course, and Punjabi (that was Cheney Singh who had come to the US with eight dollars and now had several buildings) several dialects of Chinese, whose speakers, crooked as ram’s horns were working out the real deal in Chinese while my Dad typed up the fake deal in English, the one for show, and Thai, and a dialect of Yemeni for which no interpreter could be found at court and the case was dismissed, and Ukrainian and Albanian and Russian and Greek and Turkish and more besides. And in my dream, as in life, he was dead and the office was a wreck — empty spaces on the walls where art from the neighborhood had once been, the furniture gone or out of place as if deposited after a flood, the man gone.

I awoke with tears in my eyes but they are tears of gratitude. We miss spaces but we miss the people who made those spaces, those places of love and safety. I am grateful to the tears. They teach me what I love by what I miss.

Standing in the alley against the purpling sky against the stand of ailanthus trees, giving legal advice to the grown children who might be teasing but might be needing advice from a father…against the sky what have you got that’s better? Says I: precious little. Not very much.

Charley, the Hero

Mr. Mazza did very bad stuff and the police ultimately got a hold of him. He lived on the 4th floor. Across the hall from Charley. Upstairs from us.

Mazza left lots of records, some just a few lines on a scrap of paper, some books covered with records of what he did.

Look, is it dangerous to read that stuff? Obviously it is dangerous to read that stuff. He was, as Marc said, “a sicko”.

But to just let the cops take all that writing away to put it in a vault? Charley thought that would be a waste. Ultimately disrespectful to the lives and deaths of his victims, since the way they lived and died, the way he made them live and die, left its records, filtered through his mind — massive, mazey, mythical, though Marc was not wrong, obviously sick.

What a risk she took reading those papers. Such darkness.

Such darkness.

She told me once — you know we live inside the sun. We are surrounded by photons. We are in an ocean of white, burning light. It is only because of evolution that we evolved the ability to see anything other than that radiance. By birth we are unable to see because all we see is light. Only after great struggle do we realize we are in the dark, only after great pain do we grow eyes that are able to fail to see.

My Furious Jealousy

My job is to write slogans. I got the job by writing “The Three Untils”. Perhaps you saw that poster after we ended the War in Vietnam. There was a victory parade, the one time CEOs of the fortune 500 companies were stripped down to boxers dragging a big float with a head of Mark Rudd on it and everywhere posters we ran off the night before with the slogan

UNTIL BROTHER LOVES BROTHER

UNTIL RACISM ENDS

UNTIL EVERY SISTER IS RESPECTED…

NO PEACE!!!

And this was a big hit and I was noticed by Comrade Ragowsky in the evening Struggle and I got a call the next day and reported to the Consciousness Raising Permanent Happening on Rivington Street, and I got the job.

And I did pretty good for a couple years but then Steve joined the CRPH and he started ripping off my stuff. He wrote the “TWO TRUES”

IT IS TRUE THAT STRUGGLE WILL NEVER END

IT IS TRUE THAT IT IS WORTH IT!

And that got literally written ON THE SKY in FUCKIN’ FIREWORKS on MAY DAY!

And I decided, Kaplan — you got it once. You had it once. You got noticed on End the War Day and your fliers were all over the city like yellow leaves after the first good rain in November. You can do it. And I gave my boss “THE FOUR UNLESSES”. I typed it up on my Smith Corona, left a little note in pen on my buckslip, clipped it to the note, and slipped it under his door. And waited.

Tuesday.

Wednesday.

Thursday. Struggle session. Should I bring it up? I didn’t bring it up. I didn’t want to bring it up. It might seem — maybe it would seem like it was so important to me I couldn’t let it go. Maybe Comrade Hakeem would tell there was something not quite halal going on in my subconscious. I struggled myself for craving pastries, when our brother in the third world got by on a bowl of rice. I made myself cry and Sister Marta hugged me and I felt her breasts through her peasant smock, and it was a good struggle.

Friday I waited for Hakeem before the Funk It Out for Freedom in Freedom park.

Comrade Hakeem!

Comrade Kaplan!

Could i ask you something?

Always Comrade Kaplan, you glorious mo fo. I always want to hear.

So…[LONG WINDED WIND UP SO AS NOT TO SEEM TOO EAGER] I gave you a couple of days ago some new slogans and I don’t know if you had time to read them or what or… [I WISH THIS WAS ME CUTTING OUT A POWERFUL ENDING BUT I LITERALLY JUST TRAILED OFF, LOOKED DOWN AND THEN LOOKED UP INTO HIS FACE.]

Well to be honest it’s kind of warmed up oatmeal, man. The four unlesses? It’s just watered down three untils? It’s weak. Don’t hate me, k? I gotta get down.

Of course, of course.

Just before he joined the throng of writhing funky dancers bringing about the worker’s paradise through music he turned to me and says:

“You know who you could learn from, Kaplan?”

“Who?”

“Comrade Steve! Those two trues — they are TOO TRUE!”!

And he danced away.

That very night I contacted the agents of Henry Kissinger in Cuba and offered my services to betray the revolution.

I deserve my fate tomorrow morning. Here ends my struggle.

I praise the men and women who made the revolution.

At the risk of seeming bourgeois, as much as I praise the revolution outside I love the revolution inside even more.

Comrade Hakeem, Comrade Steve, Comrade Angela you have taught me to defeat the ultimate capitalist, the ultimate running dog, the ultimate lackey.

His name is jealousy.

I die tomorrow a smile on my lips.

A song in my heart of revolution.

–Eric Linus Kaplan, May Day 1978

Celebrity News! Kissing and Diet

A recent story praised a male celebrity for deciding to stop eating meat while he was in a movie kissing a female celebrity who was a vegan. This is considerate on his part, but the story really avoids the important issue by focussing on diet. The important issue here is oral hygiene. If you brush and floss you should be able to kiss somebody who follows a diet different from yours without the kiss causing them to violate their diet. For example, if A is following a low carb diet and B is not, A and B should — with proper flossing — be able to kiss without B ingesting a slice of bread. Similarly a vegan should be able to kiss a non-vegan without a hunk of meat getting dislodged from the space between his teeth and cheek and ending up in her stomach, a kosher woman should be able to kiss a man who does not follow the kosher rules without eating a pork chop. Etc.

(I think the woman in the story was Natalie Portman — I can’t remember who the guy was. Chris Evans? Chris Hemsworth? Chris Pratt? Somebody.)

Man Eats Dog. Dog Eats Head. Head Eats Man.

I was making a list of everything I knew was true and I thought it might be faster to make a list of everything I once had believed was true and had turned out to be false.

And I thought maybe it might be easier to talk about people rather than things.

So I made a list of people who I once had trusted and had realized I should not trust, and I couldn’t decide whether to put myself on the list.

So I thought — I really need to make a list of ways that I once tried to deal with myself and realized I should stop because they were a waste of time.

But I observed that making lists was on that list and so was thinking things were a waste of time.

So I just sat quietly and looked at the clock. And it said 5 for a good long while.

and then it said: six.

Naughty Benny

I realized that they had left some important messages for me whoever it was who had made it that I grew up alone in that old house on Argyle Road. I had asked the old man next door who was cutting his lawn with a pair of scissors — his name was Feldheimer — what NB had stood for and he said “naughty Benny” or I thought he did and Ben or Benny is me — so whenever I read NB I thought it meant I had to pay attention and not miss this important point, but I was likely to skip it over because of my inadvertence, because I was a naughty. It wasn’t until years later I learned that it actually was Latin. It stood for “Nota Bene” — note well! But whoever had left those books perhaps had not made much of a distinction between me, as the one who had to be told to note well, and me as a naughty boy, because it took me years to understand what was in the books well enough and put their message together and understood what part of it was just nonsense, or system building for the sake of system building — the sheer joy of putting pieces of reality together in a symmetrical pattern — and how much of it was silly stories for babies who simultaneously feared and yenned for the world and therefore loved stories that mixed that fear and that yen together into symbols, whether it be a fiersome ogre who guarded a cave of diamonds or a foul anthropohage of a witch who lived in a house made of cookie — and how much was a message, direct, straight,clear from whatever mysterious heart had issued it, entering straight into the heart of me, Benny. And they all said the same thing. Note well! Note well! Benny! Note well, Benny to be courageous. Have no fear Benny. Maybe they will kill you or maybe they will not, maybe you will survive your encounter with the ogre, the witch, the fact that slips the symmetry of the system, but we placed you in the house for a reason, we left those books for you for a reason, and even if it tears you apart, even if grinds your heart to a thousand still beating bleeding scraps you should face what is in the room. Open the door, naughty Benny, nice Benny, whoever you are, but note well — open the door.

Poetry Modulates Time and Therefore Loses by Paraphrase

Poetry is true but it is not assertion, because it modulates time and sound in a specific way that does not travel across contexts. It loses by paraphrase.  Saying a line or word twice is different from saying it once.  For example:

O Lente lente currite noctis equi [Gallop slowly slowly horses of the night]

Is different from its paraphrase:

O Lente currite noctis equi

It’s slower.

thanatologian

a thanatalogian applying lotion

eschewing the ewer preferring

the clear wide field. The clear wide field

opening eyes, closing them orange

even the retina is part of the sun

now is the inner crepuscule

now is the silent tinittus

now the numbness that pains

Even the tired ones awaken now

Even the hospice dwellers are waiting around for this.

I was born a priest from a line of priests

You can trust me to tell me what you did

You can trust me to tell you who you are