Premonition

The fish floats on its side, crumpled
in the corner of the tank. I worry
that it's finally dead, walking closer
until I see the slightest movement.
"Hi fish," is greeted with a flip or
a flop. Sometimes I sing. And
then I toss in more bloodworms,
steering them numbly toward
the edge. I feed the problem, pretend

I'm serving up a cure. For a long
time the fish sought shelter in the
volcano, its back wedged up inside
the hollow so tightly that you had
to look hard to even see it. But
now it's always out, steady
reminder that, even if we're not
dead yet, we will be. I wait.

I watch. There was a flick of the
tail a minute ago, though as I write
this the beaten blue form floats
lifelessly, full of a life that won't
go gently into the toilet or the
backyard, wherever we deposit
our losses. I know it's wrong

of me to make everything into a
sign: the clock on the bedroom
wall that's been reading 7:50
for months, the blood that's dripping
down inside us, whether bruise
or blot, the way each coupling
feels more frantic than the one
before it. Something is rising.

I can see it. It's waiting to be
plucked from the water, dark
harvest of the reality we only
pretend to overlook. The other
day she wanted kumquats,
explained, "They're sour, sweet,
and bitter at the same time."

The difficult part is remembering
to let them linger on the tongue.
You have to wait for it. Too soon
and it's murder. Too late and you're
spending hours looking at a dead
fish. Melancholy means the space
between, staring at the moment.
I'm doing my best not to blink.

America!

The other day I spent a delightful hour in Eric's office watching various internet goodies he'd collected to show me and other passers-by. The highlights were the "America: Fuck, yeah!" clip by South Park's Trey Parker and one by Dennis Madalone, The former was obviously intended to provoke the pleasures of irony, despite the best efforts of the irony-deprived -- check out the way the America: Love It or Leave It site frames the clip -- to turn it into the video equivalent of that Lee Greenwood song. The latter, by contrast, is sincerely sincere.

Mark Morford's always excellent San Francisco Chronicle column today does a superb job of conveying the feelings that flood me when I watch the Madalone. And he writes more edgily than I do. What interests me now, though, is the way that Morford's column underscores the complexities of consumption. One person can enjoy the Parker video as a sincere expression of patriotism. Another can regard the Madalone as high camp. Intention, as we have a way of remembering to forget, does not stick to the cultural goods it motivates. The glue dries out faster than a bowl of fruit in the desert sun.

I've been teaching my "Literary Analysis" class about the distinction between metaphor and metonymy lately. The other day, I confessed that, even though there's a cut-and-dried response I want to see on their final exams, there's a way in which that distinction will, if you think about it hard enough, blur into befuddlement. We spent some time on Tuesday talking about that most famous of twentieth-century poems, Ezra Pound's "In A Station of the Metro":

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

One student claimed that another instructor, one with a far richer relation to poetry than I possess, had argued that the second half of the poem was an example of metonymy. Another, who had taken a class with that same instructor, insisted that the word "faces" was his example of metonymy. I wasn't sure what to say, not wanting to contradict the argument of someone so learned, but committed to preserving my original distinction for the purposes of my students studying for the final exam. In the end, I tried to explain that too much attention to anything has a way of dissolving the lines that separate it out from other phenomena. Sometimes this dissolution is productive. Other times it merely confuses.

I mention this classroom conundrum because I think that the distinction between irony and sincerity functions an awful lot like the one between metaphor and metonymy. The harder people insist on their sincerity, the easier it is for others to perceive the irony in their insistence. The more boldly a text signals that it is ironic, the more likely that someone will miss the point. And then there's my realization, based on personal experience, that the sort of person who is given to responding ironically to the world is probably just concealing a sincerity to painful too express.

For My Love

Here is section IX of Walter Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History" in its entirety, together with a reproduction of the Paul Klee work that inspired it. Note that the German word Engel is masculine, which helps to explain why this potentially gender neutral being is rendered as a "he":

Mein Flügel ist zum Schwung bereit,
ich kehrte gern zurück,
denn blieb ich auch lebendige Zeit,
ich håtte wenig Glück,
-- Gerhard Scholem, "Gruß vom Angelus"

A Klee painting named "Angelus Novus" shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history.

His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

Paradise here is not a goal we can attain, but somewhere that will always be out of reach because it lies in the past. I like to think of the pile as the sort of place where the odd postcard, book, or snapshot rises to the top to catch the eye, like an autumn leaf swirling on a moody current.

Clarity

The good news is that I've located the ocean. The bad news is that I've lost sight of my castle. The other good news is that Axis Bold As Love is playing over and over again in my head.