Gaza/Zombie
A few weeks ago I was sent, as attachments on an email, forty photographs of the bodies of people who have been killed, recently, in Gaza. Some were of bodies being carried off on makeshift stretchers, some were of bodies about to be buried, most were of bodies which had been crushed or pummelled by the effects of mortar bombs. An ex-student from the United Arab Emirates sent them to me. The faces of the bodies were mostly unrecognisable. If you saw a tooth that was probably where a mouth used to be. Skin was plastered grey with the dust of pulverised buildings, or was swollen orange or blue, or slicked with blood.
I didn't open all the attachments. And I deleted the main body of the email which was in Arabic, apart from, in English, a list of the names of various multinational companies (such as McDonald's). Each name had a star of David next to it. So they were being identified as Jewish establishments and, I imagine, as possible targets for retribution.
Before I deleted the email I looked at far more of the photographs than I needed to. They were obviously intended to outrage and incite - the horror we all feel at the sight of a corpse was meant to translate, probably, into a transgression of the murder-taboo, translate into revenge, an eye for an eye, and a perpetuation of the horror... I'm no fighter, or terrorist, however. I was just morbidly fascinated. Anything which disgusts us or unnerves us is also - always - fascinating.
Coincidentally I watched a TV zombie series called 'Dead Set' the same night as the email and I was struck by how similar the zombies looked to the dead bodies. Struck - I suppose - not by how talented make-up artists are these days but by how my reaction to the zombies - fear, horror - was actually stronger in some sense than my reaction to the photographs of the real dead bodies. Death had competed with 'Death' for my affections and 'Death' had won. I suppose I'm a victim of the increasingly sensationalist and simulacra-tised culture in which I live, one which perhaps increasingly drains the power out of old taboos. I live in the Hyperreal. I no longer know what's authentic and what's fictionalised or digitally enhanced or regurgitated by the Media. Have I been robbed of my normal reactions to such an extent? Can nothing tug at my moral sympathies?
Have I become numb?
These days it's a wrongheaded tactic to try and arouse sympathy with shock when shock's the meat and bread of our TV viewing and computer game-playing. These days 'blood' is so convincingly sticky and red and warm that real blood can't hope to get a look in. Real blood's boring. Real blood's puny. Real blood's for losers.
Real blood looks increasingly.... fake.
So since looking at those photos the Gaza Strip is perhaps even less real than it was before. But they weren't meant for me. They were meant for a disaffected, gullible young Pakistani boy who's sick of hanging out at the local park to smoke weed with his peers. Who needs to belong to something ineffably more meaningful than the paltry world he knows: the backstreets, the nightclubs, the rundown college, the bedroom where he mashes up techno, bhangra and hip hop on his second-hand decks. His name's Tariq. He's just given his XBox360 - plus that new zombie game - to his younger brother (who doesn't recognise the look in his older brother's eye, though he's not complaining). Tariq's just decided he's too materialistic. Tariq's just ignored his mother's calls from the kitchen, the smell of dhal on the stove. Tariq's just climbed the stairs and thrown his cap on his bed. Tariq's just logging on...
Soon his name will seem so, so unimportant...
It's been snowing and England, as always, has ground to a standstill. I was tramping through the snow on the way to work yesterday and Val phoned to tell me that college was closed. I think I stood in the middle of the pavement for a full minute thinking 'Oh - so what do I do now?' I came back to the flat and wrote a tiny bit more of '1969' and put the Frank O'Hara podcast on this blog. (Big thanks to He Who Shall Remain Nameless for recording me and tarting me up with all that lovely ambient noise). This bit should probably go at the end:
A
toddler scrawls a felt-tip pen, connects
one dot to the next, to
the next, to the next. By doing this
(&
getting to know which dots to leave free)
a dog, & then a horse,
& then a house, are drawn from chaos.
I
tell tales the same. My dot-to-dots
are scored across Time's ripped
& ripped-out pages, are scored across
gaps,
drawing out recognisable shapes
even where none, perhaps,
ever existed. And it's porous!
One
page's ink bleeds through into the next,
next, next, till the present
moment's stained & it itself'll press
down
into the future, persisting...
I think the self-reflexive nature of this project encourages the kind of passage I've just written, for better or worse. '1969' is demonstratively working out a way of writing - a way of telling a story (or stories) - as well as merely telling that story (or stories). Maybe this is good. Why shouldn't I interrogate and justify my own praxis WITHIN the poem itself? It seems like a healthier, more candid inclusivity. I'm including all my work, all my thoughts. I suppose there's a danger it all becomes too self-referential and up its own arse of course... but I'll try and avoid that. I can see that the navelgazing passage just quoted, for example, quickly needs to morph into a more concrete slice of narrative. It's a matter of balance.
I'm still working out why I need to thread the mother's story, central to '1969', in and out of so many other, disparate, though mostly contemporaneous stories. Poets always rub words and images together. This is like this, this is like this... I suppose I'm rubbing stories, or at least scenes together, hoping that they'll rub off on each other in some way. I'm making a collage of that year and contextualising a very personal story amongst wider events, maybe to lend the personal something of the frisson and significance of the more well-known events, to say that a pregnancy, a birth, a family secret, is just as historical. Maybe I'm doing it in some sense to transcend the personal - to blur its edges. The theme of 'accident' and 'randomness' is a core theme. Maybe I'm also saying that if the accidental birth had been a slightly different accident, a little to the right or to the left of where it actually happened, then things could have been so easily different. A mother in England cradles her crying, gory newborn in her arms. A mother in Vietnam simultaneously cradles her dead son who's been blown up by an American bomb. The bond is the same. The proximity of death the same. I'm not making similes. Because one is not prioritised or presented as more 'real'. I want both to remain real, both to remain distinct. Ghosting both images are Michelangelo's Pieta/Madonna and Child sculptures. So what am I doing here? Will I be writing 'so what am I doing here?' within the poem? No. No. It's brave and interesting to explain some things. It's blasphemous to try and explain others.
There has to be an unexplained quotient in every poem, doesn't there? Ideally, the poem has to have a continuing life in the reader's head, after all...
While writing this I've been listening to Norwegian trumpeter Arve Henriksen's new album. Plus Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Plus Martha Wainwright. Before lunch I'll be reading some more from John Ashbery's 'Notes From The Air'. It's a little too refined and effete for my tastes but a damned sight more exciting and ambitious than... mmm, better stop before I get myself into trouble again...
Thanks for reading,
Richard x
