Babel

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  • House of Blues

    Where there’s plenty of bad news, which the lost girl at the Honky Tonk piano wails about, tearing your heart out, as she sings her tales of a cold and heartless world, amidst the drunken toasts, smary jokes, cigarette smoke, asking what can you do when no one follows the Golden rule?  Or where can you go when you’re down and there’s no way out?  Or when will true love conquer all?  Is there any love in the world at all?

    You sit, drink, try try not to think.  But the lost girl is like the shadow you though you erased when you slipped into this dark place, crying out to your soul everything you needed to escape and don’t want to know.

  • Harlequin and the PIP Ep. 4: The PIP Likes Carnivals

    Carnival!

    Image via Wikipedia

    The Penny Illustrated Paper and its many readers surely loved carnivals. As long as they were civilized, that is. International festivals, like the very exotic “Havannah” carnival were like a breath of fresh air for both colonized and colonizers, but, for the European – namely English – observers, these types of festivals were nothing more than slightly odd occurrences. Even if the festivities were held far away from Old Europe, the carnivalesque utopian ideal of temporary freedom and equality was nevertheless respected, that is, the “Havannah” carnival was “one day of noisy liberty given to these negroes” (issue 14, 11 Jan. 1862, p. 28) Of course, Victorians did not approve of this burst of primitive and instinctual behaviour, seeing this carnival as a return to the caveman’s world.

    What is more shocking, is that people participating to the carnival “dress themselves in their national and every kind of fantastic costume,” which is then followed by “grotesque music and wild antics.” All in all, the British viewer perceives something impossible to express clearly, the kind of image Mr. Spock would label as illogical. In other words, what the outside – superior – observer sees, is a “tableau that can be but faintly rendered by the pencil” (issue 14, 11 Jan. 1862, p. 28), a city turned into a “confused, horrid din” (issue 14, 11 Jan. 1862, p. 28), as if “Havannah” hosted a sort of maniacs international convention.

    On the other hand, in a parallel universe, in Europe people not only know how to behave, but they can also celebrate properly. On the opposite pole of the far-away place where the white and wise would sadly descend to the level of their slaves and servants, the carnivals in Rome represent the apex of popular refinement. They are the aristocrats, the descendants of Caesar or Virgil. Italy, along with Greece and other countries with a warm sea-side feeling are the favourite holiday destination for all Victorians, especially for the very Victorian honeymoons and other tourist occasions. In the “eternal city,” gaiety is the name of the game:

    The palaces are thrown open by their owners to the privileged classes, foreign and indigenous; theatres of all grades, from the Apollo to the Piazza Navona, are crowded by their respective habitués; and British and American visitors are flocking to each other’s dinner parties, tea fights, or state balls. (issue 19, 15 Feb. 1862, p. 100)

    Another star on the European carnival stage, following the Roman holiday, is the  Mardi Gras , or the Shrove Tuesday as the neighbours across the channel call it. Dancing, balls, masquerades, promenades to Longchamps are amongst the main occupations of both children and adults, and, while they do that, after “the cavalcade of the boeuf gras with as much zest as if they had nothing else to think about” (issue 23, 15 Mar. 1862, p. 169). Of course, the chaos met on other – peculiar – continents is nowhere to be seen. The authorities would go to great length to prevent any disturbance, mainly in the much feared and unstable marketplace. In any case, most such festivities went smoothly, offering “no other distraction to the blouses and bourgeoisie than a gaudily-dressed cavalcade of Chinese mandarins on horseback” (issue 23, 15 Mar. 1862, p.169), of course all exotic elements were only masks worn by very dignified properly educated Europeans. Everything was about the display of colour, not indulging into it:

    The supposed inhabitants of the Celestial Empire, as well as the Druids and club-bearing guild of butchers, were soldiers so disguised. In addition to the mythological characters on the Olympian and flower-enwreathed car was a white ram with a fleece upon which was expanded all the skill of a Paris perruquier, and which bore the marks of the curling-tongs and crisping irons. (issue 23, 15 Mar. 1862, p.169)

    In any case, the carnival was turned into a parade. The crowds would watch fantastic images passing by; they would definitely not vociferate or dance frenetically as they would have done a couple of centuries earlier. Displays were only displays, they looked exotic, but, at the same time, they behaved according to the aristocratic norms. Even goddesses dressed in ball gowns or “half-naked Cupids” (issue 23, 15 Mar. 1862, p.169) passing by kept their composure while smiling and waving.

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  • All the Pretty Ballerinas

    The whirl of white dresses between the matrix of mirrors, morph into a wreath of white ashes in Lonigan’s reveries, or visions of angels amidst a holocaust, leaping, twirling, pirouetting …
    Sitting on the floor in a corner of the dance studio, Lonigan draws circles, spirals, parabolas on his ragged sketch pad, trying to capture the poetry in motion flying across the room to the plunk of a rehearsal piano as Degas once did long ago. War went on then too.
    One two three four what are we fighting for? The words of that old protest song fall out with each cord.
    When Lonigan went off to war, he knew he would never come back – at least not with his mind in tact – and he didn’t, which is why he used the G.I. Bill to go to art school instead of studying something practical.
    Up and down round and round – right, wrong, truth or dare, upside down, inside out. Makes one wonder what the dance of life is all about?

    ****

    Dark, rocky days in dead zones (like a dream but not) where nowhere is everywhere and
    nothing is anything and unknown hours fade to black.
    “The end of the world is at hand, man.”
    The alley man stares at him, starkly, gripping a Sterno can.
    Lonigan shadows through the snowfall, past doors which have no numbers, down streets
    which have no names, through shapes which have no faces, under clocks run out of time, while
    wind whipped shrouds swirl around like the ghosts of dead men’s dreams.
    “Death toll mounts!” A newsy shouts. “More troops killed!”
    He buys a paper, uses it for a hat. White veils wrap around him like wreaths, as he bundles down the ghosted streets, past the small grubby pubs and around toppling ghetto tenements, along the rows of shops filled with such stuff that only the poor would want. “I am a soldier of misfortune and” Lonigan muses as he marchs through the deepening drifts, “I fought that holy war on the desert sand.”
    At a dead end dive, Lonigan ducks in from the cold. DEATH TOLL REACHES 4,000. he scans the headlines as he slump onto a stool. “Draft.” He tells the barman and drops a fistful of day labor dollars on the counter. STOCKS PLUMMET, PLANTS CLOSE, RECESSION DEEPENS, UNEMPLOYMENT FIGURES DISAPPOINTING, HOUSES CONTINUE TO FORECLOSE. He shakes his head and broods through an article about Iraq, relives the ambushes, roadside bombings, heat, fear, and remembers the faces of guys no one will see anymore.
    A fairyland of falling snow, whorls in the barroom window. Crystal castles and other
    fanciful marvels replace the tumbledown ghetto, while white winged spirits dance off the drifts,
    fly with the flurries, twirl and pirouette.
    “4,000 souls,” Lonigan muses, “ gone where nobody knows.”

    ****

    “She’s beautiful.”
    Tracey sits with Lonigan in his studio and ponders his latest painting.
    “She isn’t done.”
    “Who’s the model?”
    “Death.”
    “You’re crazy! Hey, I know that girl! She’s that ballerina, your old flame. How come you never paint me?”
    “I only paint what I hate.”
    “You do not!”
    “War, plague, famine, betrayal – I’ll paint you next, call it Midnight Angel.”
    “Where are you going?”
    Lonigan moves from the couch to the easel, takes a hair of the dog on the way, squints as the sunlight sets the canvas ablaze. Fat Cats, the Jet Set, the artsy social whirl, play in his memories of the pretty ballerina, along with some specter of himself, who quickly became an inconvenient oddity amidst that rarefied swirl she lived in with his hard scrabble sketches of working class life, battlefield drawings, paintings of the down and out.
    “Why are you doing that?”
    Lonigan ghosts out the goddess with a solvent-soaked rag, fades her beauty, erases her eyes.

    ****
    “Dear Mr. Lonigan,

    Thank you so much for your submission to our agency. Yours is a well written and compelling collection of stories. However, after careful consideration we decided we are not the right agency for Mine Fields. We urge you to keep searching for the right fit.”

    “Dear Mr. Lonigan,

    Your collection of war stories is a riveting read. Some of the descriptions make you stand up and salute. Unfortunately, we don’t think we can handle it successfully. We wish you the best with placing it elsewhere.

    “Dear Mr. Lonigan,

    Thank you for your submission of slides to our gallery. After careful consideration we have decided they are not quite right for our collection.”

    ****

    “Artists live where all dreams end. Truth, illusion, are a dance of apparitions. You try to capture it but smoke and mirrors is what you usually get. Sometimes, if your lucky, life’s magic.”
    Black winds chase across the concrete canyons. Designer dream worlds appear in storefront windows. On corners Christmas carolers sing the season’s songs.
    As he bundles through the cold, looking in the windows of galleries and bookstores, collar turned up, fists pushed deep in the pockets of his long coat, Lonigan ponders his latest artist’s statement. The streets are crowded with tourists, shoppers. He passes a frail old lady asleep in a doorway, goes back an drops a coin in her cup, as snowflakes circle each pale ghost lost in the nimbus of the street’s night glow, where all is silent, still and cold.

    End

  • Slums and Drugs

    Dead of winter, shadowing down
    streets as black as any nightmare,
    although it wasn’t even time for supper.
    “I got dizzy, Sweetie.”
    “I knows Mama.”
    She came home from school and found
    her mother on the floor. Her baby
    brother and sister stood there by her,
    scared. They had gotten home first,
    tried to lift her. Impossible when the
    dead weight of the curse was on her.
    They couldn’t find her pills. They
    brought her blankets and pillows.
    “Where’s your purse Mama?”
    “I ain’t got no money, Honey.”
    Her mother looked ashen, like the
    embers of coal burned.
    “I needs to get your medicine.”
    “I ain’t got no more. I was going
    to the drugstore.”
    Her purse was on the floor, right
    next to her, covered by the blanket.
    There were no more pills in the vile
    she kept tucked away at its bottom.
    “I get you a refill.” She pocketed the
    container. “You two sup on that lunch
    meat wrapped up in the fridge.” She told
    her siblings. “Get Mama some tea. I
    bring you back some candy.”
    By now every predator was out there,
    prowling through the icy dark: rapists,
    muggers, gangbangers, killers. She
    pulled on her winter coat, cap, mittens.

  • The Hour of the Star

    Moon Ladder

    THE HOUR OF THE STAR

    Twins night ride a see-saw as storm

    clouds gather over them.  Each catches

    a glimpse, in turn, above the other, of a

    star on the horizon.  The grim one ponders

    hers and finds profound insights through it.

    The happy one peeks at her own bewildered

    and bemused until it finally shines on her

    too.  It is the star of life, for one magic,

    for the other a wonder of science and physics.

    Each, identical in every way except for the

    way their brains were arranged, balances and

    enables the other in their teeter-totter journey

    to nowhere. As they ride up and down under

    the clouding night sky, the grim one sees that

    soon her star will vanish in the storm.  Her

    sibling will see that too but only when hers

    is covered and is gone. The lonely cry of a

    train’s whistle wails by like a one note lullaby.