Triggered memory and tons of Swedish imports

Dear diary,

I remember what my mother said last July when we were walking through her neighborhood. By the way, my mother teaches E.S.L. (English as a Second Language), so she meets a lot of newcomers. My mom relayed the speech of one of her students, a newcomer from faraway. Let’s call the student Monika, because I can’t remember her real name. OK, so Monika, my mom reported, is from someplace in India, again I forgot where but let’s say Kolkata because I like that word. Now Monika noted that the weather is very hot in Kolkata, but nobody has A.C. (Air Conditioning), so everyone just remains outside together in the sweltering heat; and they’re all relatively happy, nobody complains, they just accept the climate, it’s simply the way things are. Monika contrasted this with our behavior here in the Midwest U.S.A. (United States of America): she said that even though it doesn’t get as sizzling hot here in Eagan, Minnesota as it does in Kolkata, India, all the Eaganites vanish inside of their air-conditioned homes when the temperature tiptoes above 72°F; and since nobody remains outdoors, no social bonds are formed: nobody knows anyone else’s name, nobody helps raise anyone else’s children, everybody is isolated and lonely.

Monika’s observation came to mind because today I’m barricaded in my apartment with the A.C. blasting: it’s 73°F outside, on the dot. No, that’s a joke: it’s actually now 88: a good year for the release of rap records, but a bad temp to bond in.

And here another memory flashes up: One time, early in the season, the electricity went out; our whole city block was without power; and this was mildly amusing – I don’t say it was scary: I was proud that I felt more curious than frightened – but the roaring air-conditioner units (those ugly cube-shaped fans that rattle in the outdoors all day beneath everyone’s windows) all shut off at once, and the landscape was eerily quiet. I thought to myself: What if the power never comes back on? But instead of making me panic, this lifted my mood – I imagined all of us neighbors eventually emerging from our fortresses and meeting in the street to exchange ideas. We’d have to learn each other’s names, and then we’d work as teams to haul vast rubber tubes over the hills which would pump in cool atmosphere from the neighboring lagoon. Chill slushy green algae. —The bond between us locals would grow so strong that, even if we were to meet again much later in life, say, in about a dozen years when the Third World War is underway, and we find that we are on opposing sides, because, due to xenophobic legislature, we’ve all been shipped back to our ancestors’ native countries, therefore neighbor so-and-so is fighting on behalf of Scotland while I myself serve in the armed forces of Jupiter; I say, our bond that we forged way back in our swamp-draining days will be so strong that we shall purposely miss when shooting our rifles at each other, we will just graze the ear and hope that our commanders do not notice our disobedience.

*

I biked to the library today because there was a book on hold for me, titled Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign. Am I really going to put myself thru reading this? Here’s my first thought: Why “doomed”? That implies that there was nothing anyone could’ve done: the campaign was ill-fated from the get-go. Hmm. Couldn’t we just as well say the campaign was charmed, in the sense that it had all the luck (read: money), fame (name recognition), and endorsements both political and celebrity; which, taken altogether, equates to a head start in the race? And who wouldn’t want to vote for the first female U.S. prez! ...The ads for Timex watches had the slogan “It takes a licking and keeps on ticking.” In other words, you had to try pretty hard to shatter them.

But I’ve turned over a new leaf: I’ve decided that I’m going to like and accept HRC no matter what she does, from this day forward until I die. Too much misunderstanding results with the good people who believe in her, if you resist humoring the . . . whatchamacallit.

Anyway, when I opened the cover of this book, a giant sturdy glossy pamphlet fell out. It was an advertisement for a book club website, which the previous reader had apparently been using as a bookmark. Inside this flyer there are pictures of ten different bestselling authors (all very cleanly looking, compared to me), who are apparently scheduled to visit a library near you and talk about literary subjects.

What I want to do here is list all these authors’ achievements, which are included in the little blurbs next to their pictures, because I am jealous; but first I want to note a fun fact about the very top author: it’s not just one face like the other nine circular frames that contain a single shot of a single beast; no, it’s two heads in the topmost circle because it represents an authorial TEAM, or, as the blurb calls them, a “mother-daughter writing duo.” I just wanted to remark that I hate when people have good relationships with their parents. And I especially hate when people go into business with their parents. You’re supposed to LEAVE your parents and run far way, sell all your possessions and follow Jesus: let the foreign occupiers blot you.

OK, now that I got that off my chest, here are the accomplishments:

Ah shit now I realize that the mother in the mother-daughter duo recently passed away. (It says so near their pic.) So now I’m sorry for speaking so savagely about their endeavor. (Might I myself be the cause of all evil everywhere? I need a modern Milton to exonerate me.) I wish that authors wouldn’t take my advice and follow Jesus to their martyrdom. But, on the bright side, if we all subscribe to my easy 3-step plan, we’ll all end up in the same circle of heaven. Dining on all the trees except the forbidden one in the middle of the marketplace.

• Honored as “Favorite Book of the Year”
• O. Henry Prize and Commonwealth Prize winners
• Long-awaited collection of spine-tinglingly awe-inspiring storytelling
• One of the foremost scholars . . . impressive opus . . . culmination of a lifetime of research
• Prolific thriller novelist
• Probably the most important book you’ll read this year
• Pulitzer Prize-winning historian . . . recently optioned for adaptation into a feature film
• Lawyer-turned-novelist’s nationally acclaimed mystery-romance
• The much-anticipated sequel to his New York Times bestseller hits shelves in October.

Now I’m depressed, thinking about how our planet is overrun with scintillating new literary talent. So I’ll just copy the rest of the MUCH LOVED passages that I highlighted from the Selected Poems of Tomas Tranströmer (see my lotsa quotes entry for the first batch).

(Again, huge thanks to the poet M.P. Powers for alerting me to the existence of Tranströmer.)

I don’t know why exactly, but T.T.’s verse seduces me to quote very brief clips; I think these details sound so attractive when showcased: I want to stress that the poems whence I mined them are well worth reading in full; surely the knowledge that I’m extracting quotes for the sake of displaying them in this ship log has some bearing on the size and shape of the samples I choose.

Task: to be where I am.
Even when I’m in this solemn and absurd
role: I am still the place
where creation works on itself.

That’s from the poem “Guard Duty.” I love the idea of aiming to be where you are; it reminds me that you are more than what you are, and perhaps you will be wherever and whenever you will be. (That last phrase is critic-as-artist Harold Bloom’s unpacking of God Yahweh’s infamous utterance in Exodus [3:14] “I AM THAT I AM.”)

And this next is from the longer poem “Baltics,” which appeals to me greatly:

. . . Something wants to be said, but the words don’t agree.
Something that can’t be said,
aphasia,
there aren’t any words but maybe a style . . .

Sometimes you wake up at night
and quickly throw some words down
on the nearest paper, on the margin of a newspaper
(the words glowing with meaning!)
but in the morning: the same words don’t say anything anymore, scrawls, misspeakings.
Or fragments of a great nightly style that dragged past?

That was from sec. V, and so is the following (I really love “Baltics”):

He wrote music to texts he no longer understood—
in the same way
we express something with our lives
in that humming chorus of misspeech.

Reminds me of Wallace Stevens, the ending lines of “The Poems of Our Climate” (“The imperfect is our paradise,” etc.) And this NEXT spark of Tranströmer is ALSO from section V:

I looked at the sky and the earth and straight ahead
and since then I’ve been writing a long letter to the dead
on a typewriter that doesn’t have a ribbon, only a horizon line
so the words beat in vain and nothing stays.

Now moving on to the prose poem “At Funchal” – one sentence and then the final paragraph. Here’s eleven words, lined up beautifully:

We’ve sided with the animals, they welcome us, we don’t age.

And the last paragraph:

After dusk we go out. The dark powerful paw of the cape lies thrown out into the sea. We walk in swirls of human beings, we are cuffed around kindly, among soft tyrannies, everyone chatters excitedly in the foreign tongue. “No man is an island.” We gain strength from them, but also from ourselves. From what is inside that the other person can’t see. That which can only meet itself. The innermost paradox, the underground garage flowers, the vent towards the good dark. A drink that bubbles in empty glasses. An amplifier that magnifies silence. A path that grows over after every step. A book that can only be read in the dark.

Especially from the island quote forward, I love that ending. This translation is by Robert Bly, by the way. It terrifies me that we can only interact with our own interior. But it fortifies me to remember that otherness is an accomplishment of the self. I also like these six long lines from “Brief Pause in the Organ Recital”:

At home stood the all-knowing Encyclopedia, a yard of bookshelf, in it I learnt to read.
But each one of us has his own encyclopedia written, it grows out of each soul,

it’s written from birth onwards, the hundreds of thousands of pages stand pressed against each other
and yet with air between them! Like the quivering leaves in a forest. The book of contradictions.

What’s there changes by the hour, the pictures retouch themselves, the words flicker.
A wake washes through the whole text, it’s followed by the next wave, and then the next . . .

Again time is slipping away from me; I wish I had the leisure right now to respond to all of this splendor. But I need to keep focused on copying, to ward off doom. Here is the second stanza of “Carillon”:

Outside, a pedestrian street
with slow tourists, hurrying schoolchildren, men in working clothes who wheel their rattling bikes.
Those who think they make the earth go round and those who think they go round helplessly in earth’s grip.
A street we all walk, where does it emerge?