David Cheezem Consist

42

David Cheezem

Consist

The search for equilibrium is bad because it is imaginary.

—Simone Weil

Simone Weil, when her headaches overpowered her, “had an intense longing to make another human being suffer by hitting him in exactly the same part of his forehead.”

That is not who Simone Weil was.

One time—and only one time—my father whacked me with a riding crop, a rod encased in leather. We were hunting for seashells on Sanibel Island with my mother.

That is not who my father was.

I can stand on one leg. For seconds at a time.

Simone Weil: The material world—the world weighed down with gravity—offers two ways to deal with suffering: pass it on to others like a tethered ball, or sap others with a cry for pity. Either response is an imposition, a kind of theft. Inflicting either pity or pain on another is “base,” because it robs that person of energy.

In his early years, when he awoke in the shack where he was born, my father would plant both his feet on a floor of Oklahoma soil. Thought you should know.

When I was 15-years-old, I hated Sanibel Island. I don’t think my father cared for it much, either. My father, a shark who could not breathe standing still. Vacations of any kind were hard on him. CIRQUE

Misfit Sheary Clough Suiter

Staid, balanced, at home in the physical world, feeling a little of what a gymnast feels, slithering into a perfect landing; what a free-climber feels, leaping from one goat-ledgehand-hold to another; what a tightrope artist feels tiptoeing 500 feet over the gasping crowd.

For seconds at a time.

There’s a story about the 70th Infantry Division in which my father served. The bureaucrats issued sleeping bags to the soldiers before they departed for Europe. Those zippedup sleeping bags—those “death traps”—scared the hell out of the soldiers. As soon as they landed in France, they exchanged sleeping bags for blankets.

The blankets were cumbersome to carry, so every morning, each soldier would drop their two blankets in a trailer. Every night they’d pick up another pair, never knowing who used them last night, or whether that wet spot was mud or blood or vomit.

The rental home on Sanibel was bathed in soft, warm colors. There were seashells everywhere. Clean, shiny,

Vol. 12 No. 2

bleached shells. Large conchs. Small spirals. A coffee table book with photographs of shells sat on a table by a regal wicker chair.

My mother needed the wholeness, the unbrokenness of shells. And she deserved it. She had married too soon, had seen her own life subsumed into the world of my charismatic father. Couldn’t the world give her two weeks of seashells, sunsets, and peace—fuel, perhaps to repair a troubled marriage?

And me? The whiney teenager? I needed to not be the young man strolling the beach hunting seashells on an island resort. I needed to be Eugene Debs.

Eugene Debs: While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

My father must have seen what my incessant whining was doing to my mother.

“…[T]he people who stood, motionless from one to eight o’clock in the morning for the sake of having an egg, would have found it very difficult to do so in order to save a life.”

Oh, Simone, doesn’t doing good have its own energy? Doesn't it lift your chest, make you feel lighter, more alive?

But then, you’re no longer standing in line to save someone’s life. You’re standing in line to lift your chest.

What would I know about saving anyone’s life?

According to the short bio in her posthumously published Gravity and Grace, Simone Weil was badly burned while fighting the fascist in Spain. Later, in London with the Free French resistance, she “died of tuberculosis…refusing to eat more than the rations of those suffering Nazi occupation in her native France.”

When I was—Four years old? Five years old?—my father told me the bird-in-the-bush story. A live bird squirms in your hands. You want to keep that bird (herein referred to as Bird One) but you’d also like the bird in the bush (herein referred to as Bird Two.)

To get Bird Two, you need to hold an angry, fluttering Bird One in one hand freeing the other to pick up a stone to throw at Bird Two. If you’re lucky, and if your aim is good, you go home with two birds. You’re probably not lucky.

I didn’t get it. Why were we throwing stones at seagulls?

Simone understood materiality as a closed system. Fuel for good only comes from outside the system, from grace with wings that defy gravity: from “grace to the second power:” wings that fly down to our level without gravity. But to make room for grace, we need a void. Everything that makes us comfortable, makes us complacent, accepting of who we are, avoids the void.

Simone: “Grace fills empty spaces but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself that makes this void.”

Simone fought against fascism in Spain, in France, and in London. But her theology—unless I’m not grasping— seems too stoic for an anti-fascist. Her theology needs suffering to create a vacuum for grace to enter. But if suffering is so essential, why alleviate it? Why right wrongs? And yet, as I type this, I feel I can almost grasp it: soft, crystalized snow warming and bonding in the sun.

After several days’ hunting shells the regular way, strolling on the beach quietly, cooled by breezes, letting the waves reveal their gifts from under the foam, my father got a tip:

43

44

a means for a higher-productivity shell hunt.

A work crew had been dredging on the other side of the island, dropping mounds of mud and debris in a nook away from the beach. From these 12-feet-high mounds, we could harvest more shells-per-square-inch.

I know about those gross blankets from a document written by Raymond Brubaker. Brubaker almost got my father killed. At least, that’s how my father saw it at the time—again, according to Brubaker.

Early in the morning, my father ordered Brubaker to lead the men across a bank of railroad tracks. Brubaker didn’t want to go. Already, several dead soldiers lay on the tracks, and the sniper was still out there somewhere. But they would have to cross those tracks eventually—and it was only going to get worse.

Only the bird in the bush.

It’s not clear in Brubaker’s report why my father was where he was when he got shot. At one point earlier in the narrative, we see him crossing over, but he reappears back at the abandoned building shouting up at Brubaker to get going. Had he crossed the tracks and come back? I can’t tell, and there’s no one left to ask.

We see him get hit, falling on the tracks, a bullet in his back, rolling into a shallow depression, bullets whizzing by. I don’t know how long my father lay there before someone finally located the sniper in a church steeple. Brubaker got shot, too, but it was just a nick.

My father found a God in that ditch. I can almost imagine: not just that time passes differently in a crisis, but that time has no handle to grab onto. If you could only say, “I just have to hold on for five minutes”—but you can’t know that. You’re handleless. The sun is pouring down, but it is dark. Nothing visible gives you hope. Only a kind of acceptance. An “OK God, I’ll take what you give me.” Simone’s grace.

A tank took out the sniper, then crinkled its way to my CIRQUE

father’s position. They picked him up, strapped him in on the side of the tank, and crinkled away to safety.

Can we talk about me now?

And David climbed the mountain of shells and mud, speaking to the salt-flesh air that lay on his skin, and dampened his jock-itchy corduroy bell bottoms--of his hatred of seashells and suburbia (and the father said “Stop.”), how there was real life somewhere out there beyond the pretty houses and the swimming pools and beaches (and the father said, “David. Stop.”) and how the mother and father trapped him here on this resort island where—you just don’t understand that this is not who I am, not who I want to be (and the father said, “David. You need to stop.”) and if you would just understand how much I hate it here, how much I hate being the kind of person who collects seashells by the seashore.

David, come down here.

I remember thinking that the rod encased in leather wasn’t going to hurt much. Leather is soft, pliable. No biggie.

I’m 63 years old. I think my father was younger than I am now. If I were in his shoes today, I would never whack that whiney 15-year-old me five times with a riding crop.

But I might want to.

Is that who I am?

Let’s go back to the people waiting in line for one egg to feed their family. Simone Weil doesn’t seem to love them. They are good people, like people waiting in line at the post office: Did your cousin find work? Did your grandfather get the landlord to fix that back step? This is going to be another frosty winter.

Well, not quite. Simone’s people weren’t in line for a KitchenAide arriving in a package in the mail. They were waiting in line for one egg.

Reach to the Clouds Susan Biggs

Vol. 12 No. 2

Is that all Simone would eat, her body fighting tuberculosis?

I’ve always loved Hayden Carruth’s poem “Emergency Haying” for its power-chord ending:

And I stand up high on the wagon tongue in my whole bones to say

woe to you, watch out you sons of bitches who would drive men and women to the fields where they can only die.

That is who Simone Weil was. That is who I want her to be.

The speaker in the poem is a humble “desk-servant, “word worker,” who is drawn into a day of voluntary hard labor, helping a friend harvest hay. In the crescendo leading up to that power chord, the speaker’s aches and pains “recall” greater suffering: the suffering of Christ on the cross, and, later, the suffering of enslaved and oppressed farmers.

my hands are torn

by bailing twine, not nails, and my side is pierced by my ulcer, not a lance. The acid in my throat is only hayseed. Yet exhaustion and the way

my body hangs from twisted shoulders, suspended on two points of pain in the rising monoxide, recall that greater suffering.

The image dissipates for a moment, then explodes in a spasm of subversive self-destruction:

I have a friend whose grandmother cut cane with a machete

and cut and cut, until one day she snicked her hand off and took it and threw it grandly at the sky. That’s who Simone Weil was. Maybe there were two Simone Weils: one in the power-chord, and the other here, in these lines. Maybe the two Simone Weils didn’t talk to each other.

She should have lived longer. We needed her after Hiroshima, Korea, Vietnam, climate change. We needed to hear Simone and Martin Luther King Jr. discuss a creative tension between the spiritual and the strategic.

I’m not so selfish as to subject her to the war on terror and the return of mainstream white supremacy. But with a full life, she would be fresh in our memory even now, a clarity and warmth that could only have grown gentler, more— graceful—with age.

A man who once lay seriously wounded for who knows how long now lay on a bed, wrapping the five-year-old in a one-armed embrace, sing-songing the story of the bird in the bush, my head on his chest. His words are soft but also firm, like the pillow of his chest, sonorous, and soothing. I don’t get it, but the clean bed, the soothing voice, the rising and falling envelop me. He rubs my prickly-haired head, reassures me that it’s okay I don’t understand, and lets me sleep.

That’s who my father was.

45

Rose Petals At The Beach Annekathrin Hansen