Mid足June
Mid-June celebrates the days of light of Chanukah with Sandi Wisenberg's serial prose poem in showcase 4.
I say that Clio is my muse--she's the History one. I like taking a piece of history and exploding it w/ associations. I live in a century-yearold house. I have my grandfather's naturalization papers, framed, in my office. I was named for him, and that's how it all started--naming as destiny. Ashkenazi Jews (the ones from Yiddish-speaking backgrounds; as my friend D says, the Woody-Allen Jews) name their children after the recent dead, finding all sorts of fanciful variations. Thus Solomon Louis Wisenberg (Hebrew: Shalom Leib) became Sandra Leah Wisenberg (Shulamit Leah). Yes, we have Hebrew names, like the Catholics have saint names. Like T.S. Eliot said about cats. But that was three names, including
a
secret
one
the
cat
http://allpoetry.com/poem/8453755-The_Naming_Of_Cats-by-T_S__Eliot S.L. Wisenberg
never
divulges.
The First Night of Chanukah We had plans. We would take the big brass family memorah (two lions of Judah facing one another, I think one male and one female) to the nursing home where L’s mother is, and we would light the candles in the afternoon, before we left to go home. We should ask the staff, said L, and I said no, and he said we might otherwise set off a fire alarm. He had a point. I thought too we could just place the candles, unlit. But no one can be trusted in elder or any other care these days so we knew we couldn’t leave the big brass family menorah in her room. In the end we forgot to bring it, left it in the car. She forgot it was Chanukah. She forgets many nouns and talks around them, the way people learning foreign languages sometimes do: They took me to that place that I like so much. (Panera Bread. I had that soup that I like so much. (French onion) Once on the phone she was describing a growing thing you eat that’s red and round. (Tomato.) But her memory or the slow loss and shoring up of it are not why she is in the home. She is there for rehab. Not for drug abuse but fractures and breaks. She fell and bloodied the basement floor. Grimped her way up to the first floor but could not reach a phone. No one knows how long she lay there. She did not have a call-alert-alarm-button devices. On the phone I said to my own mother, You should have one of those call-alerts, and she answered, You know, I was thinking I should get one of those for myself. That’s what I said, I said. She has a hearing aid, and people speak more clearly now, she says. L’s mother reads her library books in the so-called luxury nursing home, which really does seem luxurious, lobby like a hotel. Now hospitals have the hotel lobbies and one in Evanston has a concierge. For the hospital (reservation for three in the cafeteria, steak medium-rare) None of us forgot that the day before was Pearl Harbor Day, so named as if in honor of it, L’s mother remembered everyone clustered around the radio. We walked through the British-named, Jewish-owned nursing home, rooms of carpets and soft chairs, lighted Christmas trees, and stopped to look at coffee-table books. A Reader’s Digest’s history of 20 th century was one of them, photos of cars and flappers and masses of unemployed. In this story of the last century there was no Holocaust, only a black and white photo of displaced Germans after the war. I remember the face of a gaunt man in the photo, big eyes up at the camera, as if asking, Why did you do this to me?
We've been having the same people for 20 years at this Chanukah party, said C, one of our hosts. Does that make it the same party, unlike the river of Heraclitus? You can go to the same party twice, three times, a dozen. When I was young I read that sound waves never die, and that in the future there would be a device that could go to the battlefield site in Pennsylvania and pick up, say, the Gettysburg Address. The notion that nothing is lost. Which is true--the cycle of life, dust to dust, food for worms. We know this. I heard a long familiar set piece on this eternal transformation at the penultimate funeral I went to, for someone who died near 40, a rower on my team, my team comprising breast cancer survivors only. Once allowing a woman with melanoma, on the strength of the argument that skin cancer is so deadly that it didn't leave enough local survivors to make up a team.Every so often we vote on allowing women with ovarian cancer. Some have or have had both. After the funeral, we named a boat for our fallen compatriot, a four-seater bought with contributions, with the built-in shoes too small for most of us so we had to replace them with larger. We will row it on the River Lethe, whose water wiped away memory. Everything that ever lived, that ever stank up the planet is in the backwards river where we row: a stretch of the Chicago River known as Bubbly Creek, original dumping ground of the now-shut stockyard. Carcasses. the pioneers said we eat everything of the pig but the squeal. During nineteenth century cholera, the fathers of the city reversed the flow of the river to the lake, it now turns its back on itself. Like the Ouroboros, the snake mascot for eternity, who graps his tail in his mouth ; like the scarab that is a beetle that rose magically from dung, life from the dead offal of life; the human race worshipful of such alchemy from the beginning.
For the third night of Chanukah I was banned from rowing pratice. I had emailed the team that an infection on my leg had proved itself to be MRSA, Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus that is frightening everyone. I told them, I revealed it, I confessed. A scourge, leprosy of the 21st century that is not my fault, but everyone's fault for overusing and underusing antibiotics. It didn't frighten anyone personally they said, they were thinking of others who might be still in chemotherapy. We all have or had breast cancer on this team, another 21st-century scourge that is scaring everybody, but is not contagious, at least not as we understand it now. My MRSA (MRSA MRSA me!) is not contagious because I have covered it with gauze and paper tape and the fabric of my clothing, nothing is oozing out, it is confined to place, it has been trapped and captured and we are watching it, but it is frightening like a snake or uncontrolled poison. The theory I have because I must have a theory, a narrative as a favorite word the pundits took to heart this election season, as in who is controlling the narrative, as if they were unaware it was a two-dollar word for story, what happened first then next then next, because it is latinate it must be technical, a sophisticated concept, not originating in the simple once-upon-a-time of childhood. In my theory, in my narrative of my situtation, of my affliction, as a biblical narrative might put it, is that I was too kind, I brought two yoga mats to rowing practice, I shared them, other people took my mats so I used the mats of others, there was infection on these foreign mats, they invaded me, my skin, entered a vulnerable place, a cut or bite, and MRSA blossomed and swelled. Do not use the mats the shavers the towels of others, say the warnings, you could acquire MRSA it is persistent it can kill you, it flourishes among athletic teams and in hospitals, nursing homes, jails and military. In places of great conformity, of regulation, it slips and winds through the rules it jumps and flies and lands, it proliferates it spreads. This is my theory, I have also visisted two people in nursing homes, one of whom had MRSA on his back, growing from two bed sores, did I touch him, yes I touched him but only on his hand, trying to make the fingers grasp a stylus, hit the letter B on the iPad, I said, the stylus rubber-banded around his wrist at an unhelpful but hopeful angle, I feared. He hit the B he hit some other letters they did not make sense though he said I think I can be trained to do this, but he did not say, If I can't, will anyone remember that I wrote poems and sentences that grew to form biographies, narratives, that people held between covers, their eyes alighting on word after word, their brains taking them in, absorbing, in this complex process we learn as children as if it is easy. He can shake his head he can nod, he can make himself heard if he make himself, if the day the morning is a good one, he cannot swallow food without endangering himself. What is life? he is forcing us to ask ourselves, what makes it up, what makes life liveable, and he says the smallest increase he can measure, the bit between his reach yesterday and today, this is what he knows is happiness.
On the fourth night of Chanukah we saw Lincoln, which I had first wanted to avoid because Daniel Day-Lewis was made to look so grotesque in the trailers. I thought his face would distract me--all pores and makeup, thick as the mask that it was. I softened. The brilliance of the focus--on passing the 13th amendment--the horsetrading, the offers of undisguised patronage--a lever, a tool a reward you could and would offer. The president not urging but demanding: Get the votes in Congress. Implying: by any means necessary, even if ridiculously slapstick: three men colliding as if by chance in the halls of perhaps the Capitol, documents and paper money flying, landing in a scatter on the floor, two men scooping them up onto the file folders (were those file folders?) or large envelopes held by the man in the middle. Was it enough? Did they meet his price? Presumably detailed worked out off-stage. Jaunty music, because this is farce, we cannot take this corruption seriously, we cannot condemn this corruption because it resulted in a good vote, better than an honest one. What our ideas of justice are based upon. Against representation. The people back then and there so backward, of course. Unenlightened, not as we are, as we are after living in a country that has had more than a century and a half to form roots in that amendment, to stand upon it, on the shoulders of others standing on it, the sheer weight turning it to bedrock. Of course Reconstruction (not a failure as we were taught in school, though it brought the backlash of Jim Crow and its assorted illegal and treacherous looking-backward Way of Life), its lies. Of course trumped-up charges and murder and sheer sheer hatred. We are not done. And the movie no help in this one thing: The whites shown as heroic, as good-will ambassadors, leading the grateful Negroes forward, the whites loved by their servants, Great White Massas all; a black corporal in the film says he's allergic to bootblack, but he is in the beginning and is not heard from again. Instead Lincoln's chubby manservant, is that a tear in his eye, Great Man forgot his gloves again? And Mary's faithful black maid. Who has a bit of a spark in her. And one more female servant who is someone's lover we find out at the end, contrary to history, but so satisfying to filmgoers: so that's why he was so ardent for emancipation. Or consider the opposite: that Idea led to Practice. Does that happen in America, that we hold ideas dear?
By the fifth night of Chanukah we have looked up a few facts, if you can call them facts. Let's call them Traditions. We always knew that the helper candle, called the shammes--the Hebrew word for the caretaker of a synagogue, or beadle as it is translated into English--is the one that lights the others. It stands either in the middle of the other eight or on the side. Set aside. You place the candles in the menorah from right to left but you light from left to right. Otherwise, you would be favoring the first candle twice, and all the candles are equal. You can't use the candlelight to read by. It must be decorative only. Only the shammes can serve. You can't use one of the candles to light another--that is the job of the shammes. In Judaism, men have jobs and women have jobs and it is forbidden to wear the clothes of the other gender. The lamb may not be cooked in its mother's milk. You may not combine linen and wool. Most Jews don't know these whyfores and wheretos and when the time comes to know such things buy books with instructions on death customs, wedding customs and themes for the bar mitzvah. Or they turn to the experts. Among the Orthodox, each person is an expert. You know what constitutes work so that you will refrain from doing it on the Sabbath. It is holy, you must rest, you may not carry anything larger or heavier than something-or-other outside your home on the Sabbath, because such heaving and ho-ing is classified as labor. Someone has come before you to determine all of this, before you could walk, but someone has come after, to construct a loop hole, the making of which, of course, was not performed on the seventh day. The loop hole is real, you can see it, walk underneath it. The Orthodox arrange a string or wire around a neighborhood to redefine it as Home. In cities they must get a permit for this, to run the loop along the secular wires held up by poles. Thus you may hold and carry inside this designated area, within the eruv, on the Sabbath, because technically, magically, an entire area is officially designated your home. Of course there is more: They have determined that removing fish bones is work, so from Friday night through sundown Saturday you must eat fish without bones. You must not light a fire or the modern equivalent thereof, so you may not flip an electric switch. But you may leave the lights on low, the oven set on warm. You may take a specially-formatted elevator that stops on every floor to save you from the forbidden work of pushing the button. The more you know the more you know how to get around. My high school friend A says that whoever is more religious than himself is a zealot, and whoever, less, a heretic. That is what we believe. Most of us.
My birthday is the sixth night of Chanukah this year. The holiday "moves"--it operates under the Hebrew calendar, which is lunar, not solar like ours. I forget exactly how it works but I know that every so often there is a whole leap month, thus Adar I and Adar II. How much have I learned that I don't remember? How much do we have to remember now that we can Google? The Montessori method does not emphasize memorization, J told me the other day. I never went to a Montessori school, wonder how I would have done--been lost in the lack of structure, come up with my own ways of organizing? Elementary and secondary schooling in this country is nothing if not scheduled, down to bells that ring at 1:43 and 2:57. The tyranny of time, submitting to common time. The revolution that was the train timetable. Yes yes Greenwich is such a mean time. I never understood how to read sun dials. I always approached them knowing what time my watch said. Sometimes Chanukah begins in late November, sometimes late December. A story of a rabbi who said, Chanukah is always on the same date--the 25th of Kislev. My 12th grade boyfriend, B, was a free spirit, skipped school, smoked dope. I remember sitting around with him and his friend M discussing Ayn Rand. (High school, I think, is the only proper time of life to be discussing her work.) B went to college at Texas A & M, and joined the corps, a military organizaiton affiliated with ROTC. B decided on his own to become a member, it wasn't mandatory any more. During a college break I asked him why. If you don't have self-discipline, he said, it helps to have it imposed from outside. At the time I felt he was giving in. Giving up. Surrendering a part of himself that was akin to his soul. Rumor is he is now a doctor in Dallas. Rumor is that I am a flibbertigibbet http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/flibbertigibbet in Chicago. I had invited friends for birthday dinner. In the ER yesterday I had asked whether I could have people over. The nurse said yes, just don't tell them you have MRSA. Which I thought was impossible and unfair. I sent out a full disclosure. One couple stayed away. L and I bought papusas, Central American comfort food: pancakes made of masa and filled with cheese, cheese and beans, cheese and Salvadoran flowers, cheese and Guatemalan leaves. We lit the His and Hers menorahs. We drank wine. I blew out all but one candle on the cake. We were getting close to the end of the holiday. I think all religions have miracles. Chanukah came from war; the Maccabbees were able to reclaim the temple in Jerusalem from the rulers of the land, the Syrian-Greeks, who had defiled the building and outlawed the practice of Judaism. To rededicate the temple, the Jews lit the menorah. There was just a little bit of oil, enough for a day or so. The miracle: It lasted eight days, enough time for a delivery of more. The real story of Chanukah is a story of essentials, a story before personalities and weapons. All peoples have sought light when the days turn dark and nights turn cold. Each tribe comes up with a story, a ritual to serve their purposes. Make up any story you want. As long as it ends with light.
The seventh night of Chanukah came at the end of the day that the children and teacher were killed. We live in a world of evil, anger, chaos, endless confusion, greed--and some light.
The eighth night of Chanukah is December 14, almost a fortnight from Christmas. After midDecember, non-Jews are flummoxed, they don't know what to say. Perplexed that there's no simultaneity this year. In the city it doesn't show so much: People say Happy Holidays. In Springfield earlier this month the temporary doctor said Merry Christmas. About 15 years ago my friend J (a different J than way above) designed some buttons: How dare you presume I'm Christian? Embarrassing to wear--too confrontational. The language based on the gay rights' button: How dare you presume I'm heterosexual? Merry Christmas, they say and I think of responding, I don't celebrate Christmas, we caused it, or We killed him. But we've been working for two thousand years to convince the Church that it wasn't our fault. Wasn't Pilate part of the plan--Jesus needed to be sacrificed so he could return. The tortured public death, la Pieta, the cave, the stone, eternal life. Do you believe in Jesus Christ? I asked my Catholic friend K in junior high, sheepishly. Yes, she said. I couldn't imagine. Her official first name was Mary, I think she had a saint's name, too--undergroundish, like our Hebrew names we use only in synagogue. At my younger niece's bat mitzvah, the rabbi said that her grandfather, my father, must be smiling down from heaven. Do you really believe that? I asked my mother. She admitted, no. The rabbi stole the topic of my niece's speech. He gave his sermon on the helpfulness of prayer, then she did. Stole her thunder. Though I wanted to steal it again--to highlight studies that prove intercessional prayer does no good. Years ago I was planning a talk at the Houston Jewish book fair and I told my mother I would speak on my beliefs. You can't do that, she said, you don't believe. In Baby Boomer childhood in Texas, there were not the socialist-Jewish-atheist-union-workers that you had in New York City. We were unaware of the tradition of the apikoros, the Jew who does not believe, who is, well, rational: The Mishnah http://www.sacred-texts.com/jud/etm/index.htm tells us, He who maintains that there is no resurrection of the dead derived from the Torah, and [He who maintains] that the Torah was not divinely revealed, and an Epikoros," a word derived from the Greek Epicurus, do not have place in the world to come. The Epikoros is the heretic, the disbeliever who flaunts his religious disobedience. Do I flaunt? Perhaps. I don't believe except in my imagination: I like the riddle about the difference between heaven and hell--In hell, no one has elbows and they sit at a table piled high with every food under the sun, redolent, but cannot eat. In heaven, everyone sits at that very same table, but they feed one another. A groan, if you do not like sap. Kitsch, said Kundera, is the failure to acknowledge that shit exists. He could have said death, but it would have to be Final Death, not angels-and-harpsand-spirit-still-around death. We disbelievers are called Greek, essentially, which is who the Maccabees were fighting off; the Syrian-Greeks forbade us (for you should always imagine yourself as having lived through Jewish history) to practice our religion, and look at us, we are free, free, to become mayors and artists and goniffs http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ganef, and what do we do? We scoff. Scoff, scoff.
S.L. (Sandi) Wisenberg is the author of a short-story collection, The Sweetheart Is In (Northwestern University Press); an essay collection, Holocaust Girls: History, Memory & Other Obsessions (U of Nebraska P); and a chronicle, The Adventures of Cancer Bitch (U of Iowa P). The first part of her yet-unpublished-in-full novel is in the fall 2012 issue of Fifth Wednesday.
Copyright 2012 Dead Man Publishing, LLC All poems in this archive are Copyright 2012 S.L. Wisenberg.