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Cover photo: painting of H a waiian petrog lyph by J. Halley Cox . photo <·m u1esy of ..'olin Belshe. Photo page 27 courtesy of Beruice P. Hr~·hop Museum . PJ1oto page 11 :1 courtesy o f Jolrn Bel.r.,·IJ:. .

EDITOR . Christine Cook MANAGING EDITOR .. . Gayle Kanemoto POETRY EDITOR ..... Jim Long FICTION ED ITOR . . . . Susan Foster Jim Borg. Jim Kraus, Darryl Cabacun gan. Caroline Garrett. Lisa Kresge. David Nelson, Anita Pavich, Ralph Weister ADVISORS . ... . . . ....... A sa Baber, Philip Damon, I an MacMillan, Robert Onopa, Frank Stewart, John Unterecker

Hawaii Review is published twice yearly by the Board of Publications. Univers ity of Hawaii. Subscriptions and manuscripts should be addressed to Hawaii Review. 2465 Campus Road, University of Hawaii. H onolulu, Hawa ii 96822. Manuscripts should be accompanied by stamped, self-addressed envelope. Subsc ription rates. $3.00 per year; single copies, $1.50. ©1975 by the Universit y of Hawaii

HAWAII REVIEW

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I . FRITZ SENN

NAOMI SHIHAB

MARTHA WEBB GARBISCH

PHYLLIS THOMPSON

WHAT THB OLD MAN O.d.BAMS IN THB DAWN, HOTBL Bl'ENNBR

LYN LIFSHIN

TWO.POBMS

LINDA PASTAN

from VIRGINIA FLYNN

ELLIOTT ANDERSON

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CATHY SONG

TWOPOBMS

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ALBERT GOLDBARTH

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GREG KUZMA

SCRAPBOOK

PHILIP APPLEMAN

TWO POEMS

LABAN CHANG

TWO POEMS

EARL COOPER

EDGE

JOHN UNTERECKER

THRBEPOEMS

MELTAKAHARA

WAITING

ERIC CHOCK

TWO POEMS

JANE ANDERSON

THE RICHARD NIXON FREISCirttTZ RAG

GUY DAVENPORT

WATCH

ROBERT E. BUEHRIO

ACT V: HAMLET FOR THE BBLL OF IT

HOWARD DICKLER

CLBAR ACRYLIC BNAMBL

RODNEY MORALES

NOTBS 114 JOYSYJIPOSIUM PARTICIPANTS 116

edited by Fritz Senn

THE JAMES JOYSYMPOSIUM

Jacques Aubert Bernard Benstock Robert Boyle Leon Edel Leslie Fiedler Phillip Herring Morton Levitt John Raleigh Fritz Senn Margaret Solomon Hugh Staples

AUGUST 26-30, 1974 UNIVERSITY OF HAWAil CAMPUS CENTER

sponsored by tbe English Department in conjunction witb tbe Campus Center Board and Summer Session Activities and tbe State Foundation on Culture and tbe Arts

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following material has been edited from tape recordings during the symposium.

THE GENIUS AND THE INJUSTICE COLLECTOR Bdel ... Joyce remains a curious memory: his eccentricities, were those of madness, are often retold as if they were the IIJVIIlu,uua of genius; in part, I suppose, they were. His inwardhis in![Jolence, his world-mockery, and his self-mockery, him one of the great "curiosities" of modern literature, is what he will more and more become. It takes a certain of mind to give over endless pages simply to the parody of novels; it demands a curious kind of ongoing obsessive to mock the media as Joyce mocked them. His is one of saddest histories of. modern creation: genius burning itself always on a downward curve from transcendence to pattiEven the magical Finnegan ultimately palls. He is hugely adowed by the great creative figures of our time-Yeats, his countryman, or at another extreme, Eliot, and even, water-colory way, Virginia Woolf, who could mock quite &.........&&~&,,but who had more of the stuff of literary art in her she knew where to call a halt, where to round out and a form. Joyce's poems are slight; his tales are neat but not there have been finer masters of the short story; his is impossible; only Ulysses and Finnegan dramatize for the new time and space dimensions of fiction and the new ~..+•···•+,. of our century, and they resolve themselves into parwit and word games. I am reduced to saying it would seem Joyce's one disciplined work of art is A Portrait of the Artist Young Man. He is becoming largely a child of the exegetes, he also serves the needs of literary politics and acadissertations. That however shouldn't be held against him. To the miseries of his inwardness were added the physical of a dozen eye operations for cataracts, poor health, poverty at first and self-impoverishment by a grandeur of IU...&U15 • He had his compulsive bouts of drunkenness. He had of depression during which he moved from " great irritaand impotent fucy" to sudden fits of weeping. This is the and driven existence of which we are made spectators; with this there was Joyce's way-I suppose by the combinaof helplessness and ~oc.kery-of commanding always a cirfriends hypnotized by his virtuosity and prepared to immotbemselves on his altar~ They received scant thanks for their

pains, and are immortalized in the puns of Finnegan. J oy~e wrote not for literature but for personal revenge. His motivations are confused: but there is something heroic in his ideal and in his sense of myth. He belongs to the witchcraft of words. He was Faus!, but he thought himself Jesus: and Judas was everywhere. from JOYCE'S IRELAND John Raleiah .. . At the center of Joyce's picture of Dublin is really Dublin's lower middle class and furthermore, it is a lower middle class which is marked by a constant sort of downward trend, a general erosion. Everyone is always going down. Some have hit bottom like the scrounger&, Lenehan and Corley, and even they take a fall .. .. To provide some general background .. . the key word in Joyce's sociology as it is in his theology and morality is the word fall-it is a world of falls. For example, I don't know of any other novelist who makes such a thing of falling human bodies, that is, bodies that keep falling on the fioor. This runs throughout his work beginning with Dubliners in the story "Grace." Sometime in the 1890's I imagine it was, John Joyce, drunk, fell down in the watercloset of a pub and in so doing bit his tongue. Joyce picked this up and from this stems the plot of "Grace" where this incident happens to Mr. Kiernan. Now Mr. Kiernan turns up in Ulysses and his fall in the watercloset is part of Dublin folklore because Molly remembers it in 1904. ... Falls continue, Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist falls and breaks his glasses. In Ulysses Bloom almost falls as he is walking into Bella Cohen's whorehouse, going upstairs he slips and starts to fall and Zoe, the whore, saves him. Stephen Dedalus does fall; actually, in that climactic part of the Circe episode. Now move over to the human imagination and the preoccupation with falls. We find that all of human history is a series of falls. Most of these occur either in Stephen Dedalus's imagination or in Joyce's prose buried in the Oxen of the Sun section or the Eumaeus section. But all these falls have been Lucifer falls, the angels fall with him, Eve falls selling us all out, in a sense, for epiphany. . .. When you get to Irish history proper, it is of course a series of falls, one after another. To get to the period we are cottcerned with: Bloom was born in 1866, and of course we are in 1904, in the age of Ulysses. The two great events of Irish political life in Bloom's lifetime and in Joyce's lifetime were the

Park murders and, the great catastrophe, the fall of Parin 1890 and 1891. The Phoenix Park murders and the fall of are there in the Eumaeus section and are discussed move to Joyce's own life. His father's fall'also coincided the fall of Parnell. That is, his father lost his job. ... Then to the social world th3.t is being presented in Ulysses. said at the outset, it is a series of losers. Really there is only auccessful man mentioned who is on his way up and that is Dawson who is never introduced to us and is a figure of fun. of the rest are either accidents or on the way down. Even lowest of all ... the two lowest characters, Corley and Lenehave a falling out on June 16, and so on the morning of June uuru•v is left destitute. Lenehan scrounges from Boylan and Boylan a bad tip on the horse race. No matter how far down social scale you are, you can always go further. This is not true of Dublin in its entirety. It is a picture, one might of the undeserving lower middle class. Staples ... Mr. Raleigh started out very rightly in saying in one sense everything that Joyce ever wrote has to do with fall as the principal image. It occurs to me that those of us have been to Joyce's Dublin have seen a good deal of the literally. One should say, Stephen and Joyce are very much of the former grandeur of Dublin. During the last half of eighteenth century Dublin was one of the great capitals of The fall of Ireland that Mr. Raleigh spoke of really stems the Act. of Union of 1800. Great Britain passed the Act of which disturbed the balance of power. All the people with went back to England, leaving behind all those magnifimonuments of neo-classical architecture, and they, of are still around when Stephen is walking up and down wharf. But about 1750 the fashionable part of Dublin. where wealthy Anglo-Irish lived, was on the riorth side of the quay they built those very beautiful Queen Anne-Georgian IIMLW.KD· It is in fact in one of these houses on 7 E~les Street Leopold Bloom lives. I think that all of us who have been to more than once have seen this very building on 7 Ecles fall down. The first time I went there it was still up. And it is simply a weed-grown, ash-filled hole in the ground. bethose marvelous, old eighteenth-century buildings are all falling. So that this seems to me an important symbol.

And for those of you who have not been to Dublin you remember that what we are seeing here is almost the final of decay before the regeneration uf the modern state of land. . . . · I would like to say just a word about the world of which is what we have been talking about. If I might ae:scf~no• from the more abstract remarks that have been made, what y have to remember, and this accounts for a certain tone in J use of detail, is the very sordid condition of life in itself. streets were full of filth, largely on account of the fact that s tation was not enforced. Sewage was introduced about this but was hardly in use. If you read Sean O'Casey's autobio you get a much clearer picture of the actual decay. Nigh,.,.n,UT1'1• captures all this and is essentially about decay yet was once most fashionable part of Dublin and the buildings were very ..,.,,"" ...,. tiful. The real irony for the reader and for Stephen and for is to be surrounded by the monuments of Dublin's former nificence . ... So that the irony, which is the central mode, I •u~·l.Uiol• is partly accounted for by the supreme contrast between teenth-century Dublin and Dublin of 1904. from JOYCE 'S WORD-WORLD Phillip Herring ... I suppose the best way to begin this discu s ion is to remind you of a short article that appeared in an .........,.... of newspapers a year or two ago about an enterprising man in Washington who was interested in gathering intel about various things, people. What he would do was sift th their garbage nearly daily. He found clues to current events. is the kind of thing that I've been doing with Joyce. I've sifting through various garbage cans and various vVJL.L"''" ...·vu•• especially like the one in Buffalo. I got interested in the B Museum notesheets, and sought to uncover some of his and find out how they were used in Joyce's creative process. this is what you might say is live orientation as far as the goes, and it has something to say about the way Joyce got words. Frank Budgeon has the best a ccount of this. He ,,.,,"",...r, Joyce in Zurich listening to conversations, taking down on scraps of paper, on paper napkins, on disposable cups, disposable colla rs and putting them in his pocket. Gogarty tel a story about Joyce leaving the room at v arious times in a vel'sation to jot down notes on scraps of tablets and library c

What Joyce did when he was writing Ulysses was to dump all into very large orange-colored envelopes classified only to episode. When he got ready to write an episode, as Cyclops or Nausicaa, he would dump them out, ta.ke a piece of paper and go through these notes and copy them in random order. A typic~l notesheet has no sense of proThere i s no progression in the notesheets themselves. -...u"'''~'-.:t â&#x20AC;˘ he would have a basic idea of a plot outline in his and he used these notes to supplement the draft. With successive draft he would go back to his notes, and he knew own mind when he copied them off the sheet where each would go. And through each draft he would harvest and interweave them into the texture of his episode. uses words then as building blocks, and although his Ianbecomes progressively more elitist, in a sense, and more more difficult, the sources are by and large not elitist at He took what he found in conversation, in novels that he in encyclopedias, and I, for one, believe that his knowledge J&U'&U'" .. â&#x20AC;˘ of Greek culture, literature and mythology probably more from encyclopedias than from anything like scholarly is always extr emely sensitive to the way in which are used, and so are most of Joyce's characters with whom sympathize in the earlier works. For instance, one of the of the Dubliners stories such as " The Sisters," "Araby" ..The Dead" is the way in which common people use and language and cliches. . .. Language very often, at least stories, is used as an instrument of oppression for charwho are sensitive to it. On that first page of Dubli ners we the priest saying, "I am not long for this world," and later have phr ases like "Did he . . . peacefully?" "Yes, yes, you 't tell the life went out of him." And I can't help but feel the little boy in "The Sisters" is made terribly nervous and by the way in which these common people use language cliches. thing that I wanted to mention briefly is related it has to do with the way people use words and how it the quality of their minds.. .. In Ulysses we have else operatin~ in the letters. Somebody mentioned from Martha Clifford to Bloom. If you go back to that from Millie you see how ungrammatical the letter is, how sense it reflects the m ind of that v ery young girl. The letter

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from Martha Clifford is similarly ungrammatical and extre1ml~lJI• loose. She makes all sorts of mistakes. It seems to be a of the female mind in Joyce . .. . In the Penelope episode have the same thing, the misuse of the language... . w. ..,A,....,... thing just flows together in a kind of nar:rative line. This is way Penelope works. Bernard Benstock ... We are conscious of just how seJLI·l~Oils<;IO Joyce was in using words and just how painfully conscious forces us to be in considering the small elements of language .. . . . Molly's "nocturnal omissions" is a mistake, but it is brilliant mistake, an intelligent mistake. Th~ balance of oouu~:~iD.l\J,._ and omission gives us two meanings, neither one of wh should be dropped. If Molly is to be congratulated on \.:>a.JL.l.l.lJL• Ben Dollard a " bass barreltone" she might as well be conR:ra1u1• lated on the accidental pun of " nocturnal omission." Bloom has proven to be equally and ecumenically and ignorant about all three religions. When it comes to Ro Catholicism he speculates that INRI means "iron nails ran It is exactly what happens for him. We cannot ignore the that this is historical accuracy, and lingui stically far m ore erful than resurrecting those Latin w ords which give it a name. " Iron nails ran in" has a reality and an accur acy .... is the brilliance and the accuracy and the intelligence of the that we are getting from the erroneously, malapropi stic linguistically uneducated Molly Blooms and Leopold Bloc>Illl• which make our understanding of the char acters that much significant. ... If y ou remember what S t ephen Dedalus wanted from guage-again Joyce says it once, he says it only once, and is enough: Stephen is interested in the color of words. That far from anything that the linguist, the etymologist, the tionary reader is talking about. It is the color of words and music of words that is important to the writer, as brush str·okflll and notes are to the painter and composer. I think of the " 11 ' " ' • •• lative effect of the phrase which appears on the last page Finnegans Wake: "my cold father, my cold mad father, my mad feary father." There is not:tpng in the individual they are all easUy understood. The cumulative effect of mad cold, cold on mad is a musical relationship between sound sense of the language. . .. Words receive meaning, and Joyce, instead of leading

meaning, performs a sleight-of-hand by which the disappear from the page and the meaning obtrudes itself Joyce brings us constantly back to an awareness of the that he is tampering with words, with language, and perthis panel is rather audacious in trying to discuss anything as a word. As Fritz Senn mentioned perhaps we should ....,.nt .. aifo on letters. The single letter placed in a single posichanges not only words but changes worlds. This selfsness may be psychological, sociological. We may reback to the panel when we were considering Joyce's IreJoyce was told over and over again as he grew up that was not his native language. This language not only to foreigners but invading foreil!,.'.ers, the occupier, conqueror, the Saxon. .. . Joyce felt himself trapped in the English language and thus became a master of the English language, almost forcing to do this. Joyce is compelled to do certain things with English language which others, for whom the language was ... would never consider or bother to do. Consequently, has been described as having an English tongue in an mouth .. .. With Ulysses and with Finnegans Wake we become conscious, become aware of the self-conscious response to the practice carving, chiseling and etching every single word that Joyce thereafter. This self-consciousness leads to a very different of literary criticism.... JOYCE AND RELIGIOUS MYSTHEREE mrv-an1n Solomon ... I am Ms. Three. I am going to talk about evolution-revolution that involves a grasp of myth, misery in the circular progress, and a great deal of mystery misery's final cure. I am going to call this trinity creation, or sublimation, and redemption. The image that I see that you have no doubt seen in various medieval manuIt is that of a beast whose body encircles or somehow IDO:mJJafJSets the word or words-until it grabs its own tail in its This is the evolution which turns into revolution; and propelling agent is language. As one who has read Joyce's works enough to notice a change herself, :r. would like to say, very boldly, that thereisno revoluwithout language. It is language that causes revolution. I think we ought to take a look, again, at the word revolution,

because it includes revolving and returning as well as the concept of violent change. Joyce set out to become, I think, not so much an artist of revolutionary words, but an artist-creator who would change the world-or the Word which for Joyce amounted to the same thing. . . . Stephen Dedalus is certainly far more interested in the word than he is in the image. And it's almost as if he had to close his eyes-as he does on the beach in the Proteus chapter of Ulysses-in order to hear that word. But of course Joyce .u .....u"'"'.u knew that he was handed the word at birth by his parents, nation, and the Irish Catholic Church; in other words, he born into it. One could almost say he was born into slavery to word that was already there-a pre-existing phenomenon. It one of the nets he has to fly by, by means of. .. . We find S phen searching for " the word that is known to all men," as if were some transcendental word that he hasn't already as if it were something which he could find outside his storehouse... . And he finds such a discovery an impossibility. I think that is where much misery is involved, in the tual acquisition of. the word up to the point of too much ing, until one kind of mystery at least is gone. A person who so intellectually inclined, who gets so involved in language, likely to become :miserable in the knowledge of the word. But believe, too, that Joyce changed himself-and now I'm about Joyce as an artist; I'm talking about the change in work, not in his biography-in the process ofexploring his with the language. At the starting point of his literary tion, the writing of Dubliners and A Portrait, the deadly ness of the searching artist permeates his work. There is a centrated beauty of language, but it is deadly serious, or so seems to me. Then we begin to see the aesthete Stephen D rivaled by Jewish Leopold Bloom. S o mething happens to l anguage as well, and that is love. Now, I don't mean sex. cause, unfortunately, when we get to Bloom we see a man is practically impotent-at least his s exuality is psychically cient in many ways. The whole novel is full of that .... is an example of love. Now I don't think that passage in Cyclops episode in which Bloom expounds on love is ..u,,.,..,,...., to be taken seriously. It's a parody. It' s a parody of love as as it is a parody of Elijah's ascension into heaven because, bly, of the purity and piety of the soul. Because love, like guage, can also be be autiful and deadly serious, it can become

religion in itself. ... Love is an abstraction, the same as is an abstraction; it's a sublimation; it' s the humanor man-animal abstracting, sublimating. And both Ian~ and love are creations of animal-man to separate himself the animal world. Joyce's novels are not about anything other than the process itself, we can summarize this evolutionary seanimal-man-instinct, insatiable desire-becomes huUlrough language. Language creates an abstraction called Love creates philosophies, religions, nations, families, but, process, denies what man started with: pure desire, the life force. The overhumanized man recognizes the of the abstractions of language and love and embraces fue third person of the trinity and becomes a comic figure absurd but totally wonderful cycle of search and return: DUIOO··re'ITOJUtion . .u.un:~l!;cwJio Wake is a superb example of both the search for revolution of the Word. In it the characters are all symcomponents of the human being who is the creator as well creature created, and who is the Word as well as the world by it. It is no accident that Joyce's works get sexier and by progression. Joyce has learned that it is not possible man, that sex-crazed animal, in favor of strictly huabstractions like language and love. The joke is that man these for himself, and without him there are no such matters. Procreation and God-creation are two words for urge, and, to tell the truth, defecation is another way it, if we are not too humanized and proper to admit it. dream, after all, is human-ity; it's human-ness. It is a lindream. ..,_,11" .."• for me, in this kind of progression we've been talkabout, in this circular trinity, is Language. Bloom is Love. is that insatiable Desire which h. ·an indifferent to intelknowledge and to love; the desire without which no man become totally human but which, in isolation, ties man to and to hunger-power and makes him sacrifice mystery. all men-and here I'm making no sex distinction, I'm talking man, animal-man, pure-animal-man-take to the books of Joyce, because they are dangerous in language-power, generates love-power, just as frightening. Those who do them have to continue the revolution through which they a humorous acceptance of man's animal component,

and complete the trinity that includes desire for life in all absurdity. Jacques Aubert ... I wish to provide a practical application those notions about language, my feeling being that there is letter missing in Margaret Solomon's word. What I heard mis-theory. .. . Why should I speak of thecry, and why should I consider that this theory is a mis, that Joyce failed in stating, formulating a theory? I will start with the word theory. After the word means contemplation, and it appears that Joyce's session was with what he was contemplating in terms of creation, and also his contemplation of actual life, of what was seeing in a kind of visionary fashion in the actual He seems to have experienced the radiance of things, the dor of things, and beyond that, the splendor of truth. As we know, he described this radiance as the sign of beau in his aesthetic experience, in his experience of reality. Now use the word aesthetic and I think that is where things begin be more difficult for him. Because, there again, if we bear mind what the word means originally, etymologically, we how Joyce was getting very close to very serious difficulties. understand that aesthetics is very far from theology or should in some respects. After all the word was coined, was created, invented in the wake of the Cartesian revolution as a kind counterpart or complement to the Cartesian epistemology. aim was to provide a theory of obscure perception, of what obscure yet of the order of knowledge in perception. At this of course we find both-we find the reasons both of J proximity to the mystery of the Trinity and also the reason his failure, his possible failure in creating, in formulating a of aesthetics. My impression, and I think I could prove this Joyce's texts, is that he tended to forget about this very vu'l:l'-''"~. ity. He tended to forget that he was not in an exceptional po tion, he was not in the privileged position face-to-face with splendor of God, of truth. He couldn't look at the radiance things without blinking and he had to take darkness into count-darkness, mystery, incertitude. The whole process, discovery of darkness in himself, this discovery of darkne somewhere in his own experience, in his own deep experience, was probably one of the crucial points in his sonal history, and that took place in relation to writing. J "epiphany" is described in one particular place in Stephen

it is the only place where we have the word in connection the word being used and defined. What strikes me in the IJia.tn:nâ&#x20AC;˘ÂˇK" is how Stephen seems to be unaware of what is hap'"'...~6 to him. He says that a trivial incident in Dublin, a kind overheard dialogue in the street, is a good example of what epiphany is, a sudden spiritual manifestation and so on. He that is what the man of letters should record with care. But few lines before that, he said something totally different: "A incident set him composing some ardent verses ..." which entitled The Villanelle of the Temptress. And then after de~.... u ...... 6 this scene he says, "Stephen, as he passed on his quest, the following fragment of colloquy out of which he re-;, ......A an impression keen enough to afflict his sensitiveness severely." And from then he proceeded to be a theorist of But in fact what he did after this experience was not that IPDlPle. He wrote two things: a theory of the epiphany, an abintellectual account of his experience, and, more imporhe wrote a poem. To me, the important thing of course is the poem, and his involvement in words and in language. His theory, as an absolute, was bound to be a failure prebecause he couldn't look into the radiance of things, as the of hero, superhuman artist that the title of the novel sugHe had to take into account the darkness in experience, obscurity which is present in the words afflict, sensitiveness severely.

. . . What happened to Joyce was an evolution from his conof himself as a beholder of glory, truth, beauty, and God, , to the very different position and much more humble of a fumbler with words, a fumbler in obscurities.... Boyle ... Imagination must be a central word and conin speaking of mystery, and certainly of concern to me in _ ...........6 with Joyce's use of Catholicism is the artist as priest of eternal imagination, the source of everything for the artist. . . To get to the point on what spiritual or spiritual manifestameans, I would think it important to stress that it means lilnFA.....:rth the word could mean to Joyce and to us; that it means and religiosity, and something far larger. It means the an:JnticL of the imagination, perceiving, apprehending, not com........" ......u ........, reality. Imagination, strong imagination, plays such that it would comprehend whatever it seeks to apprewhich is an old theological distinction between the appre-

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'hension of mystery which we can have, and the comprehension of mystery which we can never have. . . . People begin to wonder whether we are speaking about Joyce being a good Catholic or a bad .Catholic, whether we are talking about Joyce's own belief. What I want to talk about in this area is not at all Joyce's belief or Stephen's belief for that matter, but the use of the belief he knew. That is, he knew the Catholic tradition of this word mystery which is a most profound, complex, interesting, and, to a rationalist, unavailable word. I think that it is impossible to communicate with rationalists on this point, because in the Catholic tradition the word mystery, as of the Trinity, the central mystery of all mysteries, is that which the human mind cannot grasp ever. There is no way. It is not like a puzzle, that if you get just the right circumstances you can then arrive at the answer to the mystery. This is not of course only in the Catholic tradition .. .. What every successful literary artist does is express this mystery. Joyce happened to express it in the Catholic tradition. Joyce I think found it most fruitful to express the aim of the artist, to express what lies beyond the reach of the mind. Morton Levitt ... Bloom's misery, as you all know, is his failure as a husband, his failure as a father, his failure as a would-be lover, and perhaps even his failure as a son. An unsuccessful businessman, an unsuccessful intellectual, an unsuccessful scientist, he is an alien in the city where he was born. He's a failure even as a Jew-the one persistent identity that Bloom has in the novel is his J ewishness. There are more than two hundred references to it in the novel. And each one of Bloom's references is either wrong, or incomplete, or wrong and incomplete.... Somehow despite all his misery, despite all his failure, Bloom does somehow survive, he does endure. Perhaps in a strange way he prevails. And if he does survive, it is not simply as a prototype of a mere hero. Bloom seems to me a strange paradoxical character with a way out of the paradoxical times. The way he survives this misery perhaps is the way we all survive ours. I think we have to look at it in the context of our times... . In 1922 Bloom seemed little more than a comic hero; half a century later, and with the perspective not simply of World War I, but of Dachau, Hiroshima and My Lai perhaps we need to reassess the term hero. Because Bloom really does survive, he does endure. To say that Bloom endures seems to me to be talking about

than just June 17 and what might perhaps have happened June 17, 1904.... But if the miseries are there, it seems to that there's something else as well, and this I call transcenJoyce is the first to see the Jews, in our time at least, with enduring humanistic and metaphoric values . . .. Think some of the literature of our times and the r~.e of the Jew as metaphor in this literature. Think not simply of Kafka and and not simply of the obvious Jewish writers like Bellow. . Think of those non-Jewish writers who use the Jew as meta. Think of those Gentiles who have claimed to be Jewish .... Bloom of courses does not understand all these values that calling Jewish humanistic, metaphorical values. In fact it will discovered that he even rejects many of them, though it seems me that Bloom represents these values. Now Bloom's survival the survival of certain kinds of higher values, and by values I mean explicitly non-Catholic values. He does not toresEmt belief in, nor reaction to, that other world. ... The kind survival that Bloom represents is a uniquely Jewish survival. is of-this-world kind of survival. There is no obviously reliJewish tradition... . By and large there is no belief in an in Judaism. It is this world that we have to make it in. represents the survival of Jewish values in the sense of need for us all to live in this world, figuratively. It is not easy for Bloom to survive in this world; it's not easy 'a ny of us to survive. It seems to me that in a strange way, certainly, paradoxical certainly, perhaps even sentimenBloom does survive, he does live in this world and in the ~;c::;.::;, it seems to me, he transcends the misery of his own life, .-n,11iniP!::! a way for Joyce to transcend the misery of his, and s does the same for the rest of us as well. . . . LET A THOUSAND BLOOMS FLOWER Fiedler ... There are three languages in Ulysses which call for the sake of simplicity-and then I will complicate 's language, Bloom's language and Molly's Stephen's language is sophisticated, academic, occahigh-faluting, always elitist; that is, a kind of language separates the speakers and those who really understand, some people on the outside. It is a hermetic language, an language, a language which makes a closed circle, and is at the same time, and I think by the same token, a strictly language, a language spoken among male buddies who

happen to be college mates. It is a language which is also spoken by Dublin intellectuals in the Library scene. It is, at last, the language which Stephen speaks to himself when he thinks nobody is even listening to him. It is a language which, in a funny way, is aspired to, but thank God not reached, by Bloom. Bloom would like to talk Stephen's language if he could, but is so blessed that he can't. His is a language which is mocked by Molly, particularly when Bloom pretends to speak it. And interestingly enough it is language which is also mocked by a piece of Joyce's own mind in the Oxen of the Sun episode, which is a series of high:..faluting parodies of prose styles in English which finally end by being dissolved into American evangelical jargon. It is perhaps also the language of the Ithaca chapter, and in a certain way, I think, it is a mockery of a way in which certain Irishmen have always spoken the English tongue, which is not quite native to them. . .. Stephen's language-which is, as I call it, the Father's-is bound by Latin and comes out of Latin. The second language, the language spoken by Bloom, is the language of the mass media. The really true language of Bloom is the language of advertisements in the newspapers, the language of all tQ.e popula:r_: articles about science and all the other subjects in the world of the Sunday supplements. It moves toward American, because American is permanently the language of the mass media, and the language of the future, as Stephen's languag e is the language of the past. The third kind of language in the book-and it is the one this moment which interests me more and more-is the which is spoken by the women in the book. This is the tongue . . .. The women who speak this language despise language which is spoken by people outside.... From time time in Ulysses Joyce releases the Mother's language: in the episode of the book where he allows Molly to speak, in the N sicaa episode in which he pennits Gertie MacDowell to for a good deal of the time, and in the Circe episode where women speak, including Bella Cohen who is the only woman the book who bears the name " priest" (Cohen meaning It is also the language which comes occasionally in letters Martha Clifford or Milly. It is the language of that popular fonn, which in a funny way we no longer feel is as popular Joyce did, the opera. Mother tongue is a language which women are pennitted to speak here, in the book itself, when Joyce de-

to invent a character and give her voice, though the mother a double aspect. Sometimes it seems overblown, consciously falsely elegant; sometimes it seems practical, hard and It is not syntactical. Its connections are not made in terms It is ungrammatical and unpunctuated. It is contemptuof everything except primary experience, which is to say and feeling, and response... . The three points at which women take over are points at women are at the same time real women and an aspect of great goddess. Nausicaa is obviously the girl anima. She is figure who appears in the dreams of men, the representative everything men ever repressed in their souls because they â&#x20AC;˘.t,rtA" it toe girlish to confront in daylight. What appears in Circe scene is the phallic.mother, to borrow a term from-psy. The phallic mother appears in two forms, as Mrs. Bella to Bloom and as May Goulding to Stephen. And the Paneepisode shows the beneficial aspect of the Great Mother, healing and reconciling, the great recreator and redeemer, principle of fertility itself.... Having said that the parts of the which move me most are the parts in which Joyce allows to speak for themselves, I am reminded, and I am reto remind you, that modem literature, or more specifithe first major genre of literature, or to be precise and parthe novel, the first form of a popular literature to come existence, was an attempt to release the female voice. The was invented by Samuel Richardson and Defoe who, other things, attempted to release in this new genre a of a group which was otherwise voiceless in society. Let me 1n a parenthesis that ever since, whenever the novel has been authentic and successful, it has been written for opminorities or voiceless groups of society-for Blacks and 1n the United States, for homosexuals, for the insane, for excluded people, for the insulted and the injured everyNovels which pretend to speak for the majority are not successful novels by and large... . European literature lllllllPtS. by and large, to release the voice of the greatest psychiexploited group among us. American literatu~ is very emIIITIUIII!IIKI with women and substitutes Black men and Red men women.... The essential strategy of Richardson was tO be. as it were, a female impersonator. The male novelist â&#x20AC;˘meta a novelist by playing puppet master to a puppet who in a female voice ....

Naomi Shihab WHAT GERTRUDE STEIN FELT WHEN SHE WALKED THROUGH A DOORWAY

It was always

everything awake alive whether she liked it or not it was not nothing. It was partially away of walking. Two feet and by that I mean two I mean not sliding. Each one touching earth in differ ent little spots and feeling every bit of it. That is what. Today is Saturday.

Martha Webb Garbisch

CALLING SONG

I can give you something you've never had just let me touch you, let me touch you I am all opening, aliI touch your mouth, it's a long sweet note resonant. endless. it shakes me apart You know I am all the green of these mountains and the water of the streams let me touch you, I will draw you in I am the bare foot on the ground I am the root that carries the blood of this old strong land to you.

PIBCB

rivers I ani your sea. to me, though no rains this capaeity. IRar heats here to cook loose

skins for the wind, llkyless sea no rigid circle hangs the blood around. tic black blood sac

are white for the shadow play: on, between my fingers in one piece, and not in a wall.

WAILEA STREAM

Circles are braiding between two smooth stones muscles feathers the water like a hawk's neck bends and flashes down the rocks. slows ... here sunlight shivers over the pool, and a bove light's blood beating along branches. The mirrored light clings like a web and a skin to the underside of a boulder consuming and quickening the stoneparasite or symbiote flesh to bone I leave at last, because I hear voices. The heavy weeds, the air heavy with rotten fruit may be haunted by men, although I know the gully walls are high, too steep for apes to descend in silence. Pull on my clothes wet while this nothing approaches, snapping branches. Take the gift of the stream and run away down.

stone hands, tender palms up give back to the world everything that cannot be held, everything me a tree trunk strong and wrinkled rough lighter and lighter until the high leaf cover and blue so beyond touch feet feeling stone weight tell: is the ground, strong burial on tl;le damp spinning grass. image you bring me. that I am small you high, no gentle lacy height fioating, sunlit gesture the gift that cannot be awkward: nesting boxes of words and want opened and opened the center uncontained, 路-~~val~t.love. Hands hold or break light.

Albert Goldbarth HOW THB ART GOT MADB

1. LEFT PANEL: the object without the subjective

In movies, the door slams; correlative of this time for good. But this time, in fact, in "real life," it closed with the click of a casket lid I sat in the dark for hours. My slap rode out on her cheek in a red splotch I vainly thought of, for hours afterwards, as hand-shaped. A waste: such a calling of blood from its usual circuiU'y could, in another context, have been a healthy menstrual flow, or stiffened her nipples. The after-image of the door, a gray plank against the blackness of blinking, hovered in my optical receptors with ghost-like tenacity. Additionally, the pain at Ule base of my neck has moved down the length of my back to mid-point: as if descending a ladder (the spine) from 路a brain too much on fire to save. No mail, the disconnected phone, check bounced, etc. etc. Out the window: the tree on the empty lot, and a wind-thinned city squirrel basked for Ute last of the day's autumn light in its bough.

3. CENTRAL PANEL: objective and subjective combined

He paints. We assume he has time to paint, now. The squirrel in the tree becomes the tempera image of a squirrel on a wooden panel. This is the central panel. Soon its side boards will be hinged on. But for now, it's alone. We see in it the air is hazy, as if contracted itself with the cold, from transparency to grayness. A tree, and in it, alone, itself, and meaning only itself: a squirrel perched on a central triptych panel that waits for its wings.

2. RIGHT PANEL: the subjective

Quintuplets can't sleep in this dark: his hands in his pockets. They've been up twenty-four hours, fisting. Finally, it's 4 P .M. and he looks up from the bench The Good Ship Misery. November: he's a man, . in a park, and he hasn't slept so long he's wept, or the converse. It doesn't matter by now. It's chill. A black squirrel in a leafless tangle of branches opens and closes like the pupil of a bloodshot eye. And he knows he could stare in such an eye and see the squirrel's dream too is to mutate and fly, always pacing summer.

Albert Goldbarth THE LINKAGE

In hour-old sidewalk the fingers have been busy initialling concrete into a thin gray alphabet soup, and the suspension of something so transient as a heart and its small math problem Tony + Sharon, in something so commemorative as cement, continues the tension of hands inked on the great veined cave-walls at Altamira and Lascaux. The difference and correspondence between those russet beasts done by reed, on rock, and spray-paint caking the subway wall has been highlighted elsewhere, and now I only want to say how the census of everyone left with mortality trembling his forefinger: sets outside my window tonight, and by morning will be a step closer toward being linkage, th~ sidewalk as Rosetta Stone between the ancient presence of Earth and its current circumpedestrians. + Albert +Sylvia, so much life! And no poured cement not a casket lid. The names of the dead in the hands of the living.

gardenias, their silence shine deep in those leaves my eyelids upon. ,.,-&U-;::Âť.u.LUJL.o..uâ&#x20AC;˘tu of petals above the lacing stems fingers hide under. petals and leaves. face warm down among the secret flowers. if they were pearls tenderly rubbed under my lips would have this soft wax feeling the smell of humid summer fallen the first garden of the world.

Lyn Lifshin WHAT THE OLD MAN DREAMS IN THE DAWN, HOTEL BRENNER

her voice a bell that won't ring the old man lies awake lilac in the dark room if he could make

a harp of that woman's hair later the dream of a lost boat, her rocking some thing bigger than hands more like wings

run through our heads day small, harsh tunes. words they have escaped the page wecannotchangethem. babies have died, are dead I say. children they've left their place out of our eyes our faces, then

YOU ARE ODYSSEUS

You are Odysseus returning home each evening tentative, a little angry. And I who thought to be one of the Sirens (cast up on strewn sheets at dawn) hide my song under my tonguemerely Penelope after all. Meanwhile the old wars go on, their dim music can be heard even at night. You leave each morning, soon our son will follow. Only my weaving is real.

was just peeling squash for their supper when Jay hands over his eyes and cried, "Oh my God." ran to him and knelt by his chair. "What is it?" asked anxiously. "What's the matter? Are you sick?" "he cried softly, "I've had a strange vision. As you were the squash. I saw Joanna on the table and I stabbed her the knife. Then I suddenly realized that I could do that. God, I haven't had a vision like that since I was a child." "'Jay," Virginia said, "what did you say? Do you know what saying?" "And yesterday," Jay said, "yesterday I put my arms around and suddenly I had thrown you to the floor and I was kicking I realized what I had done and I began to weep and hold in my arms, soothing you." "'Well," Virginia said, rising slowly and gently patting his "it doesn't matter; just don't think about it. I could you, too, or the baby, and I could hurt myself, but I don't about it." "'Yes, but I could," Jay said. "Of course I won't, but I know I could. I can't tell you how strange it is to know. I could

My father and I were driving from Iowa City to Des Moines. four or five at the time. I remember we pulled into a truckfor lunch and were attacked by fifteen or twenty women. killed my father and were going to kill me when about that many women drove up and frightened the others away. Ullest, most beautiful of these women took down her pants

and said, " Kiss my ass." I did as I was told. The only good woman is a dead woman. PICNIC John and David packed a picnic basket and their wives loaded blankets and a cooler into the trunk of the car. Then they all four drove out to Rosehill Farm where David bought a calf from the farmer. All four took turns holding the calf on its lead. A half hour later by the river on a grassy bank lined with trees, the wives spread the lunch things on a blanket while John and David hog-tied the calf and slit its throat. John 'cut generous lengths from the fillet and after each of the others had eaten his fill, they all stepped out of their clothes and, running through the trees, dove into the river. It was a glorious afternoon, warm but cool in the shade of the bank, and overhead the few high mackerel clouds did not obscure the sun.

GRIEF I remember standing by my father's grave feeling no grief, only the very narrow focus of my attention. I had no thoughts. I could only stare at his coffin. And running through my mind, over and over, a refrain of images, children, my own perhaps, running round and round a mother's bier, their faces bright with caution.

LIES Jay lifted Joanna from the crib and holding her in his arms whispered lies to her: "I love you, you're a sweet baby, do you know that? You are the most beautiful baby I know." His brushed against her ear as he spoke and he could smell fragrance of her soap. "You're such a sweet baby, Joanna, I you very much, I want you to grow up to be a beautiful I'll do everything I can for you. I've never known a baby so beautiful, you're incredibly beautiful, and so sweet, shall I sing you, yes?" And he began to sing for her: "You're such a s"Wree~â&#x20AC;˘ baby, Joanna, such a sweet sweet baby, I love you Joanna

will. You're such a sweet sweet baby, Joanna, the sweetbaby I know." Then he nibbled at her neck and through the cotton of her suit at her shoulder. Her eyes grew very wide she began to laugh excitedly. Afterwards, he let her suck the knuckle of his thumb. "So sweet, so sweet," he said.

Arthur Rimbaud gave up writing at the early age of twentythe day he finished an especially erotic poem called "The of the Apricot" about his infant daughter Anna. When his told him, "You publish that poem and I'll divorce you," he wrote another line.

Cathy Song REMNANTS

My fatherwho is my blood and water. Condemned at forty-six, the years in numbers attached to our house, cumbersome in renovations; weary, the surfacing of past mutilations. The old wood rots. The leaky bathtub drips at night. The constant erosion falls like dead stones in his head. He constricts beside my mother in bed, plastering the thin tiles in mirrored wall paper, streaked in gold. The house stands still. Unsold. New families with their bicycled children spring like wildflowers this season. Our neighborhood yards. They gather in our mailboxes, supple and pliant, uprooting our fences. Scents of winter upon our door step; the eviction notice, a dead bouquet. Our mourning paper glued to the lawn by dew.

house is sagging the garage. My sister's side the view. I look out breathe, breathed sigh. sister's bed needs changing. guest room now. the ghost room, first menstrual stains blotched France stickers and ley invitation mixers. tates with the filtered dust.

did the flight go? destinations splintered us; unknown pockets of air. abortion came too soon.

father stays making repairs, still; the machines with his fluids, -..~.... " the four cars. children drive off. is still making adjustments by moonlight.

is my blood and water. my mother who is his daughter. comes in her leaf green sweater; fiashlight in her hand.

The leaves set up their incantations. Someone is dead of old age. Darkness has called its guests. High in an attic window a face looks out. It is your mother, flaxen of hair. How beautiful she was last summer in Bolivia. And now she pays the taxes of her youth. And hard on her they are, though late in coming. There, in the distance, the water tower, striped like a blouse. And up around its base grow ivy green now still into November. She could see it with her glasses on. But there, she's turned away, and closed the curtains on the failing light. How splendid were those years when no one slept, or ached, or wept. Now the leaves descend, and that woman, your mother, looks hungry to the mirror which will not flesh her. It gives back only the little she offers.

-u.u.~â&#x20AC;˘K

table of mementoes! bed, its sheets and blankets of her torture. Dust in the Rooms with the numb sockets Stemware reversed on entombing their ounces

easily all this subsides. The bright red, brown beneath Deeled and peeling rain gutters.

Philip Appleman

SCRAPBOOK

What I remember is the overhead fan in Bangkok, turning like wheels in old movies, slowly backwards; I remember your turning to me and squinting as if I were shining on you. What I remember is evening haze in Calcutta, dung firing the brass pots; I remember your blondness in brown children: strange foreign light. I remember the blind camel at Isfahan plodding in circles, grinding the bloody husks of pomegranates; and in the empty bazaar your slow step in the dark.

Do you remember the parting in Trieste, sunset slipping through bars in the station, the train clanging like doors of dungeons; and pain splitting the night like summer lightning?

I remember is glances that looked deep; the touch of skin that felt bone; whispers out of the telling of the heart; you remember in the quais and airports of our past, that graying Schedule of Departures, our belonging only to places, things, adrift

inside our permanence?

Laban Chang LADY FROM A BOSTON FLEA MARKET for Kathy and Al

An irresistible bargain, she looked out of The piles of junk and antiques, perfectly Beautiful. You picked her out from the gaudy Stacks of art nouveau candy dishes and Civil War Belt buckles at a Boston flea market And brought her home, she Now sits demure under the antique glass Lampshade you bought in Enid, Like a perfect lady perhaps sunning Under a large beach umbrella, or Like the only witness at a wedding. When I first saw her, by way of introduction, And out of curiosity, I rather indelicately Tipped the lady over to look under the frozen Flutings of her skirt and observed That she was hollow. One night you and I sat over a pitcher of cold beer Talking of marriage and philosophy and chance, you said "Remember when I told you that I would never marry I really believed it then" (it must have been on a night like this just some funny thing a man would say as he reaches to fill a friend's glass of beer, thinking he has said something deep, yet naively spoken in tones so sincere that I naively believed it too) "I never would have bought her But my wife has changed me And now I love the lady."

lady, her face serene aged bronze, smiles enigmatic smile. . . . .rn><Ln .. the book she holds in her hand is a diary) fills

l'OJng路nt, resting on the floor propped on a corner of my bed ;-~n.~.u10; up at my round ceiling light, desert sun. Eyes closed I see the rippling shifting dunes on the rough plaster overhead, vulture view. Eyes moving, looking for movement of reptiles. I am a sprawled body of sand baking. A drifting wind may take me grain by grain in a slow frenzied dance. I am feverish but I have no thirst. I want the cool ablution of sleep. My mind burns like a filament. The light switch blinks like the eyelid of a desert lizard, before a mirage of water.

Earl Cooper

PASSAGE

She was eight. I would visit her in her room, and we'd sit there, sipping orange juice, trading news, and through all that bright white, clean linen, cheer talk was the clipped edge of fear crouched behind her eyeswinter light gripping furiously for a surface to hold to. One night she pulled off the end of a finger, she told me, and lit it. It burned half the night, a candle of cancer. The thing bivouacked in her breast, amoushing cells, infiltrating organs. Every night she could hear it raging and clanging through her veins, spreading toward her mind. The next evening it bloomed out, dumb and snatching. From t~e parking lot I saw her room flash with light and could almost hear her passing from the pain and fresh-cut flowers out into the night. Soaring, soaring, soaring.

completely caught in light, climbing into the lake, a soft crashing falls behind you years ahead of me. the far ridge among the cedars Han Shan would have his cabin, by the stream in the snow. mow is only here to tell us about the quiet. tell me of Han Shan, grandfather's hands, fall without dying.

....

~.~·.;

~~~-·-

~~·"'-~~-""-=---------~---

Here above the blunt surf, I can talk to your absences. They float in tide pools, a froth dissolving day's last sunlight int6 hunger. Black spines: the island trash outout; in a wash of yellow fibers: in yellow catching on black spines, delicate gaudy.

•

Or I see you as a Japanese lady in a green kimono. You have come down from the mountains carrying fire. You fit your fire into a shelter of rock. You will not hear me above the jagged glare, and so I tell you of a dreaming fisherman whose tall dream caught the moon on a silver lure. Your delicate hands tighten on rock. I imagine fingerprints pressed into darkness. I am rock. His long line dragged the gaudy moon across steep moonslope swells, a row of moon-white breakers, a froth-white tidal pool. Now you have folded volcanic rock onto the fire. A single ray breaks through, red as your mouth. When the fisherman captured the moon, he knelt on the wet rim of the tidepool. He would have out silver, handful after handful. But he hia banda iDto atranae water.

--· _..

~ L'

His fists ache from 1e1m~lDI Snails, limpets, barnacles slide across the silver moon, darkening and darkening. The last light of your fire has gone into the darkness .

•

I can speak only to absence. The Japanese lady turns her back to me and looks out across the sea's violence. High on a cliff above our heads, a young fisherman hesitates. He is uncertain whether to dive or to drop into the murderous sea the long line that loops from his fist. "Even on a calm day these rooks scare me ... " It is as if the sea. knows your name. Though I have made no gesture, the boy's eyes meet my eyes. Then in an apostrophe -to the sea, to the oncoming night'he flings outward a long uncoiling arc of light. It hesitates -a diagram on spaceas if earth's heartbeat were to hang suspended on the hungry air.

Mel Takahara RISING OUT OF WATER

not graciously but in a sudden gushing bleeder spraying the sky for miles steam clouds billowing fast as a locomotive's hot exhaust rising in the middle of an ocean foam-lace spreading on the growing surface black swells black swells lapping on infant stone now her worn summits are pale grace and blood-green rising from the sea a bird swoops into a succession of windy valleys down the green and fragil_e spine of land 0 Bird-Spirit! quivering. Whose blood screams from the gaping vent like a dragon's wound? they drive stakes into it muffling cries with cement green stuffing ears and bright red hands. invisible mountain shrimp weeping in lairs.

a green into a child's heart by the second day began to suspect se heart it really was

anxious meet the waiting who told me of

day tunnel no longer the children pull me laughing to an old room wrapped in pastures and the same dark row cows have been gazing at for hours before we dream of wild ducks and horses blood and water pebbles and five

days happen as if nothing suddenly real ends. Now gazing at the dark row i dream

how

of bursting through wrappings and pastures of unbroken grass frantic to find a child still there waiting

TIME FOR SOLILOQUY

needs no haste no forethought silent talking to the great darkness

" witness" "witness" new thread has entered the loom

- - - -- - - ---路--- - ----

April snow last year's grass wet and matted to the brown earth like sparse hair fiat on the head of a baby bom yet having given to us first cry

sun unfurls itself. thrill passes nat into daylight. turn to watch the sun motionless in a steady eye. day the light escapes me. disappears. become cold but in the dark nobody can see I am in need. am drawn to where a light shines when I step inside The dark embraces me again. They say my dreams are young But I can see about me others old enough to die.

There is laughter to acknowledge We are the stuff Dreams are made of heaped on stools slumped sullen in corners perpetually Waiting for motion.

iii

Late I come home and try to put the ignition key Into the front door. All day I have remembered her bare thighs ripe from sitting tight. She never looked at me but only cleaned her fingernails and recrossed her legs the other way but with the same effect. But the door. Open. Close. Home. The pale cast over my page allows scribbled reflections the light I need through the day. Time is the matter. Someday I will not have to repeat it, This rosary Again in my hand.

to catch the eyes and mouth wide to receive the first surprise. tis my need; to forget the seconds that follow that physical act; be there inside the cry of the first caring; to come into this world over and over in swirling shrieks and breathless ... in a body â&#x20AC;˘t;~ct::AJ.ll~ release in warmth that runs down forehead and chest into that first bed waiting For return.

Jane Anderson WAITING FOR A RIDE

Tonight in Manoa rain I am drenched in waiting. I wait for clouds to relax Oh! how wet the night is: in soggy soil roots are loosening. Thundering you arrive. I want to rejoice in your flesh but your wetness rages: bare roots are shining. Like a hero you pull me through chattering. Feeling the firm tangles inside your arms, I lift my feet. You pull me to deep water; the flow has become the flatness where water touches water. We are soaking in laughter.

have come out of the clouds tonight our shoulders are wet our feathers have become the moon's ring

we rub our damp bones together ana. ignite

Guy Davenport THE RICHARD NIXON FREISCHUTZ RAG

N THE Great Ten Thousand Li Wall, begun in the wars of the Spring and Autumn to keep the Mongols who had been camping nearer and nearer the Yan border from riding in hordes on their przhevalskis into the cobbled streets and ginger gardens of the Middle Flower Kingdom, Richard Nixon said: -I think you would have to conclude that this is a great wall. Invited by Marshal Yeh Chien-ying to inspect a guard tower on the ramparts, he said: -We will not climb to the top today. In the limousine returning to The Forbidden City, he said: -It is worth corning sixteen thousand miles to see the Wall. Of the tombs of the Ming emperors, he said: -It is worth coming to see these, too. -Chairman Mao says, Marshal Yeh ventured, that the past is past. The translator had trouble with the sentiment, which lost its pungency in English. -All over? Richard Nixon asked. -We have poem, Marshal Yeh said, which I recite.

West wind keen, Up steep sky Wild geese cry For dawn moon, For cold dawn White with frost, When horse neigh, Bugle call.

Boast not now This hard pass Was like iron Underfoot. At the top We see hills And beyond The red sun. Richard Nixon leaned with attention, grinning, to hear the sla.tion from the interpreter, Comrade Tang Wen-Sheng, English ha.d been learned in Brooklyn, where she spent childhood. -That's got to be a. good poem, Richard Nixon said. -Poem by Chairman Mao, Comrade Tang offered. -He wrote that? Richard Nixon asked. Made it up? -At hard pass over Mountai n Lu, Marshal Yeh s a id. Long February 1935. -My! but that's interesting, Richard Nixon said. Really, really The limousine slid past high slanting grey walls of The ForCity on which posters as large as tennis courts bore writRichard Nixon could not read. They proclaimed, poster after by which the long limousine moved, Make trouble, fail. make trouble, again fail. Imperialist reactionary make and fail until own destruction. Thought of C.bairman Mao. The limousine stopped a.t The Dragon Palace. Richard Nixon out. Guards of the Heroic People's Vglunteer Army stood at aeJntl,on. On a wall inside the courtyard four tall posters caught eye of Richard Nixon. -That's Marx, he said, pointing. -Marx, repeated Marshal Yeh. -And that's Engels. -Engels. -And that's Lenin and that's Stalin. -Precisely, Marshal Yeh replied. Richard Nixon went back to the second poster, pointing to it his gloved hand. -That's Engels? -Engels, Marshal Yeh said with a worried, excessively polite in his eyes.

-We don't see many pictures of Engels in America, Richard Nixon explained.

HAT MAN old Toscanelli put up to sailing to the Japans and Cathay westward out from Portugal, the Genovese Colombo, they have been saying around the Uffizi, has come back across the Atlantic. Una prova elegantissima! Benedetto Arithmetic would say. The Aristotelians will be scandalized, di quale se fanno beffa. The Platonists will fluff their skirts and freeze the air with their lifted noses. E una stella il mundo! But like the moon, forsooth, round as a melon, plump and green. 0 , he could see those caravelle butting salt and savage waves, the awful desert of water and desolation of the eye, until the unimaginable shorebirds of Cipongo wheeled around their sails and the red tiles bamboo pergole of Mongol cities came into focus on capes and promontories. Inland, there were roads out to Samarkand, Persia, Hungary, Helvetia, and thus back to Tuscany. He had completed the world journey of the Magi, it vvâ&#x20AC;˘v uJLJ. to Leonardo as he moved the bucket of grasses which Salai brought him from Fiesole. They had come from the East, gers, and Colombo's sails in these days of signs wherein moving thing must declare itself for God or Islam would worn the cross which the philosophers of the Medes did not to learn would be forever until the end of time the hieroglyph the baby before whom they laid their gifts in the dark stable. world was knit by prophecy, by light. Meadow grass from Fiesole, icosahedra, cogs, gears, .., ...,â&#x20AC;˘., ...&, maps, lutes, brushes, an adze, magic squares, pigments, a head Brunelleschi and Donatello brought him from their Bxâ&#x20AC;˘~a"'llj tions, the skeleton of a bird: how beautifully the Tuscan light him his things again every morning, even if the kite had been his sleep. Moments, hours, days. Had man done anything at all? The old woman had brought the wine and the bread, onions. He and Toscanelli, Pythagoreans, ate no meat. The machine stood against the worktable, the due rote, countably outrageous in design. Saccapane the smith was uuNuJ"'' the chain that would span the two rote dentate. You turned pedals with your feet, which turned the big cog wheel, pulled the chain forward, cog by cog, causing the smaller to turn the hind rota, thereby propelling the whole machine

As long as the machine was in motion, the rider would _ ............., beautifully. The forward motion stole away any tendency fall right or left, as the flow of a river discouraged a boat from If only he knew the languages! He could name his machines Archimedes would have named them, in the ancient words. He his flying machine the bird, l 'uccello. Benedetto said that Greeks would have called it an ornitottero, the wings of a bird. Light with extravagance and precision, mirror of itself atomo atomo from its dash against the abruptness of matter to the of the eye, swarmed from high windows onto the two. ,he1e1e'a balancing machine. The rider would grasp horns set on fork in which the front wheel was fixed and thus guide himself nervous and accurate meticulousness. Suddenly he saw the ..,n....... going into battle on it, a phala nx of these duo rote bearing . .nc1~rs at full tilt. A vanti 0 Coraggiosi, Of the trumpet called, bureggiandi le baccbette delli tamburi di battaglia. The scamp Salai was up and about. -Maestro/ he piped. You've made it! Leonardo picked up the brown boy Salai, shouldered him like a sack of flour, and danced the long gliding steps of a sarabande. -Sl, Cupidello mio, tutto senoncbe manca la catena. -And then I can make it go, ride it like a pony? -Like the wind, like Ezekiel's ~;Lngel, like the horses of Ancona. Salai squirmed free and knelt before the strange machine, touching the pedals, the wicker spokes, the saddle, the toothed wheels around which the chain would fit, i vinci. -Como leone/ He turned to the basket of flowering grasses, reaching for his silver pencil. Bracts and umbrels fine as a spider's legs! And in the thin green veins ran hairs of water, and down the hairs of water ran light, down into the dark, into the root. Light from the farthest stars flowed through these long leaves. He had seen the prints of leaves from the time of the flood in mountain rocks, and had seen there shells from the sea. -Maestro. Salai said, when will the chain be ready? -Chain? Leonardo asked. What chain? He drew with h is left hand a silver eddy of grass. It was grace that he drew, perfection, frail leaves through which moved the whole power of God, and when a May fly lights on a green arc of grass the splendor of that conjunction is no less than San Gabriele

touching down upon the great Dome at Byzantium, closing the crushed silver and spun glass of his four wings around the golden shaft of his height. -The chain, Salai said, the chain! Did the man know anything at all?

EFORE flying to China Richard Nixon ordered a thousand targets in Laos and Cambodia bombed by squadrons of B52s. He sent one thousand, one hundred and twenty-five squadrons of bombers to silence the long-range field guns of North V Nam along the border of the DMZ. Richard Nixon was .........,..... with the bombing, knowing that Chairman Mao would be pressed by such power. Dr. Kissinger had recommended the thousand, one hundred. and twenty-five squadrons of uvuu.,ta to Richard Nixon as something that would impress C Mao. The bombs were falling thick as hail in a summer when Richard Nixon set foot on China, grinning. A band The March of the Volunteers. Premier Chou En-lai did not forward. Richard Nixon had to walk to where Premier Chou grinning. They ~hook hands. -We came by way of Guam, Richard Nixon said. It is that way. -You have good trip? Premier Chou asked. -You should know, Richard Nixon said. You traveller. Richard Nixon rode in a limousine to Taio Yu Tai, outside Forbidden City. As soon as he got to his room, the telephone -Who would be calling me in China? he asked. Dr. Kissinger answered the telephone. -Yes? he said. -Excellency Kissinger? a voice asked. You are there? -We are here, Dr. Kissinger said. -His Excellency the President Nixon is there? -Right here, said Dr. Kissinger, taking off his shoes. -Would His Excellency Nixon come to telephone? -Sure, said Dr. Kissinger. For you, Dick. Richard Nixon took the telephone, put it to his ear, and 1 at the ceiling, where scarlet dragons swam through clouds pearl. -Nixon here, he said. -Excellency President Nixon there?

. . . .J. . . .a

here, Richard Nixon said. To who have I the honor of

an Mao invite you, now, come to visit him. now? Richard Nixon asked. We've just got off the We came by way of Guam. , said the telephone. You come visit. Yes? Richard Nixon said. Will do. You coming to pick us up? line had gone dead. of a bitch, Richard Nixon said. Kissinger rocked on his heels and grinned from ear to ear.

OSES, buttons, thimbles, lace. The grass grows up to the stones, the road. There are flowers in the grass and flowers dress. And buttons down her dress, and lace on the collar cuffs and hem. And buttons on her shoes. In the Luxembourg wears a shawl from Segovia and Pablo says she looks like a woman of the old school, when women were severe and and kind, and I say that she looks like an officer in the Army. We sing The Trail of the Lonesome Pine which she on the piano, throwing in snatches of Marching through and Alexander's Ragtime Band. She has Pumpelly's the hands of a Spanish saint. In France she wears a yellow hat, in Italy a Panama. Alice, I Assisi, the grass of Assisi, and the leaves Sassetta. We walk over the stones, hearing the bells ring for the nuns and girls in their school. It is s o quiet, she says, being herself quiet that it is quiet. Spain is a still-life, I -Say, only Italy is landThe birds therE!, she says. St. Francis, I s ay . The birds suffer suffering each in a lifetime, fo rgetting it as they endure. We ..,..,,.1.ll,..,.,.. . suffering from years a nd years ago. Do not talk of old she says. There is n o time anymor e, only now. Not, s ay I, can hear as I can the bugles a nd see the sca rlet flags. And I could, I can, I a lways can. The officers sit in thei r saddles the guidons with their Victorian numbers and faded reds to the head of the column. It is an old way with men, it hapat Austerlitz and Sevastopol. The generals are high on their listening to the band, to the shouts of the sergeants. It is When Leo moved out, we trotted around the room like and Basket went around w ith us. I was the genera l and

Alice was the officer and Basket was the horse, and altogether were Napoleon. We were pickaninnies cakewalking before elders on a Saturday in Alaba ma, we w e re Barnum and Bailey the Great Rat of Sumatra going a progress to Chantilly to see lace and the cream. It is quiet, she says, and I say Alice, look at the flowers. she says. Yes, I say. Is it not grand to say yes back and forth we mean something else and she went behind a bush and ened her stays and camisole and shamelessly stepped out of frilly heap they made around her buttoned shoes and I said here where St. Francis walked, Alice, you do realize, don't that the reason we came to Assisi is that you are from San cisco and this is the hometown of St. Francis and she says I wrapping my underthings in m y shawl, do you think anyone notice? Red tile, moss, pigeons. We drink wine under the trees, it is too hot to drink wine. Well, I say, we are here. Yes, she we are here, and her eyes jiggle and her smile is that of a some officer who has been called to headquarters and seen eral Grant and is pleased to please, well-bred that he is. This is not Fouquet's, I say. Certainly not Fouquet's, she I touch her foot with my foot, she touches my foot with her The crickets sing around us, fine as Strawinsky. If Spain is a life, what is Italy? They came here, I said, the grand old because the women have such eyes. Surely not to see the Alice says. No, I say, not for the cats. Henry James came here the tone. William might come here and never see the tone. W if he came would take in the proportions, and would not look the cats. A princess and a cart go by, Henry sees the princess William sees the wheel of the cart how it is in such fine orooOl'lgj to the tongue and the body. When you talk, she says, I shiver all over, things flutter inside. When you smile, I say, I bite into peaches and Casals Corelli and my soul is a finch in cherries. Let us talk and forever. This is forever, Alice says. It is so quiet. Look at the I say. Would you walk in it barefoot? Another glass of wine, says, and I will fly over the bell tower. Did you have a .-n~:Aurftl pia no in San Francisco? I ask. With a bust of Liszt on it, she a nd a vase of marigolds. Look at these colors and you can see why Sassetta was setta. Will we go to England again, she says, to sit in the

Look at these hills and you will know why St. Francis was s. roses, she says, are very old. They are the roses of Ovid, They are the only roses that are red. If I knew the Latin for I would say it, if the Latin for rose, I would say it, the Latin for red in the oldest rose, I would say it. Were I Ovid, I would you a rose and say that it is given for your eyes. I would take says. I am glad you would, I say, touching her foot with my Sassetta's rose, Pablo's rose. Madame Matisse is a gentian, she says, touching my foot with foot. Are all women flowers, all girls? Henri Rousseau was to a sunflower, Cezanne to a peartree. Alice, I say. Yes, General Grant, she says. Pickaninny, I say. Caesar, she says. Do you see those pines over there, the that look like William McKinley addressing the Republican You mustn't mention McKinley to Pablo, she says, he he has trod on the honor of Spain. He has, I say, that is the way. But the pines, Alice, the pines. I see them, she they have had a hard life. Do you, I say, see the bronze fall .. ..,.,......,""" beneath them, and know the perfume of rosin and dust old earth we would smell if we climbed there? The flutter has she says. And now look at the rocks, the cubist rocks, down hills from the pines, and the red tile of the roofs, and the chickin the yard there, the baskets. I see all that, she says. And seen it, Alice? I ask. It is there to see, she says. That is the , I say. It is also the question.

AO SAT in his red armchair looking benign and amused. Richard Nixon sank too far into his chair, his elbows as as his ears. He beamed. He did not see the stacks of journals, shelves packed with books, the bundles of folders, the writing .....u ..., ,.,. in jars. He beamed at Mao and at Dr. Kissinger, whom had called a modern Metternich. The reporters had written down. The cluttered room was dark. What light there was came from windows which gave onto a courtyard as bleak as the playof a grammar school. The translator said that Chairman had asked about hegemony. -We're for it, Richard Nixon said. -Your aides are very young, Chairman Mao said. -Are they? Richard Nixon asked.

-We must learn from you on that point, Chairman Mao Our government is all of old men. Richard Nixon did not know what to say. -Old, Chairman Mao said, but here, still here. -The world is watching us, Richard Nixon said. -You mean Taiwan, Chairman Mao said. -No, Richard Nixon said, beaming, the world out there, whole world. They are watching their TV sets. Chairman Mao grinned and leaned back in his comfo armchair. -Ah so, he said, the world.

Watch lay in the cold, gravelly muck of the alley, his cheek like bread dough against the ground. His left arm was uetted beneath the weight of his body. Rasping sounds between his teeth. He rolled slowly onto his back, hissing as a jagged chunk of rock gouged his pelvis. Silken filaof memory and nightmare intertwined in a swirling gray of semi-consciousness. He was covered with a layer of chalky mud and his eyes with the filth of the street. He slid a roughened tongue his teeth. None were broken. His left arm came to life in hot, spurts as he massaged it and flexed his hand. Tenderly brushed away crumbs of rock and dirt imbedded in his face. bridge of his nose caught fire at his touch. He drew a surbreath and his chest felt as though it would tear apart. His groin thumped dully, nauseatingly. He unfastened his and pushed his hands deep into his pants. Cautiously, he exhimself. The sticky wetness he found there terrified him he began to scream in his helplessness and pain. "Oh, Christ! Somebody help me! Ramon, you slimy shit! You ~~"~'~c:w.u.u faggot! I'll kill you!" His voice sounded distant and Blood and mucus flowed into the back of his throa t , gaggi ng His stomach began to heave. He leaned to the side and vominto a drainage gutter. When he was empty he spat the last bitterness of sour beer from his mouth and fell back, gaspHe wept, exhausted by his retching. When he opened his eyes, a rounded, black velvet image of of someone, was silhouetted against the luminous, IV. .I'"I!i<.,.. L night sky. ''Joe? Joe? You okay, Joe?" Thank God! It was a woman's voice. It wasn't Ramon.

"Lady, please help me. I'm burt real bad, lady." "Okay, Joe, okay. No cry, Joe. No cry. You be okay. " The woman tugged nervously at his bands, encouraging to his feet. He sagged part of his weight across her thin sbo and they trudged slowly up the alley toward a dim yellow shining in the distance. A dingy jeepney was parked there. As pair bobbled into the circle of light, Watch could see the asleep in the front seat, a ragged newspaper across his chest. " Joe, " she whispered, "you got two peso? Special two peso." Watch saw that she was wrinkled and frail. "It's all right," he assured her, reaching into his shirt He kept a ten peso note there for emergencies. The pocket torn half off, but the ten was still there. "You know where the USO is?" be asked. A dumb stare. ' USO?" She didn 't know. " The Manila Hotel?" She nodded. handed her the ten pesos. " Keep it, " be said. She nodded and flashed a toothless smile. She walked to the front of the jeepney and awakened driver with a flurry of scolding. Watch leaned forward into open back of the jeepney and placed his palms on the He crawled stiffly into the right hand bench seat. The turned to him and waited quietly, as though he expected sort of explanation. The old Filipina spat a string of abusive alog at him and clambered into the rear of the jeepney. The driver shook his head and started the engine. As the cient vehicle chugged and lurched over the back streets, was jolted in painful degrees to the threshold of uncon::ic,ruLr::illla He felt the jeepney bounce once more, and then they were MacArthur highway. Streetlights curved by and the soft, breeze of the night fanned his face. He was soothed by the rocking of the jeepney and the rhythmic pulse of the engine. he slipped quietly into the blackness of his mind. Watch stood at the foot of the marble staircase in front of Manila Hotel, his fists pressed against his temples as tbougb was trying to recall something terribly important. He stood weaving back and forth, muttering, "USO. Go to the USO." began to shuffle stiffly up the steps to the lobby of the hotel. footfalls seemed to ring and echo with metallic hollowness. stood before enormous wooden doors. They swung opeD. Filipino constabulary guard emerged from the cobwebbed As his face came closer, Watch could see that it was the face

shiny with brown, flaky slime. The eyes wete dull, black shuddered and walked past the dead guard to a red sofa and sat down. He looked about the room. Tall mirrors the black crimson stifle of the lobby. He gazed at his own IUI.II~a"':c- in one of the mirrors. He was covered with dried mud his shirt hung in paisley ruins from his shoulders. His own were blackened, like the guard's, his face puffy and white. " be whispered hoarsely, "gotta get out of here." voice died as the tall mirrors parted in the center and a column of golden light devoured his image. A cascade .u.u........, iridescent forms poured into the lobby and swept Ule extended arms of the constabulary guard. Shining gods around him, chirping and gleaming and singing. One over him and probed his body with its soft hands, wbispermcomprehensible things. He was lifted up and carried away. When he opened his eyes the angelic forms had fled, leaving their brilliance behind. Light slammed about the room, ri. . , .....Litl( from white tile and glass encasements. A shape sapfrom the wall and hovered above his prostrate body. It Napolean, the mortician's assistant. Napolean sliced deeply into Watch's crotch with a scalpel, inserted tubes into his arteries and began to pump formalinto him. The boy screamed in terror, "Jesus Christ! Don't you know Napolean? What are you doing to me? For Christ's sake,

Napolean placed the sharp, hollow tip of the aspirating spear Watch's belly button, then thrust it upward with brutal until it smashed through the bridge of his nose. Watch felt 路aspirator rammed through his chest again and again, felt vitals ripped into dark chunks of liver and lung, felt blood Ussue sucked down the aspirator tube and flushed down the to the sea. Two men slipped long wooden poles under Watch's shoulders carried him to a prepared bed of embalming powder and cotThey tied his stiffened arms and legs together with white and bound a sheet tightly around him. Napolean peeled off his rubber death mask. It was Ramon! ~-c~n could not resist this time when Ramon leaned over the ~111J1plng table and kissed him. Watch was lifted from the table

into an aluminum coffin. The lid floated slowly down from ceiling, blotting out the last opaque glimmer of light.

Airman first class Jody "The Watch" Inman sat at his fidgeting, trying to ignore his glowering section chief, one geant Jake Black. "Uh, hello, Kadena? Hello!" shouted Watch into the phone receiver. "Kadena.. this is Clark Air Base in the Philippines, do you copy?" He could barely hear through static buzz. "Kadena, this is Clark Stock Control. Uh, we have a little problem here, thought maybe you could help us We'd like to cancel a requisition we made last week. No, no, mistake. Requisition number? Right. Hang on one, Kadena." Watch shuffled nervously through the confused jumble paper on his desk. Jake held out the requisition form that was looking for. He took it, avoiding Jake's eyes. Watch's form clung to his back in icy folds. "Here you go, Kadena." He read off the number and There was a long silence. A fly buzzed arrogantly around the of his coffee cup. Then it hovered in front of his face before ing on his lower lip. He slapped it away angrily. God, it was He felt so damned sweaty and miserable and unclean. The ing feeling of the fly on his lip made him shudder. He wiped mouth compulsively with the back of his hand. Kadena Stock Control came back on the line. "Yeah, still here," said Watch. "Oh, you did? Okay, well, thanks way Kadena." He dropped the receiver back in its cradle. said the shipment is already on the way, Jake. We'll have to it back to them. I guess." He didn't dare look at the sergeant. whir of typewriters and computer consoles grew louder louder, the sound bearing down like the heat and Jake's eyed stare. Watch's stomach cringed into a tight little wad. Jake sat on the edge of Watch's desk for a moment staring and chewing his cigar, then got up and strode toward door, shaking his head in disgust. Watch saw the top of Sam Bray's head bobbing along upper edge of the grey plastic partition that divided Stock trol from other sections in base supply. As Jake walked out the section he bumped into Sam Bray. "Excuse me, there, Sarge," said Bray, looking back over shoulder. Jake turned away trailing smoke.

, Watch, what's the matter with super-sarge today?" it, okay Sam?" Watch said. "What are you doing here It isn't near time to go to chow yet."

..Yeah, I know." Bray plopped down on the corner of Watch's that Jake had just vacated. "I don't guess I'll be eating with you today. I volunteered for a special detail again. " ,.&,.....LI,., ..... broadly. "You want to go along this time?" Bam had a habit of volunteering for special details, to the tion of his section chief. It was a good way of getting of base supply for a day. The details were usually over with time and volunteers got the rest of the afternoon off. "I don't know, Sam," he said. "I'd rather do almost anything than spend the afternoon here with Jake in the mood in, but if I ask him and he says no I'll be stuck here and he'll as riled as he was before." "Hell, you don't even have to ask Jake. Ask Chief Pinkerton. a pretty unusual detail. I don't know exactly what it involves, you can ask Pinkerton. I'm going in to see him now." "I can't, Sam. Just forget it, all right?" Jake's footfalls in the corridor. "I mean it! Just forget the whole idea," whispered as Jake entered the section. Bray swung around casually and said, "Good mornin', Sarge." did not answer. He walked to his desk and sat with his chin on his fists. He stared at Watch for a long time. "Uh, look, Watch, I better be going," said Bray. "I'll see you "Watch nodded as his friend started to leave. "Bray," said Jake, his voice low and ominous. "You going volunteer for that detail?" Bray nodded. " Then take this damn with you." He looked straight at Watch. "Boy, don't you back to my section before you can keep from turning you touch to shit. Understand?" Watch licked his dry before he remembered about the fly. He was blushing. He 't stand being chewed out. He always felt like he might cry something. He swept the pile of papers on his desk into the drawer and strode past Bray into the corridor. As Watch and Bray walked across the parade ground their shoes were lacerated by the stubbly grass and coated with red dust. Neither had spoken a word since they had found that the detail they volunteered for was the "processing路 of Nam casualties of the Tet offensive." The Tet offensive had weeks ago. The word "processing" stuck in Watch's mind.

What in hell did Chief Pinkerton mean by that? he wondered. It could not be good. The detail volunteers were to report to the mortuary. As Watch and Bray approached the white building, they could see long lines of people standing along curb of the street in the hot morning sun, staring at a prOl.:~::s::u:ua:r of diesel-drawn flatbeds and air police pick-up trucks. Watch awestruck by the cargo lashed to the flatbeds. Stacks and of aluminum caskets. Four deep, sixteen to the wooden Four pallets to the flatbed. Four flatbeds in the parade. W lower lip sagged. Two hundred and fifty-six coffins. Ten tons dead people. He could not comprehend such prodigious The flatbed trucks pulled around to the rear of the mortuary halted, their brakes groaning, in front of an open warehouse A group of men, thirty or so, milled about the vehic shuffling their feet, some with their hands thrust in their As Watch and Bray joined the group a little gray man in a coat emerged from the mortuary office and began to issue mands. The men formed ranks. Watch and Bray fell in line at rear of the formation. Except for the flapping of the little white coattails against his shins, and the gentle swishing of branches, it was silent. Watch noticed that the man wore a gray mustache. It twitched when he spoke. "My name is Peabody. Mister Peabody. While you are you will follow the instructions give you by both Napolean, my sistant, whom you will meet shortly, and myself. Right would you please move these caskets into the warehouse and them on the floor inside the areas that Napolean designates. there any questions?" There were no questions. Peabody back inside his office. As the office door clicked shut the formation broke into rising murmur of conversation. The truck drivers had been inside their cabs; now they walked around the trucks uu~~~;~t:jJWII the pallet binders. Two forklifts roared up and lowered the carefully to the ground. The truck drivers pulled away the that bound the coffins to the pallets. Bray said, " Let's go, Watch." " Yeah," he answered. "All right." His mouth felt fuzzy dry again. The volunteers reassembled into groups of six. Watch Bray manned the handles at the head of one of the coffins. aluminum was already hot. The handle bit into his hand as lifted. The six men moved the box into the warehouse. A

man motioned for them to set the casket on the floor ina large square marked off with red plastic tape. Watch asthat he must be Napolean. The airmen set the casket down started for the door to get another box. Napolean's voice rang sharply behind them. Watch turned to see him gesturing wildthe group to return. "Open the box," he said, his brown hands fluttering. "Take the body bag and put it in the reefer." Watch called out to the others. "Hey, wait, you guys! He says have to open it up ." The airmen stopped and exchanged Napolean ran around the rectangular box undoing the latches sealed its two halves together. Then he stood back,路waiting. walked over and grabbed the handles on one side of the lid. "Well?" he demanded. Watch took the other side and they the lid off and banged it down on the floor. The sound around the warehouse. Bray turned to the other airmen. guys going to help or just stand there all day?" They quickly u~uu.cu the casket. Watch wiped his hands on his trouser several times, then reached in and grabbed one of the canvas bag handles. Watch held his breath against the clammy dead-cat stink that to the bag like dried blood. The canvas bulged here and Jesus Christ, he thought. These things really do have dead le in them. The men lifted in unison , and Watch looked ahead as they trundled awkwardly across the concrete to the reefer. Watch tried to keep the bag from touching his legs. He tried not to hear the sloshing within the sack. He his breath again when they entered the cold, damp, reefer. The pallbearers set their cargo on the wooden rail flooring. and Bray dragged it to a space at the edge of the vault. stepped carefully over the corpses already deposited in the , made a wide circle around a dark stain on the flooring, and hastened into the light and warmth of the warehouse. The airmen were perspiring heavily in the intense noonday by the time they placed the last canvas bags in the reefers and the doors shut. Two hundred fifty-six coffins were scatin halves, like discarded eggshells, on the floor. Several sat on coffin lids, smoking and talking quietly. Watch felt a faint puff of air-conditioned breeze on his cheeks. smelled of formaldehyde. The office door closed and Mr. Pea-

body stood before them once again. The men shuffled to their feet. " You people have done well. You are dismissed for the day after you leave here. " He smoothed the papers on his " If some of you are not needed in your duty sections i we would appreciate it if you would report back here after you lunch. You can be of service to us. And," he looked at the rAF!fA1''1Ll " to them." He waited. No one responded. "Thank you, men," he said, and walked back to his office. There was a movement toward the warehouse door. Bray fished a crumpled package of Kools from his shirt et. As always, he offered one to Watch . Watch did not smoke. shrugged his shoulders and replaced the pack in his pocket. " Well, old buddy," said Bray, " I'm gonna volunteer again." "Wait a minute!'' Watch said. " Didn' t he say we were off rest of the afternoon? Why on earth do you want to come after lunch?" " Do you have any idea what that old boy has in mind to do afternoon for the people that volunteer? He wants them to out in the morgue. Now for one thing, I've never seen a corpse and I'm curious about what they do here. For another, figure there's at least two-hundred fifty stiffs in those meat ers. It's gonna take those two little pissants one hell of a long to 'process' that many stiffs. If we work it right we can get every afternoon this week. Maybe next week too. Who He grinned. "Anyway, it'll be more than one crummy Watch sighed. "Sam, I think we better find out what in they are going to expect us to do first. " "Come on," Bray said. He stubbed the cigarette out and ed for the office door. Watch followed him. Peabody was behind his desk when they entered. He smiled. "I take it you two are volunteering to work this Watch shifted uneasily. " Uh, Mr. Peabody, we'd like to stay here for as long as need help," Watch said. "But first, we'd like to see what help you had in mind." "Of course," said Peabody. " If you will follow me, He took the two airmen to the embalming room and began lining the work to be done. They were to carry the bodies into the embalming room to pull off the bags. Each of the three tables in the room have a corpse on it at all times. The bags were to be hosed

Peabody and Napolean embalmed the corpses they were carried on thick wooden poles into the wrapping room and on prepared beds of linen and cotton and embalming . Watch and Bray were to wrap the bodies, seal them in envelopes, and place them back in the caskets. ou boys will see things today, and for the next two weeks, will be hideous," said Peabody. " I mean that. If you wish w your offer, please tell me now." Watch looked at Bray. His eyes were hard and glossy like new bearings. Mr. Peabody waited for a long moment, then "See you after lunch," he said, and went back to his ofThe two airmen walked past the waiting stacks of coffins. footsteps echoed hollowly in the huge room. Watch and Bray changed into pale green hospital uniforms, followed Napolean into the mortuary office where Mr. Peawaited. He was smoking a long brown cigar. A stack of rnafolders lay on the corner of his desk, and one was open in of him. He motioned for the two airmen to come closer. They looking over his shoulder at a d iagram of a human body. It covered with blue marking s. "Boys, these are the records of the corpses out there in the They tell how the men were killed. When you open the bags, especially in the beginning, you want to know what to No surprises. Take the name tags off the bag handles you put them on the tables and come in here and pull these Check the charts to see how long the bodies have been around, if any parts are missing, and so on." He looked up them. Smoke from his cigar drifted into Watch' s face and he and coughed. Bray continued to stare at the diagram. It peppered with blue dots and one of the legs was inked out bethe knee. "All right," said Peabody, " go get three bodies and them on the tables." Watch drifted toward the reefer, a step behind Bray. When unlatched the door Watch smelled again that stale, offensive "Just wait," said Bray, " until we unzip the bag. Now that is to be a smell." It was a funny comment, somehow. Watch laughed and his soun ded strange in the reefer. The first body was very Napolean came in and helped them carry it into the em.,..,~.....~ room and hoist it onto the table. The second bag was lig hter. The third weighed no more than sixty pounds.

Bray swallowed hard. "Let's do him last, Watch," he pered. Watch nodded. Bray closed the reefer door, and they ried the last small bundle to the third table. They pulled the tags from the body bags as Mr. Peabody instructed them to then returned to the office. Peabody and Napolean were hanging up their white getting ready to leave. "Uh, Airman Bray, Airman Inman, we going to lunch now," said Peabody. "You just get the bags off take them outside and hose them down, and lay out the.,...,...,..,....,. tables like we showed you. We'll be back by then, I'm sure." When the morticians had gone Bray found the records of three corpses. One soldier's name was Burns. He was oc.l.,~.luâ&#x20AC;˘~ years old. Same age as me, Watch thought. Burns had fallen front of a tank. The top of the diagram head was inked out were the right shoulder and the legs. All except for the left and ankle. It was the light corpse. The sixty pound one. The second man had stepped on a land mine. His record the one which Peabody had been poring over when they The heaviest corpse had once been a marine gunnery AA1~D'AIAI His record showed only one tiny blue dot in the vicinity of his eye. Under a heading which said OTHER IDENTIFYING ...........,u...., someone had typed in the words "bulldog tattoo, 'hell-bound'." His body had not been recovered for several Watch laid the manila folder aside and followed Bray into wrapping room. Bray looked a little green. " Let's lay out the tables first, okay?" he asked in a h voice. They prepared the tables with excessive neatness. They a double layer of thick plastic on the table, and covered it brown woolen blanket, a sheet, a six-foot-long roll of cotton, finally, two pails of dry preservative powder. They dawdled the third table. When there was nothing else for them to do, walked slowly into the embalming room where the three canvas and plastic bags awaited them. Watch noticed that three stainless steel tables had channels that ran along the to a drainage funnel and emptied into white porcelain sinks. They stood on opposite sides of the table bearing the of the gunnery sergeant. Bray reached hesitantly for the zipper and pulled it down the length of the bag, revealing a strip of the corpse. A nauseating odor escaped. Watch could look down. He studied the top of Bray's head. "Hey Watch," Bray said, his voice barely audible, "he's

Help me get him out of the bag, would you?" Wa tch caupulled back the edge of the zippered slit. The corpse was The face was swollen into an indistinguishable mass. The was open, staring from its puffy socket at the bruised the left had once been. As Watch pushed his gloved beneath the corpse he shuddered. The back was soft and as if all the bodily fluids had drained路 into the skin. The ami belly were enormously distended. He's decomposing," groaned Bray. Watch began to fast and hard and his knees started to quiver. He knew a few minutes he would probably be sick. Bray tossed the bag into the sink at the foot of the table. first corpse smelled, but when Watch unzipped the secbag, a hideous stench pervaded the room. " Oh, Jesus Christ! " " I can take anything else, but not this smell!" But Bray already tugging the bag from beneath the corpse. He had the bag into the sink almost before the horror of what lay table registered in Watch's mind. The man's leg was gone the knee and what was left of the shredded, brownish was rotten, infested with white squirming maggots. Watch's stomach began to jerk spasmodically. He walked from the room into the warm, clean air of the warehouse. swallowed and paced the floor nervously. Bray came out and h could see that he, too, was sick. His face was pale and Bray lit a cigarette, and Watch saw that his hands were when he held the match. Watch shook his head when offered him one. "Come on, Watch," said Bray after a few minutes had passed. s get the last one over with." Watch said nothing. They reto the embalming room. Before they entered Watch gulped last breath of fresh air and held his breath against the foulness. The third bag, the light one that they had elected to save for lay on the table nearest the door. Watch avoided looking at second body. He walked around the table so that his back be toward it. Neither one reached for the zipper for a long moment. Bray gritted his teeth. "Well, here goes," he said, and pulled the tab quickly down the length of the bag. Watch knew from the chart what to expect, but knowing didn't help. The head of the corpse was gone except for the crushed lower jaw. The severed foot lay in the bottom of the sack. The right arm and the legs, too, were gone. The stomach bulged through a gaping hole in the abdominal wall. Watch pulled the

corpse onto its side by the buttocks as Bray pulled the bag and tossed it in the sink. " Oops," said Bray. He reached into the sink and retrieved foot, laying it at the end of the table where it would go if the had been whole. A slight movement caught Watch's eye. corpse was moving. He released the body as though it had him and it flopped wetly down onto its back. The stomach through the abdomen, and it burst open on the table. Undi vegetables poured out. "That's all man! " shouted Watch. " That's the limit!" He to the latrine, gagging violently. He stayed there for a very time. Watch walked out the front door of the mortuary and sat the sunny front steps. Bray was not around. Watch gazed at base supply building across the parade ground, shimmering and inviting between the palm trees. Someone was w across the field. It was Peabody, returning from the chow Dust trailed behind him, rising in a reddish cloud. He stopped front of Watch, and his shadow rose in jagged waves on the " You smoke?" he asked, holding a packet of cigars out Watch. When the airman did not respond Peabody said, " okay. Neither did I when I started working here. Napolean smoke cigars." Watch looked up at him. "Sometimes it's the way you can stand the smell," said Peabody. "The smoke or dulls your senses, I guess." He shook the packet with a his wrist and two cigars popped up. Watch took one and off the cellophane with shaking fingers. He held it still in his while Peabody lit a match. Watch puffed and sucked at the of the cigar vigorously. "Take it easy, son. Take it slow and said Peabody. Watch choked on the smoke, but the taste was thick and and it coated the lingering scratchy taste of vomit. "Look, Mr. Peabody," said Watch, "I don't know if I'm to be able to take this. Those guys in there ... " "You'll get used to it. You've already seen the worst. Y see worse bodies, but this is the day you will remember." "Mr. Peabody, it's not just the bodies or anything like It's just that-hell, I don't know even what I'm trying to say, ly." He paused for a moment and puffed the cigar. "You see, my uncle was stationed here during the World War. He was killed at Bataan a few weeks after Pearl bor. I never knew much about him except what I read in

's scrapbook. He was going to be a priest. Can you imagA priest!" Peabody turned and looked toward the pa'"'"-''unu_ "Then he got in a fight with my grandpa and ran off the army. They issued him one of those old Smokey hats. Grandma has a picture of him hanging in her living

,.,.,uv\.ay 's gray hair blew across his forehead and he brushed with his hand. was the same age as I am now when he died. The Japaahot him somewhere out in the jungle. His body was never It just lay out there in the jungle until it rotted. I never even about it until now." Watch puffed on the cigar again. He .....1".~..~..~..... 5 to enjoy it. think I see what you are trying to say, Inman," Peabody "But we have one hell of a lot of work to do. We need He walked up the stairs and opened the mortuary office "Come inside when you feel better. But don't be too long it." He closed the door behind him. Watch finished the , then walked slowly up the steps into the mortuary. L ....

Watch pushed through layers of pain, resting and sleeping in soft bubble. Each time he moved bands of steel tightened his head. He waited until the squeezing subsided, then forward again. It was terribly close and hot and the bubble a clinging wet, binding mass. He opened his eyes a crack cried out in pain as light burst through and shattered his Everything was white. Blinding white. A voice floated out whiteness. He blinked and listened intently. It was Bray's

"Watch? Hey, Watch? You awake? Hey, boy, how you feelhe laughed softly. "How's your head?" "Sam? Where am I? " His own voice sounded distant and to him. Watch felt some sort of packing on his face. He tried touch his nose, but a hand caught his wrist and returned it to side. "Friend, you just lay back and take it easy, now," said Bray. "How bad am I hurt, Sam?" he asked. "According to the doctor you have multiple contusions, uh, of bruises, on your back, stomach and balls." Watch tilted his h ead up, straining against the tape a nd and put his hand against his crotc h. Br ay laughed. ou also have two c racked ribs a nd a c ut on your h ead. But you'll

be all right. You just got the shit beat out of you." He held Watch's right hand in front of his face so he could see the ski knuckles. "And it looks like you're not the only one that's h He grinned. "You nail that son of a bitch, Ramon, boy? He one that buggered you up?" "Yeah, I think so. He took my watch and I hit him." Bray walked over to a dresser and picked up a broken urotuol"• band. "Yeah, I figured something like that happened. I this in your pocket. The watch was missing." Watch felt tears forming and he closed his eyes. His had given him the wafer-thin Waltham for his graduation summer before, and it had become his namesake during training. He remembered the pride on his father's face. Now watch was gone. Stolen by a goddamned fag. Bray's voice droned on in the background. "Watch tried concentrate on the sound. "Anyway, there was some sort of cast party in the ballroom downstairs. Some director just ".u.o"'"""•• shooting a war flick about the invasion of the Philippines something. The USO was all locked, so I came to the hotel and sure enough, there you were, stretched out on a couch ing all over the place and people standing all around. There a doctor with the cast, I guess. He bandaged you up." Bray straddled a chair and tapped out an aimless rhythm its back with his fingertips. " Well?" he said. " Well what?" This conversation was getting confu Watch wanted to go back to sleep. He wished Bray would go a and let him sleep some more. " What happened last night? How did we get Bray was nervous. He always played with his fingers when he nervous. Watch's head was spinning. He put his hands on his and rubbed them gently. The tugging of the skin at the outer ners of his eyes felt good. "I don't know what happened, exactly, Sam. I know I drunk. I remember Ramon and what's his name, uh, Ricardo ting at our table and buying us a drink. Someone said we go get some girls. Then I was standing on the street outside bar. I climbed into a jeepney. I thought you were in it too. I you weren't." He paused. " Go on, man, go on," urged Bray. Something in the of his curiosity made Watch hesitate. "Nothing much to tell, Sam. The two of them, Ramon and

clerk, beat me up. I hit Ramon when he took my watch. A old lady found me in the street and brought me here. That's is to tell." "That's all?" said Bray, dully. "That's all," Watch grinned. "Some three-day vacation to , fun-filled Manila, huh?" Watch weaves and sways back and forth, alone in the darkof the hotel room. Something forgotten and wrong nags at memozy. He wants to lay down on the bed and succumb to the 1'&1Jess, the drowsiness that crowds in on him from all sides. A closes behind him and someone fumbles with the buttons of paisley shirt. It's Ramon. "Let me help you undress. The girls will be here soon, and you no longer be a cberzy boy, my friend." He is in bed now, still dressed. He could undress himself. sags the mattress behind him. The girl must be here. what she looks like. What she will look like. Feel like. bands playing with him. He is aroused. Soft, perfumed hair across his face and lips are on his own. He strains to focus eyes. What does she look like? It is Ramon 's face. The nagging Mnâ&#x20AC;˘nru crashes like a czystal chandelier to the floor. He leaps to feet, scrambling free of the clinging sheets, his mind racing, midnight alarms. "What the luck is this, man?" be screams. "What in bell do think you're doing? I'm a man, goddamn it!" Two slits of light stare at him from the darkness and he he~rs penetrating, falsetto laugh. "Where's Bray?" Watch shouts. is be?" Silence. He runs to the door and lurches down the hallway. The walls out at him, buckling and jumping. Arms pinion his own from -w nn1a. He stamps backward and slashes with his elbows. Dizl â&#x20AC;˘inEiss swirls about him. He gropes his way in the dark hallway. Thoughts careening wildly. Impossible to focus his eyes. Find Bray. Find Bray. Find Bray. His arms slam down across the desk counter. A small, bald Filipino stares up at him. "Where is he? Where is Bray? " he screams. "You have to help me find him. You know that guy that brought me here? He's a goddamn faggot! You know that? I'll .bave your ass!" The clerk gawks at him. He stumbles toward a dark stairwell that seems to lead down to the street. His back slams against the wall when he is halfway down the stairs. Ramon's face is snarling, inches from his own. He wants money or something. IIIU;~UJ~~

" Don't have any. Gave my wallet to Bray. Find Bray and pay you." Goddamn queer ":'ants money for the hotel bill. is clearing a bit. Hands grabbing the front of his shirt slam against the wall. Cloth rips. He pushes back weakly. He feels his watch torn from his arm. The band snaps off it is gone. Hi.<Âť hand floats out and clutches the watchband. other hand compacts itself into a fist . It slams into Ramon 's with a pleasant, comfortable splat. Ramon 's face spouts red. mon screams like a woman and begins to cry. Goddamn faggot Watch's collar bites into his Adam's apple. He is thrown ward off his feet. Flies backward and down. Head, neck, hips slam on the edges of the steps simultaneously. He is unconscious. He looks up into the twisted face of the desk A German shepherd snarls above him and drips thick saliva his face. Ramon straddles his legs and pounds at him. Watch laughing hysterically at his foolishness and his pride. His face crushed by a comet trailing yellow sparks. A meteor. He .rolls and over toward the shepherd's maw. He slides into that blackness and is safe. Soft, pounding rhythm on a drum far

Bray helped Watch ease out of the jeepney. It had rained Manila that morning and the ground was slippery with dark They stood in the center of acres of shining white crosses. green hill of earth stood two immense concentric circles of ble slabs reflecting the blue-white rays of the morning sun. monument reminded him of a picture he had once seen of benge. He shielded his eyes and read the engraved letters on lintel over the stairs. It read "National Memorial Cemetery of Philippines." "I hope you don't mind coming here, grandma I would if I got to Manila." " Don't be stupid," said Bray. They walked up the concrete steps to the monument, followed the circular path . of marble between the twin trains of marble walls. Emblems of the various military three feet in diameter were carved on the walkway. They the name INMAN, EDWARD A. Pfc. USA carved high up on of the slabs, hidden among thousands and thousands of names. Watch took several pictures. A thin s tream of rain water dropped from the roof and splattered on a round stone at the edge of the sidewalk. The sound was in and clean. The grass around the stone was saturated and it

in the sunlight. Watch paused. He didn't want to leave yet. down carefully on the concrete, spreading his legs wide. morning damp felt cold and pleasant. Bray sat down beside They were quiet for several minutes. The only sound w a s the splat of water on the round stone. "Sam," said Watch, "do you think the bruises messed me up? r&Ucouo::oâ&#x20AC;˘utly, I mean?" Bray's laughter was irritating. " Hell, Watch, I don't know. The doc said no. So I guess not. in hell brought this up, anyway? " "Damn it Sam!" he cried. "It's important t o me! I could have my ass killed the other night! I could have wound up dead my uncle or those stiffs back at the goddamn mortuary! " "Hey, man, hey! " whispered Bray. " Take it easy! Just keep damn noise down." Watch leaped to his feet. " Don't you understand, goddamn I don't know what girls are like. I might have died not knowAnd now I might never know. Never!" He stood on the step, _,ou...u"" hard, his fists clenched. Bray' s eyes grew larger. "Well, I'll be a son of a bitch." He nervously. "What's so damn funny?" demanded Watch. "Nothing, old buddy, nothing," said Bray, wiping a corner of eye with a forefinger. " Hoo boy, Watch. You are a case." He "You'll do just fine, old buddy. Just fine." He stood up. on. Let's go home." Watch studied once more the field of wet grass and shining The pristine cleanliness of the place satisfied him. He

Howard Dickler ACT V: HAMLET FOR THE HELL OF IT

If it if it if it The

be now, 'tis not to come; be not to come, it will be now; be not now, yet it will come. readiness is all.

Another day of unemployment, the substitute teacher, lies in bed all day dreaming sleep and turning back the al clock. But the dream ends for lack of dreams; light pours in room around the edges, through the thin body of in!mt>st<an1~ window blinds. "And this contemptuous spirit demands light?" he protested sitting up in the double bed. He surveyed illustrious cell decorated with Alexandria's canvases and and filled with shelves of unused art supplies surrounding God All Mighty six-foot and wooden empty easel which took ~n.ou_gh 路 room. -There was his cramped corner of the room to considered, his desk knee-deep in aborted second drafts of sias Unbound by Hilliard Cronson, a folder full of rejection the fruit of his magnificent first work Plantation-and folders unfinished and/ or unfinishable short stories buried under ence books including dictionary and Thesaurus-the local hole (words, words, words). This is the scene? he wondered. The situation? The cosm of all scenes and situations? Well, if this be the easel reached to the bedside table, to the floor, and found his ' King" cardboard crown. " Here Am 1," he called to the U States, " Your King, your jester!" He tensed his stomach and his fingers over the tightened muscles. How is it that the body endure what the spirit cannot? He touched the stains of monthly revenge on the sheet. It was already a week since drew a circle around the largest clot and wrote, "J\.J.exantlll

aseoatery was here. March 15, 1972." She was in the Bahamas for a living, he was at home, their illegal home, pretending employed, pretending to write, pretending to smile. Hilliard utilized the opportunist's approach to God: If God is and Hilliard is freshly shaved and showered, then, certainJUJ~uâ&#x20AC;˘â&#x20AC;˘ .. u is God. He then seated himself in his corner before his and contemplated the keys for three hours. Only the was eqttally blank, a self-slaughter of sorts. The very keys of typewriter had abandoned him. It wasn't the first time. They'd back after a few days, he only had to sit and wait. Still there the notion, the feeling, the constant p aranoia that they had for good (the paranoia would, of course, be reason for their departure). It was possible that this Tiresias was a dead end, that attempting to save two years of work incur more damage than its abortion. Do you murder the to save the Mother, or in murdering the child do you also the Mother, or ... ? Here I am, the over-achiever shunthe below genius I.Q., and slaughtering myself in the proCould he bring charges against the poetic muse whose joke it to touch him too lightly? He should have held out for a betcontract, should have argued his case with God. Moses was no he argued Moses was a true Jew of reality, a businessman and prophet second. Hilliard put the " Emperor Concerto" on his stereo, and then took it off. Music made no sense, it hadn't for at least five, six, The keys were gone, his ears were also gone. He abandoned desk and moved into the kitchen where he sat clutching at a of Coca-Cola. His tastes were fixed, as static as anything College, less than a full year ago, there was energy to spare; ran on a new formula gasoline racing through the first draft of u~~:~,,,..a.;::,. College, already the Golden Age gone, gone but the deep ...&&&&1'5â&#x20AC;˘"' and memories of faces, places, things done, conversa-au~.~ welded to the soul-those days of energy and expression. Oh The smell of spring! Hilliard sipped at his quart bottle of Coke. What reign did he bave over his life? He didn't even have enough money t o buy another quart bottle of soda, enough money to mail out his book again. Lucky there was some gas in the tank of his graduation present, lucky there was food in the reefer, lucky he had a quarter to pay the toll on Friday when he'd pick up Alex at the airport. He was already in debt to Alex, to his parents. If only the phone would ring in the morning and offer him employment. They

. ,.

hadn't called in so long he had begun to hope they wouldn't call all. After straightening up the apartment-Cleopatra was a ice at compulsive ceremonial-Hilliard checked the There were several letters for Alex, and a letter from his Alex used to write when she was away at work. She didn't more. Mother's letter contained its surprises: a ten dollar bill the time you get this I hope things will have gotten better. If treat yourself to lunch or anything that will help lift your its."); and a clipping from The Wall Street Journal, Mother's of truth. He glanced at the clipping. He usually threw them without reading them-more propaganda from home-but Mother had written above the clipping " Maybe you were The editorial reviewed the absurdity of education courses teacher certification, those Polonial undertakings necessary attaining the priestly rank of public high school teacher. Hilliard stood before the bathroom mirror. He adjusted crown, and fancied himself the lord of all his truant faculties. dragon slayer from the days of yore, he tensed his body into muscleman's position-exhibitionism was exhausting. He moved his tongue for exercise the past week. Masturbation an impossibility. No dragon slaying today, he thought. But at 6:15, Mrs. Ross, a fellow student of the art of education, instruct the class in how to teach Hamlet, " a simple 1"A'lTA1ru play," in the secondary school. She was aware of his feelings this topic-slightly more than critical. Therein was the bum, for Hilliard too had a play in mind, and it was a play (truly, tragedy belongs to the winter season). There good reason for skipping class, avoiding a dangerous scene. all, Hamlet himself put off the fifth act until it was time for fifth act. Act V will come, or Act V must come? There were many available parts with their respective lines, but for all seemingly, only one conclusion. Hamlet always dies in the Hamlet. It was already dark when Hilliard walked across the parking lot. He stepped carefully around the lakes, jumped the cra ters and ditches filled with the slushy body of a which chose to express itself so covertly. How would spring spring if winter refused to be winter? How more fitting it be to attend school on the moon, as many miles removed reality as reality was removed from itself; or was it simply:

, stale, flat, unprofitable seem to me all the uses of the "this world. It occurred to him that he might allow his textMethods of Teaching English in the Secondary School, to from under his arm into its appropriate place in the mire . ........ uuâ&#x20AC;˘u on the moon was a slow process: after twenty-three he had accidentally stumbled into the single truth of existlife depends on one thing and one thing only-the hell with imagination, wisdom, joy, sexual aggrandizement even All he wanted in life was to die of natural but Hamlet asked, " Hilliard, my brother, what are natural ' Endurance, endurance for what? To put off Act V inHilliard graded himself middling to good on endurHe ran cross-country in high school. He wasn't fast, had running style, but he had endurance. And in college he had running that race and getting that grade. Was it a blessor a curse when he began writing fiction and discovered LuciContracting Inc.? He himself hadn't signed the devil's pact. It signed for him by the doctor who signed his birth certificate, his parents, his teachers, the Presidents and leaders. Of when he did become aware of the pact he did nothing to it. He didn't call a lawyer, an angel, God himself. Hilliard to believe that passing final exams bought his passage into Oily Oily Oxenfree Universe. They molded you, now you can yourself. Laertes had the line: "For he himself is subject to birth; He may not as unvalued persons do (Luckily we are all ble by our worthlessness), carve for himself . . . " Alex of working four years straight, clearing a hundred grand, retiring to her art on the interest. Is life a savings bond? Hilliard entered the North Building. He pulled at one side of high school letter jacket opening all eight snaps with the sinmotion. The regal red and blue robe was much too small, oflittle protection (status kept him warm in high school), but, s , if he wore the trappings he could: Read one text of gospel. Transfer sentences of gospel from the text to two test papers. 3. Create at least fifteen pages of interpolated or extrapolated gospel. 4.Attend all classes (cuts were not allowed). &. Keep big fat mouth shut. Number five (5) was the main hazard, his mouth being neither big nor fat, but nonetheless the bottomless pit of his rage (a predicate without ostensive objects, and, thus, a fine source of, a veri-

table fountain of, a plethora, of a cornucopia, of paranoid delusions). Endure, endure, keep the iron sewer cap in place. Die to survive and one day you will have your chance to teach them to make the same mistake you did or didn't make (are there ly other possibilities?). Teach them ecology: He who pollutes Great River of Life swims in shit. God gave me a face, and I made myself another. The keys are gone, my ears are gone, mouth is curbed. Hilliard was late. The third floor corridor was empty. HeiOJ~ classes students would loiter in the hall smoking, eying, ..."''"'UJ'"against window panes, staring at Sears Roebuck Central standing green-signed in the distance. He passed down the leaning into the different classes, searching for a short glimpse cute frailty expressing itself in neat clear concise notes: "Sir Thomas Crapper invented the flush toilet-1865." were good note-takers (a biological or sociological flaw?). used to watch them in high school-"Sit up straight Hilliard, your spine will be curved for the rest of your life." He tried straighten up as he walked past the lockers, but it was no use. was too late-the teachers had been right. He slouched his way into the classroom, dingy yell room with rotten trim and the specified amount of stagnant Mr. Toolman ignored his entrance, continuing his standard ing oration from the Journal of the National English Teachers sociation. Hilliard chose the seat that offered the clearest view green Sears. "Sue Pulls A Good Train, 278-3434" the desk top He listened to Toolman preaching the Heavenly Way to the two rows which week after week remained empty. Toolman the stoic approach to education: if you ignore the student and hard enough he will eventually disappear. Could Herr man be written off? Perhaps, there was no secret intent to manner, but the results, the results! Could they be called nign? If only he taught by the whip, lectured fascism and sl even compliance with the fervor and wrath of Hell! If only were that grand, that blatantly mean and dogmatic ... that lightful! Surely there was more human truth to be found in perverse and supernatural civility of Grendel and his n,.,. . u,~n than in Toolman's symposium of "teaching facts." Toolman read smoothly, clearly, resting the JNETA on his open briefcase bulging and hopelessly impacted with teacher's journals, educational pamphlets, and special from well known institutions under grants from high places:

the student sit; how to make the student roll over; how the student lick your hand; how to make the student your hand and smile; and, the final affront, how to make student go outside. In New York City dog owners would soon to remove their pets' excrement from the streets. The and ethics of any civilization had best be examined by the gist. Hilliard listened to the words. Toolman was no essayist, but the words were escaping recognition, as if spoke in a foreign tongue. Toolman the barbarian! Was that ? At least Grendel was alive, demanded attention. Still, "'............... was the norm par excellence both kin and kind to his ancestor, Mr. Reynolds, who engineered Hilliard's sixth educational deluge: " Albany," Hilliard said answering the examination question correctly. Hilliard flipped the bird in to Jeffrey' s angry finger (Jeff didn't remember the capital New York), and found himself standing outside in the hallway Mr. Reynolds' frowning tie clasp. "Hilliard," he said, " I am disappointed with you. Your parwould be disappointed. You're a good student, and you never stoop to such vulgar behavior." He waited for the response, but Hilliard dug his finger into Reynolds' "Look Buddy-boy. You tryin' to pick a fi ght?" What if he had said that instead of " Endure, Hilliard, you must endure! " Toolman finished the article, dropped the journal into his briefHe played thoughtfully with the two stacks of folders on his lecture notes and a collection of old term papers. The had r equested to see them. " I can't emphasize strongly the importance of giving the student highly structured .....l'>..,,......."'....ts. I'm sure some of you have different opinions on this, it is my experience that whenever I give my classes 'loose' as~nmteiJtts they generally ask me for more structure." QED, Hilthought, Hilliard fat mouth; Oh, uncontrollable left hand ~路tu.U.u~ in the air. Toolman consulted the seating chart. "You're in your proper seat. Mr. ?" "Cronson," Hilliard said, C-R-0-N-S-0-N, "Hilliard Cronson." "In the future would you be kind enough to take your assignseat. It makes things easier," he smiled awaiting comment. " It seems to m e," Hilliard began ("Seems, madam! Nay, it I know not seems!" Hilliard had learned seems), "that when a -~IIU.I路u begins school, he goes to school not for the sake of learning, to gain the affection of his parents, and, later, the affection

of his teachers-substitute parents. Of course, he most gains the affection of his parents and teachers by complying the demands made of him. Perhaps first affection is a gold and later grades-affection as canned goods. By the time a dent enters high school it's only natural-a matter of operant ditioning-that he would feel utterly lost without strict and cise directions. The ability to think. to imagine. has not cultivated ... only the ability to comply. He must know what satisfy his judge. Today you have brought some old tenn for our inspection. Did we request them because we have idea after twenty years of school how to write one. or because want to know what Mr. Toolman approves of?" Hilliard ~e~per in his seat along with his mid-term grade. If there was a Colgate Invisible Shield to protect him; if only the others come to his rescue; if only they'd rise from their seats ously yelling: "Yeah, Toolman. what about it? Huh? yourself! Jesus. Toolman. do you think you can get away murder?" But Toolman read the class reaction, and his tation was the same as Hilliard's. Toolman wouldn't have to " Mr. Cronson, you're an asshole." Someone else would say it him. Toolman manipulated his glasses. "As I said, it is my ence that my students seem to demand highly structured a ments. . .. If there are no other questions, I believe Mrs. Ross a paper for us on how to teach Hamlet on the high school Mrs. Ross confronted Toolman's domain, bearing her gogical design between her legs. Hilliard imagined her school students were well behaved, too busy considering the man physique to consider their Shakespeare. She would her sermon on experience. It would have to be combatted on level with what experience? There was the weary radical Hilliard had twenty years of experience. observing himself ing bored. Her breasts (gold peace medallion dangling in cleavage), her muscled thighs and legs were appealing. She probably thirty-five. He watched her nervously sorting her note cards, an abridgement of the required fifteen-page that she had beside her for reassurance. Her copper colored thick black hair, dark brown eyes, and small sharp-lipped gave her an appearance completely opposite to Alex's, but, in her particular appearance there remained a fading quality was much stronger in Alex. This quality. a quality of """'TTl"'" strength-strange abstract word with a thousand

just as well that Alex didn't write. He wouldn't have to react usual uncued outbursts, her affirmation-reaffirmation, af_ ...v ••-reaffirmation that she would never get married, never children. It was easy to ignore the implications, but it was Alex was becoming a nihilist. Running to New York, to the MUJua.'"'• to Puerto Rico, to Italy, to Venezuela, drudging dimfor dollars, selling her image for a living was draining her. was becoming a laughing mannequin. She talked of having fun, fun .. . . Still if he loved her at all, if their relation wasn't a matter of accumulated convenience becoming less conveit was fo r those qualities of warmth and strength emanatfrom all of her, from her light complexion enunci ated, aesconstrued, by her wholesomely soft and gentle olive her lips so sensitive, each and every line-the way her light hair that alway s smelled of the earth fell against her skin of her flesh, a body , a being, well known by his hands, transforming those trembling roughly conceived sen.instruments, hands, into p a rts of a body, a being, that can and feel in the touching. Yes, she brought out the poet in But Alex was losing, or choosing to deny, or simply abanthat strength to be human. She was swallowing up large .....,u.....,. of poison. Alex would take the plunge. And there stood Ross, a prime exhibition of the " spirit drain." She began without composure: "As you know I wrote my paon h ow to teach Hamlet . .. in the high school. I know that it's whether or not Shakespeare can be taught .. . in high school. I decided not to deal with this question. . . . Well, my feeling that he can be taught, because if I didn't think so I 't have written this paper." She smiled nervously. She was by her audience-they were listening without taking Her say-so was evidence enough for her own students, but seemed mere hearsa y to this different specie that could afford be more discriminating. Her eyes made their Motherly flight the class, finally meeting Hilli ard's . She knew he had his opinions. She lost her place in her notes, searched through first, and then began again on the second. " For all pr actical "'"..-n'""'""" I would teach Hamlet as a boy of, well, twenty years of Of course, in the folio it says he's thirty, but it's easier for the student to identify with someone closer to his own age." In Shakespeare's time, Hilliard thought, they'd throw rotten fruit and vegetables, parts of chicken at her. She lost her place again. Searched her notecards again. If there were no rules he could walk up to her

and rub her neck to comfort her. There were rules. He deeper in the seat, his eyes almost at desk level. He opened small green bound notebook Alex had given him for stray ideas. was a diversionary tactic. If he didn't listen to her slaughter Hamlet he wouldn't have to react, Act V didn't have to .u...tJ}I'I>II He read through the one poem he liked: I SEE GREEN SHIT I see green shit when I look through my eyes most of the time. I'd like to see other things, of course; I'm not the sadistic or masochistic sort nor an opportunist or anything like that. It's just that things were ruined for me, and byrne; A disease of nurture nurtured by nature that distorts. "After all there are so many interpretations of Hamlet I doubt," Mrs. Ross contended from her cross-legged and desk position, " ... I mean it's such a great work of art no interpretation could possibly be entirely correct." What does mean? Hilliard wrote beneath the poem. If it was a good something worth writing, no one would ever know or what it meant. Sooooo what was the sense in writing it? "I lieve that Hamlet can be taught in high school by simply ing the story line. Hamlet clearly wants revenge for his murder." Who's buried in Grant's tomb, Hilliard wondered? what order, should he, a college graduate, read Hamlet now that you're old enough, you can read it backwards as speare intended)? Mrs. Ross followed her assertion at ease now, filling in the analytic logic deduced from the principle. Hilliard peeked around the class at desk level. He was yond the point of no return; the edge of the desk-seat dug the small of his back. His legs were too far extended aimlessly push him back into the chair, and he was slowly sinking to floor. The chair balanced on its two front legs. There was the

that it would fall forward on top of him. He could still act, why should he pull himself up? Why should he finish the novany novel, any story, any poem? Why should he breathe? not become the complete skeptic? "To let the chair flounder, not to let the chair flounder, that is a question?" What sense there in this compelling quixotic animal drive for identity? any assertion worth alienating Mr. Toolman, lowering his inciting Mrs. Ross's wrath, and coming off like a fool? All ends in Qegative apotheosis: the history of man is the comrecordings of all actions. World history, The Tragical History Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, the life and regrets of Hilliard ron.so1t1, were all humorous little paragraphs in God's own pricomic book (this is where they get the term divine comedy) Act V. The longer you refused to get on with it, the longer prolonged the Faustian episode, the bigger and better the But there was still more involved: Once you accept Act V play it to the end, it ends in Act I. There is no rest, no advanceso what was the sense? Mrs. Ross's voice came to its conclusion. She appeared very relieved that the ordeal was over. Perhaps, she was surby how little she had said, and how long it took to say nothHands reached into the air, fishmongers setting their nets brownie points, to reveal specific points of interest, to lend prognosis: "There's the coward theory," offered one stu"That would explain Hamlet's delay.. . . Personally," he at his wirey black beard, "I don't agree with it." A fat gimpy blonde suggested: "There's also the theory that suffered from melancholia." " Involutional psychosis." "He was a manic-depressive." " Paranoid schizophrenic." "He was lonely." "Well," Mrs. Ross summarized, "as we all know there are so many interpretations... . " Her mouth gaped on the wish of words. Why wasn't she wild, vivacious, challenging, as she might be in bed, Hilliard thought, in bed knowing. The keys are in the heart; her body could tell her Hamlet. Let us investigate our lives, our hamlets, our microcosms of the world, then we will know in the seeing as we know in the feeling. "But as I said," she finally offered. "Hamlet can be taught on the high school level." She collected her paper and notes and returned to her seat. Mr. Toolman gained his proper position behind the desk. He

thanked Mrs. Ross for a fine presentation. " I even recall one claim that Hamlet was a homosexual, " he said dipping into his briefcase to find his l ecture. " At least that explains his attitude towards Ophelia." Hilliard shook with the fear of the cue, fear of missing the cue, his chance to what? Forget all the images on papers, tombs, dollar bills. Let it pass, endure! The chair beneath him. He hit the floor. It was the protest of his bent The class was watching. He had seen people fall out of their seats before. It had never happened to him. He stood up facing out window, he suffered delirium tremens. A flashing red sign said, " Eat at oe's ." He started walking to the front of the How easy it was to do so, for the body to carry itself from one to another while the mind trembles with fear from the motion. approached Mr. Toolman. " Would you like to be excused?" Toolman inquired. "No .. . I would like to say a few things." He listened to words, they sounded cool, sure, even severe. He was actually ... " I believe you can make your comments from. your seat, Toolman said softly. There are no soft words in Act V. Hilliard clasped his hands together and looked down, lO<>KEICI up. " Mr. Toolman," he said, " I have some crucial things to about Hamlet, and I really fe.el compelled to do so." 路 " Mr. . . . Cronson," he said turning to the class, " I grant you may have an interesting interpretation of Hamlet, there so many, but this is no place for a literary discussion. We are here to argue what Hamlet means. Everyone's entitled to his opinion. It is the purpose of this class to learn how to teach let."

"And it is my contention that you can't teach any work of unless you know what it means, or even what it is. How can attempt to teach anything if you don't understand what it you're teaching? " " You could spend the week writing up y our ideas and it as a term paper next week. We have a lot to do." Too picked up his lecture notes entitled: "Developing Class tion. " Toolman wouldn't use force, he had the force of his sta "I'm sorry, I must do this." "He can have his chance next w eek, unless he wants to spond to my paper," demanded Mrs. Ross. Her eyes were ing, her face distraug ht that anyone should have the right to a major verbal refutation of her paper. She would never

"I only want ten minutes," Hilliard pleaded with the class. "What do the rest of you think?" Toolman asked. Discussion The major issue was whether he intended to teach a litinterpretation, or if he was going to teach how to teach. "But understanding Hamlet and teaching Hamlet are the thing! " Hilliard insi sted. Didn't that make sense to them? After fifteen minutes of discussion it was decided that Hilshould have his ten minutes. Toolman took a first row seat Hilliard standing alone behind the desk. Where would start? He hadn't thought of that, and there was no time to think starting. He faced the class. He was aware of them for the first After two months of classes they were all strangers to him, each other. What things do we have in common? That we are teachers or aspire to teach? That we live in the same world, a different world, but subject to the same forces? Even Toolthe taskmaster, was the same, but Hilliard had less feeling Toolman, less feeling of love? Yes, love. Why should he love ? What had they ever done for him? What would they ever for him? Why should he do anything for them? What could do for them, even if he wanted to? He looked at Mrs. Ross. She a burning bush of resentment, and he'd dedicate this little to her. Or Alex? Or himself? Or to God's classic comic? the hell? I must, this is my chance to . . . for something, for Yes, you must begin with your self. He touched the edge the desk. It was really there, just as Grant was really buried "Before you can teach a work of art ... you have to first unit. It would seem that a correct understanding of a work if it's correct, lend some insight as to the best way to apW tltmla.ch it in a class." Hilliard stepped slowly towards the windows, his mind enunciating its argument, inward expansion. His right hand searched for his direction. " I think . . . Hamlet ... and any other work, can be best approached if we can ask the right questions about it. What we have to be aware of is, simply . .. what things about this play don't seem to make sense... . Using this approach, the point of departure should be: What is it, exactly, that doesn't seem to fit." Hilliard reached the windows and turned to the class counting on his fingers, a slight shrug, an inward smile at an earlier admission: " Well, the ghost of Hamlet doesn't make sense to me . . . I don't understand why Ophelia commits suicide . .. I don't understand-if Claudiu~ really did

murder Hamlet's Father-why Claudius didn't act against .... a ............ from the beginning ... I simply don't understand why it is Hamlet has no strong reaction, has no reaction at all to murder ... I don't understand how Gertrude can be so .I..LLJU"'""'ÂˇÂˇ~ so tolerant towards Hamlet if she really helped murder his ther." Hilliard stopped in front of the desk. He was past.,..,..,.,..,,,.. ness. He was in control of himself, his self finally aspiring to and discovering in itself an instinctive familiarity. It is an ing thing how a body can walk, move its fingers, its arms, a dination of a million processes. We try to be more than we and we become less; but being what we are, are we not ., ... ,u..........v The class told him he could choose his own tempo, the ten ban was off: You cannot tell a tree to grow to maturity in minutes, it takes its own time, seeks its own pace. " I would like to start with Yorick. . .. In the play tells us that Yorick 'bore' him on his back, that Yorick him laughter, delight, and happiness when he was growing would seem that, in a single passage that doesn't even add to motion of the plot, we discover that this Yorick, a court j stands alone, clear, beli eved, and loved in Hamlet's Metaphorically, this might suggest that Yorick's place in the is as Hamlet's true spiritual Father. Working with this a.ssuJ~ tion, we might say that the power, even the brilliance of encounters with the likes of Polonius and Claudius show let's genius, not the symptomology of a disease... . If this is at true, why is it that we shoul d look for what is wrong with instead of what is right with him, what was right with Yorick, maybe, wrong with all the other characters. Maybe rather trying to explain Hamlet, we should try to understand after all, Hamlet's g uiding star seems to be the spirit of the spearean fool ... a Shakespearean fool who by accident of must play the part of a. prince and eventually a temporal king. This in itself would suggest that we've only considered Hamlet's reality.... If Hamlet is part Yorick, he's also part nius or Claudius, people who desire power over all else. .. the play there are true kings and pretenders, but even theY the true kings, must endure a world, a Denmark, ruled by Hamlet, himself, was raised to be a false king in an n.,.n"â&#x20AC;˘'l"hn world. Years have been spent programming him for the part been decided that he will marry Ophelia, that he'll be king Claudius dies. His situation shotildn't be strange to us; brought up, educated, not necessarily to be happy, but to

designated place in the workings of a world we didn't create, we barely appear to have control of.... As much as Hamlet like to say, to feel, that he's one hundred percent Yorickhundred percent himself-he knows that it's just as true that like Polonius, and that in order to survive he must be willing tend with the kind of world that Polonius makes and repre"Now let's take a look at Hamlet's Father." A moment of now at the door. My feet, my feet, they carry me well, even I have disappeared from myself into their silence, I have is it real, is this true, do I believe, or does it only seem. "From the play we know that he was a 'good and generous ' In this we see the 'Yorick spirit.' But he was also a king in Polonial world, and, therefore, a man who by necessity had to his way as best he could through that world. He must bend spirit in order to play king and survive. Hamlet's own situation exactly the same ... and he, like his father, must make the deto bend with the breeze or break. Let's look at the possibiliWe are told that Hamlet's Father was poisoned, but there's indication from the attitudes of Claudius or Gertrude towards that any such literal act occurred. Besides this . .. there many kinds of poisoning, and it is, perhaps, less likely that he poisoned with arsenic than that he was poisoned by the life tried to lead, a life in opposition to life, to the human spirithear of people 'working themselves to death' all the time .. . . this metaphor, the degree to which Hamlet's Father bent the breeze, probably, determined the amount of poison he ... If we were all to drop dead tomorrow from the s our factories, cars, our cities pump into the air, are.._we to that we died of natural causes, or that we poisoned ourselves "At this point we could say that the play involves Hamlet's â&#x20AC;˘ Den:epti of his dual existence, and his attempt to save himself, and, by doing so, perhaps, save the life of Denmark. To save himaelf he has to eliminate the poison that's inside him. To do that he must also destroy the poison that surrounds him. I would agree that Hamlet is a revenge play, but it is more than that, it's a play of self-revenge and self-slaughter." Hilliard paused again. He was somewhere else, now at the window. Where were they? Had they followed? Their eyes were upon him. Even Mrs. Ross eyed him with interest. No doubt her anger would return. All that remained was to clean up minor is-

sues with as much dispatch as possible. "The play should now open to us ... . As for the ghost of Hamlet, it's only his figuratively; actually it's a representation of Hamlet's ..u••l"-,. tion, his war with himself of which others would l}.aturally aware.. .. Claudius wouldn't have felt endangered by at the beginning of the play, simply because he had nothing do with Hamlet's Father's death as far as he can see.... 0 commits suicide, because at this point Hamlet can only react her as an object, part of his station in a world he hates, the of himself he must divorce. And here she is partially reiSP40n11UQ . . . because . . . on the advice of her Father and brother, she's willing to express her love for Hamlet. Instead she herself with false face; then, thinking her love's rejected, simply says No to a barren world. Only when it's too late, in funeral scene, Hamlet realizes that she, like himself, like .......,.,,,.,. fights the same battle-he's just simply a thousand times aware of what that battle is, and what's at stake. 'To be or be, that is the question.' Hamlet's not contemplating nhuatll suicide, he's deciding whether or not to participate in the world. If he chooses to do so he must suffer spiritual death, by poison; but what would follow if he chose to live in a world with his human spirit? He can't. Yorick can only be a ter, the fool carrying the standard of beauty in an ugly Hamlet wasn't brought up to be a jester. "Then the last scene of the play, it's Hamlet's attempt avenge himself, his Father, Ophelia, Yorick . . . ...., ..,u~u ..••• his attempt to 'take arms against a sea of troubles.' Of ,.n,........ physical attack is doomed to failure because it is more uuaa.uua ical than real-killing a fraud king doesn't rid the world of who desire power at others' expense, nor can it change the position of a society which will and can maintain them. . . . the play seems to suggest is that we're all Hamlets in varying grees, and like Hamlet we're all lost somewhere between spiritual world of our humanity and this Polonial world which live in.. .. Maybe Hamlet's battle can't be won-maybe meaning is only in the struggle-but then we've read the and we're still alive at the end. Hamlet's not.. .." Hilliard found himself standing in front of the desk. He down bending over forward towards the class, the class, the of the class were glazed but by what they might have or was it just the intensity with which the words had poured his mouth, that big fat mouth. He was relieved. He had done

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to do, even if he would have to start out again from But not till tomorrow, only one performance a day, tomorrow. understand your interpretation," said the black-bearded "and it sounds okay to me, but how do you intend to it to high school students?" 's head dropped towards his chest. " I wouldn't teach interpretation, I would teach the play." He rubbed his foreand stood up straight. "It's a process. If you can just get your to come out and admit what they don't understandof cause and effect or structure within the workings of play, things that just don't make sense, things that don't to belong-then you can start talking, start thinking, and magic. .. ." "But!" It was Mrs. Ross too loudly recovered. She cut her vol"But how do you intend to get your students to read the enplay if it bores them?" She looked satisfied with her ques"How have you succeeded in doing this?" "Suppose you were to just hand out copies of the play one and read it in class giving the students parts. But in assi ;ning you give them real roles to imitate. Say that the pee: _t>le who the lines of guards and attendants are told to react their lines they were the tackles and guards on the football team. Claudius the principal of the school. Ophelia is a cheerleader, Hamlet A student who can't stand school. Fortinbras is next year's . The possibilities are infinite." "Have you ever done that?" Mrs. Ross demanded. No, but I would like to fuck you, Hilliard wanted to say. He at her with, well, love? It embarrassed him, the soft look returned to her twisted angered expression. Nobody in their mind would ever set him loose on a class anyway. " No." "That's all I wanted to know," she said. Hilliard slouched back his overthrown chair. "That's an original interpretation, I believe," said Toolman .-.~u...l!!!i his desk, " this spirit against the physical world." Toolwas pushing to get strangled? Dream against vision, damn Hilliard thought. But it was no use. In three sentences Hamlet just another contending theory for his own identity. Poor ftDBJ>ez路o forever cursed and alienated from his own work. Hillilooked out the window at the Sears building. He could even home '\nd look at Alex in between the covers of the Sears Catalll>l搂,&uJu&&&l!!!i路

The students took out the study guides Toolman had given them the week before. He asked someone to explain what was meant by "cells and bells." It was in the text but no one answeted. Finally, Mrs. Ross proffered the sentence from the text. Hilliard would have to go over the text again and again-some things were getting harder and harder to do. He had to pass this class, get teacher certification, find a job, and endure. Maybe he could endure. There were moments, hours, extended to years of being alone, afraid, impotent, but there were also moments, hours, extended to years of being together with others, together with self as he had been only moments before. Perhaps he was stronger for it; perhaps, he was secretly much stronger than could even imagine. He leaned back in his righted chair, ..., ..,,........VY up above Toolman at the clock-only ten more minutes-and tened to the " cells and bells."

ACRYLIC ENAMEL

it comes. Clear Acrylic Enamel. Funny how it hits you after you've given up trying to remember. Boy, it had a good Wouldn't even bother to describe it. Like sex, acid, death, adulthood, you gotta try it to know what it's about. I let the capture me. It had long been reverberating in the inner of my mind and now something-a smell, a taste, a sound summoned it to the forefront, ringing clear, to be absorbed before it is reduced to fragmented memories. Silver lips. It is memory now. Our insides must have been lacquered and enameled. I wonder if the paint eroded any past two years. Lenny is trying to sneak in. Arthur's verbally seducing two Me? I'm watching. I've been watching since sixty-nine my fingers were slammed by a yardstick and my terrified watched her mouth moving "In my class you pay attention!" mean, craggy, Oriental face. I had merely been leaning back, the two rear legs of my chair, against the wall, with one ear against it, trying to hear what went on on the other side. It must have been the paint. Sharpened me insenses or someMade life a motion picture, a Cezanne painting come to life, Lenny, me and Arthur the central characters, the subjects. These nights were a movie. The same movie again and again, ,.....,.......,.. after weekend, concert after concert-sneaking in. It's a habit, me, Lenny and Arthur sneaking into concerts. Arena, Waikiki Shell, Andrews Amphitheater. Wherever conwere held, the film was being done on location. It was always D&iUeJlging enough not to get boring, like the pinball machines at Billiards, when we mastered them to the point that the weren't fun anymore. Sneaking in is hard. Well, not so much at Andrews, with its not high chain link fence, its relatively easy to climb walls. One

could even go under the fence at one part, while the less (LRs) climbed one of the portable buildings around the -···.-theater for the loftier view. Getting into the Waikiki Shell is difficult. The fence is than that of Andrews. Once you get over the fence at most of points around the place, you have to run across a field and still another fence (if you are able to avoid being tackled by a who is just itching (and I mean itching) to rough you up). The chance is to leap the fence by the bathroom, run into it and take a piss. HIC Arena? Now that's a brand-new ballgame. Those of with weak hearts better go and buy tickets right now, if any left. It's a flying saucer (modern, I guess) shaped castle, with a moat around it. No alligators, though, just millions of pia, not to mention a sizable number of ducks. The best nne~e~•n• way of getting in without the ticket that lets you cross the bridge is to creep along the walls which have a fairly long wide ledge, leap a waist-high railing, dart toward the stairs either sit down conspicuously on the stairs if there are no seats or walk around all night like you're spaced out. The problem is getting over that little railing without being vr,... n•by a cop or security officer who usually is waiting to knock into the moat. The cop is waiting for Lenny, who is standing along a with his back against the wall. The cop senses he is there he can't see Lenny because the ledge he is on projects like an The cop is at the top point of the letter and Lenny is .., ...,..........._ along at the bottom. It is only when Lenny turns the corner the cop can see who is crazy enough to make the attempt. I my forehead, signaling Lenny that the cop is present. He .....1t .....ttJ to the diagonally-opposite end of the top of the L-shaped wall onto the safety of the grass. It's important to me that Lenny gets in-1 don't care if I do it and Arthur's more into scoring with chicks anyway-oe1cHo1LU Lenny's the best. Sneaky, clever, and gutsy as hell. What's -dig it-he's on a streak. He's gotten in free eighteen times in row, man. Not the last eighteen concerts (who wants to see Carpenters?), but eighteen times in eighteen tries. He's got get in. Our goal is twenty. That's why I'm standing here on grass giving him signals. You follow me? Maybe there's paint you. Remember, movies don't provide you with instant like T.V. does. And sometimes you have to read the book first

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The cop moves from his position and stands by the snack bar is contained within the L-shaped wall. He is itching to bust or any non-payer's (NP) head. The re is and isn't a crowd No cohesion. Not like that Hendrix concert when Lance still around and before I began watc hing, when some weird of a bitch pulls a fifth column by accidentally (hmmm) leaning the wide latch release, with the door flying open, with fifty smashing through the door. Then, with the security officers chasing them all over the place and the notoriously-innocent yelling "Wha'd I do? Wha'd I do? " , me, Lenny, Arthur, Lance some other guys who later changed into Double Knit Assholes are sucked in by the wide vacuum and settle on the steps just in time to hear Hendrix make the "Star-Spangled Banworth listening to, shortly before he was shot. Wait. Wait. It King who was shot. Christ, I'm getting my history distorted. I know who was murdered, who simply OD'd and who was â&#x20AC;˘"'-'Âˇuu''~ as I am now. Maybe that's what I'm doing: Seeing that history comes out t and clear-truth in other words-because I know that , who approaches me now, is making history. "Pretty rough tonight," I say. "Ah, fuck, we get 'em. Even if I gotta swim." His words make look at the ducks for some reason. " Where Atta went? " "Where else?" I turn my head to inform him of the direction which to look. "The fuckah, " he says. Lenny, with h~s hands in his pocketif to make his shoulders look bigger-approaches Arthur who is with a couple of Oriental girls. Both Lenny and Arthur the same height, about five-eight, but Lenny's frame is 1erawny while Arthur's is quite husky. Lenny's features are obnously Filipino while Arthur's reveal some Hawaiian. I have aever asked him what the rest is. Me? I'm watching. Not only watching, but following Lenny so I can also listen. I see that Lenny, perhaps instinctively, approaches the shorter of the two girls. "Hey, you like fuck? " One thing about Lenny, he's honest. The girl turns colors before my eyes, different shades of red. "Man, I know you like fuck. " Color Arthur steaming purple, the other girl pale.

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" We better go the other side," the taller g irl s ays. The girls walk aw ay . Arthur turns to Lenny. He is angry but want to speak t oo loud. " You fuckah! " he says. " What you trying? I had the Shit. Now I gotta start all ovah again." Lenny glares back at him. " Shit. We no mo' all night! Man. they like, they like! Why waste our fucking time? You like get or not!" "Fuck the concerti" Arthur yells. " I rather fuckl" For strange reason, whenever they start to argue they glance me as if I should say something. " Clear Acrylic Enamel." What else could I say? "Hey, yeah!" Arthur says, "Thass the one!" Lenny does look enthused, because he is. His facial expressions are downplayed, like the expressions of someone who knows camera on him and wishes to deceive it. "Thass the baby," he says. "Taste so fucking sweet, Lenny's tone changes suddenly, addressing me. "Hey, you try or what? This fuckah," he points to Arthur, " retire " I goin' try," I say. "But you gotta get in first. " "No make difference. I can get in by myself." "Sure, Lenny," Arthur interjects. " Sure." Within a few utes we agree that Lenny has to get in first. We try the same with me and Arthur playing first and third base coach, tively. It is too risky and we stop him before he gets thrown We decide to wait until intermission. Only minutes later the crowd starts pouring out of the sanctum. It is intermission. You may leave now. Be back in about ten minutes. What? You're still here? Intermissions can be too? Really? The inside crowd is not a crowd. No cohesion. Faces faces. I see glazed eyes, eyelids painted blue, green, eyes eyebrows lifting, lids sagging, eyes passing eyes, ass eyes. But the clothes! Polyester, double-knit slacks, perma-press jeans, skimpy blouses, perma-wrinkled silk sandals, slippers, high-heeled shoes, all suggesting that the is of secondary importance. One can always tell who's the crowd. Most of the people wander around, captured in a

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tranquility. A few stand by the railing that keeps falling into the moat and stare, outward, at us. Actually, them are staring at the ducks. ducks! Why didn't I think of that? . Atta." I sound enthused. "We go give them one deeArthur looks puzzled, while Lenny, though he may be puzto have it figured out already. I tell Arthur to go along ledge and attract attention. Not too obviously, though. has already figured out his part. He heads toward the ledge ninety feet to the left of the L-shaped one. on the outside see Arthur on the ledge and watch me third-base coach, a job I relish. They seem to be united by .......,....,_.. effort. The cop, sensing something, acts like nothing on. He doesn't want to stop the attempt, but rather wipe â&#x20AC;˘n'"'"'.... reaches the railing. Those by the railing sense what's too. They're actually paying attention. is all smiles. The cop knows I'm giving signals and preotherwise. The lady security officer who watches the ledge feet to the left senses that something's up and unobtruwalks in the direction of the cop. Lenny steals across the like no one else can, leaps the unguarded railing and is lost inside crowd. Number nineteen. One more to go. The outcrowd applauds. Arthur sticks his head around the corner L-shaped wall and smiles at the puzzled cop and equally security lady. Intermission is over. seeing the inside crowd and sensing that the cop is itchget me, I don't try very hard to get in. I end up joining Arwho is talking to the taller of the two chicks. I start talking to one, and me and Arthur end up heading toward the car the two faceless girls. The morning after, while me and Arthur are blessed with achballs, Lenny is telling us how great a concert it wasn't. A effort. "Yeah, Lenny, yeah," me and Arthur harmonize. "Fuck teasers," Arthur adds, "wasted my fucking dope." "Our fucking dope," Lenny says. "That's the trip," I say. "Painted eyelids are for teasing, Clear does the pleasing." I do not know what the fuck I am talkabout which is cool because none of us do most of the time. It

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is this absurdity that links us together. Words, by necessity, on different shades of meaning in the continuously process of language. We understand the absurdity; that's matters. My words sent their minds back in time (Or did minds summon a piece of their past? What goes where? way). We reminisce. We live in a two-bedroom apartment in MakfiP., the apartment/ condominium center of the Pacific, in the shadow Punchbowl, the extinct crater now used as a national The three of us sleep in the bedroom with wall-to-wall nuLn1rAJIâ&#x20AC;˘ and floor to ceiling naked lady posters and assorted scrawls drawings. In the other room we keep our guitars and struments, all small except for the old honky-tonk piano. We play for fun now since Lance, our lead singer, is away. The bination living room-kitchen has only the essentials: a gas a small refrigerator and a sink (of course) on one end; a foot table in mid-center with mats under and around it, which we sit on; a telephone on the wall that bisects the apartment; against that same wall, a stereo component system. It had taken us about a year to fix the rust on our '64 V wagen. It belongs to me, Lenny, Arthur and Lance, should he turn. That's how we got into the paint thing. Yesterday, S we sanded down all the rusty areas and patched up the holes bundo. Then we sprayed those areas with a primer. The scent us into our pre-car adolescent sniffing days, the J?re-grass Then, like right now, we reminisced on our spacing out, on hearing the "Now I know I'm stoned!" buzz, and, we laughed over the time we didn't use the usual colorless ic paint and stood out at a dance-party because our silver glowed in the dark. Silver lips, the more we thought of it the we laughed. It was the accidental yet obvious emblem of our fiance. Our own silly way of saying luck your world. But we couldn't figure out what paint gave us the best until I flashed on it last night at the concert. Sundays are dull, duller when it' s cloudy. And they are when it is early November and clouds are a sign of come. Makes you almost wanna put on your Sunday best and church, just for the hell of it. I am on the verge of putting on thing decent when Lenny suggests we go to Sandy Beach. " If we goin' get wet, we might as well get drenched," he The day might be salvaged. The only problem is who is drive. It's always a struggle.

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leg sore," Arthur says, getting off to a good start, holding nut for emphasis. "Lenny says, " My eyes too fucking phased out, man." drive," I mumble. my leg!" Arthur squeezes tighter. only need one leg, pal," Lenny says. t about the fucking clutch?" Arthur counters . ..Shove it up your fucking nose," Lenny says, smiling. ..I'll drive," I say louder. They continue to argue for a full minbefore they realize I have offered to drive, to everyone's surincluding mine. "But everybody gotta chip info' gas." It is a thirty-five minute drive to Sandy Beach from our apartin Makiki, in the midst of the mess that is Honolulu, but if lucky we'll make it in an hour. First we stop for gas at the station where we work. Then we head toward an on-ramp H-1 Freeway. All the car windows are open because the ~ ..,GU.1,~ ........ ~ clouds and the tall buildings on each side of the narstreet box us in enough already. When we are on the freeway breathe easier as the stretch of freeway toward Sandy Beach the city. Honolulu is like a woman who doesn't know what she's got does everything to look more like someone else every passing , the someone else being L.A. They've shaven your pubic palm trees and replaced them with a concrete slab ... Out of which grow sky high cement stubbles that make you look so drab . . . . . . Oh no, Lulu, what have they done to you. Nobody's singing. And the words aren't mine. Words from a Lance wrote echo in my mind. I now remember the last, unIIUcuu>u lyriC he ShOWed me; What's the price, what's the cost, we get lost counting the time we 've spent Tumbling dice, flung across the horizon, gather moss as a monument ... . . . All the Timothy Learys with their spacy theories .. .

"Hey," Lenny says. "You sleeping o' what." "No," I answer, snapping out of the daze induced by hypnotic highways, " just meditating my ass off." "I just wanted to make sure you know wha's happenin' ahead" "Yeah." We have come to the part where the freeway ceases to be a freeway and becomes a highway, with traffic lights and all.

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As we cruise down the long stretch of road known as ......... _1&' anaole Hig hway, most of the claustrophobia is gone. No tall ings. Just good old suburban-type homes, wide streets and By now everyone knows that the wider the streets are, the the homes. Quite unlike the one-lane two-way streets in ... Whoops. Starting to daydream a gain. Better keep my eyes the road. In other words watch. Trees are abundant on both sides of the highway, ''"JU''"-'"'" ' slightly in a gentle breeze that i s not so gentle for us as we now down the roa d with everyone's hair a ll messed up. Lenny tells to stop at Koko Marina Shopping Center a little further up. I turn in to the parking area of the shopping center and alongside a curb, because parking's hard to find and me and thur will wait in the car anyway. Lenny dashes out. I turn up car radio: " There must be some kinda way outa here," said the joker to the thief. " There's too much confusion, I can 't get no relief . ... "

" Hendrix sings the shit outa that song," Arthur says. I nod. starts to drizzle. Lenny returns in a couple of minutes with a age. Arthur asks him what he bought. Lenny says "Dig!" turn back onto the highway, I am in the right-most lane. tells m e to shift into the next lane because the one we're in into it up ahead. With the drizzle, and with my mind into Hendrix' s guitar-work, my eyes checking the side mirror for cars and hands turning the wheel simultaneously, by the time my a ness is set on what's ahead by Arthur's " Hey! " I find myself ning a red light. I blast my horn without knowing why. Maybe a n instinctive grasp for legitimacy. The other guys laugh and at the cars we pass. I gaze, while the road creeps uphill, into rear-view mirror for a cop's flashing blue light but only see two red traffic lights. As the lights get fainter, I am relieved, secure as the drizzle stops and splinters of sunlight etrate the clouds. We arrive at the beach. Somehow water lures us like else, with the possible exception of music. Arthur passes by chicks on beach towels, who are hoping for tans, with glance. He wants to bodysurf as much as me and Lenny guess his balls still ache and he knows the therapeutic value whirlpool of salt water.

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and Arthur are pros in the ocean. They carve through weave under them, slice the fucking ocean to ribbons. Me, uuasJue~J.. But don't get me wrong. I love every fucking shoreof wave that smashes me into the sand. I love when it sucks for more, perhaps because I know I'll somehow manage to in a couple of good rides. funny how we take to the ocean after Lance's disappearThe papers say he drowned. I don't believe what I read. They found the body. I dive under a mother of a wave. Lance split. and Arthur know that. It was the first and last time I acid. The four of us were walking along the sea wall at Moana when the acid hit. I am drifting now. At that instant we â&#x20AC;˘..,,1'\,.,.,..A, into the Beatles walking down Abbey Road. I felt I part of an album cover. Who could imagine how they felt, me, Lenny and Arthur felt when it started to become a fourstreet, when Lance broke toward the beach, dove into the and swam toward the crooked bowl of moon as water filled it. All we saw afterwards, when we swam out there, a blinking red light. We spent the whole night looking for long after the rescue unit gave up. I am drifting out more. He know how to drown. Besides, he had plans. We don't talk Lance much-his quiet, calculated movements that almost his constant agitation-but we knew better than to go a fucking memorial service. I tread water. He was weird but he the sharpest of us. His conception of the world was getting to sneak out of concerts. Damn it. He's just playing some sly game, waiting for the right time. He's gone underwater. have I as I gulp down a mouthful of salt water. Aack. What a It sometimes takes hours to describe a moment. On the other . . . . Hours later I fall down on the wet sand I look up ahead see Lenny ripping his towel apart. There's a buzzing in my head. Someone is watching me. In there's a lot of them. I stare up from behind the sea wall. No choice. I make a run for it into the ethereal darkness. I stumble, ecraping the tops of my toes. My mind runs back to a Santana concert at the Shell. There's at least a thousand of us outside. We have two things in common: we hate (or can't afford) to pay for music and we want to get in. The vast majority of us are male. More than half are white guys, haoles. There are no fences between them and us shaded folks. There's a proliferation of at-

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tempts to get inside. Cops slam the ones they tackle against fence, then make them climb back out. Some return u~~'"""LI.LIII Twenty police cars are parked at one end of Kapiolani Park, partially surrounds the Shell. A couple of cops are giving to cars parked along a dirt road in another part of the park. on motorcycles drive through the crowd, dispersing us, as we rowdier by the minute. The cops get even rowdier and force to dive out of the way. Santana starts to play. The percus ....v,. .u••• spray of beat captures us. Some crazy fucker climbs the Then another . .. and another .. . then a hundred. I start to as the screaming guitar pierces the wall of fear. Halfway on stop because I don't see Lance, Lenny, and Arthur. No! It's cause there's more going on outside! I leap back. Lance runs up me with a bunch of parking tickets he pulled off the of cars. The police department is gonna have one hell of a convincing a lot of people that they got tickets tonight. The buzzing gets louder. We drift from Abbey Road and through a world of dark, only starlit space and metronomic, dulating rhythm. Secrets unfold as universes open like eyes. Seemingly impenetrable boundaries unbound, reveal selves as clear walls of sound, soaking in an ocean of black, void. Space. Rhythm. Space. Rhythm. The HIC Arena floats In the starlight of distance far beyond, I see Lance filming it A silver circle is spinning, I am finding. Unwinding. Unwind I am staring at the door latch release button of the V wagen. I no longer hear the buzz. I see a piece of towel in my and realize it is dark. We are still at the beach, for Christ's Hypnotized by a fucking release button? I am freezing my ass as I get up to look for Lenny and I am headed toward the bathroom when I see them walking the beach with rags held to their mouths. I see a blinding right at Lenny's waist. It is the moon' s reflection off a paint tucked in his shorts. Monday. Arthur has managed to get the phone number of girl he met at last Saturday's concert by calling up all the ' at random in the phone book. I laughed everytime he said ' numbah" and slammed the phone. He tries to make a date Friday's concert at Andrews. She won't go unless her friend come along. He tries to get me to take the other girl. " Come on, you fuckah," he says, cupping the ,...,,.o:t;,..,•• , desperate, man."

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way." come on. I really dig this chick, man. She all right." some other flower." He tells her he'll call her back later up the phone. He is quiet for awhile. How about if I pay for your ticket," he says, breaking uv.u.cor;,. He is desperate. getting in free," I say, "along with Lenny's record-breaking He can get in by himself. He not one baby." He is silent moment. "Hey, come on. I know we can get us some fucking lays." " I sense a wall forming. He's pretty pissed off at me, is several times a month. This time more so. ten in the morning. Lenny started working at eight. Me start working at eleven. We all work as service station ~u- at the same place, Herb's Union (HU), in Makiki. I am ready to go to work. Arthur's using the phone again. work, we talk about the previous day and night and swear to get nostalgic for a can of paint again, especially one that give us silver lips. week goes by fast. I anxiously await Friday's concert, features local rather than mainland groups. Arthur is ectO the point of actually being nice to us. The girl finally to go with him to the concert alone. It bothers me and We sense that he is one of the DNAs now. Me and Lenny not discussed the matter but there is no need to. When you go some profound changes with someone your wave lengths generally on the same frequency. We know that only Lance's could knock some sense into Arthur. I spend my spare time (when I'm alone) drawing. I use the table for support. I try all kinds of styles, utilizing my notions of cubism as well as some renaissance-type repre-·•u~u:u sketches. I even try to draw a map of Honolulu cenon three points, representing the HIC Arena (to the left of the Waikiki Shell (far to the right), and Andrews Amphi(above the center). I first draw lines connecting them, I fill in other places, drawing more and more lines. until the is a mess. I end up drawing conclusions: fiction, not real. A sound is echoed. reverberates, is _DThis..••:risdistorted. Do you see yourself in these lines? It

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Andrews is quite a place; compact in size, as compared to others. Its situation in the center of the University of Hawaii antees a student audience. Portable buildings linger off two of the Amphitheater and their rooftops give far better views concerts than a fairly large arena. It isn't that difficult to the portable buildings either. Just balance yourself on the as I am doing now, reach for the roof, then pull yourself up, ging the roof as if your life depended on it. While I am struggling to get the greater portion of my body the roof (being that most of me is dangling), one of the LRs me up and I temporarily join their ranks. As I gaze inside taking hits from the joints that keep coming to me, I recall hardness of the concrete seats that circle around the cra"'I--z,iiUI:IoiUIII place and the contrasting softness of the grass in the center, front of the stage. The majority of the people inside huddle on grass. The ones with meaty asses sit on the concrete, while bony-assed freaks walk around. I see quadrofiends, lunatics, professors, but no Arthur. I guess he's just a part of crowd. I decide to go down and join Lenny as, simul~..Lâ&#x20AC;˘cu'u'"" the red spotlight shines from its position on the grass, re~ects the polished steel of a guitar, stabbing my eyes, and the loudly-amplified instrument screams in agony. I almost fall the roof. I join Lenny outside a side gate, where the group can be tially seen. "Lenny, pain is in my ears and in my eyes," I tically sing. I watch the stage act, remembering how a very vous Lance once told me that each stage is a world. Sneaking in seems so easy here. The fence-bordered sphere leads to a jungle of plants, an ideal place for balling if don't mind bugs crawling up your ass. The other uc.u..... ol' wall, with a railing on top so no one falls out. If you can race the wall and into the crowd you're good-or nobody's (Remember, Lenny's the best-and I'm watching.) The here are not cops, usually, but guys hired by the promoter pending on the promoter's whims. Usually University (DUDES) who've got the "ins" with the promoter or his All in all, it looks like number twenty's gonna be no trouble Lenny, who is biding his time right now. It's hard to believe the same group is playing. Th~ has been toned down and the sound is pleasing to the ear. music permeates the atmosphere with a folk-rock haze. I soaking in the juxtaposition of a stirring bass and drum

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and a high-pitched, intricately woven harmony. I recognize to be (unmistakably) a Jackson Browne tune as I tune in words. . . . I thought that I was free but I'm just one more prisoner of time, alone within the boundaries of my mind . .. is a short instrumental break. . . . I thought I was ...

piercing three-part harmony. Cut. One voice: . . . A child. the music's good who cares about anything else. I acsmile. The cool November air fills my lungs. Good fucking

.,...._&..,a......,..,

just wen' give it to one of yo' friends," a rowdy voice says, the acoustic blend. My first thought is to respond. Then that the voice is addressing a haole guy a few feet to my (Lenny's on my left). The haole guy looks at the source of and says nothing. The source is a husky, Hawaiianguy, carrying a gleaming silver object. It is a flashlight. are a few other husky guys around him. promoter of tonight's concert has a mean streak. talking to you, you fuckah." The husky Hawaiian's voice rowdy now. It is outright hostility. "I wen' give yo' friend good whack with dis," he says, waving the flashlight. "I da bugga stay bleeding. Why you no go look?" The haole says nothing, doesn't move. "He tink he can sneak ovah da eh? I like see you try, you fucking haole." The last words sting. The connection is clear now. What he is saying is, " I hit one of yours." Does the husky Hawaiian of himself as " one of ours?" My face is on fire. When I turn to look at Lenny's, the glow in eyes suggest the same. There are god knows how many of I stand immobile. Me and Lenny, the husky security men, the two (an unsuspecting fool comes by) haoles form a curious Three sides rather than three angles. The inside of the is solid, though invisible. We are the edges of clear acrylic There is no straight route to any one of the other sides . â&#x20AC;˘ one had to hit his outer edges and make a radical turn. isn't time and space for that, especially when each side to rest on a different plane. Who created these walls? Were they there all the time? Moments fail to pass. I close my eyes to prevent their glow

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from being caught by the gleaming flashlight. I see it .:tJ..l.lJ..l.IJLII me as I provoke assault with taunts: " What you doing in brah? What you doing inside?" The gate swings open and about ten of them charge me, and any haoles that are nearby. I swing wildly, seeing blood from cut eyelids, broken noses, seeing blood on oncoming I see the flashlight coming towards my head. My hands 'are numb. I can no longer defend myself. I see it all even nothing has happened. I've just reopened my eyes. t<:uA'M:Tnlll still on their edge of their triangle side. You see, I read the Does the mpvie, or should I say silver screen extravaganza, a cast of god knows how many, end the same way? I Lenny. "You know what Lance would do in this situation." I Lenny. " Lance is dead!" Lenny screams. "The fuckah is runs up to the gate and starts pulling on it. I am frozen. " Hey, what you trying? " the husky Hawaiian says. "I hit you." Still numb I too leap toward the gate, and pull. The and other people on the outside, for some strange reason, to the fence and start pulling. I pull because I am burning because I didn't tear down the HIC walls to see Joplin died No! I am pulling because when I leaned back ..~.c........ wall in class I was listening to a message that Lance was ing out from the other side. I am pulling because of the way are so strategically placed, so remarkably calculated I feel the fence come crashing down. I see the husky whack Lenny with the flashlight. I jump on him. Lenny flashlight, runs into the inside crowd, throws the ~~ ..,.,. . . .,~~e~""~ when I see and hear the red spotlight shatter I cease to

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~'.~~~~~:,; ;!:,_ .,,.

····.• . / '

..,

NOTES

1 (

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ELLIOTT ANDERSON edits TriQuarterly and has had short tion appear in that publication and Extreme Unctions. He in the Department of English at Northwestern University. selections in this issue are taken from his novel-in-progress. JANE ANDERSON is producing Writers in Hawaii, a radio show which features readings by local and visiting of poetry and fiction. She also teaches in the Poets-in-tnt~-t;CniJG program and is a student at the University of Hawaii. PHILIP APPLEMA~ is a professor of English at Indiana sity. He has published two volumes of poetry, Kites on a Day and Summer Love and Surf (Vanderbilt University In 1974 he received a Fellowship in Creative Writing from National Endowment for the Arts.

ROBERT BUEHRIG teaches high-school English and is a ate student at the University of Hawaii. He was stationed in Philippines in 1968-69. LABAN CHANG admits he used to think disparagingly of This is his first publication. He is a graduate of the UnivA1~A1t:v. Hawaii and plans to enter law school in the fall. ERIC CHOCK is a graduate student in English at the of Hawaii and a co-ordinator of the Poets-in-the-Schools""'"'""'"'.,.. EARL COOPER teaches Mandarin and English Composition Leeward Community College and is developing a poetry ..,....n...,.. for seventh grade students in the Hawaii public schools. He presently working on a fantasy novel for children. GUY DAVENPORT is a professor of English at the University Kentucky. A reviewer, poet, translator and artist he has lished critical essays on modern poets and his stories have peared in the Martha Foley and 0. Henry Prize Story annuals. most recent book is Tatlinl (Scribner's, 1974). HOWARD DICKLER did his undergraduate work at Trinity lege, Hartford. He has written two novels and is presently plating his M.A. in English at the University of Hawaii.

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WEBB GARBISCH was born in Hilo, raised there and and Maui. She graduated from Carleton College in ..u.u::r.~. â&#x20AC;˘.~, Minnesota and is currently studying poetry at the of Hawaii. This is the first publication of her work. GOLDBARTH is currently a visiting assistant professor University. His collections of poetry are Jan . 31 (DouCoprolites (New Rivers Press), Optiks (Seven Woods and the forthcoming Keeping from Ithaca House.

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KUZMA edits Pebble, a poetry journal, and The Best Cellar pamphlet series. His recent books include Good News (Vik1973) and The Buffalo Shoot (Basilisk Press, 1974). New will be appearing in various publications. LIFSHIN is presently teaching in workshops and giving Her chapbooks and books include The Old House (Capra Press), Plymouth Women (Morgan Press), UpMadonna (The Crossing Press) and Thru Blue Dust (Basilisk MORALES is a songwriter-musician who recently from the University of Hawaii. This is his first short He wants to "thank Jackson Browne for the inspiration and Ann Kamimura for the perspiration and the

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PASTAN's chapbook, On the Way to the Zoo, has just been _ ....,..u,""'" by Dryad Press. Her new book of poems, Aspects of will be published by Liveright in May. SHIHAB works with the Texas Commission on the Arts Humanities, and has had work published in a variety of magincluding Modern Poetry Studies, Hiram Poetry Review, Sunstone Review.

SONG has lived in Hawaii most of her life. She has travthroughout Europe, Japan, Mexico and North Africa, and the fall will be leaving the University of Hawaii to attend school Boston. TAKAHARA's poems are from his first volume of collected . He is currently involved with Hale O'Ulu, an alternative for adolescents in Ewa, Hawaii. S THOMPSON teaches in the Creative Writing Program

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at the University of Hawaii. She has two collections of published, Artichoke and Other Poems and The Creation This spring she is teaching at SUNY. Buffalo. JOHN UNTERECKER teaches at the University of Hawaii and the author of two books of poetry, Dance Sequence (Kayak and the forthcoming Stone. He is the author of Voyager: A of Hart Crane (Farrar, Straus, Giroux) and a book for uuuu~足 The Dreaming Zoo (Henry Z. Walck). His poetry has appeared a. number of magazines.

JOYSYMPOSIUM PARTICIPANTS

JACQUES AUBERT is the author of L'Esthetique de James as well as numerous articles on Joyce in both French and ..........& ..... He was a visiting professor at the University of Hawaii in and is presently at the Universite Lyon II in France. BERNARD BENSTOCK is president of the James Joyce tion. He is the author of Joyce-Agains Wake and a. number articles on Joyce. He teaches at the University of Illinois. ROBERT BOYLE, S.J. teaches at Marquette University. He is author of Metaphor in Hopkins as well as numerous articles Joyce. LEON EDEL holds the Citizens Chair in English at the of Hawaii. He is the biographer of Henry James and has a. record of distinguished writing. He is also the author of Joyce: The Last Journey.

LESLIE FIEDLER is the Samuel L. Clemens Professor at Buffalo. He has given the major addresses at two James Joyce Symposia., Dublin, in 1971 and 1973 and is the of Love and Death in the American Novel, The Second Stone, End to Innocence as well as other books. PHILLIP HERRING teaches at the University of Wisconsin, is the editor of Joyce's Ulysses Notesheets in the British He has authored numerous articles on Joyce.

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TON LEVITT is the author of Bloomsday: An Interpretation James Joyce 's Ulysses as well as various articles on Joyce, Durrell and Arthur Miller. He teaches at Temple RALEIGH teaches at the University of California at BerkeHe is the author of Time, Place, and Idea: Essays on the and of a forthcoming book entitled The Chronology of and Leopold Bloom: Ulysses as Narrative. SENN has been " studying James Joyce for years. " He is European editor of the James Joyce Quarterly and has written number of articles and notes on Joyce. He spent the Fall 1974 ster as a visiting professor at the University of Hawaii. ARET SOLOMON is the author of Etern al Geomater: The Universe of Finnegans Wake and numerous articles on She was the Director of Hawaii James Joysymposium and the resident Joycean at the University of Hawai i. H STAPLES is the Nathaniel Ropes Professor of ComparaLiterature and English at the University of Cincinnati and the of Robert Lowell: The First Twenty Years; The Ireland of Jonah Barrington as well as many articles on James Joyce.