Common Place Vol. 5

COMMON PLACE NUMBERS 13, 14 & 15 | 2019 & 2020

Volume 5’s three numbers mix poetry and short prose with a research paper on factory-built housing.

Number 13 combines a set of short pieces with a longer, discursive poem loosely set in Berkeley.

Diverse Theses & De Minimis Common Place No. 13: Summer 2019

This new issue includes a set of short pieces and a longer-than-usual poem inspired by reading part of Charles Olson’s Maximus poems, which Robert Duncan mentioned in a book of interviews, A Poet’s Mind, that I read over the summer. The prose pieces and poems are in some ways complementary, reflecting how the two differ in what they convey and how they convey it. Both are self-reflecting, and what the self reflects has inner and outer origins.

History, Hayden White said, is narrative, which is to say that it’s loosely tethered to what it tries to describe.

Friedrich Hayek argued that description is a valid endeavor in the social sciences, and I do this always as an observant participant, to borrow the anthropologist Vasilina Orlova’s wonderful term. This is no science, of course, just some theses drawn from life, like the speculations of those Greeks, which are then set to music, although evidently not: an editor tells me that I’m no lyric poet.

DIVERSE THESES “In making a selection from the infinite flux of what has been, we give it a shape, and all shapes suggest some primitive species of starting point and imply some vaguely adumbrated end.”—Stefan Collini, The Nostalgic Imagination (Oxford, 2019), quoted by Jack Ingram in “Backwards,” TLS, 28 June 2019, p. 24.

1. Possible evidence for other worlds In correspondence with a Melbourne friend, I mentioned applying quantum theory to life, how what we try to grasp eludes us and how so much that seems solid proves not to be. This could be mere contingency, of course, and not the physicist’s conjuring act or the cat in Schrödinger’s box, reminiscent of another in Zen lore, neither cat particularly lucky. But let’s go with it, extend quantum theory to love, for example, with its time-bound, evaporating truths.

I read, vaguely apropos of this, an introduction to five short stories about women written by Robert Musil. He was praised for writing about love. I haven’t read the stories yet, but love isn’t easy to write about. I wrote a letter to the aforementioned friend that accurately recounted an experience, then I wondered later how it would be received. A film arises when I think of the event, but it’s not a film I could exactly make. A given afternoon is a series of incidents that string together as a whole—my correspondent made this point, how things have a beginning and an end, although she was thinking of a relationship’s trajectory, as opposed to its playing out over several hours. Yet this is also a whole, especially in memory: I remember it whole.

I read almost accidentally of the death of a woman friend from undergraduate days. Our friendship was derailed by my inability to make love to her when she wanted me. It took me a long time to get past this block with women, desire inhibited by inexperience. In a truly crazy gesture, she arranged for me to lose my virginity to her mentally unstable friend. I liked the woman, but the experience was horrid and it seemed to unhinge my classmate, also.

Before this, though, we spent time driving around St. Louis in her aunt’s Chevy. We went to the Bellefontaine Cemetery, which has some remarkable Victorian tomb statuary, and out into the country. I found her an easy companion, and these travels were memorable.

My friend died in 2007 at the age of 59, I read. Her survivors didn’t provide a cause. Unlike me, she had stayed on in St. Louis, although her father made motorboats in Florida. When I noted her death on social media, a colleague wrote that he’d worked with her and found her a helpful mentor. Her given name was from the Greek, she told me: “Bearer of Victory.” I used to pronounce every vowel when I said it. She was taller than me, with long blonde hair. She had sufficient funds to buy Marimekko fabric by the bolt when we were in Manhattan together. On that occasion, when I proposed that we share a bed, she responded, “What’s the point?” So, I slept on the floor.

Yet I really did enjoy her friendship. Last night, writing about her, I was reminded of a trip I made in college to visit my sister at New Year’s. She had a guest, a woman around 30 who said she preferred women to men. At one point we danced slow and I got a hard on, which made her laugh. Yet this was a new and singular experience for me. I think it reflected her having taken herself out of contention, relieving me of any inner pressure to respond.

In an interview, Robert Duncan used the term “male lesbian.” I’ll have to look at it again to get his definition right, but my own would be any man who’s attracted to women because he identifies with them, in whole or in part.

Duncan went on to define “bisexual” in this context. My sexuality might be better described as hermaphroditic in that I have masculine and feminine aspects that are fluidly present. Fluctuations in my weight and body shape growing up—being initially quite tiny and then ballooning in grade school and into high school, and then losing weight, all without understanding the mechanisms—caused some anguish and confusion. It’s been helpful to see, as the I Ching argues, that these traits pair internally as complements, Receptivity and Creativity, each with its contingent moments of ascendancy.

A good friend has noted that he knew early on that he was homosexual. Even as a boy, I saw sexuality as playfulness, and my initial problem with women as sexual partners was my failing to see that lovemaking with them, too, was improvisational, a game played with the senses.

As a boy, I played such games with other boys, but had girls been available, it might have been them. I was in love with several when I was young, one deeply enough to be stung when we quarreled. I had one close friend, Paul, who caused me heartache when he moved away. I was angry in a way that scared and embarrassed me, so that when he came back later to visit, I couldn’t bring myself to meet him. I still regret this, because he was a good friend. Youth is especially fraught because we don’t know what we don’t know, and are caught out by our actions, which seem inexplicable to us at the time and later. We examine them, but they remain blotches on life’s fabric, still there when time’s distance has faded so much else.

There was a girl I loved in grade school. She was quite beautiful, I thought. She had a dog that I let run with its leash on and she panicked, thinking it would choke. It must have happened before, so her anxiety was triggered. I had no idea, and was taken aback by her reaction—she seemed set against me. It’s not in my nature to turn against a friend, so this too was a shock.

Duncan used the term “male lesbian” in relation to Native American shamanism (as discussed by Jaime de Angulo). He defined “shamanism” as a matter of crossing or transgressing gender and other boundaries. He defined “bisexuality” as the desire for a partner who could play both roles, masculine and feminine. He bemoaned the loss of conviviality, which is the desire for others without the need to have sex with them (therefore avoiding the coercive element that the conflating of sex and love brings into play). And he pointed to marriage as an alternative to breaking off a relationship—a means to keep it going, to put it positively.

Collectively, this relates to some things I want to touch on here. I’m neither a male lesbian nor a shaman, but I’ve crossed boundaries, usually with specific consequences. Having tried and failed to mix sex with close friendship, I’m lately an advocate of or convert to conviviality. The dilemma, which apparently extends to physical love in general (as Duncan notes), is indeed that marriage is where the close relationships want to go, need to go, to continue. It’s possible that I didn’t test this theory adequately, but the stress of boundary transgression shouldn’t be underestimated. Goethe understood this and warned against it, but I hoped he wasn’t right.

As a result, we failed to form an enduringly close friendship. But is this true? It’s hard to know how other possible courses of action might have gone. When I think back, it’s also clear that many things are in play when an offer is put on the table, including sexuality and ego. The spark of desire is one factor among several. The sense that a relationship makes is rarely how it appears initially. Both parties can be breaking through some blockage inside themselves, which may be the point. Understanding that it was is only clear in retrospect, and at different paces.

Lovemaking occasions a particular intimacy. The interludes are especially memorable, but much else happens that becomes indelible. Truly close friendships have aspects of this, and it may be that age and the falling away of the tics that dogged relationships earlier, the baggage brought along from benighted past experience, free them to have a deeper intimacy. We also learn the limits of destiny—how even when something uncanny happens, it isn’t enough.

We imagine we can glide through life, but find that it’s a minefield. Fragments of the past are like dynamite, and they’re always there, surfacing inevitably and inconveniently in the present. A range of feelings attaches to love’s talismans and places, everything from guilt to longing. As we live it—testing life’s limits, trying and failing to do no harm—we seem to be repeating old mistakes, but mostly we’re facing new situations and applying the wrong lessons to them.

2. Space-time disturbances That “something uncanny” was an bona fide of authentication. No matter how indelible, such markers of connection may pay off long-held expectations, but they come with no instructions. My thesis, on seeing it, was that we are a cohort of time travelers who find each other in life after life, and use the intervals to set things up. The origin is something that my psychic friend said to me about my wife and daughter—how long those connections stretch back, changing their stripes. No instructions, so we do what we can. And there’s a kind of conviction about it, because we saw what we saw. Yet life rolls on, everything gets frayed as missteps multiply. Is it really the “whole” my correspondent mentioned, bounded by a start and a finish? I hope not.

For some time, I’ve been awakened by vivid dreams of hangings and beheadings—executions that play out in my head with great realism and diversity. This morning, I had a vision of two of the basket cases in which severed heads were placed. Why am I having these dreams? My first thought was past lives, but their variety argues against this.

Then I remembered an article I read about the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami in Tohoku—how certain survivors of that disaster were plagued by dreams in which the dead recounted their horrific experiences. What was happening was that some survivors were, unwittingly, mediums for spirits who needed to tell their stories because they were caught up in their experience and unable to get past it.

This may explain what’s happening—that I am an inadvertent medium who these executed dead seek out to share their experience and get free of it. I imagine a spirit world in which I’m seen as a portal they find and pass through on their way, finally, to somewhere else. Unlike the survivors in Tohoku, I’m not overwhelmed by them, but sometimes the experiences are realistic enough that I find them disturbing. A working theory about their origins makes them less so.

3. Reflections on writing In an essay about writing in The Little Virtues, Natalia Ginzburg notes the shifting emotions that arise, how the act of writing can be pleasurable, necessary, and hard going. Her point is the necessity of writing and how life can interfere with that, put it out of reach despite our desire. Eventually I started to identify myself as an editor and writer, activities I share with Ginzburg, who made her living as a book editor. She published novels and books of essays, finding an audience, but—unlike Trollope and his mother—was never financially independent because of this. The money her books produced was extra. I also made my living as an editor, and my own writing is a vocation, to use Ginzburg’s word, “something I do,” as I have since childhood.

A vocation is a summoning or a calling. “Inner necessity” might be another way to define it, but without the compulsion that necessity seems to imply. A lot of writers on writing describe it as a practice, but “something I do” is truer to my own approach. I divide this “something” into three parts: done for money, done out of friendship, and done entirely of my own volition. The first shifted from writing to editing, because I made a good living as an editor. The second has been a long collaboration with my main graduate school advisor around our shared interests. The third is whatever I choose to write: letters, poems, and brief prose pieces. In 2008, I started this personal journal to honor David Diderot, who passed manuscripts around to his friends, and Virginia Wolff, who started a press in order to publish her work exactly as she wanted.

Ginzburg wrote poems, then stories, and finally novels. The Little Virtues are personal essays. The novel I’m reading, Happiness, As Such, is epistolary. It’s also experimental, I would say, in that it shifts its vantage point. The question of form seems quite important. I’m not much good with long pieces, although I can generate sets of shorter ones like this. I give them titles and even imagine they have themes, but that’s doubtful. If anything ties them together, it’s the season of their writing. The last one I wrote spanned a year, interrupted by a comment my daughter made that I had to digest, so two seasons, maybe, distinct yet related.

These letters, poems, and short prose pieces lend themselves to specific subject matter, because they differ as means or vehicles of self-expression. My letters to friends are often rambling essays which permit themselves to be discursive and informal. Short pieces (I hesitate to call them essays) are more pointed if polemical; or they sidestep digression by spreading it out across a set. Poems provide a scrim of varying porosity or opacity. Only poems can say certain things, because—unlike prose—they can touch on life without needing to explain it.

4. Narcissism’s taxonomy A correspondent wrote describing how psychology parses narcissism. She located her field between neuroscience and philosophy—an interesting placement. Narcissism to me falls into two categories, ordinary and toxic. The first, which takes in solipsism and self-regard, is universal, wrapped up in ego, and sometimes harmful to self and others. The second overlaps and I think may be overtaken by behaviors attributed to sociopaths and psychopaths. There’s a border area to toxic transgression, and sociopaths and psychopaths are on the far side of it.

I took a semester of abnormal psychology at my first university. It was mostly sexual. The male professor said that knitting was sublimated masturbation. He may have been joking. The remembered content of this course came in handy when I ghostwrote a letter a psychiatrist signed. Sometimes you need letters of this sort, and he was willing to sign them. My letter was speculative: under the pressures of that, this could result. It was probably true, now that I’ve read Robert Duncan’s account of a similar situation. When I studied abnormal psychology, it was clear to me that much of it applied to me in some fashion, so what was this “normal”?

Ordinary narcissism turns toxic when the heart is injured. I read an account of this in a book by A.H. Almaas, The Point of Existence, that’s mostly a long riff on Dennis Winnicott, the child psychologist. Winnicott posits that we are pure beings as toddlers, and the hard knocks life deals us—gravity, the actual limits of our tiny bodies, the impositions of adults—make us wrap ourselves in ego as a kind of protective layer. This is what Wilhelm Reich called character armor, and he was speaking of adults for whom the ego had become a hindrance. Almaas observed that because love immerses us accidentally in moments of being, if our lover breaks it off, it’s like being forced to quit cold turkey from a habit-forming intoxicant. Not understanding the mechanism, we try obsessively to recover what we lost instead of shedding our shattered ego and letting ourselves “just be,” consciously embracing being as an acceptably human state.

The Zen philosopher Dōgen Eihei enters the picture here for me, arguing that being is a state like any other, so our awareness or consciousness of it is more on the order of recognizing it. To put this in another way, recovery from narcissistic grief and acting out means that we recognize our ego when it surfaces. Imperfectly, tentatively, this enables us to be better humans—better to others and of course better to ourselves, more willing to let life unfold, tell us what to do, and less prone to cast blame angrily or to feel hurt, humiliated, or spurned. Narcissism makes too much of us and too little. We puff ourselves up and beat ourselves up, delusively. Toxic narcissism dials this up: we resolve to puff up and beat down all comers, sometimes even us. Ordinary narcissism is more readily seen through, despite the pain involved. We can recover.

A nun wrote or said that we are better than our worst moments. Is there a point at which their sheer accumulation overwhelms that possibility? Winston Churchill thought that the Nazi leaders should be rounded up and shot. The trials were meant to establish their guilt and set a precedent for the dispassionate administration of justice. It worked in Germany, but it didn’t work in Japan, whose hidebound elite is still trying to revise history to conform to a view reminiscent of diehard partisans of the Confederacy, with their War of Northern Aggression.

The shrine visits and the government’s on-again, off-again attitude toward wartime guilt and reparations reflect this. Yet the majority of Japanese citizens acknowledge the actual legacy of Japan’s imperialist-militarist past and resist right-wing efforts to change its pacifist constitution.

The recent suicide of Jeffrey Epstein reminded me of the nun’s comment. A Catholic prelate, an advisor to Pope Benedict XVI on the issue of priests molesting boys in their charge, described such priests as incorrigible— an evil that had to be confronted and uprooted. Epstein appeared to fall in this category, preying incessantly on underage women. The question that arises from his suicide is its motivation. Hitler and Goebbels also committed suicide rather than face the wrath of the crowd or death by tribunal. Epstein’s victims feel he cheated them of a reckoning.

Suicide is an assertion of control in a situation that offers little or none of it. Epstein’s world had come apart, and—as in the game of go—you don’t play a sequence out if it has a known ending. Narcissism in its toxic forms seem to be about control, organizing life so your whims are at the center. As long as you can keep the game going, keep control of it, anything goes.

As the Vatican prelate noted, some narcissists are evil. If there are shreds of humanity, as the nun reminds us, are they real or just part of the act? How psychopathic are narcissists like this? And how, as a society, should we deal with them? Epstein’s death exceeded what justice could have demanded. To be confronted by his victims was seen by both as the greater suffering.

When Norway executed Vidkun Quisling, its wartime fascist leader, it repealed for a day its constitutional ban on capital punishment, acknowledging the gravity of his betrayal and the lives it cost. This placed him in the same situation that he’d thrust on his countrymen, using state murder as a political weapon. The crimes of Anders Breivik, a terrorist and mass murderer now serving a 21-year sentence, might seem to deserve a similar fate, but his punishment is tempered by Norway’s unwillingness to sacrifice its hard-won values to provocation. So, he lives on and will eventually be released. He seems unrepentant, the mark to me of a real monster.

I described my theory of narcissism to a friend. There are three categories: ordinary, toxic, and monstrous. You don’t see monsters now like the militant atheist Sigismondo Malatesta, who had two priests hanged before him on his deathbed for offering to hear his confession.

Monsters are part of our human capacity. Men are said to be more monstrous than women, and It seems true at the margins—men are evildoers at an epic scale, but everyday life is filled with the lesser evils that women and children also inflict. Mea culpa—every monstrous act I ever committed lives on in my stricken conscience, but garden-variety monsters like me can seek absolution for their sins and repent of them. Epic monsters retain this possibility, the nun reminds us. History has its enlightened humanists who started out as ruthless warlords. These instances of unexpected, fundamental change are exceptions that show the contingent nature of life and the situational nature of ethics. They point to the spectra of character that the enneagram depicts. Its thesis is that the flaws embedded in human nature are early coping strategies and we can draw on insights from our lived experience to transcend them.

Dōgen Eihei’s radical nondualism also sees our spectra of behavior as implicitly human. We never lose the capacity to be flawed, and we share that capacity with our fellows, but we retain the capacity to live otherwise.

What’s sometimes called the art of living speaks to this—loving our neighbors as ourselves, as Jesus taught, and extending self-care to others. We do this because we gradually understand the consequences of our actions and connect them to flaws that we always seemed to be “who we are.” As we experience the limitations and pitfalls of our flawed ways of life, we can end up knowing too much to continue as we are. The knowledge fills us with shame, and all we can humanly do is change—a slow, uncertain, very human process.

Let him who is without sin cast the first stone, Jesus also taught. In the era of social media, crowd-shaming and the assignment of guilt as a matter of not-to-be-questioned belief are prevalent. I see it as a holdover from adolescence, a peak period for behavior of this sort.

What others think of us, what we think ourselves, is a constantly shifting thing. Much of what we do in life, however flawed it may be, reflects our willingness to experiment, to test the limits of what it means to be human. If toddlers construct an ego to deal with their hard knocks, we emerge disabused. What constraints are fundamental, what actions cause grief—learning this, we do less harm, but we also learn how to live well with ourselves and others in this milieu. It’s a kind of heightened realism that attracts us more than the distorted one we thought we knew.

This describes most of us, in reality. There are monsters out there, but fewer than we imagine.

5. Friendship between women and men, unfolding A friend translated a Chinese saying: “Fated to meet but not to stay together.” She wrote it out in Chinese as calligraphy and gave it to me as a gift. We both have some experience with this, I said, mentioning La Rochefoucauld, the author of such maxims as “There are only three cures for love, none of them foolproof.” His life was a series of reversals, but he found a close woman friend, Madame de Lafayette. What makes for a close friendship, I asked, and why, between men and women, are they so fraught? Attraction, affection, and desire overlap, and we encounter each other “out of order,” yet sometimes feel the hand of destiny. What do we do with it when we sense it? It took me a long time to work this out.

We intuit destiny in different ways. It’s like we arrived here with certain expectations, a kind of foretelling or foreshadowing of our life’s narrative to which events answer. As it unfolds, we start to see how destiny works—that it’s triggered by intuitions about others, but offers no guarantees as to the outcomes. We construct a narrative around these events and constantly rework it in light of experience. While life is a series of wholes, episodes with beginnings and ends, as my Melbourne friend asserts, the important human connections persist, even after death.

(Stendhal made this a theme.) Another correspondent applies this idea to human history, arguing that the collapse of a political system or the failure of a collective dream of progress is never final. When we look back, Walter Benjamin pointed out, we find emissaries from the present alive in earlier periods. It follows that emissaries from the future are also among us, together with fragments of all periods, vying for significance in our here and now.

Some say that life is best considered in seven-year increments that, grouped together, define broad periods within our lifespan, each of which is about some things and not others. (This isn’t a very elegant way of putting it, and of course there are many exceptions.) To the extent that we learn things from each period, life may progress dialectically, but—like destiny’s hand—this imposes a narrative on life that we may “make true” by artful revision.

And many seem to live without much sense of a narrative at all. This is relevant because my calligrapher friend, an historian, shares my view that “narrative” is a valid term when it comes to describing life.

My sense of friendships between women and men is that they depend on an asynchronous open-endedness to thrive. You vow not to possess and yet still honor the unfolding connection. You share an acceptance and empathy, leavened by affection, that appreciates the luxury of being free of love’s complications. Marriage too moves toward friendship, a rediscovery.

Heartbreak is love’s hazard, as La Rochefoucauld noted. A close friendship between a woman and a man consciously seeks to forestall it. Heartbreak puts you out of sync with life. You close it off, fixated on what you think you lost. Only when you let yourself swim again in time do you recover. “The glittering sea,” a translator of Horace’s Odes put it: a half-drowned sailor drying his clothes in a temple and, we infer, planning another journey.

Bon voyage, I say to him.

6. Profiles of inference I’m working on an oral history of one friend, and once wrote an introduction to the oral history of another. Of three oral histories in my possession, two are full-blown—by people who write them for a living—and one assembles interviews conducted by the subject’s friends. Writing “my past and thoughts,” as Alexander Herzen put it, makes an oral history feel superfluous. But the presence of interlocutors may prompt thoughts that might not surface in self-reflection. It’s also more spontaneous than a written text. For real spontaneity, though, consider the profiles we create inadvertently as our online transactions are tracked as data points and analyzed.

Amazon provides a version of this when it offers us related goods, sometimes prompted by an immediate purchase, but also gathered as “things you might like.” Ads washing up on social media are franker, I think, in responding to the edge conditions of web forays. But they may also be calculated bets that our demographic might bite for someone/something like this.

It’s possible, I read, to obtain these profiles. They’re reminiscent of personality tests that paint a portrait in mannerisms, all the tics that surface as we encounter other humans. INFJs crave society and then, quickly drained by it, rush off precipitously in order to recover. The enneagram’s character types similarly touch on live wires of self-recognition: how charm wards off pain, for example, and how gluttony is the worst sin because it permits all the others.

Ubiquitous monitoring, which the CCP imposes on China, constructs profiles based on tracked data and then uses them for social control by turning privileges on or off. We do the same, of course, but limit the data. It’s still possible here to avoid being tracked, but you have to work at it and a lack of certain data can be held against you by financial institutions. What’s oppressive about both regimes is the algorithmic certainty of their cause and effect.

“Nothing is hidden,” Dōgen Eihei remarked. It seems true—every last thing will surface in time, so it’s tempting to reveal it yourself. The liberating move of living openly is better than late-in-life confessions, but both can still make you look silly. The real question is if anyone will care. The Stasi investigator in The Lives of Others was focused on figures of cultural importance, even celebrity; ordinary people were left to their neighbors to denounce. The CCP now has block wardens on a mass scale, but the sheer numbers involved, even with AI doing the sorting, means triage. And workarounds emerge, of course, when the algorithm shuts people off from something like a train ticket. For a price, scalpers stand ready to help.

If I write openly about the ambiguities of my life, it’s to lend support to the idea of nuance. We’re presented with a binary world, but some realize early on that this is a hoax, and the people who see things this way are deluded. I write to make sense of a life that never entirely makes sense, and will probably never align with how convention wants to construct it. One of life’s dilemmas is that we have to live with these conventions, even if they’re shams. If we mostly live as privately as possible, it’s to put some distance from our lives and them. Yet this may be an era when it’s better to go public with our nonconformance so we can quickly find our cohort and our cohort’s cohort, parading our idiosyncrasies in a spirit of solidarity.

Sources Robert Duncan’s interviews are in A Poet’s Mind, edited by Christopher Wagstaff, New Atlantic, 2012. The tsunami story is from Richard Lloyd Parry, “Ghosts of the Tsunami,” London Review of Books, vol. 36, no. 3, 6 February 2017, pp. 13–17, excerpted from his book. Natalia Ginzburg’s essay “My Vocation” is in The Little Virtues, translated by Dick Davis, Arcade, 2017, pp. 69–88. A.H. Almaas’s gloss on Dennis Winnicott is in The Point of Existence, Shambhala, 2000. Sister Helen Prejean, an opponent of capital punishment, is the nun I cited.

Hee-Jin Kim discusses Dōgen Eihei’s radical non-duality in Dōgen on Meditation and Thinking, SUNY, 2006.

My edition of the Maxims of François de la Rochefoucauld is a 1982 Penguin edition translated by Leonard Tancock. See Claudio Naranjo’s Ennea-type Structures, Gateways, 1991, for the character flaws that system depicts, insights into which Naranjo credits to his teacher, Oscar Ichazo. Letters, conversations, encounters, and manuscripts also prompted this, for which many, many thanks.

DE MINIMIS Prologue Does he declaim, climbing the stairs?

Poetry’s king, waving ancient books, the macaw and the rooster gone, Cadillac parked on the street, his lights a beacon in the dark when deer come through the fence (I heard).

Does he declaim? I’ve heard him yelling, his guitar. He looks more and more the role.

in late August, wanderers in the east.

August found us living on the hillside above the stadium, a brief vestibule to marriage that gave us a first son, wanderer with his parents, imbiber of our wedding day champagne, who made his presence felt on the train near Edmonton. “I’m pregnant,” said with the certainty of an oldest sister.

I, Minimis, am a poet too. This shared place is diagonally linked, visibly, audibly tied.

I’ve lived here thirty-five years, this house.

In storms, airplanes descend snorting.

In late afternoons, a dog, craving humans, croons his loneliness. I hear them both.

Behind the one, another, even smaller.

Looking up, the house rises impressively owing to the pitch. Looking out, the garden, yet another place, brick-floored, fenced, an expanse of plants around a terrace, path deceptively foreshortened when the trees form the forest where it’s set, a fairy tale if I chose to tell it, territory unpossessed.

I, Minimis, only half believe in possession.

What we own slips out of grasp. Women give themselves entirely, then renege. We too come and go, or stay on provisionally.

A digression Sometime in March, driving east, we stopped at Little America, four a.m., heard a waitress tell a truck driver she was pregnant with his child.

And later, somewhere in Wyoming, a woman wouldn’t sell me cokes because “Indians in your car.” No, they’re Chinese. “Oh, in that case.”

And before that, in Salt Lake City, the boys pumping gas did their work then, finished, rolled tires at us, godless hippies in their estimation.

Later, we lived off Telegraph, Dwight near the corner store. I dropped acid.

This was summer, nineteen seventy.

Marriage Across a counter, that connection, instances of which run life to life, find their line. How smitten I was, how doubtful such a one could be courted. Yes, her sister said, write.

I, Minimis, awoke to find, surprisingly, offspring were desired, so marriage loomed into view. I wrote the letter, projective prose, one could say. Sent, It garnered no firm commitment, but she returned in May and we married

A list If I, Minimis, inventoried this place’s foibles, then there’d be instances of marijuana’s pungent smell, how the same six people ask for money, now gaunt, now bold, now dying.

How a neighbor, temporary, set out to mesmerize the block, fucking.

How the sound of it is like a dog the way it cuts through all else.

Only the sound, not the scent, the way that beds are like boats pitching in their waving rooms, the window sill a jetty’s edge.

An echo “An American sound,” Peter said as the train wooed the Flats, horned its way south. This was another song.

Poetic notes An open field, per Robert Duncan, is like a continent one ambles onto, as a woman is to an infant or a lover, he doesn’t say, when A to B isn’t the itinerary, when digressions rule the afternoon, are its essence.

Book four of Paterson released him, Duncan says of W.C. Williams. More poured out of that source, unplanned.

I, Minimis, have more, too. Plans for me are names of things: food, items, tasks.

“Imagination is my ground,” Duncan adds.

Good intentions here form a collage, or, in the midst of it, try to make light appear, Fiat Lux, but that’s self-created, Duncan notes, a city reinventing itself.

Topography is a clue, although the hills became the flats except for Albany’s.

Climate and topography mark progression, their intercourse produces weather, views.

An interlude The shades of poets reappear, carrying signs of judgement, posthumous reputations worn like bandanas were, a code for those we intend to suffer.

The town rattles on, plans becoming bulks of stuff.

In media res I, Minimis, live on Arch Street, fourteen hundred; Chez Panisse is four intersections west, then south.

An event Wing sent a cup. I love her blue but it’s a tempest, grey and white.

Walking downstairs, she stopped in front of a painting that stems from Matisse, his model, his last student. “This is a good painting,” Wing said. I told my gallery friend Jack I was relieved. Would they have taken back Henrik’s volcano?

This is high drama on Arch Street.

The museum here exists in parts.

Classical and contemporary, only the latter by friends save this one, cousin by marriage, Janie, the cusp where modern slips into history.

The cusp Where now is that cusp? A fault, maybe, ready to collapse the junk that mars the beauty hereabouts.

There was a region here once, architects proclaimed. Slippage legislated and imposed, “It will be dense.” Bulk rules. Diagram City and its clerks, date-stamped on issue, untouched by hearts that race at form, untouchable now, such beating hearts, taste left to Alice and the pizza line.

Mortality Now only two, a duo, aristocracy and immigrant like their elders.

There were three. The other’s heart gave out in Bolinas, coastal town of poets, with its missing road sign and channel, dangerous to swim.

Dead of complications, he read, and born in Butte, a favored son.

Uphill, up steps, an aristocrat with books, a terrace, views in two directions, connections near and far. A blow, a blow.

Vast as the sea it once was, shallow, teeming with things like nightmares, but larger, or only vegetarians, mouths agape, their bones sidled up to mountainsides, if sidled has some sense of smashed.

The remaining two journeyed there and back; these creatures traveled east until the Rockies stopped them, a slap audible a long way off. Montana looms.

A doorway—staring in, contrast strong and hard to see, someone knows where, and instinctively.

Off Bolinas, but no, off Stinson, these creatures test the shoals and spit out rubber and flesh.

My daughter! My daughter!

I wail, and my silent fear’s a talisman against the sharks, Our Lady or some local saint dangling from a wetsuit collar.

Someone stopped. The rest, hereafter, is all that’s left.

Visitors A mother and her son sing a childhood song. The driveway makes it slope away. The gate scrapes loudly as they enter and close it behind them. Cries follow from the baby, audible even now, colic maybe, ailment of infants, grasping their guts.

In/out of dreams At night, a creature out of Bosch visits. I felt someone sit down next to me where I slept alone.

A materialist view of all possible phenomena papers over gaps left by emptiness, pregnant as they are with the uncanny, as if night made its garden here, near my solid bed amid bookshelves, paintings, things my daughter left.

I shook it off, I wrote later, dreams being involuntary, pushed at us like clips surfacing in the ether.

A lone mosquito joined the chorus and I fled from bed to bed, pursued only by my early-rising wife, who lit the room up to read the clock. Six it was, early for Saturday. She started to find me there, but it was quieter.

They are our worst predators, I read, these tiny flying reedy things, blood on their minds. I, Minimis, am a treat they seek out, like lamb in the spring.

Thus, reality blurs with what minds produce, painting from the same box.

Bosch just set it down. I see it yet, gelatinous, feasting, a kind of horror that arrives unbidden, night terror.

In winter The road south from Olema weaves through encroaching woods. Nearer Bolinas it opens out. Along the lagoon there’s a stretch that crawls in summer.

I slept alone in an upstairs cot. The sea and wind lay beachward half a block.

The Way comes and goes, the I Ching says, handing us a rhythm then disregarding it.

Oceans swell and fall to the moon’s pull.

Its movements trace stories on the floor.

Certainty arises, tangible at moments as feeling or conviction, and we know it.

It’s never clear how the remnants add up.

Shells, rocks and sea glass aren’t a beach, just ephemera with histories attached, eyes rolled back in ecstatic blankness.

Between zero and infinite you need a rule that unfolds to catch the prime numbers spiking up amid ordered life, like the rocks out there with their gulls, seals, and sharks.

Memory too has truths and perils. Shrines litter its byways, left by time in disrepair.

The trek seems daunting, a pilgrimage without its Compostela—Stinson Beach.

The street How long together, these opposites?

Post-carousing, he lists complaints while she demurs sotto voce until at the kitchen window, enraged, returns held-back ripostes. Servants are another topic: to wait for them.

But a compromise is worked out.

Several fast cars, characteristic when throttled, signal movement.

Cats and women, moving, yowl.

A dying parent leads a couple to speculate about conception.

“I think I’m too old,” one says.

“Six months to get the drugs out,” the other answers, not hearing.

Conditional futures The grave is tended, a blue-wire fence around it, the marker slants, a nod to modernity, to the dream of progress to which he contributed, manning a bulldozer, clearing a path.

His namesake’s post explains how despite accidents of gender she took up his name, lived up to it, writing out the village stories told her by his former neighbors.

The ice gave way, the weight was too much for it, plunging him with it into the icy waters of the Angara River. His name floated east until she caught it.

How far they fly, winter’s birds, and yet return along the river or under wood houses’ eaves.

I imagine this, thinking of her, graveside in the village summer.

Her son will soon be grown, this place a memory of youth.

Those who knew it as it was will all be gone. Only the words live on, their memories’ archive.

A line dies out, a promise goes missing. Where did progress go?

Tie your Pioneer scarf, young hero and set your mind where your name points you, far away and back again.

Common Place No. 13 SUMMER 2019

Š 2019 by John J. Parman | complace.j2parman.com Written, edited, and produced in Berkeley, California (Calligraphy by Peiting C. Li)

Number 14 summarizes year one of my research as a Visiting Scholar in Architecture at U.C. Berkeley.

THAT WAS THEN, THIS IS NOW: NOTES ON THE EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRIALIZED HOUSING COMMON PLACE NO. 14 | AUTUMN 2019

THAT WAS THEN, THIS IS NOW: NOTES ON THE EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRIALIZED HOUSING

By John J. Parman Introduction “The technology that carries the promise of mass production too easily turns multiplication into forms of degrading repetition.” – Colin St. John Wilson1 “I wonder, as for the future of our profession and for society as a whole, what the hell we’re going to be doing in 20 years? We’re all going to be living in 1,000-square-foot apartments, because that’s all we can afford to have.” – Chuck Davis2 In the early 1970s, Professor Richard Bender led a team in the Department of Architecture at U.C. Berkeley that evaluated Operation Breakthrough, an industrialized housing demonstration program of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development—HUD—under Nixon appointee George Romney, a former CEO of American Motors, a car company. I was part of the team, and Bender and I concluded at the time that HUD and the various large companies involved in Operation Breakthrough misjudged the actual productivity of conventional construction. Despite industry fragmentation and regulatory differences from locale to locale, contractors made effective use of lightweight power tools, and components, materials, and products that were prefabricated to standard dimensions. Building sites were industrialized and their output could be readily tailored to local markets.

Today, after a 45-year hiatus, factory production of housing is enjoying a comeback the San Francisco Bay Area and elsewhere. National and even global companies are offering modular housing “products,” including volumetric and panelized systems. Cross-laminated timber (CLT) is also in the picture as component of multistory timber buildings. The high cost of conventional multi-unit housing construction in the Bay Area’s urban core gives modular housing an edge. As a result, Factory OS, the largest local manufacturer, has succeeded when earlier ventures like Blu Homes and ZETA failed.

For industrialized housing to have long-term viability, it will have to prove its competitiveness on cost, schedule, technical performance, and design quality against conventional construction. In the early 1970s, conventional construction readily beat factory-build systems on each of these measures. The so-called Great Recession of 2008 pummeled the Bay Area’s construction industry, depleting its workforce of experienced people. The overall cost of housing rose, driven by a glacially slow entitlements process, fast-rising land costs, prevailing wage agreements in the urban core (raising the cost of labor), and growing inequality among prospective homebuyers. Factory-built housing is a response to these factors. If they change, will it persist? Right now, it has an edge on cost, schedule, and technical performance. Its weak point is customization—even panel systems are less flexible than conventional construction. But factory-built systems are acceptable now in part because what for-profit and non-profit developers and some tech companies offer are variations on fairly standard solutions, each aimed at a price point.

While a downturn in new housing starts is widely expected, that event may prove less significant to regional companies like Factory OS than the evolution of housing development in a broader sense. That larger context takes in regulation, technology, lifestyles, and many other factors, known and unknown. As they reshape the design-build-occupy-service-upgrade trajectory, the landscape could transform disruptively. The distinction we make now between factory-built and conventional construction could be meaningless. An outlier like Katerra, which wants to optimize across that trajectory, may the real model. Or it may have arrived too soon.

This paper considers “then and now,” but has “next” in mind. But my speculations are more urban than technological. The question is still how region can finally get the housing it needs and deserves.

Industrialized Housing in the U.S. through Operation Breakthrough Operation Breakthrough followed earlier efforts by the federal government to industrialize housing production. During the Johnson Administration, HUD and New York City’s Urban Development Corporation tried to renovate older apartment buildings with prefabricated units. Two decades earlier, immediately after World War II, the Veterans Emergency Housing Program (or Wyatt Program, for Wilson Wyatt, the Truman Administration “housing czar”), anticipating a shortage of middle-income housing for returning veterans, set an ambitious goal in 1946 of building 2.7 million new units per year, partly in wartime factories retooled for prefabrication. Had it gone forward, the Wyatt Program would have involved the federal government directly in a mass housing strategy, extending the central planning model adopted by the U.S. Government in World War II.3 Operation Breakthrough and the UDC project reflected the production goal set by the 1968 Housing and Urban Development Act—a goal similar to the Wyatt Program’s 22 years earlier: Building or rehabilitating 26 million housing units in 10 years—a rate much higher than any previous production level. To achieve this goal, HUD anticipated in 1969 a progressive increase in required construction of housing units over the 10-year period, reaching 2.6 million units in 1973.4 Nixon and Romney sought to enlist the private sector to provide housing at a mass scale. They assumed that if housing could be produced like cars, higher volume would make units cheaper. Harold Finger, who came to HUD from NASA to run Operation Breakthrough, believed that the advent of housing manufacture would disrupt the conventional housing “industry” and cut through the regulatory and labor issues that contributed to its fragmentation and inefficiency.

This optimism was shared by the private sector. Part of it was grounded in the belief that the U.S. Government would be an active partner in housing production.

Most Operation Breakthrough manufacturers anticipated Government housing programs would be a large market for their housing systems. In 1969, HUD estimated that 4 million new housing units would be constructed under Government housing programs during the next decade, an average of 400,000 a year. In the beginning of 1973, the Federal Government suspended its major subsidized housing programs pending a complete reevaluation of the Federal role in housing. … This suspension has a major effect on several Operation Breakthrough manufacturers. In 1974, the national housing construction rate dropped below 1.4 million units a year, about half the construction rate assumed

by Operation Breakthrough plans.5 There was also clear initial investor interest in industrialized housing’s potential. These different public and interests converged in Stirling Homex, a publicly listed company in New York that drew headlines when it shipped its volumetric units to Mississippi in the wake of Hurricane Camille and proposed to build a factory there with Federal Housing Authority—FHA—participation.

[On July 2, 1975], the Securities and Exchange Commission accused the bankrupt Stirling Homex Corporation, once one of the nation's leading modular homebuilders, of creating phantom sales, making illegal political contributions, using illegal bugging equipment and making payoffs to union officials. The suit charged in particular that from 1970 through 1972 Stirling Homex materially falsified its records by the fraudulent recording and reporting of fictitious sales. About $12.5 million of sales reported in a 1971 financial report were either fictitious or improperly recorded, the S.E.C. said, including about $8 million of sales from a proposed $15-million project in Mississippi with the Greater Gulf Housing Corporation.6

A news report that Stirling Homex’s delivered modular housing to Corinth, Mississipi, New York Times, 16 July 1970.

Note that Harold Finger, who led Operation Breakthrough for HUD, is quoted. Stirling Homex needed public-sector support to be viable. When it wasn’t forthcoming, it acted as if it had secured it. Widely reported, its ability to ship units to Corinth should have raised the question, “Why did it have so many on hand?”

Stirling Homex went bankrupt and its founders went to jail. Alodex, a Memphis-based modular housing company backed by the founders of Holiday Inn, failed less dramatically. According to Larry Dodge, who consulted with Alodex, it decided to test its concept in a deliberately chosen “hardest case”: scattered site housing in East St. Louis, Illinois. Alodex won the endorsement of the city’s mostly African-American leaders by proposing to open a factory there and build some 2,000 units of scattered-site housing.7 At its peak, around 1970, Alodex had nearly $90 million of construction work in progress and a staff of 250 people. It was operating in 10 states under the leadership of Lloyd Clark, a builder. Alodex's problems became apparent shortly after it was reorganized as a national company rather than a Memphis area operation. In 1969 Mr. Clark, a well-known building contractor, approached [Alodex] with a proposal to merge [their] operations. … As part of the expansion, Alodex stock was offered for sale to the public. Under Mr. Clark, who left Alodex in 1973, the company expanded from single-family residential work to construction of turn-key housing for government agencies and big projects, none of which included provisions to cover cost increases. The company also expanded into … condominiums and multifamily units. Problems appeared in the summer of 1971, a few months after a public offer of Alodex stock. The prospectus did not make clear the large losses suffered by the company on some projects.8

Larry Dodge, as an architect with Building Systems Development (BSD), a consultancy founded by U.C. Berkeley Professor Ezra Ehrenkrantz, consulted with Aerojet General and TRW on a spun-glass fiber modular housing concept, which they proposed to apply to an Operation Breakthrough demonstration site in Sacramento. The initial concept was a two-story module spun on a mandrel. Developed at TRW’s R&D campus in Redondo Beach, California, it was housing as imagined by scientists and engineers who worked on NASA and military aerospace projects. “What’s the minimum size a window can be?” was a typical question. However, TRW’s head marketer rejected the concept, opting for more conventional housing produced using glass-fiber panels enclosing a layer of honeycomb Hexcel insulation.9

TRW’s Operation Breakthrough concept (left), the Townland concept (right), and the School Construction Systems Development (SCSD) concept (below).

The aerospace industry’s interest in manufactured housing reflected its ambition to diversify with a product that could take up slack in its factory production lines. (Boeing was involved in the Townland project in Seattle.) It also reflected a belief in the applicability of the so-called systems approach, first pioneered in World War II, to the challenge of meeting ambitious housing production goals set in 1946 and renewed in 1968. Others involved in the building industry—aluminum, glass, steel, and timber companies—also participated in these initiatives, hoping to find new outlets for their products and demonstrate how their materials and housing innovations together could deliver superior performance.

One precedent for Operation Breakthrough was the mid-1960s School Construction Systems Development (SCSD) program, in which Building Systems Development was heavily involved. At the time, California was building public schools in substantial numbers. Legislation allowed districts to band together to bid these projects, which generated interest in industrializing their construction. SCSD proposed a modular, steel-frame system.

Inland Steel was an investor, eager to get a foothold in the market. While SCSD failed, one of its components—a multi-zone roof-top air-conditioning unit designed by Lennox—found a national market in conventionally built school projects. “We enjoyed 15 years of spin-off work,” according to Ted Gilles, who helped develop the product for Lennox. What made it successful was its flexibility: “With flexible ducts, we could jiggle the layout,” he said.

Flexibility was one of SCSD’s design criteria for the components, which applied equally to any new school that fell within the standard mid-1960s typology. This was “why packaged units wound up on the roof,” Gilles added.10 When Richard Bender’s research team looked at conventional tract housing in the Bay Area—the kinds of projects that Operation Breakthrough envisioned shifting to factory production—it found the consistent use of locally produced prefabricated components like roof joists and handheld tools like nail guns that could be used by small crews of builders to frame and enclose units quickly. Houses produced in this manner used materials and elements that were geared to fast assembly by semi-skilled labor. The only skilled workers on those jobs were the “mud guys” who smoothed over sheetrock imperfections. It resulted in housing that hit its price point, met local codes, and let the developer offer a range of types. Operation Breakthrough’s prototypes, in contrast, were hindered by code fragmentation and undone by their inability to support the kind of mass customization the housing market required.11 Only the kind of captive market that public housing can deliver or a substantial cost difference could have saved them. Demonstrating the latter on a national basis in the absence of a captive market would have required deep-pocketed investors to accept heavy early losses before achieving full-scale mass production.

From Operation Breakthrough’s Demise through 2008 Operation Breakthrough resulted in “model” legislation enabling states to issue permits for modular housing that override local inspections. (California has such a process, focused on volumetric units.) It failed to shift most housing production to factories. Until the “Great Recession” of 2008, conventional construction was the norm for all types of housing except mobile homes and vacation “kit homes.” Yet, across this period, market-rate housing typologies became increasingly standardized, especially in the use of prefab assemblies like window walls and curtain walls, and interior elements like kitchen cabinets. While mass customization continued, the band of customization narrowed while the cost advantages of field construction were eroded by prevailing wage contracts in the urban core and the multiplier effect of general contractors working with subs, each adding their markup.

The “Great Recession” stopped new construction in general in its tracks and flushed skilled construction labor out of urban markets.

Downturns leave some players as the last ones standing. The Great Recession divided the urban housing world between “marketecture,” which emphasizes the residential unit, either by pushing its luxury or subdividing it aggressively, depending on the price point, and “community” developments that, even if they mix subsidized and market-rate housing, engage communities of neighbors and residents in their planning and design. In general, “community” developments emphasize shared settings, including open space, over residential units. The real estate consultant David Chen, who recently surveyed western European housing, identified projects commissioned by building associations there as having similar traits.12 While it can and has been applied to community projects, factory-built housing is geared to “marketecture,” which lends itself to standard building forms and layouts. (The simplest applications are hotels and serviced apartments that use single modular units without side-wall penetrations.)

Industrialized Housing’s Revival in the Bay Area and Elsewhere In a 1967 paper, Richard Bender wrote of building systems that were then being put forward, These systems make buildings, but they do not make buildings with properties important in relation to the whole problem. … We must avoid the approach that says, “Here are the technologies available to make buildings. Now let’s figure out how to build better buildings with these.” This approach starts from a solution and goes looking for a problem to solve. Creating building systems is not enough. We need a new, more subtle kind of building system which does more than produce buildings. We must produce buildings which will function in the fullest social, human sense.13 In 1973, commenting on the industrialized housing of the Operation Breakthrough era, Bender added, For those whose picture of modern production is the auto assembly line, building seems far from industrialized. But perhaps it is just this view of industrialization (as only machinery, tools, production lines, and automation) that has been standing in the way of significant advances.14 When Bender and I visited Factory OS’s factory in March 2018, we saw prototype units—6-sided wood-frame boxes—that shift conventional construction to an assembly line. This is industrialized housing as George Romney envisioned it half a century ago. David Baker told me later that Factory OS’s 6-sided units are more weatherproof and damage-resistant when shipped by truck than 4-sided units. Locking off the units while the building is finished around them minimizes damage as the trades do their work. That damage can be considerable, he said, requiring a hefty budget for ongoing repairs.15 That Factory OS is successful also reflects the region’s current situation: an acute shortage of skilled construction workers; conventional construction costs that exceed what the housing market can support; a longterm shortfall in new housing construction in the urban core, especially around the rail transit corridors that San Francisco and other cities have prioritized for new development; and the possibility of tapping semi-skilled but unionized construction labor at the region’s edge and bringing it into factories to produce volumetric modules for multifamily housing. Factory OS now serves the West Coast and cities as far east as Denver, with a catalogue of 20 different supportive (ex-homeless), affordable, market-rate “workforce,” and student housing designs, including studios and 1- and 2-bedrooms. The company is producing employee housing for Google. Its designs have width, length, and height constraints, but can support façade articulation. A 2-year Carpenters Union contract keeps wages stable. The company aims to increase its cost savings over convention from 20% to 30%.16 RAD Urban produces 4-sided steel-frame volumetric units in a factory in Lathrop, CA.17 Z-Modular, in Birmingham, AL, owned by a steel foundry, gives away the design and technology of its steel-frame volumetric units to local factories, supplying the steel to fabricate them.18 Katerra, founded by Wolfe Homes entrepreneur Fritz Wolfe, attracted a $2 billion investment from Mayoshi Son’s Vision Fund. Katerra has aggressively acquired talent and manufacturing capacity in its quest to vertically integrate housing production and extend the reach of industrialization from the factory to the building site.

Shipping is seen as an extension of the factory floor, which led Katerra to focus on component-based rather than volumetric systems. “Why ship air?” they ask. Katerra sees itself as a technology company that builds “platforms” for developers with enough backlog of new housing projects on flat sites to support large-scale production.

Katerra rationalizes designs to meet these constraints, producing “tiers” of housing to meet market and regulatory requirements. A given tier offers the quality and performance expected by the developer’s targeted buyers. Katerra believes that its platforms can deliver better cost-to-value than its competition, with greater customization than is possible with volumetric units. Like the auto industry, it chose California’s residential energy regulations as its

standard. This is a higher standard than some other states, and some developers have resisted paying for the higher performance. Katerra’s vertical integration includes manufacturing cross laminated timber (CLT) components, lighting components, and plumbing fixtures. Prefabricated plumbing walls are “in planning,” I was told in February 2019.19 Although Katerra advertises the design freedom it offers developers, one architecture firm I interviewed said its decisions sometimes prioritized manufacturing by allocating square footage where it wouldn’t generate a return for the developer. A Bay Area developer questioned its track record here and noted that its “closed system” would work against it compared to “open-source” competitors.20 Katerra’s Seattle architecture team pointed to the challenge of working nationally. In California, it ran into problems getting state inspections for its panelized units, as the company that handles them only had experience with volumetric units. They see Katerra as a work in progress, appreciating its Katerra’s efforts optimize housing production by eliminating waste and harnessing technology to bridge between the different steps involved more effectively. What sets it apart from its competitors is its view of housing production as an end-to-end manufacturing process that links factories, shipping, and building sites. Its efforts to vertically integrate are part of this, aimed at reducing costs, limiting waste and unneeded variation, and optimizing cost to value on a tiered basis for quality and performance.21 Other developments in industrialized housing Ikea recently announced that it will take a modular approach to its numerous products, developing “platforms” for products that previously varied slightly in their dimensions. By standardizing height, width, and depth, Ikea hopes to rationalize manufacture and tailor it to changes in its retail model—a consumer preference for smaller in-city stores and for products that are delivered preassembled or put together at the buyer’s residence by Ikea personnel or designated third parties.22 Ikea and Skanska jointly own a company, BoKlok Housing AB, that builds affordable multi-unit housing in Scandinavia and the U.K. using a volumetric system fitted out by Ikea. Aiming at younger buyers with modest incomes, BoKlok has produced 11,000 units since 1997.23 ByggHouse and Lindbäcks are two Swedish companies involved with industrialized housing. Interest in it there and also in Japan has continued without interruption over the decades when the idea was dormant here. ByggHouse makes components and tools for housing producers, while Lindbäcks Bygg AG produces 2- to 4-story modules for student, family, and senior multi-unit housing of up to 16 stories. According to David Baker, Lindbäcks cranes temporary roofs over its buildings during construction to deal with bad weather. Its modules hang the floors from the exterior walls to eliminate redundancy in unit floors and ceilings. According to Baker’s colleague Brad Leibin, Lindbäcks’s factories are designed so a person weighing as little as 130 pounds can perform any step the manufacturing process requires. Lindbäcks’s goal is for women to make up at least half of its factory workforce, he added.24 While Japan has had an equally long involvement in prefabricated housing, it faces a shortage of homebuyers owing to its aging, declining population. Two manufacturers, Toyota and Panasonic, are merging their housing businesses as Prime Life Technologies to focus on “town development” and to integrate smart houses with smart cars and other accessories of a younger-generation lifestyle.25 Sekisui House, which claims to be the largest housing producer in Japan, has teamed with Woodside Homes to produce a concept home for Builder magazine to be unveiled at Summerlin, a planned community near Las Vegas. Sekisui House applies a proprietary metal joint system to its housing projects, which are marketed as healthy and sustainable. Expanding globally is its response to declining sales in Japan.26

Industrialized housing and modularity Companies that produce panelized and component-based systems are tapping industrialized housing’s longstanding interest in modularity. While construction in general has considerable “default modularity” due to the standard dimensions of its most ubiquitous components, Europe, including the former Soviet Bloc, applied modularity to large-scale housing development before World War II and then through the 1980s, initially in the service of postwar reconstruction.

Reinier de Graff recounts part of this history in his 2016 essay, “Architektur ohne Eigenschaften” (“Architecture without Qualities”).27 Building on prewar and wartime experience, East Germany’s DDR evolved panel systems, applied to urban housing development, until its collapse in 1989. In 1999, I saw newly repainted examples in the former East Berlin, strikingly midcentury modern, but Graff writes that by 2014 many were torn down or reconfigured beyond recognition, “an ideological cleansing.”

The East German standardization effort is generally viewed as a radical phenomenon of the past. But how radical was it? It can also be explained as simply the all-out pursuit of a universally available minimum standard. Like communism itself, the whole effort contains a curious paradox. Even though it necessitated “radical” change, its ultimate goal—“normal” conditions for the largest possible number of people—was surprisingly mundane.28 Graff describes parallel developments in the Netherlands, noting the French influence on its systems.

The technical adaptation of the French system to suit Dutch building regulations had been made possible by large public subsidies to help solve a pressing housing shortage in the Netherlands—such policies being, at least during those years, as common in the West as in the East.29 Following Germany’s reunification, large scale housing was steadily “normalized” to the market. Now, Graff writes, “Normal (East) German workers can barely afford the ‘normalized’ homes.”30 For a while the East and the West, despite their political differences, seem to have run on parallel tracks.

Produced in the millions, abundantly applied in both the Western and Eastern Hemispheres, the prefabricated panels are—at almost improbably poetic level—an expression of a global bond, a form of consensus in the context of an otherwise deep ideological rift, a universal response to a globally felt urgency.31 This looks back to modernism’s early ambition to provide worker housing of a high standard at mass scale, in contrast to the tenement housing that modern architects regarded as a blight. Modular, panelized systems that could be manufactured locally and erected quickly in different configurations was an accepted solution that government programs and subsidies made possible.

In 1977, I spent three months as a visiting researcher at Stichting Architecten Research (SAR), founded by John Habraken at the Technical University of Eindhoven. SAR was a clearinghouse for research on modular approaches to housing components, buildings, sites, and communities. Its “tissue method” aimed to provide a basis for user participation in multi-unit developments, a goal of specific interest to such architects of that era as Herman Hertzberger, Lucien Kroll, and Frans van der Werf.

SAR developed two related approaches to housing focused on “supports” and on “territories.” This reflected the nature of Dutch postwar Dutch housing, especially in new towns and rebuilt areas—row houses of different heights with a uniformity that spoke to cultural aspirations for equality but made for blocks, neighborhoods, and districts that appeared as “built diagrams.” But SAR also had proposals like Le Corbusier’s Radiant City in mind as it focused on what it called the support and tissue levels.

At the support level, the support plan makes allowances for different materials and construction systems, so that the basic spatial character of a given support can be maintained despite those differences. It also provides opportunities for variations in dwelling arrangement and configuration. At the tissue level, similar allowances are made for the problems of fitting a given tissue model to actual site conditions, and for its elaboration at the support level.32 The tissue level is “a planning level…more specific than a land use plan, but less specific than a support plan in terms of stipulating the characteristics of a given territory.”33 SAR’s tissue method was a later development in its thinking, reflecting its interest in making users active participants in housing’s development and evolving use.

This reflects another aspect of Dutch housing at the time: the residents were responsible for more of the interior fit-out—for example, for the hardwood floors, which were designed to be demountable—than is normal elsewhere.

The units were delivered as shells, whether they were to be owned, rented, or held cooperatively (through building societies, for example).

Lucien Kroll’s MéMé project in Louvain, Belgium of 1970. The photo is from Architectural Review, 28 August 2018. AR’s Paul Davies wrote that, “In negating his authority as expert and subverting the mode of production, Kroll probably got as close to the work of social theorists Henri Lefebvre and Guy Debord as it might be possible for an architect to get.”

Users can alter the façade and transform the interior as their needs change.

Projects like van der Werf’s Molenvliet Project in Papendrecht and Lunetten Project near Utrecht applied SAR’s approaches to fairly large developments that, despite their size, “allowed users to have control over the volume, layout, and façade detailing.” Lunetten extended this to the site plan.34 While not directly informed by SAR’s methodology, Lucien Kroll took its underlying philosophy further. His MéMé (Maison Médicale) Project at the Woluwe-Saint-Lambert campus of UCL (Université Catholique de Louvain) was inspired by Giancarlo de Carlo and French social theorists. Kroll engaged the faculty and students to create housing that can be radically altered, inside and out. Visiting it in 2010, Rafffaella Poletti wrote that “the years have witnessed a succession of incongruous and disrespectful alterations perpetrated by the university, which has never wanted to accept the value of this architecture.”35

MéMé realized John Habraken’s dream of granting housing’s users a “fine-grained exercise of power.”36 Habraken’s original proposal was that the specifics of the dwelling unit should be left to its occupants, while the specifics of the support (the building housing the dwelling or the block in which the dwellings are situated) should be determined jointly by the dwellers and the community. This argument has now been extended: as the dweller controls the dwelling, so the neighborhood controls the neighborhood, and the district the district. Each exercise of decision-making power at the given level of territorial use involves the interaction of the users of the territory and the users of the broader territory to which that territory belongs. Decisions that are appropriately made by the neighbors themselves are left to them, with the framework of rules about the formation of neighborhoods.37 SAR initially embraced industrialized housing, but with a focus on infill. “SAR’s founders looked forward to the possibility of industrial production of ‘detachable units’ (SAR’s term for those parts of the dwelling under direct control of the household.) These were pictured…as consumer products.”38 An effort “to develop a panel system (for infill) based on SAR’s principles of dimensional and positional coordination…was stymied by…Dutch government standards for residential living spaces” that were “irrational” from SAR’s standpoint but inflexibly enforced, resulting in panels of too many widths.39 We are back to the problem Ikea is trying to resolve: the need to develop platforms of products with standard dimensions to simplify manufacture and still meet consumer demand and regulatory fiat. In developing comparable platforms for a given line of housing, Katerra has the same issue. “Principles of dimensional and positional coordination” are again relevant, and SAR and the DDR laid the groundwork, among others. (The UK’s Building Research Establishment did similar work to support Council Housing.)

Getting housing out of its box Even a casual survey of contemporary multi-unit housing in the Bay Area reveals the similarities across a range of projects of the same scale. What you find more and more are decorated boxes that reflect their zoning envelope.

Kroll’s MéMé is admirable for its effort to break out of the box by playing radically with form. It gave residents the possibility of altering the supports, not just the infill—a freedom reflected in its freewheeling façade. Potentially, with UCL cooperation, alterations could have continued indefinitely.

David Baker Architects’ Union Flats in Union City, CA, a project of Fei Tsen’s Windflower Properties. Photo

by Bruce Damonte.

In the Bay Area, the main exceptions to the decorated box are affordable multifamily projects with strong participation by likely residents and neighbors. The work of David Baker Architects includes some of the best of these projects. They standardize repetitive elements—dwelling units, hallways, and the housing blocks that enclose them—and tailor shared settings to the needs of the community. The repetitive elements are set off by minor but telling variations like color, balconies, and solar shading, while the shared spaces are concentrated so they work together synergistically to give residents collectively a greater sum than the usual box can provide, effectively extending their personal space. Open spaces are an important part of this, connecting the housing with its neighborhood and supporting activities like urban agriculture that are popular but rarely found in market-rate multi-unit housing.40 In the Bay Area, David Baker Architects’ projects are starting to incorporate factory-built housing. A recent example, The Union Flats, sustains the quality it has achieved with conventional construction. The challenge, especially on smaller sites, is the tail-wags-dog nature of volumetric units, for which the box is ideal for fast erection. The Garden Village project by Stanley Saitowitz’s Natoma Studio for RAD Urban in Berkeley uses the units as “building blocks” to create visual interest. RAD Urban’s next project on Telegraph Avenue and 51st Street in Oakland’s Temescal district is less differentiated. New laws that override local zoning and a pervasive regional sense of “housing crisis” are leading cities to approve big boxy schemes, out of scale with neighboring buildings, that they might have rejected in the past.41 Stanley Saitowitz / Natoma Studio’s Garden Village project in Berkeley for RAD Urban.

Missing Middle Housing seeks to revive prewar multifamily housing typologies that were supplanted by postwar suburban tract housing and garden apartments; and urban “boxes above parking podiums” and residential towers. This repertoire of developer “products” is seen as lacking nuance, especially in its ability to fit housing into existing neighborhoods. Co-founders Daniel and Karen Parolek argue for the variety of multifamily housing options that prewar towns and cities offered, given their potential to contribute significant added density. The idea is to minimize the need for dramatic increases in height and bulk by enabling more modest increases in density across the existing fabric.42 Karen Parolek sees form-based codes as a bulwark against the “big crap” likely to be built as new state laws in California override local control of development through existing zoning.43 Form-based codes specify “street and building types (or mix of types), build-to lines, number of floors, and percentage of built site frontage.”44 SAR anticipated this approach in its 1977 report, Deciding on Density.45 A 2014 redevelopment plan for BART Pleasant Hill Station takes a form-based approach, as does Missing Middle Housing’s 2018 proposal to redevelop BART North Berkeley Station. 46 Aside from preserving local communities’ decision-making power through zoning, form-based codes encourage a mix of buildings and open spaces that, even at a higher density, produce a richer, more urbane fabric.

California’s new laws put housing production above other factors, which may create a Hobson’s choice between a lack of housing production in the transit-served urban core and a lack of urbanity as developers takes advantage of bonus densities and expedited, state-mandated entitlements. Bigger, boxier housing projects could soon be the Bay Region’s norm. Is this the price of being housed at all? Graff might say, “Don’t pay it. Look for an ‘ordinary’—a ‘new normal’—that delivers livability.”

Looking beyond housing to regional livability “Speeding up housing production” was the starting point of my research. Various factors slow it in the Bay Region, including the growing inequality of would-be buyers and renters of housing. A recent Financial Times article on housing trends points not only to factory-built housing but also to corporate ownership and management of rental housing and potentially of the neighborhoods where it’s located. This is controversial—not all tenants are happy, and some cities are wary of the loss of competition and potential for monopoly pricing—but both trends relate to a third: the higher energy and ecological demands that governments and consumers impose on housing.

They make data more important and dwellers more amenable to smart home systems and third-party digital management. If new housing is Alexa-controlled, developers like Google-owned Sidewalk Labs want to extend this to districts.47 The new term “modern methods of construction” (MMC) reflects the way the design-build-operate trajectory that defines the building industry is being transformed. Katerra and others are trying to shape this, but their focus is U.S. housing developers. Some European multifamily projects, like Germany’s baugruppen, share the livability of affordable projects here that also engage residents and neighbors as active participants in their planning and design.48 If we want housing to “function in the fullest social, human sense,” as Bender argued in 1967,49 then we have ask what such livability means in a given urban context. With these place-specific requirements in hand, we also have to ask how a metropolitan region and its communities can achieve it. Focusing on livability frees us from seeing housing as “things”—as density targets, unit counts, and production targets. They still matter, of course, but they may blind us to livability’s bigger picture: the opportunities that come with it and the strategies it implies.

Horst Rittel saw housing as a wicked problem—intractable and complex, its presenting issues symptoms of larger problems. Our housing problem falls squarely in his definition. With a regional economy the size of the Netherlands, our metropolis is an entrepôt of ideas and innovation. Yet we struggle to house people decently and provide other basic services effectively. Despite our wealth, our public realm is frayed by decades of underinvestment. It is becoming less and less livable.

Singapore is a city-state, so any comparison to the Bay Region is inexact, but it’s worth considering.

Its welfare-capitalist mass housing strategy combines ownership through long-term, inheritable leases with the possibility of moving “up, down, and across” the public housing on offer. Size, location, and quality are based on family means and preferences, with a consistently high minimum standard. Education, healthcare, and transit are part of Singapore’s welfare-capitalist mix. Subsidies are tied to employment, but the children’s social mobility isn’t harmed if their parents don’t earn very much. They get good housing and their kids get a good education.

Healthcare is universal. And this is accomplished without a huge tax burden—Singapore levies globally competitive flat taxes on companies and workers.

Can we, as a region, up the ante on Singapore’s benchmark? Can we overcome our chronic housing shortages in our transit-served core by rethinking the region as a public realm? How will this impact existing housing in our communities and neighborhoods? Can we have housing and urbanity?

In my second year of research at U.C. Berkeley, I will turn to successful examples of mass housing and urban infrastructure programs and strategies that emphasize livability even as they aim for increased development and higher densities. If the goal of multifamily housing is to build community, as David Baker argues, such examples will be relevant here and to other U.S. metropolitan regions.

Notes 1.

Colin St. John Wilson, “Two Letters on the State of Architecture,” 1964 and 1981,” Journal of Architectural Education, XXXV: 1, Fall 1981, p. 10.

2. Transcript of Bay Area architect Chuck Davis in conversation with his former EHDD Partner, the architect Marc L’Italien, Albany, CA, March 29 2018.

3. Richard Bender and John Parman, “The Factory Without Walls: Industrialization in Residential Construction, California Management Review, XVIII: 3, Spring 1976, pp. 47–48. https://www.academia.edu/11910783/Factory_without_walls_Industrialization_in_residential_constructio n 4. Operation Breakthrough—Lessons Learned About Demonstrating New Technology, Comptroller General of the United States, November 2 1976, p. 2.

5. Op. Cit., p. 18, https://www.gao.gov/assets/120/117465.pdf 6. Robert J. Cole, “U.S. Says Stirling Homex Reported Phantom $ales,” July 3, 1975, https://www.nytimes.com/1975/07/03/archives/us-says-stirling-homex-reported-phantom-sales-upstatehomebuilder.html.

7. Notes of a conversation with the architect-planner Larry Dodge, Berkeley, 9 August 2019.

8. Regentald Stuart, “Alodex Millionaires’ Pitfall,” New York Times, April 8, 1976, page 55. https://www.nytimes.com/1976/04/08/archives/alodex-millionaires-pitfall-fiasco-follows-motelsuccess.html.

9. Larry Dodge, Berkeley, 9 August 2019. The TRW and Townland drawing are from Richard Bender, Larry Dodge, and Nicholas de Monchaux, “Looking Back at Operation Breakthrough,” arcCA, no. 4, 2007 http://arccadigest.org/looking-back-at-operation-breakthrough-from-arcca-07-4-prefabiana/ 10. SCSD image from “Prefabrication experiments – 32 – The School Construction Systems Development initiative,” 29 September 2014 http://prefabricate.blogspot.com/2014/09/prefabrication-experiments-32school.html; Barbara A. Checket-Hanks: “The 1960s: Heat Pumps, A/C Blast Off,” ACHR News, 25 April 2001. https://www.achrnews.com/articles/84046-the-1960s-heat-pumps-a-c-blast-off 11. Richard Bender and John Parman, “The Factory Without Walls: Industrialization in Residential Construction,” California Management Review, vol. XVIII, no. 3, Spring 1976, pp. 46–56.

12. Kriestien Ring and Geoffrey London, “Owner Occupied,” Assemble Papers, 3 March 2017, reprinted from Future West, University of Western Australia Faculty of Arts, Business, Law, and Education, Perth, https://assemblepapers.com.au/2017/03/03/owner-occupied/ 13. Richard Bender, “Industrialization and Low-Cost Housing,” paper, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York, 1968, pp. 3–4.

14. Richard Bender, A Crack in the Rear-View Mirror, Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1973, p. 1.

15. Notes of a conversation with David Baker, FAIA, David Baker Architects, San Francisco, 31 January 2019.

16. Notes of a conversation with Andrew Meagher, Design Director, Factory OS, 15 October 2018.

17. Sara Pacelko, AIA, at a SPUR panel on modular housing, Oakland, 13 November 2018 and at an AIA San Francisco panel on modular housing, 18 July 2018. Pacelko is a design director with RAD Urban.

18. Fei Tsen, SPUR panel on housing innovation, 5 June 2018, comment to the author. Tsen is the founder of Windflower Properties, a multifamily housing developer. She was Board President, Treasure Island Development Authority and Real Estate Director, Port of San Francisco.

19. Notes of a phone conversation with Craig Curtis, Michelle Ha, Peter Spruance, and Chester Weir, Katerra, Seattle, 8 February 2019. Curtis is the head of architecture, formerly with Miller-Hull.

20. Katerra phone conversation, 8 February 2019.

21. Conversations with BAR, 5 December 2018 and 22 January 2019; conversations with Fei Tsen, 26 April and 5 June 2019.

22. Richard Milne, “Ikea dismantles tradition to see inspiration from car industry,” Financial Times, 2 October 2019.

23. India Block, “Ikea is bringing its low-cost modular units to the UK,” Dezeen, 26 June 2019 https://www.dezeen.com/2019/06/26/ikea-build-low-cost-housing-uk/; Hilary Osborne, “Ikea gets green light to build affordable homes in UK,” Guardian, 25 June 2019 https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jun/26/uk-council-ikea-affordable-housing-worthingboklok; BoKlok Housing AB website https://www.boklok.com/ 24. ByggHouse has an outpost in the U.S. https://bygghouse.com/; Jack Balderrama Morley, “Production Line: How Sweden is Pioneering Automated, Prefab Construction,” Architizer, https://architizer.com/blog/inspiration/industry/swedish-modular-housing/ David Baker, “A Traveler’s Perspective on Housing Affordability,” DBA Blog, https://www.dbarchitect.com/us/news_blog/364/A%20Traveler's%20Perspective%20on%20Housing%2 0Affordability.html?; notes of a meeting with Brad Leibin and Jonas Weber, David Baker Architects, San Francisco, 1 February 2019; David Baker’s comment on Lindbäcks’s craned-on roof was made in passing during a meeting at his San Francisco office in the summer of 2019.

25. Kyodo Reuters (news service), “Toyota and Panasonic to merge housing units and team up on ‘smart town’ business, Japan Times, 9 May 2019, https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/05/09/business/corporatebusiness/toyota-panasonic-merge-housing-units-team-smart-town-business/#.XZ1GXCVlDBJ 26. John McManus, “Sekisui and Its Woodside Homes Will Team up on BUILDER Chöwa Concept Home for 2020 Unveiling,” Architect, 24 March 2019 https://www.architectmagazine.com/design/sekisui-and-itswoodside-homes-will-team-up-on-builder-chowa-concept-home-for-2020unveiling_s?utm_source=newsletter&utm_content=Brief&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=AN_03251 9%20%281%29&he=cf21dc3f08679adb883cbd3f4114953428d7af12 27. Reinier de Graff, “Architektur ohne Eigenschaften,” Four Walls and a Roof, Harvard, 2017, pp. 31–53.

28. Graff, ibid., p. 53.

29. Graff, ibid., p. 52.

30. Graff, ibid., p. 53.

31. Graff, ibid., p. 53.

32. John Parman, “A Visitor’s Observations,” Open House, Vol 3, No. 1, 1978, p. 37.

33. Parman, Ibid., p. 37.

34. Parman, Ibid., p. 39.

35. Rafffaella Poletti, “Lucien Kroll: utopia interrupted, Domus, 30 June 2010 https://www.domusweb.it/en/architecture/2010/06/30/lucien-kroll-utopia-interrupted.html 36. Parman, op. cit., p. 37.

37. Parman, ibid., p. 38.

38. Parman, ibid., p. 37.

39. Parman, ibid., p. 37. See also SAR 73: the methodical formulation of agreements concerning the direct dwelling environment, which sets out these principles for supports and tissue (or fabric).

40. I’m working with David Baker Architects on a book on multi-family housing, and have reviewed its portfolio in detail and discussed it with principals David Baker, Daniel Simons, and Amanda Loper.

41. This reflects my own observations and conversations with Berkeley architect David Trachtenberg.

42. Remarks of Karen Parolek, SPUR San Francisco modular housing panel, 18 July 2019. Missing Middle Housing’s website: https://missingmiddlehousing.com/ 43. Parolek, ibid.

44. Form-Based Codes Institute, “Form-Based Codes Defined”: https://formbasedcodes.org/definition/ 45. Deciding on Density, SAR, Eindhoven, Netherlands, June 1977.

46. Form-Based Codes Institute, “Pleasant Hill BART Station,” with links to the February 2014 plan https://formbasedcodes.org/codes/pleasant-hill-bart-station/; Missing Middle Housing, A Thoughtful Approach to Form and Scale: Envisioning the Future of North Berkeley BART, October 2018 https://www.berkeleyside.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/08-Opticos.pdf 47. Aleksandra Wisniewska, “How will we live in the 2020s?” Financial Times, 12–13 October 2019 https://www.ft.com/content/0dfb7bb4-e8fc-11e9-a240-3b065ef5fc55 48. Call with Daniel Chen, who made a four-month tour of examples of this work in Germany, Denmark, and elsewhere. Chen was formerly an investment banker with Morgan Stanley focused on real estate. For baugruppen, see Geoffrey London in conversation with Kristien Ring: “Owner Occupied,” Assembled Papers, 3 March 2017 https://assemblepapers.com.au/2017/03/03/owner-occupied/ 49. Bender, “Industrialization and Low-Cost Housing,” op. cit., pp. 3–4.

John J. Parman is a Visiting Scholar in the University of California, Berkeley, Department of Architecture. He started Common Place, a personal journal, in 2008. He co-founded the quarterly Design Book Review in 1983, publishing it through 1999. He is on the editorial and design advisory committee of ARCADE, and is an editorial advisor to ORO Editions’ AR+D research imprint, Architect’s Newspaper, and Room One Thousand, a journal edited by graduate students in architecture at U.C. Berkeley. © 2019 John J. Parman Cover photo: Windflower’s Union Flats, by David Baker Architects, under construction in Union City, CA. complace.j2parman.com

Number 15 collects poems written in 2019 “through Christmas,” a return to the journal’s main theme.

A YEAR’S POEMS THROUGH CHRISTMAS COMMON PLACE NO. 15 | WINTER 2020

The year ends with gathering poems to have a look. I could have waited for possible additions, but Christmas presented itself. What appears here overlaps some previous issues. I’ve omitted a handful and revised some others, but this is a reasonable account of poems written over the last 12 months.

The cover photo, taken in mid-November, is of the 30ml CafĂŠ in Melbourne suggested by Joy Low.

POEMS THROUGH CHRISTMAS 2019

Three life-of-Jesus poems

They mark time

Like a breeze? Or nothing, air still, his finger raised, I thought?

Silent despite rippled silk, its color hard to place, eyes averted in the moment.

After, I was ravenous, and later swollen and sick.

Life drained, that trope, false though when I consider how in the midst of it a narrow view, naked and showering, gave “stake my professional life on it” resonance to what arrived later: you.

(I use this specific, familiar form despite gathered misunderstandings, the herd of second and fourth opinions, slivers hanging in mid-horizon that remind me, prompt bits of this and what transpired.)

He has these dreams, he tells me.

In one, travelers gather around us, their words portents; another, a calming hand extends, points west, insistent.

He stores things. We leave at night.

A moon. The baby’s quiet.

She seemed not to notice.

Or if noticing, not caring.

Enters rustling, glides over tile or dirt, never speaks.

Thoughts take root anyway.

We must flee, I tell her.

He won’t also must be said.

Women who never have kids are ageless, my friend asserted. Having them takes a toll.

Is it true, I wondered? In my wife’s parish, fecundity is like a wave at some services.

They mark time, the kids, from the outset.

I could write cruelly here about dogs and cats as substitutes, childhoods extended, accessories like Rina’s wolfhound, Irish setter, her laughing as she told me they were her grandmother’s.

She had two kids, lost her beauty but gained her standing as their mother. Nothing is lost, the Taoists remarked. Kids bore her beauty.

From the Polish

Look away!

Panoply of forms—she shifts, another writes in Polish.

Shifts, is thin and thick, a race, a truce with love, a truce with them, student days coming to an end. Hope seeps into texts. Desire mixes with contempt. Men.

Returning to a theme, love disrupted, diminished—dust obscuring what was there, love that finds its source, loses it, flees or is fled from, frees or stays fixed to remnants of it.

What Polish words describe how women are in bed?

Who is this, before a wall, floor held despite their gaze?

One wafts, I think; this other’s gravity turns off and on.

My hand, each finger blurs, balled up and taken in, metronome, a coming tune: too much, too much. Form foregone, only rode it out.

Horses roll, the Polish rider unruffled sits, some distance from authority, wanting (well, not him). Saddle sore come Monday, one confides.

Heft rolled her close to death.

The Polish rider looks away.

Whose gravity, then? We must rewrite things to account, theorize when there’s no proof, touch the root, the spot, roof or seat, fount, spout. These are not Romantic words. Form follows function as night betrays the day.

Look away! Look away! Love trails behind me unwanted.

Not even our dead friend compensates for injured pride.

Walking back, regrets circle as aftermath, arrhythmic.

Three seconds, the dancer said, between was and will. At night, bare feet touch the wooden floor.

Dreams extend footfalls; acid makes the longest afternoon— you may scoff; she didn’t.

A line forms In my memory, a scene’s laid down materially– what I supposed as spirit chemistry, silver in light, orchestral effects: narrow cleft, moaning as a line forms; scraped raw sometimes or healing, a phantom or an exile.

(We speak now, set one of two, while set two’s estranged and mute.)

Lacking a spark Walking home, I felt relieved of obligations, the stir missing that desire brought.

From a distance your face, hair and clothing both works of art, a pencil clenched then removed— particles lacking a spark reminded me how it starts with words, so hard to refuse.

About form The Berlin Review arrives, a famous local poet’s featured, his photo, poems.

I heard him speak about form.

Plagiarism in the Times, a friend mentioned, though not named.

He sued a plagiarist, lost.

Poems are also stolen.

Ambition and vanity, self-delusion, fantasy, lying, thieving, laziness, revenge, obsession, madness— the poet’s talk was pieces of his text as anecdotes, like musicians who perform from memory, turn their heads toward others, daring themselves to forget, get lost, omit, risk a matter of degree.

Like him His Irish head, Kentucky bred, speaks anecdotally— it could be a film, I think.

The waitress is slow with drinks.

Mussels, drenched in aioli, concede to my restrictions sort of. (I eat around it.)

Like him, I become a wraith, thinning out the girth of age.

I write for a handful I tried to read these poems and got nowhere. Who chose them?

Diderot flew by, propelled by hard work, it’s said. Careful not to go to press, handing manuscripts around. Coffee with Rameau’s son, eccentric in his account, written out.

I write for a handful. You might be one, Melbourne, LA, Saint Charles, Fairfield, Singapore: comrades looking at their screens, except Christine in Brooklyn.

She prints them out, marks them up.

Pass through Bay trees leaning close to oaks: contagion spreads, is handed around. Blame comes in the mail, descends, heavy and opaque.

Mice scamper. Wool’s spun. And cries edge close to coming, pass through terrains of hope, abandon.

A long trek, the path fainter, no word, even dreams vacant.

Two poems from nature Close observation stirs up resonance, they say. A bird hunts for food across a deck.

Myriad droplets of rain cover west-facing windows.

Walking yesterday, the ferns drew her notice. Woods cut back bring them forward, she told me.

The hills from here were outlines, dark against a lighter grey.

Two corners away, more rain, though it had stopped when I left.

With sport coat, no umbrella, a man crossed my path ahead as I neared the left turn home.

Write about nature: many here before me. Anything to add? On the bridge, grey hues.

We drove angularly west.

Sun broke through amid redwoods.

An incline needing first gear.

A view, narrow Tomales.

A left turn, barely a road I parked alongside. We walked.

Humans now, talking paving, fire, taxes, volunteers, then eating. We left early.

As we climbed, a bird spoke up.

It smells like Norway, I said.

Enlightenment Memory is matter and spirit, alive in our heads, Bergson said. Birds mating seasonally, their differences, revived an old narrative: all things unfolding from a source. Finches retold Darwin this story.

Surfacing as sensed, nature seemed to be given them and then unfathomably stretched out.

Minds took it in, hearts quickened, hands set it down reflexively, hoping for enlightenment.

Walked or tramped, then wrote while others sketched or dug to coax it into consciousness.

Ikkyü’s coda (Version 2) We went angularly west. The bridge, grey hues, and later into shade, redwoods briefly alight above us.

Ascended in low gear, Tomales glanced, narrow where it starts.

Descended, more trail than road, found the house, earnest talk: winter’s rain and fall’s smoke, the weight of all that fell on us.

Left early, climbed. A bird spoke up.

“Smells like Norway.” The scent, damp woods close to the sea.

Ikkyü’s coda, another bird.

Ours warbled territorially, not so much woken as aware.

A banner In red, I think of her, red or some other solid hue.

She glances from man to man in search of bona fides.

Who will bring her a future to justify the effort?

Red like a flag, a banner, a parade of one, waiting for a car, a text, a sign.

It’s my topic Orlando. (It’s my topic, time compressed so the shape shifts at lovemaking’s illusive pace, partnering with the air.)

There is no great house, only a blanket-covered sofa.

(Another brought the man out, but his essence was slower, if essence derives from thrown, not from theories or speeches.)

Breasts are a giveaway—hers are hers, but each orifice has its story and its fetish, stage directions for handling, all in play and no witness to spoil the fun, sister.

(Running with feathers, laughing.)

A Yiddish word In a dream, a room aside (a country house, three salons)— “I’m a grandmother,” she said, turning. Noted her marriage, though long, was stale. (The word used was Yiddish, I thought. Not sure.)

“I see,” I said. She went on: “I love you. I want to fuck.”

“I see,” I said again, now that desire, reviving after an absence, saw beauty rising to its gaze.

Bresson says the emotions take the simplest forms. I thought of your tremors, how you came longer than seemed possible.

You think all this is foregone or pointless, and I’m unsure myself how to add it up, yet among my memories it’s there like Vesuvius or Aphrodite, to slap the most obvious label on the can that holds the film.

The vein Let it be said, material explanations for it all— even I suppose the vein of silver that flashed, a kiss releasing it, as I thought watching it, though It proved that I alone saw it. Sometimes I doubt it myself, but then less doubt than utility takes hold of truth: it explained not much and the laws held up that govern things, even here.

And yet I saw what I saw.

Heads turned License, I said, thinking how Heian aristocrats loved according to their tastes, not locked in pairs. We sat angled, sometimes eye to eye, that close to her, in mind writing this— our heads turned, voice quiet but the consonants set off, an accent she remarked on.

I wrote when she was away.

She brought back calligraphy, a poem I propped up, seen every morning from my bed.

The last character is mine, the mountain they climbed to view.

They fall back Laughing on the street, passersby amused too by it, how she waves a bit, among men, the dance work lunch imposes if not alone with her thoughts, eyes fixed inwardly, reptile of a machine for sidewalk striding—they fall back, daren’t catch her gaze, its rays. But now it’s turned off, with the boys, out.

Intruders Warmer days, insects, a bee briefly between blind and glass, released, the latches set so it wouldn’t raise. I didn’t set them thus. Another’s fears, I guess: intruders, ladders.

Of what am I now afraid?

I could ask what will kill me, but spring has other questions.

Out walking It’s hard enough transmuting what for example a glimpse apprehends in moments, how gait animates, receding, how a distance collapses as the mind plays out its thoughts, remembering the color of skin, the form of shoulders.

Out walking, half rain, passing— my diminished reflection, seen, not seen, a tapped shoulder, greeting, warm and brief. Lost it, I think, but nothing is lost.

Energy, mass: how they talk, now ballooned, now shrunk again, I could wrap myself, crimson, but I lack her majesty.

In my mind, it’s revolving in a sage’s open hand, yet hate rains (her refrain). Who dares detract her, my empress?

Meanwhile, meanwhile, just a tap to ease the day. Wrote a book in two pages based on it.

Wedding notes A groom’s cake, ten pounds of lamb: wedding collides with Easter.

We text to commiserate, she in a hotel lobby looking for a place to think.

Calvino’s letters, my phone has them “in case all else fails.”

When the cabin lights go dim I read what he had to say decades ago, pertinent often, despite everyone being dead, because writing is writing and editors’ advice holds up, the good ones.

For Simone “I am the King of Bread,” said while waving a baguette, draws an appreciative chortle from young Simone, forgetting how her brother thumped her, cries rising from the next room, not one to suffer in silence, Simone. I predict great things.

Reverie And she married her old man.

At the concert, came to mind, sun lighting a house, steep hill rising behind it, birds sang as he played Liszt, his left hand crossing the right one, upper notes plinking, a Yamaha lacking resonance, a prompt for accompaniment, birds and a bobbing dowager falling in, the sun lower, slicing the audience, I put on my dark glasses, I never remarried, the sin Paris fell into, choosing.

Orange tinge Wandering, waiting, a sign glitters in, but its color cautions. A legion of men, aging, smiling, disbelief flickering, forms of self-doubt trickling like piss on the floor, unmade, these lately sung, low they fall, to ground grovel who were certain as rubbers in wallets, you never know.

Indistinct, a kind of haze stings the skin, eyes narrowing, arms instinctively held up, head wobbling, an orange tinge as one by one down. She counts.

Re: Yeats Politics in the sense of named mars the eternities that cause the muses to descend. They detach their songs from dates, and even lampshades, I read, are suspect. If a politician, despite her passing fame, fades to oblivion in the afterlife, the muses think it tragic that a poem led her to expire twice.

Seeing is just Just girls when I began blindly, a boy among boys.

Is each not memorable who gave something of herself?

For what was given up when she allied herself with me?

Women laughing, holding on, yet sadness grew, tyrants eclipsed us, stole our thoughts to throw them in our faces.

What was given up? Lies, she might say, posed as truths.

I don’t know, truly. I saw, but seeing is just seeing.

Knowing is more than that, remembering how it was.

Sometimes I think I see her or wish to be seen as now, anew, unimpeded.

Handed round From a distance, you, and later, your trace.

I read a word just now, samsara, traveling through.

Ghosts, I said. I’d been one.

Below, the Buddhist dead were innocent of tempting.

In the sports club, flesh briefly said those things only it can say.

Pain gets handed round, sepsis here and endings elsewhere, deaths of hope and would-be issue.

Marks apparent In my heart little has changed.

How much else, marks apparent, slippage, a journey scattered seaward, foam below where two friends make their homage, another hand held, yet gone as going goes, circling back— she trembles like a cello still.

Far away it must seem to her and folly too that distance says, while to my senses proximate.

Speak freely, tear down little Find your roots, your languages, the poet said, recover the mother tongues your grandmothers spoke.

Like species, they’re stamped out in a feast of monoculture, pure is always the myth of retrospect.

William Morris, horrified to see ancient churches the objects of meddlers, started Anti-Scrape.

The world is as received, he said, every dialect as godly as the next.

I stayed once at a farmhouse extended left from its origins, part a ruin, but there, marking where it began, those tilling and raising sheep, chickens, through peace and wars. When I told the taciturn farmer we were Americans, he ran inside and brought, dirt-encrusted, the bottle of red he buried against the day liberators’ sons would appear at his door.

To throw Goethe Correspondence, she wrote, assumes elective affinity, to throw Goethe into this. Swedenborg quoted Scripture: as above, so below.

Her letter flew in this morning and by two I’d read it thrice.

She never mentioned Goethe; Walter Benjamin did that. He also a correspondent in several senses.

Her letter conveyed state of mind.

(As did his, of course.) In writing another, distance foreshortens the way it does in conversation, despite the one-way nature of it.

We imagine receptivity. This may be better than sympathy for what gives rise to the affinity we elect.

No mystery A sketchbook view, taking in a grey streak or the way age sets in around her eyes, how her daughter is taller, a tot when I last saw her, chasing Robert’s dog. I’m older too in the same degree, lighter than I was, dressed in blue, a sweater against the cold despite the harbor’s glare.

No mystery, I think, writing this out. Just my friend as she was this morning, here.

Where a garden was I generalize, pointing out attraction’s perils, how its half-life takes us unaware, how desire’s uneven, how it seeps or leaches though so apparently rooted, how anger leaves soot, gravel, where a garden was, fecund with possibility. Attraction isn’t enough, I write; depth is inexplicably there. How to find it is one problem and enduring it another.

In season Minions skating on an icy plane.

So many violations, one more fresh gasp at his rasping sting, this thing he grew, falling. Yet how many gasps, really, blood there to be licked up once, met your match, Tinder’s real, ain’t it?

Bon mots mean less and less.

I crave bourgeois life, he thinks: country house, a wife and kids, a dog perhaps and nothing dead save a grouse in season or fish.

My whole life Facts open out to poetry, as they will.

Wave and wave and wave and wave: what terrors, then, in the depths?

Feet dangle, a phrase set loose, drifting toward a made-up abyss.

A pen thrown sticks into a wall, nib and all, or penetrates the heart.

Fifteen feet of grey cartilage, teeth visible in shallow water; grown men postpone their exercise. Don’t surf!

(My whole life has been like this.)

For years, I dreamt their dark shapes shot sideways in the rolling surf.

The air is warm, not like here, black forms evident from above.

Coming is their signature In the archive of memory, a gallery’s set aside for it, shelves for motion, drawers for touch, hooks to hang categories of grasps and splays.

Like Thoreau, mostly local, but a room for hotels and streets there to the right, just past those big jars of sheen, salt and sweet.

How the sound of it is like a dog the way it cuts through all else.

Only the sound, not the scent, and how beds are like boats pitching in the waving rooms, each windowsill a jetty’s edge.

Passed along I thought earlier how pain flowed across my face. My second son had finished school. Ashland’s crowd marked the occasion. Adrift. Worse as summer wore on. September twenty-first—the date stays with me— was the nadir. Life unfolded oddly.

Every theory disproven with time.

Years have passed. You don’t forget how pain flowed across your face.

There must be a theory of it, too, passed along like contagion, seeping into love the way autumn drains whole forests, edges of streets.

Souvenirs derived Falling in with regret or falling out of love, regretting this (love fares badly under siege).

Regret falls silently, reproach for all reproachable things we bring along, souvenirs out of love, derived from it or carried as memories. Time we swam in once or waded through, soaked in excess and caught out, tapped. Life closes in, opens out. Regrets aren’t even texts, there being no recipient. Ruled out. Numbers only come to mind, of phone, year of birth, the day, month.

Names drift. Somewhere, pianos are untuned or, tuned, evoke the memory of tuning.

Time since “Write what you want,” Carrie told me. Sonnets invite their writing. I nodded. Some time since I wrote one. It seemed true, bonnets abuzz with bees put me off, despite rhyme almost a thing of nature, how it flits from line to line, fecund rescuer of a random thought that slips, dips, then sits perched. Mere rhetoric, I confessed to her, more an osprey than fluttering. The fish regrets its surface nibbling, how flies wandering at dusk became a last dish, garnish on the fish’s tongue as It dies.

We’ve come a distance from garden verse.

As for the fish, things could hardly be worse.

Who lost China?

Window open, I see my friend.

Turns out she’s in a rush. Goodbye.

Tomatoes make a stew later, talk of two women’s ups and downs.

The papers repeat a mess I read earlier on my phone. Who lost China?

We traded it for Greenland, gave back the promises we saw in it, futures like so many soybean-filled hulls preemptively emptied, enterprise rolled and lit, the red glow of no.

Shadow Late summer, family at the river; fear comes briefly by to taunt me with permutations of my luck.

I think about my parents, lurching past disaster, steadying, a hand finding a railing, existentially.

A flaming boat prompts it, too, but my son rejects the analogy, as previously he turned fear aside when I mentioned him. Like a dog poking his nose in for a snack, fear smells my brain chemistry, wiring crossed in some little way, sparks of doubt, shadow of a doubt. Doubt.

Missing her I wonder what it takes to loosen the cords that bind us to reality.

In my mind, wobbling things find their way airborne like pelicans, incongruously. I want that freedom, missing her—heavens, speaking of incongruous! How gone gone can be. She is, yet she’s not. That hedgerow or those dark trees, warm as a summer night, love is close as close can be.

I wonder what it takes.

For my late friend Sometimes invited, endings and caught out every time, drawers spilling contents in loose order. A mind gone to its poles, his family wrote, that was gentle, even feckless when I knew it. Talking once in a car, and then his reply crossed my path last night, one poet quoting another.

The sense revolutions make comes at the end, if right.

The tiger’s stripes visible and the leopard’s spots magnificent, and my friend cartwheeling through time, landing at my feet, a cat’s smile, not smug but kind.

Profusion Late afternoon, two birds are not crows. Earlier the heat, floral profusion, bees made for it. Night is crickets’ rhythmic din not silent as they claim.

Words for it Lapses from convention, root causes catalogued under “usual stories,” sub-indices decisive about things like sheen.

Talk’s profoundly small.

It’s been years. Straight and narrow’s not the trail.

Sixty words, like the Inuit or is it three hundred?

How many, voices raised or throttled like angels on God’s third rails, waft giving way to tongues, guttural marks in rooms used to this, their stains vivid in the waning light?

Only refrains No story, she said, and yet birth and death figure, sex and love, treachery and sentiment mixed in.

Cause, effect, like gravity’s anvil, all those stopwatch plots, sundial trists aptly named, how fires turn on near the beach. No story, she said, no, only refrains, stanzas of variation, themes, fugues, tropes. Nothing. None.

Poetic response In my friend’s wonderful poem the god expresses impatience.

His father was subtler, though, coming on as a swan or a bull, drifting golden, theatrically lit.

Seed wombs, found continents: reason enough for subterfuge.

They remembered him fondly, wings, horns, spangly things, and how they cleared a path for him who took their measure in long crescendo, not like those ordinary men, offspring sweet being half of him, their beauty.

Walking it back (Version 1) We docked at Entropy last night, the one remaining port. I thought how you’d let me drift, and now the whole thing’s flipping back.

I can feel that heave of holes darker than wombs, their pull vague here. We have a beer, me and this friend, the kind you said I’d pick up, pirate-like, but I just like her company out here where time wound down.

A beer, then a tide to ride, I suppose we’ll cross paths as time reverses, tidying up then coming, walking it back.

It’s hardly natural, but then I’m sure we’ll like it, age before beauty like they said.

Time’s unspooled (Version 2) We got into Entropy Friday, the last remaining port. Drifted here on the current, but now the river’s turning, pulling like a womb in heat. My friend and I share a beer, company.

Time’s unspooled and now we’ll ride it back like lovers, tidying up before we come, older first, then we’re young.

Innocent No need for color, blank wings like shrouds later, folded up. Summer’s gift, working the garden, sun theirs while they have it, innocent of any ending.

Marked on the skin Winter counts, time marked on the skin, in dreams, times awake at four to the strikes a hammer makes, a spring of sorts that sings distantly.

Winter counts, the streaks of chalk white that passion leaves, the human sounds, ends after starts, the beds made and torn, rented to use, one flesh again then separate and gone.

Winter counts, stirring, ordinary time slowing minutely. A beach wet with foam then bleak, littered, windswept.

Winter counts, ripples the day left shadowed.

Melbourne poem A layer of white, crimson amid galleries your arms make. Eyes curved, gesture for the wings like Kabuki, a lip’s point, provocation.

At the restaurant the maitre d’s tattoos overflowed formality; yours float and drift. A walk loosens the grip of things.

Buildings tell time as we pass.

The new ones will, you’ll find, future provisional, their stories your own, but my small chapter.

Unknowingly We shift, it seems, from versions of a theme, astrological leaps made unknowingly. Features vary the way terrain is verdant and then tauter, but beneath it blood floods minds, words pour on the page or across tables.

One won’t speak, another does.

One said she’d be replaced.

Who’d do so? A coincidence isn’t interchange. You are you, I say again, and she is she is she.

What we call borders Everyone we carry, every last scent, how grass feels, a bird alight, regarding us: what we call borders, headspace, eyes in our skulls, how we breathe in, how we’re taken or take, sex too a border passed, why we couple, make others who then take their leave, issue who once were us.

Vast expanses, east, west, tracks laid, rivers bridged, dreamt, dammed, nature held under, subjugated, then back in heat, Kali to our demons. Borders then like paper shacks.

Birds aflame, grass brown, how we breathe unclear.

We carry until we can’t.

Count the cards Quid pro quo is to say something is handed back and forth, a game that pays us to keep up.

Narrative is accumulation, social capital for some not others—you know which when it’s revealed.

Loss floats above the bed; I feel anxious. “Nothing’s lost,” the oracle asserts.

Count the cards, tote up hours, then let go. Empty may also be proscribed, lest two minutes fill it.

Bred in Adrift in a way, although the house reforms itself for winter. Bourgeois life must be bred in, I think, the way aristocracy too rises from graves. Fancy dresses must be worn and lines continued. They flow down, blood tinged, ‘til exhaustion does them in.

Across a pasture, a horse— life on many acres. A fence the deer stand beyond, roses unmolested, only color until spring returns.

Dark as the gown The year dwindles, light shrinks to points, the sky briefly red. Gray, cold, the motifs I dread, loss a bone buried, waiting always, the dog’s return slow if ever, whistling or wishing, holding treats in two fingers the way it’s said they like. Dark as the gown thrown, the moon hidden, she’s oblivious, manuscript unbracketed. The bone denied then taken in, all manner of mixing permitted as it’s her, her whim, her century.

What can be said Set aside what can be, I tell myself.

Time also clears things away: pain that errors bring; the chronic fog of regrets sometimes flooding in.

What can be said of experience beyond living it? What can’t?

What should? What art results?

Gauguin is now condemned whose colors found subjects, whose diary’s reflective. Time lies in this respect, condemning as if it knows and always knew.

Relic A year flew by, he told me.

Three years of hell, I said.

I carried home a talisman, It weighs a lot. Against black its color works. I hadn’t thought these texts would land on it. They strike me as ephemeral; here they sit, mottos of their era.

If unearthed eons later, epic banality painstakingly revealed will reward some scholar’s work.

Who is this and why?

Happenstance Nature is whatever we light on, despite the history of place.

I dreamt two nights ago of a kiss arising from talk.

In the dream, I felt the stir.

I only knew her by name, yet things moved along.

In the dream, I weighed the pluses and minuses love brings with it. This is a sign of life, not precisely wisdom but knowledge only gained by happenstance or fate, mixed with design, we think.

Ha ha—as if. Nature is all lips.

Bring her forward Domesticity borrowed, neither friendship nor marriage, a knowing in a deeper sense, surface and talk mixed. When it comes apart, knowing ends.

Adrift on time again we come a distance, far enough to get our knowing back, every word we said or wrote, every sense we once invoked. It is a voluntary thing, I tell myself. Ten years now almost for one and the other comes and goes. The gods orchestrate the scenes: hotels with their red-stained sheets, houses with art and cats, motifs of wooden floors, dark walls, terraces, ships. They bring her forward, nod foreknowing, yet act surprised when each small marriage comes undone.

In disarray How like rain it is.

Green shades toward sleep.

Thickets where gates were, dying forests, and yet birds sustain themselves.

Crows loud when I fetched the undelivered newspaper fleshy with Christmas, the way holidays are declared, beds left in disarray. They liked it then, being fucked, the way it conjured up something else.

A yellow sofa in three variants

A borrowed staircase

A yellow sofa surfaced and traffic, especially the buses. Not the ocean of another room. Distance is relative with another body. She liked kings but there we were, there it was.

Under the bathroom light, a hole.

The universe is rent and warped, the odds coming to mind, weighed.

How to square these two things?

Oh marriage! What is real and what isn’t? What lies between these poles, honesty and deception? Overrated, the one, and the other’s misconstrued that was mere awkwardness, the way ghosts emerge from walls and the dog is put away, yet lingers, scents, sounds too prevalent to ignore.

Congress is one word for it, desire needing a room, horizontality.

Children float at the edge, a potential.

Welcome them, the Church teaches. Lever in a way, forcing the issue, hounding bliss, if that word can be used, the fog of hours spent in bed, myopia.

It would be better if time kept crawling or even stopped like Rockefeller’s heart.

(Better for him but not better for her.)

Who will clear a path? No one, I conclude.

Traffic all night, I remember.

“Marry me” had its symmetry.

Nothing that can’t be justified by brain chemistry. Wears off.

No and no, and so, no and no.

A Chanel outfit in the photo.

Congress, they used to call it.

Ache sometimes Such gifts as I brought, gestures desired, needed, outgrown, rejected in a huff or set down like drinks forgotten on a table.

Flowers in hand or naked, only the telltale sign and how it dies.

Pen in hand, reading, reading.

I ache sometimes of anger and neglect. How brittle stems become when moments pass, yet small bits of blue remain.

A borrowed staircase, anecdotes mingled with my own. How far we went on a fruitless errand, despite ample though belated coverage, a romp, pilfered wine.

I gloss rather than copy prose, these phrases hitched together as a preface. Long runways end in wrecked and burning planes.

A borrowed heaven, afterlives doubtful and we daren’t write.

Names are dropped, fathers scorned. No issue. An ending.

The path seems evident. Trudge another day amid stolid trees, winter coming, alone but for letters, visits, the spells broken then restored, the breaks, chasms, basins, geologic time inserted just because.

Seemed evident. Solidity is life despite sleep, sunlight.

Barely a flicker, this thing haunting us then pausing, then manifest, cutting through in its peculiar way and taking over and over.

In Aix

Like buskers

Blooms incongruous, thoughts arising the way bliss too appears.

I used to want it, wrote it down among early January’s desires.

In Aix when I felt it everywhere, despite loneliness. Words draw.

Paralyzed in a way. They go off to mass.

“It will be sung,” she said. Laundry’s dry and folded in this material world. Songs pour from the box, season appropriate.

It was May, fifteen years, some months away from now. The way bliss too disappears, cold descends in life.

We build our huts. Wrapped in furs like old people, shamans, traders, amber in our pockets, bits of it floating in a kind of glass, once so viscous two fingers slid in, angling.

At the funeral, Heaven was invoked, life eternal. Like here, Swedenborg noted, only it goes on and on, a telenovela of good and evil. Banality, Arendt wrote, like buskers on the train, murdering time to make a buck. A waiting game, I read, imploding as they will, which were mighty, and so, we wait, avoiding vodka, living on to reap what rattles east. Soothes envy knowing they will fall just as Marx wrote.

Even the pope struggles to pay his bills.

Those choirboys seduced, law suits— wives to keep them honest or at least more honorably corrupt is our answer.

No Prada slippers, no monkey business.

“It will be sung.” Laundry’s dry, folded.

Materiality brought us here, stranded but we do our best with it. Abandoned, we embrace it, tell you what the news is.

“A bumpy year” to everyone. Vodka and a chaser, the usual denials. Mass is over. Hope your husband’s better.

The prince is crimson, so Wills then.

Common Place, a personal journal | Š 2020 by John J. Parman | complace.j2parman.com