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LAWRENCE UPTON
Stroking
the cats
As I walked through a landscaped housing estate, I
thought "grassy knoll", unconnected with anything else. Kennedy's assassination
has the same presence in my consciousness as the crucifixion of Christ, Santa Claus and
Elvis Presley. I believe all the Kennedy stories; I believe none...
I think there is nothing that I can do about
"the state of the world". Perhaps there is nothing to be done; because whatever
we do, "they" send in a gunship; and the people united will only happen at
random, requiring a larger probability than that required for chimpanzees to type out the
collected Shakespeare, with or without variant readings, before they become extinct.
Therefore, the only thing to be done that I can
think of is either to charge a tank like a Pole or a Cossack, and let the surviving laugh
at me; or to see what can be done for myself and those few I care about a lot
subjectively...
That is, I am not in an Auschwitz and may well be
able to stay out of one; one up for me and those I love. I may be old enough to die before
the gulf stream stops flowing or someone assured of certain certainties, perhaps someone
from my country, explodes a big one over my country; one up for me and those I love...
Were I a praying man, I might thank the vacuums...
I persist with my poetry and try to improve it; and
I persist in telling those who will listen about the poetry I admire; I maintain the
courtesies with as many as possible, and intimacy in a handful of friendships...
If an acquaintance becomes tiresome, I can tell the
other party with all the persuasiveness I can summon, how I see the world and what needs
to be done to save it from the culpable destruction we impose upon it; and they go away.
It becomes psychologically necessary to look away
for as long as possible from the horizon, where the fighting can be seen against thick
smoggy light. I look into the nearer distance, tell others who are trying to keep warm
towards the ongoing end of things how to get a bully off their back at work etc; and
sometimes, by accident, there is a bit of peace and quiet or something worth looking at
which hasn't been trampled into the mud...
Pills help in moderation, but talking to the medics
who control them is a waste of time. Walking helps. If I acted as if everything nasty I
can imagine and more is happening and will happen again with greater intensity, which is
the way it is, then I would not keep going. I don't know what the point of keeping going
is beyond my observation that sometimes I enjoy it a bit, and sometimes others seem to
enjoy my company or my poetry, though I know that if I were dead I wouldn't be here or
anywhere to remember it so why bother?
There comes into my mind, and stays, despite its
sentimentality, the last frames of Joe Hill (a Bo Wideberg film, I believe), where
he's strapped into a chair, blindfold, in front of a firing squad; and, while they're
going through their ceremony, which they think turns murder into something other than
murder, he shouts out with some pleasure "I can hear a bird".
I recall the tone of Harold Pinter's voice at the
end of a production of Sartre's In Camera: Let's get on with it.
& that, to put it another way, is why I stroke
cats; but I know, in general and in some detail, what is going on. I'm not asleep. On the
contrary, I wish I could sleep more.
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