In July of 1983 my father wrote a tract called THE ARTICLE.
It was his opus. He asked a simple question. What are the benefits of war? He
was in Delray, Fl, on his friend’s sofa when the composition took place. He wrote
for many hours a day. He went to bed late at night trembling. He woke in the
morning thinking that the work wasn't getting anywhere. People stopped by. Once
one of his old girlfriends came by. He opened the door to her and invited her
in and asked if he could read some of his new work to her. She looked out the
window and said she'd rather not. She told him that for the longest time the
only voice she had heard was his. She came by to tell him that she had started
writing. It didn't come easy, sometimes she found herself still having to shut
him out, but at least she was writing. People, with exceeding exactitude, get
to die, he said. I think you should go. She left and proceeded from there to
drive to the ocean, and what happened to her once she reached the ocean would
remain a mystery.
My father returned to his manuscript with a new vigor. This
was during the third phase of the Lebanese Civil War. The poet, Nadia Tueni,
who my father had just heard of from a man at the Frog Lounge, had recently
died. He began to consider the subject of his work not war itself, but the
events occurring around it, the virtually unrelated activity of living and
dying, what is external to casualties, collateral, economic, perhaps
superficially unaffected, voided, by the mechanisms of war itself.
He imagined the bar where he would drink himself to death,
but his drama would be the parking lot just across the street, or the way the
abandoned building looked at him in the middle of the night, when he felt his
paranoia creeping in and was compelled to go to the window to make sure the
buildings the street the world he was comfortable with had not made any sudden
movements, lurched itself in any one particular direction.
For instance, Nadia Tueni's death was unrelated to the
activity of that war, that is, she died in a well-lit hospital room in London,
but she seemed to my father a representative countervailing force, the
utterance of minutely coded excesses, during wartime. It was his project to
start with these coded excesses, to interpret them.
We seem to live in these excesses in America at least, our
lives take place in the impalpable air of a constant war, we go to work in it,
live, move, speak through it.
She was not, he asserts in his first sentence, a great poet,
nor was her death the cessation of her poetic act, obviously, but the
continuance of a shared banality. She was, for my father, the act of memory itself,
forgetting that it is the result of a chain of amino acids, coming unhinged, a
jaw, a man asking how many hours until we've arrived at a geographic
destination. You live in a neighborhood, you do service in another. She was a
woman pronounced and lived as if made in words used to order pizza, address
your landlord, complain to your friend about the weather. Taken by them, we
etch ourselves against a landscape of great foreboding, wave lapping onto wave,
a sound, or a kind of sound.
Who gets to die? At her death, a few suggested that she
wrote poems able to withstand the pressure of the time and were therefore, of
our time. My father asserts that this is an unnecessary way of thinking. Or
that it goes without saying. That all work whenever it’s read, will reflect its
readings’ context. People have to assert that a work is timeless to keep that
work from the incarceration of its inherent illiteracy. Such is the tension of
a book distributed to classes in middle America.
Any poet of any worth will hold the world surrounding her
work accountable—read or unread. Her work itself is this grief of possession of
ethics. People have wars. People without phones, people with phones. Computers
that are phones, phones that are computers. People whose stories keep changing,
people who do not think it possible to find predicate B completely outside of
the subject A, who think of sixty to zero, performance, people who know about
doing everything well, or the best of everything, jazzed up with the flavors of
Bourbon St, nothing called, the metaphysical component necessary for extension,
the swelling and poorly officiated sex scene, afterward a lot of thought
already inherent in the subject, a lot of things to think about.
Having thus detoured, he begins, again, by addressing the
dead poet and her body. She is lying on a small table in an empty room. My
father is the only one in the room with her, tasked to keep an eye on her--or
is it the engulfing stench of decomposition? Either way, he feels like he’s
being tested, or set-up. Her body is perfect and my father is afraid to touch
it. Not that he is afraid of her body so much as he is by the compulsion to
touch her body, which he feels rippling through him, like a sound. He can in
fact hear her, her cold perfect breasts, the soft mound of her vagina. She is
blue, veiny, ghostly, and the nervousness and dread he feels on him loosens him
from the trivial dimensions of the room and sends him headlong into a black and
terrifying opening in himself. It is a small and fiercely written passage. He
states calmly that he could not comprehend his desire. He moves on from the
body to the TV. This is not apostrophe in the exact or formal sense. A hope
rings out almost immediately. I sense some urgency here in my father’s writing.
One sentence begins and ends quickly. Another goes for it, and you can see the
screws tightening. He trains his eye just so, then squints, then looks at
something else. It is not among my father’s best passages. I get the sense his
own urgency didn’t interest him. Who gets to die? We preceded his writing. There
may be an answer in the next sentence, written after us, before we encounter
ourselves, or the following sentence. The man gurgles. What is that sound he
asks. She was speaking to him while he wrote, that is clear. His world could
not have contained what he spoke of. His position in Delray was limited. But
his world was trenchant. There were tanks and bombs, people who filled streets,
who poured into them, giddily or angered, people who spilled into nearby
streets, dazed and wistful. He was listening. He felt the next book she would
write inside him. It felt like an event, he felt like he had a concert hall
inside himself. The traffic on the Miami Federal Highway was sparse. He listened
to it through the open window, the sound of passing cars soothing him, and at
this moment the composition took a turn for the worst. He felt the sound pass
through him, into being by him. He
thought of cars as he wrote. They became the book, accelerating.
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