Dina & Dan Return

Natural disaster, in how you frame it, in what you make of it. The National Guard shows up; 17 year olds with tanks and AK-47's strapped across their backs, they are walking around, pacing. The way in is closed but the way out is open, evacuation. What can Randy Lee and Katie Jean do more than this, pace inside a space in a head far away in a city unknown. This is how we are policed. No electricity, and then light, no water, and then. Where can we procure an AK-47. You loot, we shoot. What more is this that is no more, how roads are imprinted into your brain of places you will never ago. How that feels, to have all of this spatial information about place. Go here, no, go here. Turn left. When you leave, where you go. You should plan on seeing this and this and this while you are out. We have been away long enough that those places do not exist. Sigh. Recover. How many days until we fully understand catastrophe? 364, to be exact, take a day off. Randy Lee understands bravery in all of its permutations. An AK-47 strapped to his back. How to live in a world that is a building perpetually coming down. How a building is closest to heaven when falling. Expansion, relief. The National Guard show up, FEMA shows up, Your President shows up briefly, Red Cross, everyone is here at the table, we are feasting. What it means to feast on remains, the guts in the streets, no you cannot arrive, yes you have to leave. What it means to know a place so intimately and never return.

Thoughts Concerning The Greek Epic and Terrorism

The Greek heroic was an elect property, comprised of birth, class, and system. As opposed to an average man in an extraordinary ethical moment, the heroic moment was the volition of its hero--the appearance of the heroic man. The Greek Mind dominated nearly every educated modernist. Its rise was understood in mystical terms and considered the high point of cosmic mischance--the Greeks were considered fated. Boys in classrooms in Europe read Homer while their fathers warred with great imperial dignity in India and Africa. Yet by the time the early modernists found themselves in the trenches, the Greek esteem seemed to have crumbled. Moral philosophers had for too long extrapolated from their (emotional) biases greater social enthusiasms that were simply nonexistent. Joyce wrote it was "a damned lie that there could not be a substitute for individual passion as the motive power for everything." Men were killing and mangling one another in high numbers "in the defense of the outmoded epic codes" they had read in schoolbooks. It was far too likely that the people were dissimilar from their descriptions; and their models had likewise been grossly handled. That is, that the descriptions of their Greek models did not match what was being described; or it was as if they had been mischaracterized by their proximity to a strange and sentimental fiction of culture itself--that things had once been good somewhere at some point in time.

It seems inevitable then that the modernists accused the social and political culture of a kind of collectively bad interpretation of the classics; how could the same source produce any two more utter and divergent readings? The chance of war was not equal--it is never one or the other, but both. If such were not the virtues of the day, the day was as it was, because Philistines were at the helm. Pound attempted a mastery of classics as show of his fitness for political and social activity. It is both, Pound would argue. Joyce turned to the Greek epic, in order to shrink its "virtual" effects into the span of a single day. In his way, he said it was both. Pound and Joyce worked from a principle of ordinariness--either of style or of content. Both reverted to the old forms for the modern epic of social ordinariness. Simplicity or austerity are almost exclusively examples of a sort of reclamation.

This was primarily a moral and material reclamation and critique, rescuing and creating an art concerned with having a body and a mind as means of experiencing the social production of the world. It was therefore critical of both the apparatus and its subsequent production, which had to at that point include a cultural assessment of Greek virtue and historical military virtue, writes Kiberd. The heroic man, argued the modernist, was nonexistent, insofar as every man played such a role merely going through his day--(Bloom, Prufrock). What amounted to an existential crisis in America in the 1950s was the loss of the meaning of the big work; the major narrative; and this loss proved incommensurable at the end of the Cold War, where after a ten year period an imperially heroic ordinariness reigned supreme and the novel all but disappeared.

The new dominance is predicated upon wars, which lack or do not even demand, individual heroics; at most, we have troops; but the real heroes of the new age are the average citizen-victims, intermittently ripped apart in terroristic bomb blasts; their "epic ordinariness" in the social systems makes "enemy combatants" of them. The gulf between this ordinary citizen and one of the troops, it would seem, if we're being honest, is only an investment of time (this also corresponds roughly to the national trend of de-specialization of labor in the United States). What prevents any man from firing remote controlled missiles and finishing a puzzle are almost identical. "Time was God judged," writes Hölderlin.   

Only things that are in their very nature stable are capable of being disrupted or terrorized. It is because of this that the age of terror demands a stable social age. The paradox is that the most stable of systems are always host to explicitly unstable citizenry. These new people are composed of many differing sub-individuals, a loose arrangement of parts that in part denote the essential presence of an individual. The principle motive of terror is social disruption--to set off within not the system at large but individually something on the threshold of panic; a sense of the loss of function, disruption or contamination. Terror tolerates the loss of life for this shock; yet so too does the system, in its ability to maintain itself and its appearance of stability. It tolerates a startling number of the murdered. Yet the average citizen is always anticipatory of terror; such is the tension produced by living in a discursively coherent system. The social systems it exists within do not register this panic so much as it retransmits these energies through its communications networks. It hardly even trembles. An event of terror is merely a confirmation of its stability. 

I am not belittling the phenomenal consequences of terror, but am merely recapitulating, in different terms, what our leaders have already told us--and usually ask of us in the aftermath of its event. The new-heroic day is ever always just about to be but not quite broken apart by strange chances, and in spasms of this possibility of "breaking apart", one recognizes the moment of a new age--a time for people ceaselessly and creatively unchanging themselves; to remain or to hope to remain the various component parts given at the outset by the system in which the "self" finds itself constructing its self.

For this terror in its essence can never become a norm, it will have either defeated itself, or the system it resided in could no longer house its diffusive energies. Terror succeeding its own boundaries will necessarily return to check itself. It is effective insofar as it seems only like a gross or absurd deviation, which for it to function, at least periodically, must be a deviation from a norm solidly in place.

A terror present--or coexistent--with a daily basis becomes something quite else--because of its ordinariness of appearance. What it becomes is war, in all its banal inefficiencies and destruction. War, of all systems of social discursivity, is most like the market. A drone hovers somewhere. Fifty men are killed. This happens almost every day in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Libya, just as the exchange of goods and services for money does in Minnesota and 

Odd Future

Not at last, everything that is dead

Is yours

But yes, one wouldn't make it seem that way

While she sleeps, she is dead

Because she is yours

One thinks stealthily, isn't she here too

Dead in my arms

My arms must be her arms

The spring you stole into, clattering down

And broke such wonderful things for, the songs must die

It seemed one wanted to hear the dying of that which must die

Which were hiccups stolen from thoughts from slavery

You were always wearing.  No, and you were always wearing Difference

Which was to become the instrument of your truth

And yet it shouldn't quite be and now you're ready

Only that the sound of it was its breaking down

But if you had been honest

Then everything would sound different

From what you had said it was in the beginning

When it was winter, and the instrument of your truth was a ghost

For what great lives you would lead together, a grandeur of ghosts

To say the wind has stopped, at this point

Now all the past is different without having changed

Attire, as though one had been living in a blue house all this time

Only to start calling it yellow

And anything can be called something else

Except that these things preferred to be called very

By the ones who had been there when they were first seen

In the old way. And that that can't tolerate

The new way

As if all this hasn't been

And so places upon your head a crown of wanting

That which couldn't have been and is now coming true.

Who are you now that she is covering her face with a question

You who sits with a sly grin

Brimming with old misdeeds

That the things that had happened previously, to unknown people,

Found new people, through the long process of an error

And happened again. It takes a long time to say

Anything given that your time has been an exercise

In this confusion. But having been made a stranger of yourself

Do you seek refuge in others

Deadness that feels like they must be

In full armor. The stranded nights--and this will change your life now

Or what life you had led approached this error,

There were living people almost able to speak

And the self is cold, as a sky going by the window

In a curve, will seem cold. 

Dan Enters

Only because he had looked unfamiliar, the way a house takes light, the way a light takes mesmerism, the sky revealing for one period of satisfied lyricism its gold and pink treasure, my brother’s house in western Michigan, the lake and the great state of Wisconsin waiting on its opposing shore, like an old pal. Do not think I am someone understanding the certain satisfaction of sense impressions, but as they appear to the artistic mind, the counteracting and the mobility, the sense of appropriate proportion. Largeness will only make matters scan; the frame bends unjustly to exclude. He thought he was a lot smarter than he was. To be full of grief, to be full of mistrust for mostly living, with details, the very small, because I do not stroll outside of the inhabited grip. You could tell too because he was talking, and I always had the suspicion that perhaps he was not talking. How dumb Randy was to think that that other woman, looking backward, would fold over, like clothes, and was married, to the first man who saved her life, to the second man, who had stepped on her face. But this is not to be precise. Randy cared nothing for precision. The kind of man who learned to counteract feelings of grief with the understanding of the mistake of it, to have been at all, although, being very prone to foolishness, no matter all the young gentlemen today appear to be dressed in mourning, for never having been at all. Grief stains the language of grief, Randy, the fifty thousand dollars he was given because he was unhappy, because he fell among painters, only they were arranging rather than leaving their wives behind, the furniture in the rooms where they conversed, fully dressed, the windows, a thousand to the left, divorced from the wall the way light is divorced from falling and is finished on the finished wood floor, hardened into a pool of shadow beneath the domestic sofa bed. Guys who think they are, and the women who think they are. The smart talk at the curve. As he had been thinking he was ahead of it, how stupid they are, not to be. Randy, for months with painful self-appropriation. They want you to feel sorry for them, say awww no you’re not. 

Dina Stops at Dan's on Her Farewell Tour

Dear Dan, I am leaving you but before I go I must tell you this, this is what I have always wanted to understand, the ways in which I can leave and not leave, go and not go, stay and not stay, haunt. Dan, what salutation makes you think of brick buildings more, fog and then a small lake we can look over together, some boats at dock and clinking. It is dusk, dawn, dusk again, we have not left each other in these many hours, remember all the hours together. This summer when my childhood home was set on fire, Dan, I wanted you to come with me and see the skeleton, charcoal, lead. I wanted you to understand the womb from which I came. When I look out into the woods and see the vegetable garden that goes un-tilled, the one year I helped you bury potatoes, these fresh out of the ground, I put them there for spring time vegetables, here is my bounty, my bounty. Dan, with my finger up my nose, with something up my nose. Dan, I salute you. The way in which your urine arches like Blake's angels from a woman's head of yellow hair, the way in which it is relief. Dan, all I can do is apologize now, I am sorry for everything ever was and has been. Some days you are closer to me than others. Like God. Some days God is closer to me than others. Like you. What does that say about divinity. What is divine and where do I stand. Dan, we are standing underneath glass at an aquarium, my hand is in yours, do you remember. How the fish seemed like they were floating. The way the sea lamprey looks crazy, slack jawed and wide eyed, lunatic. Dan, this one is for you. And that one. And that one over there. And the one that goes, thank you from the bottom of my heart, sex sex combustion no. Dan, thank you for the glock to the head, three strikes, what sport is that again, you as catcher, my heart as ball.

Dina & Dan Feel Remarkable

Why don't you just go home you freaks says our neighbor when we arrived very early to go to the yard sale in the neighborhood because yard sales were a big thing around here, everyone poor buying everyone else's stuff, no one is rich around here, the houses are old and have been in families for generations so people simply own them outright and that is why they are here and so everyone from the community scurries to the grand opening of the yard sale and this particular yard sale there were boxes of hair care products, bows and gels of all kinds and this lady wanted it and the mother of the house gave her a deal but her math was off and the lady got sore about it and another lady piped up as is happens at yard sales in the community and the mother says well I don't care and before she finishes the other lady says well she cares, its her money and the lady who wants the boxes says o don't worry about it and the mother says, what I was going to say was, I don't care what you give me for them and the ladies say nothing and the woman pays what the mother wants and says I am going to give these to my little niece, tell her we're going to play dress up and when she leaves we hear the mother say who would want their child to put those dirty things in their hair, what she is going to do is resell everything in that box for a higher cost, make some money, all of these dirt people, this dirt city.

We are at this yard sale and we have been here on and off all day since it is just a block away and we are getting into things, trying clothes that obviously don't fit on and running around and playing with toys and breaking them and finally the mother says leave please you freaks, leave.

One of her daughters is on the porch watching us. She is the black sheep of the family. She and her sister will always be treated differently. The daughter on the porch was a replacement child for the one they lost before her. She will be ignored when the other children come, especially her blond haired sister and her two little brothers. She will be left out and not included in anything. In adulthood, she will be goth and misunderstood. Her sister will get her Master's Degree in English and have two children named after literary heroes and writers.

We begin to run, kicking a ball we steal that no one notices.

Dina & Dan's Family Rules

My sister and I know when we have been too long when the lights are out in the house and we have to wait until morning to get in so we sleep in the garage because our parents said if we are not back by a certain time the house would be locked and we have no keys now and so we sleep in the garage like raccoons and in the morning our father lets us in but we are in trouble and we may not go to sleep, we have chores and a huge breakfast to eat and I want to die I tell him, I want to die and he says well if you'd follow the rules than what the fuck you know and your grandparents are coming over, look presentable.

I have been outside in the shed slamming beers I stole from down the street. Last week they asked me for ID to buy a lighter (get real) but then I figured out how to steal the beer and who cares about the lighter? Not me. I go up to the counter with a nice smile and buy gum and a candy bar and the attendant side-eyes me with suspicion but I have to stay real cool about things, real solid. The shed reeks of something dead and I figure out a raccoon has passed away, a mother's skeleton surrounded by two baby skeletons. What happened here that they could not get out? Snow? At least they died together.

I don't want to die with anyone. I am dying, I tell our family at dinner. My father knifes a potato and puts it on my plate, I did not have anything otherwise. Eat, he says, goddamn it. I don't want to, I'm not hungry, I'm drunk and red faced. I begin to laugh uncontrollably, jeez, look who's stoned our mother says.

At night Dina and I spoon because we have to,  but sometimes because we want to, our limbs intertwining, our contortion making it even easier to sleep.