Whose genes did it?

By George Beetham Jr.

There are days when I wonder to myself how I have survived all these years in this crazy, mixed-up world. And one of those days was Saturday.

My brother and wife had tickets to see the Trenton Thunder play the Reading Phillies on Saturday night. So I ordered a ticket and planned to join them.

I got to the stadium about a half-hour before game time, went inside, ordered hot dogs and beer, and set out to the section where we would be sitting. I found them, sat down, chatted a bit, and began wolfing down the dogs.

I filled out my scorecard with the batting order. We all stood for the National Anthem, and the game began.

It was in the bottom of the first inning when the PA announcer announced, “Will the owner of a gray Ford Escape, license number (my tag number) please report to where your car is parked in the parking garage. Bad news: your lights are on and your car is running.”

“Is that you?” my brother asked.

“It sure is,” I replied, heading for the exit.

I got my hand stamped for re-entry and set out for the garage, a good five-minute walk away.

I got there and headed in. When I got to the bay where my car was parked, two parking attendants were looking inside the car. As I walked up, they both looked at me.

I nodded as if to say, “Yes, I’m the airhead who did it!” They had parked near my car and were standing by, making sure nobody stole it.

“Is this your car?” one asked.

I told him it was and thanked them for having me paged. I used my spare key to unlock the door and retrieve the key from the ignition where I had left it, car running and lights on.

I locked the car and headed back into the stadium, thanking the two attendants again. I felt like an idiot, but face it, things had worked out well. I only burned an hour’s worth of gas, and by leaving the car on I had inadvertently kept the battery from running down.

Inside again, I headed to my seat.

My brother looked at me, as if to say, “Well, how did you manage to pull off that airhead move?”

I told him how I managed to pull off that airhead move, and how I had a spare key attached to a

on my cell phone pouch.

He just looked at me as if to say, “That really was a airhead move.”

I looked back at him as if to say, “Who needs little brothers anyway?”

I told him that on the way back I was wondering to myself whether I had channeled our late father or our late mother.

A few innings later another PA announcement was made for another car owner who left his or her lights on.

“At least they didn’t leave the engine running,” my brother said.

“True, but their battery is probably run down by now,” I replied as factually as a person with egg on their face can state anything.

“But they’re not running out of gas,” he pointed out to the airhead.

“Neither did I,” replied the airhead.

“And I figured out who I channeled,” I added. It was the Pop gene, but it blamed the Mom gene!”

The airhead edits a weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pa., when he’s not running around loose doing airheaded things.

Poem

Supernaturalness

When you cross the Animas Mountains in the morning,
if you want to keep their peace along your way,
let me offer you—time traveler—a warning:
you must let the past and future fade away.

Pay no mind to double-talking apparitions
who will claim to have control over your fate.
They’ll revive your old regrets and superstitions
and attempt to make you doubt and hesitate.

And when shadows let you know your day is over,
if you follow as they travel with the night,
in the disappearing lands you will uncover
your new world of sound illusions and insight.

Luis Verano

L.V. is a professor of Romance languages at the University of Oregon. About the setting of his poem, he writes:

The Animas Mountains, in southern Hidalgo County in the southwestern corner of New Mexico, extend for about thirty miles along the Continental Divide. They include desert, grassland, juniper and oak woodlands, dense conifer areas, riparian zones, perennial watercourses, and springs. A very wide diversity of bird species, mammals and reptiles breed here. Even jaguars are occasionally seen within the Animas. The largest part of the range is within the 300,000-acre Diamond A Ranch, which includes land previously known as the Gray Ranch. The Diamond A was purchased in 1990 by The Nature Conservancy, and since then, the Hadley Family—a long-time family of ranchers—formed the Animas Foundation that now manages the land, preserving and maintaining its natural beauty in harmony with the environment.

Mechademia

Image from STEAMBOY

I have now finished Mechademia, and there are two good essays in it. One is a brief and somewhat fragmentary commentary by Ueno Toshiya (one of only two Japanese academics represented in the journal) that questions whether the linear “storyboard” or series of successive images (in film or animation) does or does not match the way people view their surroundings when they are not watching a film. That’s a neat question. Obviously it doesn’t have a single answer. The other good essay is actually a great essay, “The Multiplanar Image,” by someone from McGill named Thomas Lamarre, who takes the backdrop technique used in Steamboy as his starting point and then moves on to a host of issues: Disney, the invention of the multiplanar camera, Miyazaki, Murakami and the “Superflat” esthetic, and ultimately the history of the use of perspective in visual art and the link between Murakami and the ukiyoe “floating world” school of Edo art. There’s actually more than that; it is a tour de force essay with the best description of “superflat” I have ever read—much better than Murakami’s own explanation and also key to seeing in a flash that much of traditional Japanese painting and art was superflat by esthetic choice.

Here is Lamarre’s definition of superflat:

First we need to ask how something apparently uniplanar (flat) becomes superplanar (superflat). Superflat implies that something is not simply flat but very, very flat—complexly flat. To make something look superflat, you have to begin with layers that introduce the possibility of depth and then crush it. … You achieve superflatness only by having complex layers and making them all appear equally on the surface, and equally important visually. In other words, backgrounds or intermediate layers don’t fade away, allowing themselves to be overlooked. On the contrary, they push to the fore. Oddly enough, very flat backgrounds—say, a background of a single color or one composed of speed lines—often appear as important as the figure that they highlight. Depth comes right to the surface even as it serves to direct attention to the character. Foreground and background become equally striking.

This is the basic idea of superflat: no element within the image is more important than any other element. The result is a visual field without any hierarchy among elements. You could also call this a distributive visual field, since elements are distributed rather than hierarchized. … When everything comes equally to the surface, you still make connections, you will still orientate yourself, but those connections and orientations will not be guided by depth cues… you are orienting yourself in a densely packed distributive field—a sort of information field. Rather than simple flatness, you have complex superflatness.

It’s funny in a way that Murakami has always promoted Superflat as an art revolution when, in addition to some traditional art, ordinary maps are superflat by definition.

Gary Mawyer

Male-female relationships in war

The following was written in response to my editor’s request that I put into writing some of the things I said at a staff meeting on ENDURING WAR: STORIES OF WHAT WE HAVE LEARNED, the winter 2008 issue of MANOA. Another post on this issue appears below.

Chester Aaron as a soldier during WWII

Male-female relationships are part of the story of war. In some cases, they parallel war, as in Chester Aaron’s “Winterswijk.” The relationship between Benjamin and Nikki parallels the relationship between the Dutch and Jews during WWII. He separates from her at the end because he can’t tolerate her limited responses to his pain as an individual and as a Jew; that she wants to have Piet, another man, in her life is indicative to him of the ambivalent, compromised response of the Dutch to the Jews who were taken by the Germans. When Nikki insists that “Dachau” is the answer to his pain, this is true and yet too simple. The pains of his ethnicity and history are intertwined with his pain as a man. This idea is expressed, in very different circumstances, in David Shulman’s set of short essays, “On Being Unfree: Fences, Roadblocks, and the Iron Cage of Palestine”:

David Shulman (photo by Tzahy Lerner)

These are men with the sensitive pride of the Mediterranean male. Their story is one of continuous humiliation, of agonies of impotence: they cannot protect their own fields; their homes have been taken away from them over and over; they are easy prey for the settlers with their guns. They ache the man’s ache, the one that has no healing. I hear it in the broken, staccato language that embodies memory after memory—last night’s incident now added to this unending series of insults.

In Benjamin’s case, he enters Dachau as a victor, but it is too late: he cannot save those who were killed. And when he enters the marketplace of German men and women, he relives his “impotence” as a Jew. The beard he decides to grow at the end hides his scars as an individual and a member of the Jewish community—and, ironically, will make him even more Jewish looking than before.

Shmuel HaNagid’s “First War” is a powerful poem, especially when read in relation to Aaron’s story “Scent of Thyme.” The desperate circumstances of war turn women into prostitutes—voluntarily or not. When HaNagid conflates the desperation of prostitutes with the desperation of soldiers, he is equating the degradation, wounds, and hopelessness of one with those of the other.

Sharon May’s story, “Last Song of Saravat,” probably describes the most complex male-female relationship in the issue, in part because the relationship changes over a long period. The woman is a secondary character, but we have a stronger sense of her than we do of the narrator. Both are survivors of the Khmer Rouge, but the man chooses cowardly means, disguising who he is, destroying evidence of his economic status and his personal history, and so forth. The woman does not become a prostitute or someone’s wife but instead tries to survive without a man—both as a woman and a mother. Her relationship with her daughter is not ideal, but she does not seek to provide the daughter with a father; that is, her sense of what the daughter needs in order to grow up in a healthy way does not embrace the traditional idea of family. In the course of the relationship the man and woman develop in the Thai refugee camp, the woman’s strength, steadfastness, refusal to act out of desperation compel the man to reflect on his limitations and to change.

Shepherd Bliss

Shepherd Bliss ends his essay, “The Grim Reaper: Agrotherapy, Kokopelli, Pinochet’s Darkness,” with a description of two women: a woman he has formed a personal relationship with; and a fellow vet in his writing group. Here is the last part of his essay:

Recently, my new friend and I have been speaking Spanish to each other. She suggested that we go to Chile sometime. The idea does not appeal to me. Even communicating with her in Spanish—though I love doing it—evokes unpleasant memories. After the Chilean coup, I lost my Spanish—a psychic numbing that helped me survive the terror. Many years later, when I visited Spain, my Spanish began to return as I became more able to go down into my grief. Conversely, with the return of the Spanish comes the memories and feelings about Chile.

Leaning on Each Other

“I know I won’t always be here,” the co-host of our vets’ group comments as she looks out the window from her hilltop home into a marvelous Redwood Empire valley. Leaning on her World War II veteran husband, she adds, “So I want to appreciate and care for the earth while I can.” We recently celebrated her husband’s eightieth birthday.

Robert Bly begins his poem “In the Month of May,” “I see when I walk how well all things lean on each other.” As our vets’ group goes on its afternoon walking meditation, I notice how well the trees and other vegetation lean on each other. Such leaning can create great joy and the capacity to endure pain and suffering. The reverence and humor of our being together enable me to speak more of my truth, ask for help, and lean toward others, thus dispersing some of the isolation that has long dogged me.

I am seeking to talk and write about my bright summer images of torture in order to replace them with sweet images of leaning on each other. It is warmer that way. As we walk on our meditation by the giant trees, a woman vet takes my arm. You can lean on me, I think as we go down the hill. May I lean on you? I wonder.

Bliss’s leaning on the woman vet—as he has learned to lean on his “new friend”—is a wonderful suggestion not only of the power of comradeship but of the power of men and women to help, console, and heal each other. There is a power inherent in the opposition of the genders that can heal, make things whole. When these are set in violent opposition, as in “Scent of Thyme,” the result is destruction of the kind that war produces—the destruction of the individual that Serbian writer Vladislav Bajac describes in his essay and that we often see only the outward forms of, e.g., the relocation camps in Leo Litwak’s story, “Heartless Willy.”

Tamura Ryuichi

I like the idea of having Tamura Ryuichi’s poem “The Ashen Colored Notebook” come right before Ch’oe Yun’s story. Ryuichi writes: “Thirty years have gone by / since the war ended / and my ashen colored notebook / has completely burned up…”

In Ch’oe’s “Whisper Yet,” the notebook of the handyman becomes a magical thing, like the wand that appears at the beginning of the story. Here is what the narrator first says about it:

Several times late at night I saw Ajaebi scribbling and erasing in old notebooks I no longer kept. That I became particularly interested in these notebooks only belatedly might have been because I too had begun to keep a journal around then. For all I know, he might have been writing in notebooks for quite a long time.

Ch'oe Yun

It’s only with time and maturity that the narrator is able to put together the story of Ajaebi’s life, the notebook being one of the keys. When she addresses her daughter and says

My child, I have so much to whisper to you, like I did when you and I were one body. How should I tell the story now? Shall I tell a story of tears, a story of laughter? A story of days gone by, a story of days to come? A story of air, a story of fluid? My child, the sun is still so very hot…Shall I tell you the story like I did when you and I were one body?

she is speaking not only with the urgency that Ajaebi’s death has imparted to her but also the understanding of what happens when things are bifurcated: life into life and death; mother into mother and child; experience into experience and knowledge; Ajaebi’s life into his life before he met her and after. Chased by time and a sense of how little she understood things when she had much time—i.e., while she was growing up—she can’t wait to impart stories to her child, even before it is born. In a sense she does so to coordinate their living, to make their lives more parallel, to avoid the loneliness that Ajaebi suffered by having to withhold his life story from her—and the loneliness she suffered by fully realizing his story only after he was gone.

Vladislav Bajac

What war does to men is similar to what men do to women. For this reason, I sympathize with Vladislav Bajac’s account, “Back to the World,” of his retreat into himself during the NATO bombing of Serbia at the end of the twentieth century. There are no significant females in his essay—unlike the stories of Chester Aaron and Leo Litwak, for example—but his descriptions of the destruction and the recovery of the self will speak to the experience of many women. And when he says, “I was able to convey the viewpoint of one who believes in the reign of the spirit,” his readers—men and women alike—celebrate with him.