Incidents in a Life (Book I--Abridged Version)

 The shadow play, through dirty windows, of morning light on a basement wall

Book I Things Do Happen

(Abridged Version)

--Chapter 0--

(opens in shadows)

What went on before I was or did.

--Chapter 1--

(something flickering)

And then I was born.

--Chapter 2--

(there might be light)

What went on that I can hardly remember.

--Chapter 3--

(certain shapes appear)

I might have learned to read.

--Chapter 4--

(lines, delineations)

Writing doesn't come easily; I'd rather draw a tree.

--Chapter 5--

(a trajectory perhaps)

Things go on happening that I'd like to report; things go on that I'd rather forget.

--Chapter 6--

(the road runs on)

Sometimes, memory fails me, and this, too, becomes something I fear.

--Chapter 7--

(the cliff edge)

Things neglected; things left to happen.

--Chapter 8--

(pebbles scrabble over the edge)

I know I'll die but I'm not dead yet.

On saying goodbye (when does death arrive?)

The morning arrives still, grey, humid.  Offshore the sea blusters with a coming storm, but here the water is a claude glass, the air full of black flies.  We swat them away as we walk out past the woodpile, up the slight incline to the barn, then along what used to be a fence line to the apple orchard.  The apples aren't any sweeter, but they are redder, and some have begun to fall on the ground.

Past the weedy patch and the mound where the rhubarb grows, past the gangling burr oak with its few clinging brown leaves and then we are there beneath a birch and some spruces: our own private pet cemetery. We stop there briefly to speak to all our gone ones: in 17 years, the litany of names has become very long.  Four dogs and now three cats and the ghost of a fourth haunt this grove, this section of stony earth. Enya, the new dog, who is almost two, sniffs the spot worriedly and then moves on, quickly, down the path to the pond. It is not a good place for living dogs to linger.

We buried our cat Dante there last week, after taking her to the vet for an overdose of sedative. In seconds, her poor stricken body, her paralyzed bent paws and stiff legs, the blind eyes and nictitating membranes that would not close relaxed. She bowed her head as if in sleep and all of the tension drained from her body. Her heart stopped and she was dead.

Sad as we were, as we watched her unfurl into death, we were also relieved, for her pain had become unbearable; despite her paralysis, she had tried again and again to run from what ailed her, only to fall, and her misery to worsen.

We'd had 17 years with her, our "big cat" as I called her, although she had always been small. Still, in the last year, as her kidneys failed, she had become tiny; two weeks ago, her legs weakened and began to stiffen. When I said goodbye to her on my way out the door to work that week, I thought it might be the last time I saw her.

She stopped drinking and eating that day, and because she kept falling, Marike took to carrying her around on a blanket or in her basket. She held Dante all night the Tuesday that I was in Halifax, and then when I came home Wednesday I did the same. We thought she died quite a bit that night, but was clearly still in pain.  Mostly blind, mostly paralyzed, organs failing, her extremities--paws and ears--cold, only her tail still lively, impatient, expressive, switching and twitching, we bundled her in a blanket and took her to the vet, where a needle full of sedative slowly stilled her heart.

But is that when death arrives, when the heart stops or the autonomic nervous system ceases? Or does it settle in by degrees,  as we who are living also let go, and the beloved body cools and stiffens?

I held Dante in my arms and petted her all the way home, speaking softly into that near space where it seemed her spirit, her particular character and being still hovered, touchable, keeping us company. We had not yet released our hold on her singular life, but what had been so lively and so alive without us now remained and shifted inward, circulating as memory and sensation and drifts of kitty fur, sewn through the cushions and corners of our lives.

In this way, she is not yet gone, but nestled into the forms of our gestures and habits. At night, in the dark, I still step carefully, as if she might be nearby, unseen, underfoot--as, in a way, she is. When I wake, I listen for her, sure I'll hear the drop of her paws on the floorboards, her soft purr as she climbs up on the bed, glad to have conscious company in the middle of the night. I put out my hand, curl my fingers around empty space.  Likewise the dog curls on the bench by the fire, nuzzling a stuffed toy, sniffing at it as she did Dante, clearly missing her animal companion.

How does Rilke put it, the character of such missing and the way it shapes our lives? In the Eighth Duino Elegy he writes:

                         Here all is distance;
there it was breath. After that first home,
the second seems ambiguous and drafty...

Who has twisted us around like this, so that
no matter what we do, we are in the posture
of someone going away? Just as, upon
the farthest hill, which shows him his whole valley
one last time, he turns, stops lingers------,
so we live here, forever taking leave.

So we live here, forever taking leave of our loves--until the days that we, too, will die.

Unlike Rilke, I do not think that we live or die differently from other animals, although he might be right that we tend to busy ourselves with preoccupations, with objects, as he puts it, rather than "that pure space into which flowers endlessly open." But now and then, as death creases us, we too may turn or wake and look, not at life, but at something like being, as its wings beat by our heads. These too are gifts, as if from the dead to the living: look here; see; and hasten not your mourning.

Notes
Dante cat died on Thursday 13 October 2016.  She had come to live with us when just a kitten sometime in the fall of 1999, a gift of Nicole Moser, who had heard we needed a mouser. We had two large black dogs at the time, Negrita, a black lab, and Binky, our three-legged wolfdog stray. Dante spent her first three days in the house on top of the kitchen cupboards; on the fourth day she descended, having somehow mesmerized the dogs, and despite her tiny size, whipped them into respect and obedience without ever extending a claw. In fact, that's how she got her name, for as Marike said, she was little, and needed a big name that was easy to hear and to call. Who better than after an exiled poet, who mapped heaven and hell and all of the regions between?

She was wise, scrappy, playful and clever--gave birth to five kittens, instructed Binky how to care for them rather than to eat them, and survived a neighbour's hate and traps, as well as an attack by roaming huskies that killed her daughter and wounded Elisabeth. Until a year ago, she kept the house free of mice and other small critters; she trained all of our dogs to be good to cats, and figured out that if she came and rubbed herself on our computers as we worked, she could be sure of nearly endless petting. She could play good jokes, sticking her paw in our water glasses, or dropping pellets of food in our shoes, and then watching to see how we'd react. And sometimes, when we played ball with a dog, she'd run interference, as if she could catch, but really to interrupt the dog's concentration, and make the ball drop. We'll not soon see her like again.

The Rilke I cite here is from Stephen Mitchell's translation and bilingual edition, Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (New York: Random House, 1982): 195, 197.

Running out into the rain: Remembering Bill Readings (1960-1994)

It has been twenty years since my friend Bill Readings died in an iced-up airplane that plummeted to earth in an Indiana soybean field. Twenty years since a phone call that Halloween night cancelled dinner plans, and turned our Montreal party into mourning. Twenty years since the world changed.

Twenty years is a lifetime, and no time at all. Enormous sorrow, but also every subsequent gift seems to flow from that catastrophic event; the finality of it has figured, one way or another in most of the major moves of my adult life, from the onset of an acute depression, to quitting my job, and an eventual recovery by and on the sea. I can trace back to that accident the fact that I've built an unusual but deeply rooted and sustaining family life, here, at the edge of my adopted country. I do not know if I would be a storyteller now, one who makes things with others, if that event had not interrupted the narrowing focus of my academic life and career, and derailed them. Now my life is filled with teaching, sure, but also with shared days and nights, fresh air, clouds or stars, frogs and owls, cats, dogs, poems, photographs, sailboats, sketches, videos, voyages, berry crisps, time to love, time to breathe, and walks with chickadees, who flutter by to feed from our hands.

Bill, I do not know if I would have had the courage to make those changes without the fact of your death before me, the stupidity of it, in a plane that had already been designated a "grave," on the return leg of an international academic commute, when what is routine turns suddenly deadly, and no fragment of you is ever recovered. How peculiar still to be thus suspended: we prepare for a meal to which you never arrive.

At first we waited. We thought you'd change your mind, come back from the dead. We thought we'd sit in your kitchen again while you pulled espressos and steamed milk from that machine that made you so proud, a salvaged restaurant-grade cappuccino machine you'd had plumbed in beside your kitchen sink. We thought we'd gather around your big glass table again, and drink and argue and eat exquisite meals (risotto with black truffles, seared squid, perfect greens), listen to tango, talk about politics and soccer, you with your slow deliberate French--your third or fourth language--carving enough room for all of us, no matter what or how we spoke. We thought we'd hear your reliable advice again, your homespun scholarly wisdom: the best way to pull down a grant, plan a trip, bend back the pages of a book so that it looked as if you'd read it.  You were expert at the rhetorics of the university, but you never let them master your zest for living. Until you died.

I remember one late meal on a cool fall night. Your house was full of visiting artists and scholars. One from Japan, two from Brazil, a friend from Switzerland, where you'd once taught, a scattering of friends from Montreal. I'd helped you cook dinner. You were telling stories about the first time you'd come to North America, on an open ticket that let you fly around the world. For a moment you were sober: I've taken so many flights in my life, you said, that sometimes I wonder if I've flown my number.

We all shouted you down: no, don't be silly! You're joking, right?

Two weeks later you were dead. And your comment haunted all of us who were there.

Would you have gone anyway if you had known how it would end? I know you hadn't planned to die; you'd come to see me just before you left. I'm sorry I can't stay longer, you'd said, but I'll be back next week. You were worried about your recent weight gain; we'd made a date to repot some houseplants, and to talk about something serious,  but what that was I no longer remember. How to survive the pressures of a long-distance relationship? Perhaps. Both of us had partners in the US and insanely large phone bills; we knew and shared those vicissitudes, the miscommunications and the loneliness of long-distance loves.

I remember one of the last nights I saw you. As I prepared to go and you hugged me goodbye, you clung to me, tearing, as if I were a life raft.

But that's what you had been--and continue to be in some respects--for me: the one who saved me from drowning, even as the storm of year death nearly sank me. Surviving that and the storms that have followed it have taught me what I know about strength and weakness, sadness and joy, living while and as you can.

Sometimes I still think I see you, tall form striding down a damp autumn street in your lemon yellow raincoat. You emerge from the crowd then slip back into it: ghost, old friend, guardian angel. Choose how you want to live, I hear you say; don't simply withstand. Reach out if you're unhappy; do something. Raincoats are so you'll run out into the rain.

I still miss you Bill; I always will. But now I'm putting on my coat and going out into the rain.

Notes
The first two pictures are copies of photos taken in 1994--of Bill's last birthday party, on a ski holiday with his wife, Diane Elam, and friends Annie and Carolyn, as well as me and my partner then, Kristin Bergen.

The last photo is from a collage of images of an early snowstorm in La Fontaine Park, which was near my house in Montreal.

Mourning

Full clear light, sunshine, sharply
etched colour, and I am
mired in fatigue.

Is this how sorrow feels,
slipping along your spine?
And whose sorrow?

Unjust that
I should open my eyes, should
look upon grey sea and implacable

isles (they break
the waves and are not
submerged)

when he won't rise
or see another
day.  By what

name or
reason comes such
undoing, such

cessation,
such unroping
loop of heart or life?

He stops
now;
forever slips

away.
Instant;
accident;

her world,
their world,
our world

unmade.

In memory of Steve Rowe.

On feeling blue (reflections on insomnia and melancholy)

Every year around this time, I lose my steam. It's not just that the days are shorter and colder and the wind more cutting, although these things are surely factors in any sense of diminished purpose; it's not just that so many of the plans packed into the early days of the autumn semester, with freshly sharpened pencils, and as-yet unread books--yes, we will get through it all!-- have somehow been undone by circumstance and scaled-back ambitions--let's just make it to the end of term in one piece, without too many tears; it's not just the stacks of papers mounting, the endless marking, the fatigue of one-too-many committee meetings, or the necessity of getting the snow tires on, although these things do take their toll. It's not even the lists of things undone from the end of the summer, the unprocessed photos and sound and video files (some not even yet downloaded!) from our latest summer sailing, the fact that the floor of my home office is covered in stacks of papers I don't have time to file, and that there are still gaping holes in the wall where two years ago the carpenter banged out chunks so that we could observe whether the window frames were leaking water inside the walls; it's not the cupboard full of partially completed manuscripts, or the printer I need to fix so that we can print photos at home again; it's not even the six cords of wood recently dumped by the wood racks that we must get up off of the ground this week, despite the fact that I wrenched my back last Friday while stacking wood, and for much of this week, could hardly bend down to tie my shoes, or the fact that our beloved boat blew down this autumn and is wrecked beyond repair. These are in the end, just things, annoyances, labours to be completed (albeit sometimes Herculean), rendered more difficult by the fact that all I seem to want to do is to huddle by the fire or hibernate, and that for half the week at least, while I am in town at work, I do not live at home.

In the end, what gnaws at me and wakes me in the night is something other than all of these things.

At first, of course, the source of my insomnia masquerades as one or another item on my infernal lists--all with a sticky sort of power, so that one item gets enchained to another in an endless midnight series. I lie in bed and unfold the list, accordion pleat by accordion pleat, not forgetting to add old sins or invent new ones--it is as if I am, now and forever, reciting the terms of the Lutheran confession that framed my childhood days:
Most holy and merciful God,
we confess to you and to one another,
and before the whole company of heaven,
that we have sinned by our fault,
by our own fault,
by our own most grievous fault,
in thought, word, and deed,
by what we have done and by what we have left undone.

As I child, I had thought it terribly unjust that "things undone" (something of which I am forever guilty) somehow weighed as much as things wrongly done. My wakeful night time adult self however understands utterly the scale of my own worthlessness as measured in things "left undone." We never can come to account; life is lived in arrears these days--financial, temporal, social, familial: the holes are everywhere. Darkness comes and you tumble into it, with all of the lists of your dead.

For this is the crisis, in the end, not the wrestling with earthly tasks, but letting go of the dead, (autumn seems to bring so many). Finding joy and purpose without them. Lists of chores aren't enough to bring on a full-blown existential crisis (although throwing your back out and then adding to the lists of things to do might assist); what creeps around the edges of the duvet on these cold nights are the winds of mortality.

There are so many I miss, gone, like the winking out of starlight; and the longer I live, the more people and creatures there are to miss. Why are we built thus, "so that," as Rilke writes in his Eighth Duino Elegy,
no matter what we do, we are in the posture
of someone going away? Just as, upon
the furthest hill, which shows him his whole valley
one last time, he turns, stops, lingers---,
so we live here, forever taking leave.

In these middle of the night agonies, I am, perhaps, despite my own feelings of worthlessness, doing the poet's bidding, even perhaps, hearing my own calling...

In the Sonnets to Orpheus, Rilke writes, 
Be ahead of all parting as though it already were
behind you...
For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter
that only by wintering through it will your heart survive.

Impossible task. And yet, which other one could I choose?

After all, most of those things that I do and don't do on my to do lists don't add up to much: they are but preoccupations--not exactly what one must do for life to have had meaning, for it to have been enough.

Here's the odd thing: we wake and churn and turn about inside, but what feels like enough is never much and never within. It is the white flash of gulls' wings in the sun, or the far flung spangle of the milky way. It is a ray of sun on my cheek or the cat's purr; it is a friend's laughter, a lover's breath, the aching arc of a melodic line, the first frost etching patterns on the pond. It is the boom of a wave and the smell of sea spray, the burst of red juice from a ripe pomegranate or the flicker--now you see them, now you don't--of surviving deer slipping into the woods.

Fragments for a windowpane (First Act)

I. Did we who did and were and not

In the beginning,                          

no thing.

A slip of light divides the darkness.

I emerge                                           

you do.

There would be a dog,

a third,

a fourth,                        

death                                     and water. 

Everything  invented.

Everything                                                                        

                                                                                                            lost.

II.  (One is not one for one but two)

Of course it was a love story.  They always are.

Payroll of Bones (El Salvador)

6:30 am and we crowd our way onto the road with

bulls hens women with plastic tubs of tamales balanced

on their heads, pan sellers cycling back and 

forth, round baskets of rolls handlebar-strapped, sleepy

lines of factory workers waiting for the bus.

Smoke smudges the horizon, crushed

cashew fruits spatter the tarmac red, a man explodes

nuts from their shells, stirs the coals of his

roadside brazier,

his wife stacks cabbages, swats a passing rooster.

Suddenly everyone scatters--

a bullet-proof black Suburban

windows darkened roars 

up the highway, leaves

 

one yellow dog rib rack gashed broken

leg still kicking.          he

didn’t run fast enough

 

On her demise

You must let me go first because I live in the sea
always now, and know the road.
                  Emily Dickinson

No matter which way you slice it,
the story doesn't change.

Disastrous.
Forever miserable, my blasted flower

your petals all are blown.

Photos were taken in West Quoddy, Nova Scotia.

In Desolation Sound (Bathsheba's Poem)

Sharp rattle of relief:
rain patters in a dry place, gives a sense
of letting go.  --Or sudden terror:
the sodden suck, the lack of
air, as if you're drowning.
Too much, too soon, a flood
of missing: blasted. Echoless. O grief.

Rain drums against taut canvas
sighs joy and lamentation, signs
pinpricks heart's ease fur furrows ear flaps dog's paws
sings the scent of grass upon her feet.

We tumble into fog into
seal's slap and wolfish wail, blind
to what they see or know. So near,
so far; too late to bring you home.

Teakerne Arm, 14 August 2013

Bathsheba b. 16 August 2002 d. 12 August 2013

Photos are of Bathsheba swimming at Psyche Beach, Taylor's Head Provincial Park, Nova Scotia, one of her favourite places on earth.

Bathsheba suffered the rupture of a bloody tumor in her lungs on August 12 and had to be put down....just days before we got home to be with her. We are very very sad. Don't really believe we will return to a dog-empty house. Life. Feel....remiss. Lost. Missing. Enormous thanks to our friend Paulette, who loved Sheba profoundly, and was with her at the end.

Reading the Lists of the Dead: Poetry and Social Justice in Mexico

I. The Global Economy's New Killing Fields

Yesterday as we walked the dry hills, every small white stone seemed a skull. 

Thousands litter the paths; I had not known there would be so many without number or name. 

Journal entry, 1 March 2011

On February 17th, on my way to Mexico, I begin reading Chuck Bowden's Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields. We'd heard him interviewed on the radio in January, his voice languid and haunted, cracking from the speaker like something from the other side of death.  Which in a way, he is.  He's been counting Mexico's dead and often brutally dismembered--journalists, photographers, prostitutes, police, Central American immigrants, drug addicts, homeless, mentally ill, children, tourists, students, mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, passersby--the mounting "collateral damage" of the joint US-Mexican "war on drugs." This month, May, the numbers of Mexico's dead stagger towards 40,000.

Bowden's book reads like poetry; it's an elegy for missing people; a maddened cry; a descent into hell.

Small details arc through the text.  For the most part, Bowden cites newspaper stories--this one, for example, the 907th "murder" story filed in 2008 by his friend Armando Rodriguez, who was then gunned down before the story appeared.  As Rodriguez wrote in El Diario in Cuidad Juarez the night before his own death: "The man assassinated Tuesday night in the Diaz Ordaz viaduct was a street clown, according to the state authority.  Nevertheless, this person has not been identified, but it was reported that he was between 25 and 30 years old, 1.77 meters tall, delicate, light brown complexion, short black hair" (vi).

Nothing is known; everything is known; names are rarely reported.  This is why, recently, in the days of protest called for by poet Javier Sicilia, whose 24 year old son, Juan Francisco, was tortured and killed in March near Cuernavaca, there has been a move to post the names of the dead in town and city squares all over the country. As Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos wrote in his letter of support for Javier Sicilia's call to action, from "somewhere in the mountains of southeast Mexico:" "[W]e know well that to name the dead is a way of not abandoning them, of not abandoning ourselves."

Thus, for a part of one year, 2008, in just one place, Ciudad Juarez, which lies across the mostly dry Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas, Bowden tries to track and to name every one among the dead or brutally injured that he can find.  He fails miserably.   

Partly because he loses heart--or rather, he and his assistant Molly Molloy do--and partly because it is impossible. This is, in fact, one of the reasons they lose heart.  As he writes in the introduction to his Appendix, titled "The River of Blood," an effort to track and translate the daily press reports of the dead, "At first, it is simply a clerical task.  Read the papers and put down the names, if given, and the time and cause of death....[But] by June 2008, the city cannot handle its own dead and starts giving corpses wholesale to medical schools or tossing bodies into common graves.  The list of the dead becomes a dark burden as solid information dwindles.  And so it finally trails off, a path littered with death and small voices whispering against the growing night" (237).  Elsewhere he notes, "By the summer of 2009, Juarez looks back on the slaughter of 2008 as the quiet time" (233).

But I've not gotten to this point in the book on February 17th when my flight lands in Phoenix, Arizona. Still, I understand one very important thing already: Bowden is tracking a logic of death, a pattern to the killings that will be, as he puts it, "coming soon" to cities all over the world.  It's already scheduled, we could say, for a city near you.

"I want to explain the violence as if it were a flat tire and I am searching the surface for a nail.  But what if the violence is not a kind of breakdown, but more like a flower springing from the rot on the forest floor?" (116)  The factories of Juarez, its famous "free-trade zone" maquiladoras are, Bowden argues, "now the house of death, offering no future, poisoning the body with chemicals, destroying the spirit faster than cocaine or meth" (116).  To make matters worse, they don't pay enough for anyone to get ahead.  Prices in Juarez are basically US prices, but wages are at best around US$70 a week, and workers live in cardboard dumps, without security, benefits or protection of any kind.  The children of these workers don't see any reason to join the wasting fields where their parents labour and die young for such dishonest wages.  Drugs are rampant, so too labour in its fast factories, its killing floors--the new maquiladoras of the new century.

What if, Bowden asks, Juarez isn't "behind the times"--what if it isn't slow, not a spot not yet swept up into the development curve--"what if Juarez is not a failure," but an image of "the future that beckons all of us from our safe streets and Internet cacoons?" (117) What if Juarez is the very figure of neoliberal economic success?

"After decades of this thing called development, Juarez has in sheer numbers more poor people than ever, has in real purchasing power lower wages than ever, has more pollution than ever, and more untreated sewage and less water than ever.  Every claim of a gain is overwhelmed by a tidal wave of failure.  And yet this failure, I have come to realize is not failure....

"Everything in Juarez will soon be state-of-the-art. For years, the prosperous here have bundled themselves into gated communities, and now their strongholds are not sufficient, and security has vanished from the life of the city,  After all, this is a city where the publisher of the newspaper and the mayor and his family live across the line in the United States in order to feel safe.  There is no job retraining in Juarez because there are no new jobs to be trained for.  The future is here now, the moment is immediate, and the message is the crack of automatic weapons.  All the other things happening in the world--the shattering of currencies, the depletion of resources, the skyrocketing costs of food, energy, and materials--are old hat here.  Years ago, hope moved beyond reach, and so a new life was fashioned and now it crowds out all other notions of life" (118).  

What's coming isn't an apocalypse but the fulfillment of decades of policies that gut city services, destroy institutions and tax bases, separate the haves and have-nots, and ensure that the poor become ever poorer.  Structural readjustment--soon to happen or already begun in a municipal or state zone near you.  It's a great idea for governments to get out of the business of governing.  You can turn everything over to business--or what you can call business.  Remove oversight. Then it's all a free-trade zone!  And by the way, bring your weapons, you'll need them.  It's a jungle out there.

 It is midnight when I zip the book into my bag, collect my luggage and walk out to the taxi stand.  The air is warm, dry; a nice change from winter in Nova Scotia.  I want to go to the Tufesa Bus Lines station in Phoenix.  I have the address in my pocket and pull it out to ask the two young African American guys on night shift at the taxi stand how much a ride out to the mall where the tiny bus station is going to cost me.  

Wait, where are you going? they ask me.  They mean, once I get to the bus station.

To Mexico, I answer.  I want to catch the 1:30 am bus.

Aren't you afraid?

No, not really.  After all, I'm not going to a political meeting outside a grocery store in Tucson.

They laugh, wanly.  On January 8, Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords had been shot in the head 10:10 in the morning at a meet and greet with constituents outside of a Safeway Supermarket just north of Tucson.  Altogether, 19 people were shot that morning, six killed, by a young man with a 9mm semi-automatic pistol and a mission to assassinate, and still many politicians and residents of the state continue to press for the right not only to carry arms of any sort, but, as well, for the right to carry concealed weapons. 

The taxi comes.  My cab driver is Iraqi; he's lived in Arizona since just before the outbreak of the Second Gulf War.  When I tell him where I want to go, he too asks, Aren't you afraid?

Of going to that mall, or of going to Mexico? I ask.

I don't know, he says.  Either.

Should I be? I ask.  

This question makes him laugh; this is when he reveals that he's Iraqi, and has more than enough of his own dead to worry about.

The bus station is tiny and the only brightly lit spot in the mall. Be careful! my cab driver warns me, as he unloads my bags.  I hope you know what you're doing.

I'm fine! I tell him.  I've done this many times!  But I begin, for the first time, to worry that perhaps I don't know what I'm doing.  I'm sure this worry is a product of the influence of Bowden's book, but I'm sufficiently spooked that I decide it wouldn't be a good idea to be seen reading it just now, so I pull out a novel, something more innocuous looking--Barbara Kingsolver's The Lacuna.   Who knows who might be looking, who might be watching?

II.  Benvenidos a Mexico!

Sometime before 2 am we board the bus.  The bus has come from Nevada, or perhaps somewhere in California.  Nearly every seat is filled and the luggage hold, beneath the bus, is overflowing.  A Peruvian family is aboard, touring the Americas, and their very large suitcases sprawl across the tops of every compartment.  They and the driver wrestle gamely with these behemoths, but to no avail. Everyone laughs and holds up their hands: nothing to be done.

I take my seat, the driver switches off the lights and I settle into a fitful sleep.  Half an hour north of Tucson, the driver pulls off of the road and turns on the lights.  He waits a minute, until it's clear that everyone is awake, and then he says, very quietly, very seriously, in Spanish, In half an hour we will be in Tucson. If you do not have the papers you need to cross the border, you need to get off of the bus at the station in Tucson.  US agents will be getting on this bus before we get to the border.  You need to make sure you have all of your papers in order!  Any questions?  And then he gets up and walks to the back of the bus where I am sitting--the only middle-aged gringa on the bus--and asks me, did you understand that?  Do you have your papers?

Si, I reassure him.  I have a Canadian passport.  Gracias.  I tell him I will need to get off of the bus on the Mexican side of the border and go to migracion for a tourist visa.  Will he wait for me to do that? 

Si.  

I am relieved.

No one gets off of the bus in Tucson.  We pick up two passengers and head south in the dark.  We stop on the American side of the border, the lights piercingly bright. Two border agents board the bus--a man who steps quickly to the back of the bus, and a woman, with a little hand-held passport reading machine who stays in the front.  They begin to interview the passengers in Spanish.  The woman is slow, gentle--the good cop, while the man is rough, even nasty.  He tears open luggage in the overhead bins, shakes things, wants to know why we're all on the night bus, prods a garbage bag full of mysterious soft white bricks--baby wipes it turns out--roughs up a couple young guys.  None of us look at each other or at him; we're all nervous, all ashamed, guiltily so.  Anything could be an infraction; you never know what.  

He seizes my passport and looks at it closely.  You were born in the US, he says, why are you using a Canadian passport? 

Because I'm a Canadian citizen I say.  This is hardly good enough.  

Why are you on this bus? 

Because I'm headed to Guaymas, where I have a boat, and it's much less expensive to fly to Phoenix or Tucson and take a bus than to fly from Canada to Mexico. 

Why are you on the night bus?

Because my flight arrived at midnight, and a bus leaves for Mexico at 1:30 am. 

It's clear that he doesn't like any of these answers, not a single one, not from me, not from any of the others.  But we're all clean.  Apparently. No one is removed from the bus.  

3:30 am. We slip across the border into Mexico and everyone must disembark and haul their luggage into the aduana, then step up and push a little button beneath a stoplight.  Red--unlucky you!--you must have every item in your luggage unpacked and handled by the customs officer; green, you may drag your things back to the bus.  I draw green, stow my luggage, remind the driver I must go to migracion, and then find someone to let me through the gate to the immigration office.  The gate seems to be penning a dozen young men in some kind of custody.  They sprawl on the concrete and talk from the corners of their mouths, spitting occasionally. A guard escorts me past them and into an office where a uniformed young woman hands me a an application for a tourist visa.  I fill it in, pay 250 pesos, and am given permission to stay in the country 180 days.  My passport is stamped, my visa card inserted, and I head back to the bus, escorted by the security guard.  

4 am and everyone is on the bus. They've been waiting for me.  I walk back to my seat and the older man sitting across the aisle behind me stands up and extends his hand, which I take.  Benvenidos a Mexico, he says formally, bowing slightly.  And then he straightens up, looks me in the eye and grins impishly.  BE CAREFUL! he says loudly in English.  I laugh, along with everyone else on the bus.  Clearly, it's the new Mexican joke.

He knows, as well as I do, that it's what everyone in El Norte has said to me as soon as they hear I'm headed for Mexico.

III. Hasta la madre: poetry and social justice

I cannot bring myself to read the list of the dead.  I have to--what other claim do these people have upon us now but this--to be remembered thus?  And Chuck Bowden and his assistant Molly Molloy have been made crazy my compiling this list: it is something to which we must bear witness, but I fear it.

Journal entry, 2 March 2011

"One puts oneself to the pain of reading the papers," poet CD Wright observes in her poems of rage against America's contemporary wars, Rising Falling Hovering.  I try to put myself to the pain of finishing Bowden's book, and the lists of the dead at its end. The details mount unbearably; more than 300 hundred murders in less than five months are documented thus:

 "A homeless man was found this morning with his head destroyed by a large rock next to a wall in the Colonia Hidalgo" (238).

"This morning the mutilated body of another executed man was found..." (239)

"The body of Mirna Yesenia Munoz Ledo Marin lies in a white casket in the center of a room in a small adobe house in Colonia Mexico 68, watched over by her family and friends" (241).

"Corner peanut vendor murdered...at midday by a man traveling in a car similar to those driven by the State Investigative Agency..." (241-42).

"Vidal Arambula was violently taken from his home on Puebla Street, and after being handcuffed, he was apparently told to run for his life (la ley fuga) and was then machine-gunned in the street. His body was left lying on Avenida Mexico in front of a taco stand" (246).

The resonances of this last entry seize me--la ley fuga--in which both law and runner are fugitive.  Without the rule of law this is the law, the rule, and it runs, "run so you may be a living target." Practice for future killings. Killing, the hardest habit of all to break.

February 13, 2008 is the date on this clipping.  Who can go on? But the killings neither pause nor cease, and I am not even halfway through this single short list of some of the dead.  If 100 abbreviated accounts are this agonizing, what of the 40,000 dead whose names Javier Sicilia and many others are trying to assemble, speak, and post in town squares all across Mexico? And so I read on.

A March 15, 2008 article from El Diario about the exhumation of 33 bodies from a warehouse in La Cuesta, Cuidad Juarez recounts the following story.  While neighbours suggest they had "sometimes heard strange noises in the house that they attributed to tortured souls, ... an older man living next door discarded this idea.  'Look, here you have to be more afraid of the living than of the dead'" (265).

And this is exactly the problem.  It's why Spanish reporter Judith Torrea--the only international journalist who remains in Cuidad Juarez--quit her New York-based job and moved to Juarez, where she reports on the killings, but also on the lives of survivors--mothers, brothers, lovers, children and friends of those gunned down in this joint US/Mexican "War on Drugs." Her blog, Ciudad Juárez, en la sombra del narcotráfico (Juarez City under the shadow of Drug Trafficking) is an oral history of the agonies of the living, of those who have buried one family member or friend after another, of those who hope without hope that their "disappeared" children or parents or partners will finally come home.  

Torrea poses a question for us: "how many murders are needed in Mexico for some to enjoy a line of cocaine?" Like Bowden, who writes, "one way to lose your sanity in Juarez...is to believe that the violence results from a cartel war" (23), Torrea is explicit about why, we could say, la ley se fuga en Juarez, the law and the rule of law itself is on the run and being gunned down in Juarez: “The Mexican President, Felipe Calderon, and the army are not fighting a war against drug trafficking. They are supporting the Sinaloa Cartel and its head, ‘El Chapo’ Guzman, to defeat the Juárez Cartel." Or as Bowden describes this situation, "The state still exists--there are police, a president, congress, agencies with names studded across the buildings. Still, something has changed, and I feel this change in my bones" (22).

Everyone does.  Not to feel it in your bones is already to be dead, perhaps.  What should be legitimate is not legitimate--in Bowden's words, "in this new way of life, no one is really in charge and we are all in play" (22).  The consequences of that are lethal, not only to life, but to truth.

When Mexican President Felipe Calderon insisted that the dead sons of one mother were gang members, Torrea investigated, and disproved that allegation.  Not everyone who is gunned down in this "war" is a criminal, many are simply poor and unlucky, bit actors, walk-ons in the killing fields. Torrea and Bowden and virtually anyone else with the courage to report on it wrestle against the slipperiness of "truth" in this "war," where if you die you must have been in with a bad crowd, there must have been a reason; if not, after death, because you're dead, you're converted into a criminal.   Or as Javier Sicilia puts it in his May 8 speech in Mexico City: "The wickedness of crime has killed [those who have died in this drug war] in three ways: by depriving them of life, by criminalizing them, and by burying them in mass graves with an ominous silence that is not ours [but the silence of the government, which stands by, even approves, as its citizens are assassinated.]"  The alternative, as he writes in his open letter to the Mexican government and the cartels, is simply to accept that "death [is] a matter of statistics and administration all of us should get used to"--and this is completely unacceptable. 

The phrase "no mas sangre, estamos hasta la madre, ni un muerto mas!" / "no more blood; we've had it up to here; not one more death!"--watchword of the 8 Mayo marches in Mexico--emerges out of the rage and sorrow of Sicilia's April 3rd letter,  where he writes to Calderon and his minions:

There is no word to describe such pain [as we surviving family members feel]--only poetry can come close to it, and you know nothing about poetry. What I want to say today, from these mutilated lives, from this pain that has no name because it is the product of what does not belong to nature--the death of one’s child is always unnatural and this is why there is no name for it: one is therefore neither an orphan nor a widower, one is simply and painfully nothing--what I want to say from these mutilated lives, I repeat, from the indignation sparkled by these deaths, is that we have had it up to here (hasta la madre).

We have had it up to here with you politicians--and when I say politicians, I am not referring to anyone in particular, but to a large number of you, including those who make up the political parties--because in your power struggle, you have torn the fabric of this nation. Because in the middle of this war, which is badly designed, badly made and badly conducted, in the middle of this war that has thrown the country into a state of emergency, you have been unable---because of your meanness, your fights, your miserable skulduggery--to create the consensus needed by our nation to find unity, and without which this country has no way out. We have had it up to here because the corruption of the legal institutions generates complicity with crime and the impunity allowing it to be committed; because, in the midst of this corruption that is proof of the failure of the State, every citizen of this country has been reduced to what philosopher Giorgio Agamben has called, using a Greek work, zoe: that is, unprotected life, the life of an animal, of a being that can be subjected to violence, kidnapped, ill-treated or humiliated and murdered with impunity; we have had it up to here because you only use your imagination for the sake of violence, weapons, insult, and in so doing, you show a profound scorn towards education, culture and job opportunities implying decent and good work, which is what makes great nations; we have had it up to here because this short-sighted imagination is allowing our youth, our sons and daughters, to be not only murdered, but later criminalized, made falsely guilty in order to fulfill the intent of such imagination; we have had it up to here because another part of our youth, due to the lack of a good government program, have no opportunities to get an education, to find dignified work, and therefore, being pushed towards the periphery, are possible recruits for organized crime and violence; we have had it up to here because in view of all that, citizens have lost confidence in their rulers, their police, their Army, and they are afraid and full of sorrow; we have had it up to here because the only thing you care about, apart from gaining helpless power that is only good to administer misfortune, is making money, encouraging competition, your damned “competitiveness” fostering boundless consumption, which are other names for violence. 

I have quoted Sicilia at such length because this is the letter that catalyzed the recent demonstrations in Mexico, and it's clear why; his is a language that has force and emotional resonance; it is a language that names things: loss, grief, nothingness, corruption, the point at which we've all had enough--hasta la madre. Now and then, this is something that poetry--and poets--can do, something we are called to do.  Poetry doesn't make injustice cease or social justice happen--feet in the streets and the stubborn and unremitting press of bodies and shouts and national and international pressure are required for that. But poetry cries out; it names our sorrows and our yearning--even, sometimes those situations--a parent bereft of a child--for which we have no words.  And although Sicilia has sworn off writing poems since his son's death, it is clear that poetry has not left him.  On the contrary, now more than ever, as he dedicates himself to the urgencies of activism, he's drawing upon its deepest resources.


May's National March for Peace in Mexico has given rise to a call for a National Peace Accord, to be signed in Ciudad Juarez--"the epicenter of sorrow"-- on the 10th of June 2011.  The terms of this pact are terms any citizenry ought to be able to demand of its government.  They are terms forged in Mexico, and paid for in blood there--and in this season in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Bahrain, Yemen, the West Bank, Guatemala, El Salvador....in Tucson and Los Angeles,  and yes, even in Toronto.  Let us not simply read this poetry then, but line up behind it and act upon it:

1. We demand truth and justice.

2. We demand an end to this strategy of war; what we need is an approach to governance that ensures the security of our citizens.

3. We demand a fight against corruption and impunity [from prosecution].

4. We demand a fight against the economic roots of and proceeds of crime.

5. We demand emergency care for youth and effective actions to reconstruct the social fabric.

6. We demand a participatory democracy, a better representative democracy and the democratization of the media.

As Javier Sicilia warns, "If we don’t do this our children, our boys, our girls, will only inherit a house full of helplessness, of fear, of indolence, of cynicism, of brutality, and of deception, where the señores of death reign with their ambition, their excessive power, their complacency and their complicity with crime" (8 Mayo speech in El Zocalo, Mexico City)

Notes:
Quotes from books are cited by page number; citations from websites are linked back directly to the source cited.

Books:
Charles Bowden.  Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields. New York: Nation Books, 2010.

Barbara Kingsolver. The Lacuna. New York: Harper Perennial. 2009.


CD Wright, Rising Falling Hovering. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press. 2009.


Online sources:
Interview with Chuck Bowden. "As it Happens." CBC Radio. 13 January 2011: http://www.cbc.ca/asithappens/episode/2011/01/13/thursday-january-13-2011/

The number 40,000.  Cited by Javier Sicilia and others in http://globalvoicesonline.org/2011/05/05/mexico-prepares-for-massive-national-protest-on-may-8/


Javier Sicilia's call for days of protest: "A National Emergency: Javier Sicilia Calls Upon the People of Mexico."Youtube Video posted by Yabastanomasangre. English subtitles. http://youtu.be/T_CiKzttxMQ

Letter of support from Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos to Javier Sicilia: English translation: http://glasgowchiapassolidaritygroup.wordpress.com/2011/05/02/letter-from-marcos-to-javier-sicilia/ Espanol: http://javiersoriaj.wordpress.com/2011/04/28/carta-a-don-javier-sicilia-de-subcomandante-insurgente-marcos/


Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords shot in the head: a detailed summary of events and links to news stories may be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Tucson_shooting


Judith Torrea, the only international journalist who remains in Juarez: Silvia Duarte. Judith Torrea: Under the Shadow of Drug Trafficking." Online magazine Sampsonia Way. January 2011: http://www.sampsoniaway.org/bi-monthly/2011/01/18/judith-torrea-under-the-shadow-of-drug-trafficking/
Torrea's comments come from this article.


Judith Torrea. Ciudad Juarez en la sombra del narcotrafico. Blog. http://juarezenlasombra.blogspot.com/


Javier Sicilia. "Javier Sicilia Speech from the Zocalo in Mexico City" May 8, 2011.  The Narco News Bulletin. Published May 10, 2011: http://www.narconews.com/Issue67/article4413.html
In Spanish: http://www.proceso.com.mx/rv/pda/detalleExclusiva/91052
and  http://marchanacionalporlapaz.blogspot.com/2011/05/discurso-de-javier-sicilia-8-de-mayo-df.html


Javier Sicilia. Open Letter.  In Olivia Stransky. "Letter from Poet Javier Sicilia to Mexican Government and Cartels." Online Magazine Sampsonia Way. May 17, 2011. http://www.sampsoniaway.org/blog/2011/05/17/letter-from-poet-javier-sicilia-to-mexican-government-and-cartels/
In Spanish: http://www.internationalpen.org.uk/go/news/m-xico-estamos-hasta-la-madre---carta-abierta-a-los-pol-ticos-y-a-los-criminales  

National Peace Accord: Full text here in Spanish: http://marchanacionalporlapaz.blogspot.com/2011/05/discurso-de-javier-sicilia-8-de-mayo-df.html

Six key demands are listed in English and Spanish (awkward English translation) here: Geraldine Juarez. "Mexico Day 4: 80,000 Citizens Demand Peace Justice and Dignity Against the War on Drugs." Global Voices Online. Blog. 13 May 2011. http://globalvoicesonline.org/2011/05/13/mexico-day-4-80000-citizens-demand-peace-justice-and-dignity-against-the-war-on-drugs/

See also:

http://juarezpeaceproject.org/

http://projects.latimes.com/mexico-drug-war/#/interactive-map

http://www.dailygrail.com/blogs/red-pill-junkie/2011/5/HASTA-LA-MADRE-The-Tears-Poet-The-Cry-Nation

Images:
Discarded shell. Bahia San Carlos. Sonora, Mexico.
Feathers. Beach. San Juanico, BCS, Mexico.
Severed Ray head. La Ramada. BCS, Mexico. Rays are killed and dismembered in great numbers as bait for sharks, for shark's fin soup and other delicacies.