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.

Days of Death II: Awake So as to Find Words

4:44 am

I cannot sleep.

The crescent moon has risen, and throws an hour-glass shaped path of light across the bay.  It's bright enough that a few of the islands are illuminated. 

Why am I wakeful?  I feel, somehow, a failure of words.  It's not just a failure in the face of death--though our neighbours' son's suicide, and the impossibility of saying anything meaningful to anyone or about anything in the face of such a yawning gap plays its part in this night.

Suicide is a break in the compact we make with each other to try to survive; it is this compact that keeps us alive.  We all see how the parents have plunged, themselves, into this brokenness.  We say, I don't know how they'll survive it.  And as we speak perhaps we mean that phrase metaphorically or psychically.  But it is also terribly literal, awful in its concreteness--the father speaks nonstop like someone drowning in waves of emotion beyond words--and he is.  The words keep him drawing breath; without them he simply gasps for air. 

I can't stop hearing his cry as he ran upstairs and paced the empty rooms: oh Sonny, Sonny, Sonny, why did you do it?  Anguish so large it spills over, laps around our necks.  I hold my head above it, but just barely.

Every heart knows something about such a cry.  --But not this, not this: the sudden shot to the head.  Who could know that? It's beyond knowing.

Just before he ran off and began sobbing, the father stepped over to me and asked, Is my eye bloodshot?  I feel like my eye is bloodshot.

No, I said.  His eyes were red-rimmed, but not bloodshot.

Well I think it's bloodshot, he said. It just seems bloodshot.

Oh my dear, I said, it's your heart that's bloodshot.  The words just tumbled out of me.  A truth.  Blood shot indeed.  And he ran off, gasping.

I feel badly about that, although I also know he probably barely heard what I said.  The wailing wasn't about what I'd said.  It was that his son was blood.  Shot.  Who knows? Maybe in the eye.  We've assumed it was the head.  Because for us, in part, it is.  Your mind just stops working when you think of such tragedy, such catastrophic collapse.

Words are dangerous.  They always say more (and less) than you think you mean.

Perhaps that's why I've been finding them such hard going of late.  I seem to be able to find a few right ones. A few wrong ones. And then pockets of silence, that's all.  Pictures hum more loudly, echo in my inner (bloodshot) eye.

I think of one of Paul Celan's last poems, "All those sleep shapes" ("Alle die Schlafgestalten") written not so long before he too committed suicide, unable any longer to count up the fragments:

All these sleep shapes, crystalline
that you assumed
in the language shadow,

to those
I lead my blood,

those image lines, them
I'm to harbour
in the slit-arteries
of my cognition--,

my grief, I can see,
is deserting you.

I know we cannot guard others' grief for them, or from them, no matter how wakeful we remain.  My wakefulness this morning will not have meant, I am on watch so another can sleep.  My watch relieves no one; it simply keeps me here, in the compact with other sorrowing souls. All it really can mean is that I, too, rise, dull before grey dawn--to continue, with the rest, as best we can.

Notes
 Paul Celan, "All those sleep shapes" ("Alle die Schlafgestalten"). First published posthumously in his final book, Zeitgehoeft (1976). In English in Poems of Paul Celan. Trans. Michael Hamburger. New York: Persea Books, 1988, pp. 336-7. 

In fact, however, I've quoted this fragment of Celan from American poet, Claudia Rankine's meditation on death, depression, loss, family, sleeplessness and hollowness of contemporary American life in Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. St. Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2004, p. 61.

There Where You Are Not

The hardest thing about death is the way your senses are trailed by ghosts.

For a very long time, maybe forever, a dead one whispers into your surround and you think you see this one, there, over there.  Or you pick up the drift of her scent, the timbre of his voice.  The corners of your eyes, the backs of your ears, the edges of your palate, sometimes even the insides of your elbows are in haunting collusion with the dead; together they conspire to keep you on the switchback between sudden hope and crushing sorrow.  Even today, nearly 15 years after my friend died in an airplane crash, I sometimes think I see him, in a city where he'd never been, striding down the street in a lemon yellow raincoat, hair flapping over his eyes, grizzled rain on Halifax sidewalks.

Love conjures these ghosts; we look for those we miss everywhere. Unceasingly, as if in prayer.

We returned from Mexico to a house without Linus, but her shade is with us still, in every creak and crack and wail and cranny of the house, in sunbeams and on blankets, in our gestures and responses, our habits of listening, of moving; she remains sewn through the motions and spaces of our daily living.

We will learn new habits, but we will never entirely lose the spectral sense of emptiness that particularizes these places, here, there, where she was and is home no longer. 

This is how we feel the proximities of each death: again and again, our hearts rent like fabric, a patchwork of tearing that can only continue until we too, will die.

Images
Linus spaces: chair and blanket, sunbeam and radiator, edge of the bath, food dish for raw liver, chair and bear, cat-clawed chair

The Solace of Colour

Grief. And Grace. II

After Linus died, and the bees came--and the wind, pinning us into one harbour after another--I began to dream in colour.  Marike and I would pack a lunch, bottles of water and gatorade, our swimsuits and snorkeling gear, and paper, brushes and boxes of paint, and head to shore.  We walked, swam, looked out to sea, and painted.  What mattered, to me anyway, was not so much the quality of the final product, but the fact of making something, the layering of colour, like a laying on of hands in our hearts.  Not healing exactly, but solar solace, a bouncing of light beams, a rendering of the world which rent us, at once awful and beautiful and more vast than we could tell.

Broken rocks for broken hearts.

 
Images
Watercolour sketches, San Juanico, BCS, Mexico, 18 March 2010

Grief. And Grace

Sudden and sharp, grief cleaves us as if cleanly, but the wound is forever jagged.

You never get over sorrowing after a creature who once clung, closely, to your skin, who huddled in the curve of your hip, who attended your waking and sleeping and sickness and joy. "Nurse kitty," we called her, after her habit of looking after all of us, her closeness, her attentiveness, her insistence on grooming every one of us, licking the hairs of our heads into place.

All of us miss her in acute and particular ways, including her closest friend, dog Bathsheba, who fell into a profound and terrorized depression when Linus died; for days and months it seemed, Sheba sank wearily onto her bed, limbs cracking and creaking. Big sighs: nothing in the world seemed to count anymore.  We worried that she might give up too soon, herself, on living. 

But here, the end of the summer, and we do all go on, managing now joy and not (always) nightmares.  It has taken months for me to muster the courage to tell this story.

I think again and again of the last lines in Toni Morrison's Sula, when one character realizes, years later, just how much she has missed her friend.  Sorrow has dogged her, hovered just out of sight, like a little ball, off to one side of her head.  But she never turns to look at it.  And then one day dead awakens, becomes memory, words, then "not even words. Wishes, longings...A soft ball of fur [breaks] and [scatters] like dandelion spores in the breeze."  The loss of her friend Sula presses down upon Nel and she cries out.  Morrison's story ends here, with this description of uncontainable grief:  "It was a fine cry--loud and long--but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow."  Here is something I know--we know--in living with our surviving animals after the trauma of Linus's death: Rilke got it wrong.  So too did Levinas.  Not only "our eyes are turned backward..." Any animal, and not only humans, is

twisted 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.

(Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, VIII, trans. Stephen Mitchell)

We all have faces, inward looking eyes; all of us know something of our own mortality. If you doubt this, go sit in a vet's office where animals are daily put to death and watch them, even the most aged and lame, resist crossing the threshold--or else pass, head down, already resigned to the death sentence.  Look into the eyes of cattle destined for slaughter and see if you don't recognize there, that "recognition of mortality" Levinas believed was so crucial to having a "face" that could command the ethical imperative, "thou shalt not kill."  --But enough of this; already I am off topic.  These are arguments for another day.  What I wanted to talk about was grief. And grace.

Here, notes from my journal, a sequence of days.

Cats Bees Broken Hearts

12 March 2010  

Puerto Escondido, BCS, Mexico 

Something worse than the worst thing I can imagine (have ever imagined) happened yesterday morning--Linus was cornered and trapped on our porch by a neighbour's two huskies, who had escaped, and killed. Elisabeth and Sheba witnessed it--Elisabeth's hands hurt as she was trying to get Linus away from the dogs.  She kicked them, finally lifted the broken cat body above her head and got her inside.  But Linus soon died. Dante cat has disappeared.  No one knows if she too was mauled or killed or has just run away in terror.  It is cold again in Nova Scotia.

Elisabeth buried Linie with the help of neighbours John and Paulette today; she is under a pile of rocks back by the garden where Binky and Negrita and Tiger are also buried.

Here, the wind blows and we are heartsick. I feel hollow, like an empty broken thing. Fell out of the dinghy and into the water today, I was so upset.  Fully clothed in foul weather gear.  It does not float.  But the water was warm, at least.  Our friend Allister, who is visiting for ten days, jumped down into the dinghy and hauled me out of the water, for I was laughing and weeping and couldn't pull myself up.  My arms had gone rubbery and useless.

14 March 2010

Isla Carmen, Ballandra Cove

How do you address a sorrow wider than your body and range, a sorrow that rips you open, flays you, empties you of joy? Dante still not found.

We are anchored in Ballandra.  Violet flowers scent the night air; the stars come out; the sun rises and the bees come, hunting for water.  Northerlies are on the way, but for the moment we're sheltered and resting. A hard sail yesterday--surprisingly high winds on the last tack and we were over-canvassed, boat dogging in short period steep waves.  Not a very long trip but I was violently sick, hardly able to hold on, physically or emotionally.  I have to find my center, some place where I might hold onto my stomach, but I don't quite know how.  

Still waiting for Dante, calling her, calling her in the sleepless nights.  I'm exhausted, sick to my stomach.  Have to rest.  Have to push away the sorrow, develop some other project.  I think, I am in Mexico, where calaveras are treasured; I have to make some pompes funebres for my little ones, some ritual offerings, some celebration.

Bees fill the cabin. They are seeking our washcloths. I hang them out, but Marike is made frightened by so many buzzing insects. Each one a potential death sentence.  I don't want to kill a single one, so put on gloves, shake the washcloths, drop them into a bag.  We light mosquito coils, and bit by bit the bees disperse.

What shall I collect for my precious ones; what toys would delight their souls?  I think of flowers and feathers and small shells to bat around.  But my arms are empty, my heard afraid.  It never occurred to me we could lose both cats in one swoop.

Fear is the field where courage grows. I have not to be afraid to go on living. Well.  With joy and warmth and hanging on, as Linus and Dante would do if they could.  I imagine holding a kitten, playing.  This is not a replacement, but eyes that look back and fur and joy so that I may remember how marvelous life can be.  Hope.  Fear is the field where courage grows. But where can I find hope?  I have not to close my eyes.  

The wind comes up 

and a dozen buzzards circle in the gap 

between mountains, drop; 

now ten are lined up on the beach.  

They totter along the ground, some flap 

their wings, naked red heads pointed seaward.   

What sorrow draws you thus, 

I want to ask them.

Haven't we walked enough beneath

the shadows of your wings,

dogged by death?

They wait for more

and the wind carries them.

Meanwhile I sit leaden, sorrowing,

too many absent already this year. 

The bees land on me

their feet fur soft

I know they would comfort me if I were not afraid of them.

I know they would comfort me if I were not afraid.

Later

Dante emerges from hiding!!!

15 March Benito Juarez Day

Ballandra

Strong northerlies 

The bees sip water from every surface:

condensation on the side of a yoghurt container

the residue of dishwater on a cup,

but too much and they drown--

the buckets on the stern accumulate carcasses. 

16 March

Ballandra

Hooting northerlies, so still holed up here.  One boat left this morning early, after what seemed to be a benign weather forecast.  Within half an hour they'd radioed back: northerly winds of 25-30 knots and 5-6 foot swells, on the nose for those of us heading north.  We decided to stay put, though in the silent spaces between gusts now and then we'll call out, okay, let's go! as if anyone could get anywhere in a 40-second calm.  We sail at anchor in those 30-knot gusts and watch the spray mount at the edges of the bay.  Pelicans gather in the lee behind the boats, floating, and buzzards line the beaches, rising and falling in the thermals, then resting. 

The surf has cleared the beaches of stones, sucking them away, so for once the sand is soft enough to walk the strand barefoot.  And the bees continue to stream to the boat, but they are dying in increasing numbers, drowning themselves in coffee, yoghurt, sink drains, buckets.  I pluck them out by the dozens. 

  

Bees swarming the paintboxes on

the beach today,

bees drowning in yellow ochre

                           ultra marine

                           viridian

                           burnt sienna.

I am dreaming in colour and it is a solace, as if I am visited by Linus's soul. 

Images

Watercolour sketches of Linus (2009) and three views of mountains and sea from Ballandra Cove (16 March 2010).

Notes

Quotations from Toni Morrison, Sula. New York: Plume/New American Library, 1973, are from pp. 171 and 174.

I've also quoted from Rainer Maria Rilke's Eighth Duino Elegy. Ed and Trans Stephen Mitchell, in the bilingual edition, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke.  New York: Vintage Books, 1982, pp. 195, 197.

To be fair, I am characterizing re-readings of Levinas on animals, in particular his 1975 discussion of "Bobby," a dog that for a time visited the philosopher and his fellow Jewish prisoners of war company in the camp near Hannover, Germany where Levinas was kept from 1940 until the end of the war: 

"And then, about half way through our long captivity, for a few short
    weeks, before the sentinels chased him away, a wandering dog entered
    our lives. One day he came to meet this rabble as we returned under
    guard from work. He survived in some wild patch in the region of the
    camp. But we called him Bobby, an exotic name, as one does with a
    cherished dog. He would appear at morning assembly and was waiting
    for us as we returned, jumping up and down and barking in delight.
    For him, there was no doubt that we were men." 153) 

Levinas, Emmanuel. "The Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights." Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism. Trans. Sean Hand. London: Athlone, 1990. 151-53.

See also John Llewelyn, "Am I Obsessed by Bobby? (Humanism of the Other Animal)," in Re-Reading Levinas.  Ed. Robert Bernasconi and Simon Crichtly.  Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991,

Cary Wolfe, "In the Shadow of Wittgenstein's Lion: Language, Ethics, and the Question of the Animal." In Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003, pp. 54-62 and 

Tom Herron "The dog man: becoming animal in Coetzee's disgrace". Twentieth Century Literature (Winter 2005).

Further significant reflections on these points--and engagement with these texts is to come, here and elsewhere. 

Valdesca: On Cancer and Courage

 

"Fear is the field where courage grows"

Fifteen years ago, one of my best friends died in a plane crash.  We had been planning to meet for dinner that night; in fact, we and several others had planned a Halloween night party.  Instead, on the first leg of his journey, the plane, a turboprop used on short commuter hops, had been forced by a landing queue to circle in freezing rain for an hour.  Ice built up on the wings; the plane became unstable, flipped and slammed into an Indiana bean field.  Nothing larger than a bread box, it was said, could be plucked from the wreckage.  No identifiable portion of my friend's body was ever recovered.

In the weeks and months following this accident, I came, myself, disassembled.  The simplest things seemed difficult, even impossible; I did not know how or why I ought to struggle on.  I had not known death could strike so suddenly so near.  I had not known it would start to call me too.  I gave myself over to death in some way, even while it terrified me.

While I was in this state, another friend--an acquaintance really--came to visit and decided I needed a change of both scenery and ideas.  He packed a picnic lunch and drove us from Montreal to Lake Placid, in upstate New York.  There was someone there he wanted me to meet, he said, a man in his nineties, a veteran of the "Great War."

I don't remember much about that day--in fact I couldn't remember at all where we'd gone; I had to look it up in a road atlas and make probable guesses. I can't even remember either man's name: such holes in my recollection are signs of how terrible those days were, how far I'd dropped into sorrow.  But I remember the meeting--in the library of a private school--green and maroon volumes in wooden shelves ranged along the walls.  And I remember the story the old man told me, for it was about his own experience of grief.

He'd come home from the war, body intact, but mind utterly blasted, another shell-shocked survivor, unable to imagine how he might rejoin the legions around him simply living everyday lives and petty concerns.  "I knew nothing," he told me. "On my own, I would not have survived.  But there was this school here, and someone asked me if I could look after the primary students during recreation times.

I did not think I could.

Children terrified me.  They were fearless, wiggly; they moved erratically and asked questions.  They were energetic, alive, a kind of future--and I wanted nothing to do with them.  But standing with them while they played, that was my job.

At first I stood at the back of the playground, my face to the wall; I couldn't even look at those children.  But they would not and did not leave me alone.  They asked me questions, wanted me to throw a ball or look at a bloody knee.  And gradually, day by day, as they played, they returned me to the world. 

For you see," he said, turning to look me in the eyes, "fear is the field where courage grows.  If I was to live, I had to dare to walk there.  I was brave--I had been in the war--I'd seen terrible things.  And because of that, I was afraid.  I entered my fear like a shell and tried to hide there. But as the man who gave me the job of watching the children knew, I couldn't stay there and live."

When we left Lake Placid a few hours later, I felt as if I'd been delivered an oracle. But exiting the state I was in wasn't easy--it took years, in fact, of effort and therapy.  Grief casts a long shadow; once it touches you it never quite leaves, but always hovers just there, alongside you, over your shoulder, almost out of sight. 

Still, what I took from my meeting that day was a handhold, a grapple, a tool I've since used again and again when I've needed to haul myself back to hope, to reason, to the pleasures and accidental joys and engagements of life.

Often at sea I think of the old man's line--fear is the field where courage grows--and use it, like a mantra, to calm myself down.  For even if you set out feeling fearless, a match for anything, the sea will educate you otherwise.  An experienced sailor is someone who's been scared silly again and again but refuses to be paralysed.

Fear is the field where courage grows: you don't do brave things because you're somehow especially brave, but, in fact, because you're mortally afraid.

We go to sea in a stout, ocean-capable "blue water" keel boat packed full of survival gear and food and a watermaker and spare parts and tools and communications devices and elaborate medical kits--everything that Marike's lifetime of sailing experience and our combined foresight can imagine to put together. And still, often enough, I feel anxious, bounced around, at some edge.  So when I see people who embark on long voyages in kayaks or other small boats I am full of admiration--these people must be very courageous indeed.

One small boat in particular moves us--the Drascombe Longboat, a yawl-rigged open boat--in part because it is so pretty and so practical at once.  NOLS (National Outdoor Leadership School) operates a small fleet of these "teaching boats" in the Sea of Cortez, and it is a lovely thing to watch them come around the corner and into a sheltered cove.  They're versatile--one can attach a little outboard motor, or row or sail these 22-foot beauties.
  

This year, in San Juanico, we encountered another Drascombe, home for three months to Claudia, a geologist, and Tim, an artist.  Right away, Claudia asked for our story--how had we come to be sailing in the Sea of Cortez? What accident of life gave us the urge and the capacity to be away from Nova Scotia for a chunk of time and living on a boat there? Mix the feeling that life is short and not to be squandered--we'd left jobs we hated after too many friends had died and tried to make a new life-- with the wish for a boat, the chance that the boat we most wanted was for sale at a very good price in San Diego in 2003, and our story unspools from there.  Having answered, we turned the question around--how did you two come to be sailing a Drascombe here? we asked.

The answer was short, sharp, shocking and very clear: Claudia, a geologist who had worked for Los Alamos labs, had had three rounds of cancer.  Last April, everyone had thought she might soon die: she'd even registered for a place in a palliative hospice, so it would be available when the time came.  But then she got an idea. She'd quit her job and get into shape and they'd have an ADVENTURE in the Sea of Cortez, where she'd done fieldwork for her PhD. And that made her feel like living, which is exactly what she was doing. When we met her, she looked hale, tanned, strong; you'd never guess she'd so recently been so ill. 

In many respects, the way they were sailing took a lot more physical strength, planning and courage than the way we were sailing.  It could be much colder, much less sheltered; they were constantly closer to the elements, at risk of being swamped; they had to camp on the beach each night to sleep. But Claudia was clearly thriving--obviously much to Tim's relief.  To risk her life was, not to save it so much as to seize it and make it worth living; because she had courage, because they had courage, they were also utterly alight. 

Same lesson, different, thrilling, example.  Thank you, Valdesca, thank you.

Notes

For more on Claudia and Tim's adventure see

http://valdesca.blogspot.com/

For more information on the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) and their sailing program in the Sea of Cortez, see

http://www.nols.edu/courses/locations/mexico/bajasailing.shtml