Adrienne Rich — A Long Conversation

–warm bloom of blood in the child's arterial tree could you forget? do you remember? not to know you were cold? Altercations from the porches color still high in your cheeks the leap for the catch the game getting wilder as the lights come on catching your death it was said your death of cold something you couldn't see ahead, you couldn't see (energy: Eternal Delight) a long conversation between persistence and impatience between the bench of forced confessions hip from groin swiveled apart young tongues torn in the webbing the order of the cities founded on disorder and intimate resistance desire exposed and shameless as the flags go by Sometimes looking backward into this future, straining neck and eyes I'll meet your shadow with its enormous eyes you who will want to know what this was all about Maybe this is the beginning of madness Maybe it's your conscience... as you, straining neck and eyes gaze forward into this past: what did it mean to you? to receive "full human rights" or the blue aperture of hope? Mrs. Bartender, will you tell us dear who came in when the nights were cold and drear and who sat where well helmeted and who was showing off his greasy hair Mrs. Bartender tell me quickly who spoke thickly or not at all how you decided what you'd abide what was proud and thus allowed how you knew what to do with all the city threw at you Mrs. Bartender tell me true we've been keeping an eye on you and this could be a long conversation we could have a long accommodation On the oilcloth of a certain table, in the motel room of a certain time and country, a white plastic saucer of cheese and hard salami, winter radishes, cold cuts, a chunk of bread, a bottle of red wine, another of water proclaimed drinkable. Someone has brought pills for the infection that is ransacking this region. Someone else came to clean birds salvaged from the oil spill. Here we eat, drink from thick tumblers, try to pierce this thicket with mere words. Like a little cell. Let's not aggrandize ourselves, we are not a little cell, but we are like a little cell. Music arrives, searching for us. What hope or memory without it. Whatever we may think. After so many words. A long conversation pierced, jammed, scratched out: bans, preventative detention, broken mouths and on the scarred bench sequestered a human creature with bloody wings its private parts reamed still trying to speak A hundred and fifty years. In 1848, a pamphlet was published, one of many but the longest-read. One chapter in the long book of memories and expectations. A chapter described to us as evil; if not evil, out-of-date, naïve and mildewed. Even the book they say is out of print, lacking popular demand. So we have to find out what in fact that manifesto said. Evil we can judge. Mildew doesn't worry us. We don't want to be more naïve or out-of-date than necessary. Some old books are probably more useful than others. The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society...it creates a world after its own image. In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class developed–a class of laborers who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labor increases capital. These laborers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market. –Can we say if or how we find this true in our lives today? She stands before us as if we are a class, in school, but we are long out of school. Still, there's that way she has of holding the book in her hands, as if she knew it contained the answer to her question. Someone: –Technology's changing the most ordinary forms of human contact–who can't see that, in their own life? –But technology is nothing but a means. –Someone, i say, makes a killing off war. You: –I've been telling you, that's the engine driving the free market. not information, militarization. Arsenals spawning wealth. Another woman: –But surely then patriarchal nationalism is the key? He comes in late, as usual he's been listening to sounds outside, the tide scarping the stones, the voices in nearby cottages, the way he used to listen at the beach, as a child. He doesn't speak like a teacher, more like a journalist come back from war to report to us. –It isn't nations anymore, look at the civil wars in all the cities. Is their a proletariat that can act effectively on this collusion, between the state and the armed and murderous splinter groups roaming at large? How could all these private arsenals exist without the export of increasingly sophisticated arms approved by the metropolitan bourgeoisie? Now someone gets up and leaves, cloud-faced: -_I can't stand that kind of language. I still care about poetry. All kinds of language fly into poetry, like it or not, or even if you're only as we were trying to keep an eye on the weapons on the street and under the street Just here, our friend L.: bony, nerve-driven, closeted, working as a nurse when he can't get teaching jobs. Jew from a dynasty of converts, philosopher trained as an engineer, he can't fit in where his brilliant and privileged childhood pointed him. He too is losing patience: What is the use of studying philosophy, if all that it does is enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic etc. and if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life, if it does not make you more conscientious than any journalist in the use of the dangerous phrases such people use for their own ends? You see, I know that it's difficult to think well about "certainty," "probability," perception, etc. But it is, if possible, still more difficult to think, or try to think, really honestly about your life and other people's lives. And thinking about these things is NOT THRILLING, but often downright nasty. And when it's nasty then it's MOST important. His high-pitched voice with its, darker hoarser undertone. At least he didn't walk out, he stayed, long fingers drumming. So now your pale dark face thrown up into pre-rain silver light your white shirt takes on the hurl and flutter of gulls' wings over your dark leggings their leathery legs flash past your hurling arm one hand snatching crusts from the bowl another hand holds close You, barefoot on that narrow strand with the iceplant edges and the long spindly pier you just as the rain starts leaping into the bay in your cloud of black, bronze and silvering hair Later by the window on a fast-gathering winter evening my eyes on the page then catch your face your breasts that light ....small tradespeople, shopkeepers, retired tradesmen, handicraftsmen and peasants– all these sink gradually into the proletariat partly because their diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which modern industry is carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the large capitalists partly because their specialized skill is rendered worthless by new methods of production. Thus, the proletariat is recruited from all classes of the population... pelicans and cormorants stumbling up the bay the last gash of light abruptly bandaged in darkness 1799, Coleridge to Wordsworth: I wish you would write a poem addressed to those who, in consequence of the complete failure of the French Revolution have thrown up all hopes of the amelioration of mankind and are sinking into an almost epicurean selfishness, disguising the same under the soft titles of domestic attachment and contempt for visionary philosophes A generation later, revolutions scorching Europe: the visionaries having survived despite rumors of complete failure the words have barely begun to match the desire when the cold fog blows back in organized and disordering muffling words and faces Your lashes, visionary! screening in sudden rushes this shocked, abraded crystal I can imagine a sentence that might someday end with the word, love. Like the one written by that asthmatic young man, which begins, At the risk of appearing ridiculous...It would have to contain loses, resiliences, histories faced; it would have to contain a face–his yours hers mine–by which I could do well, embracing it like water in my hands, because by then we could be sure that "doing well" by one, or some, was immiserating nobody: A true sentence, then, for greeting the newborn. (–someplace else. In our hopes.) But where ordinary collective affections carry a price (Swamped, or accounted worthless) I'm one of those driven seabirds stamping oil-distempered waters maimed "by natural causes." The music pirated from somewhere else: Catalan songs reaching us after fifty years. Old nuevos conciones, after twenty years? In them, something about the sweetness of life, the memory of traditions of mercy, struggles for justice. A long throat, casting memory forward. "it's the layers of history we have to choose, along with our own practice: what must be tried again over and over and what must not be repeated and at what depths which layer will meet others" the words barely begin to match the desire and the mouth crammed with dollars doesn't testify ...the eye has become a human eye when its object has become a human, social object BRECHT BECOMES GERMAN ICON ANEW FORGIVEN MARXIST IDEAS ...the Arts, you know–they're Jews, they're left-wing, in other words, stay away... So, Bo Kunstelaar, tell us true how you still do what you do your old theories forgiven –the public understands it was one thing then but now is now and everyone says your lungs are bad and your liver very sad and the force of your imagination has no present destination though subversive has a certain charm and art can really do no harm but still they say you get up and go every morning to the studio is it still a thrill? or an act of will? Mr. Kunstelaar. –After so long to be asked an opinion, most of that time opinion's unwelcome, but opinion anyway was never art. Along the way I was dropped by some, others could say I had dropped them. I tried to make in my studio what I could not make outside it. To even have a studio, or a separate room to sleep in was a point in fact. In case you missed the point: I come from hard-carriers, lint-pickers, people who hauled cables through half-dug tunnels. Their bodies created the possibility of my existence. I come from the kind of family where loss means not just grief but utter ruin–Adults and children forced into prostitution, orphanages, juvenile prisons, emigration–never to meet again. I wanted to show those lives designated insignificant as beauty, terror. They were significant to me and what they had endured terrified me. I knew such a life could have been my own, I also knew they had saved me from it. –I tried to show all this, and as well to make an art as impersonal as it demanded. –I have no theories. I don't know what I am being forgiven. I am my art. I make it from my body and the bodies that produced mine. I am still trying to find the pictorial language for this anger and fear rotating on an axle of love. If I get up and go to the studio–it's there I find the company I need to go on working. "This is for you this little song without much style because your smile fell like a red leaf through my tears in those fogbound years when without ado you gave me a bundle of fuel to burn when my body was utterly cold This is for you who would not applaud when with a kick to the breast or groin they dragged us into the van when flushed faces cheered at our disgrace or looked away this is for you who stayed to see us through delivered our bail and disappeared This little song without much style may it find you somewhere well." In the dark windowglass a blurred face –is it still mine? Who out there hoped to change me– what out there has tried? What sways and presses against the pane what can't I see beyond or through– charred, crumpled, ever-changing human language is that still you?