Midnight’s Talking Lion and the Wedding Fire
excerpt
Everything moving all the time. Falling is an art in space
and time; bomb is to obliterate them. In steps any moment
is possible and only way to do it is to do it. Falling is one
ways of moving; but regardless of vest or plane, movement
is expressive. Thoughts about space, ways to use it – Einstein's
there are no fixed points in space. Still, little thinking involved,
but work, images, the body… everything is there. Anything can
feed the operative, depending on the way seeing or listening
is done, which can provoke
imagining. Always the same source—movement; source can be
small or large, birds, insects, bats, &c. Time no longer imagines
bodies, but images frozen within soft boundaries. Legs
and arms can be a revelation of the back, the spine's
extensions. It is upon length and breadth and span of body
sustained in muscular action that detonation invokes its image;
it’s not expressing anything, just presenting people
moving.
~
The blast has own continuity that need not be dependent upon
rise or fall of sound, or pitch and cry of words. Its force
of feeling lies in physical image, fleeting or static;
and emotions, constantly being propelled by some new face
in the sky, some new rocket arc, some new sound in the ear,
but they are same emotions. You don’t separate human being
from actions they do or actions engulfing them, but see what
it’s like to break actions up in different ways, to allow
passion—and it is passion—to appear for each person in their
own way. Ecstasy in bombing comes from the possible gift
of freedom, the exhilarating moment that this exposing
the bare energy can give the body. What is meant is not
license, but freedom. To what end this eternal daily struggle?
Because inside of that is possibility of ecstasy. The bomb is
constant transformation of life itself.
~
Inaugurate elaborate act of self-contextualization
by emphasizing the physical features location, “the room,”
makeshift, in a building which had nine such rooms before
war. Now three. The building on escarpment above dockyard,
rooms stacked atop others—the other two-thirds removed by
bombing, sometime during winter’s lengthy and moving
account of how the nation was decimated by aerial campaigns,
banal bomb. Diaries and journals recall the crisis a year
and a half averaged ten raids per day processes of ongoing
wreckage stage.
~
Our write of nothing now but the rain of bombs from what
was once heaven. Builders practice patience but with desperate
nervous hatred of this war restlessness for it to be over.
Alloyed younger love, fear, motherhood, half-men who built
sanctuaries. We talk as animals might “[i]n the midst of
the bombing,” The form and function of expression, practicing
a craft “with pick, shovel and rake reshape labor; suggests
that no such history exists, because history itself, in sense
of linear progress and evolutionary development, does not
exist. Duh.
~
Points, finally, to “social organization” and engagement with
wreckage to fabricate what Smithson terms a nonsite, aesthetic
object that would in some sense arrogate the logic of the real,
material locale to which it refers. The many possible definitions
for logic of degradation an issue of temporality and blurred
boundaries deeply attuned to “what it might mean to live
in rubble” of individual subjects, social groups, and whole
nations manage to survive, thrive, amid “processes of ongoing
ruination” which concludes with the people of Watts taking
a break from their own experience of “siege” to celebrate
“the memory of Simon Rodia” and not without conveying
the devastation of Kosovo, Shield/Storm, Lebanon, Vietnam,
Korea, World Wars, underscores -wide sense of communion”
precipitated by bombardment, inside rock-cut shelters beneath
cities; brings shelter to life (“The rock hears everything”),
renders it a quasi-object, something that “makes
the collective,” or remakes it, in the midst of its unmaking:
for the victims of the siege, “it’s the rock they come back to.”
~
Adam Day is author of Left-Handed Wolf (LSU Press, 2020), and of Model of a City in Civil War (Sarabande Books), and the recipient of a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship for Badger, Apocrypha, and of a PEN Award. He is the editor of the forthcoming anthology, Divine Orphans of the Poetic Project, from 1913 Press, and his work has appeared in the Fence, Boston Review, APR, Volt, Lana Turner, Iowa Review, and elsewhere.