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The Legal Studies Forum
Volume 30, Number 1/2 (2006) reprinted by permission Legal Studies Forum Lawyers and Poets A World Ever So Mad _____________________________ LAWRENCE JOSEPH In It, Into It, Inside It, Down In How far to go?-I have to, I know, I promised. But how? How, and when? And where? It was cold. The sky, blue, almost burst, leaves burnished yellow. Nearing Liberty, Liberty and Church streets. So it happened in early November. Which is to say a story took place. Once again new lines, new colors. One scene and then another. Characters talking to one another. It was she who opened the conversation. "A wild rose, and grapes on vines along the ground, a butterfly on the green palmetto, plums the size of walnuts, gray and vermilion"-she sat up straighter, lips pressed together, looking me square in the eyes-"and why, you tell me why, in this time of so many claims to morality, the weight of violence is unparalleled in the history of the species . . ." What needs to be said- why not say it? "Who dares to learn what concerns him intimately," [469]
is how he says it in his book. Then the mind runs through the spaces left behind, crossing over to a different place. It certainly was a well dressed crowd. Here, again, the General, the Attorney General, a beeper in one hand, a crucifix in the other; here, again, language, a language-a style, a groove, a fate. On the esplanade, Battery Park, a newspaper, old, caught in a gust, a child, lost, crying-the pain was ours, I know it now; beauty, the answer, if you must know- the sun ablaze on the harbor. Hearing a sentence phrased in . . . a tenor? countertenor? . . . an error of nature, after all-made of thought and of sound, of feelings seen- in it, into it, inside it, down in. [470]
Inclined To Speak I saw that. One woman, her personality and appearance described as lovely, while performing her predawn prayers, watched the attackers shoot to death her husband, her seven year old son, three of her brothers, as they grabbed her four year old son from her arms and cut his throat, taking her and her two sisters away on horses and raping them. Of course it's genocide. And, yes, it brings to mind I am constantly aware of, in making the poem, Brecht's point, to write about trees- implicitly, too, to write about pleasure- in times of killing like these is a crime; and Paul Celan's response, that for Brecht a leaf is a leaf without a tree, that what kinds of times are these when a conversation-Celan believed a poem is a conversation-what kinds of times are these when a poem is a crime because it includes what must be made explicit. What is seen, heard, and imagined at the same time-that truth. A sort of relationship is established between our attention to what is furthest from us and what deepest in us. The immense enlargement of our perspectives is confronted by a reduction in our powers of action, which reduces a voice to an inner voice inclined to speak only to those closest to us . . . [471]
On That Side April and May. There, very near, dimensions imploded- the point, the line, the surface. The arrangement of power, the immanence of the pressure. "What," he said with a laugh, "you think I'm exaggerating?" I can't say that I've internalized it all yet. I'm over on the other side- Green Dolphin Street, the bar and café, that is, a table in back, in the garden, engaged in an act of asceticism. A memory-so vivid, I close my eyes. [472]
Why Not Say What Happens? I Of icons. Of divination. Of Gods. Repetitions without end. I have it in my notes, a translation from the Latin, a commentary on the Book of Revelation-"the greater the concentration of power on earth, the more truth is stripped of its power, the holiest innocent, in eternity, is ‘as though slain . . .'" It has nothing to do with the apocalyptic. The seven headed beast from the sea, the two horned beast from the earth, have always I know, I've studied it-been with us. Me? I'm only an accessory to particular images. II According to the translation of the police transcript, the sheikh-the arrested head of the cell mockingly said-in a plot involving a chemical attack, needs, simply, two or three young men with brains and training with nothing to gain or lose, not an army. It doesn't take much these days to be a prophet. Do you know how much poison can be put in a ten liter barrel? You pour it and spread it, then you leave. The web is, prosecutors believe, so intricate, the detainee, they think, may also be a member of cells in Barcelona and Frankfurt. III Yet another latest version of another ancient practice-mercenaries, as they were once known, are thriving, only this time they're called "private military contractors." During the last few years their employees have been sent to Bosnia, Nigeria, Colombia, and, of course, most recently, Iraq. No one knows [473]
how extensive the industry is, but some military experts estimate a market of tens of billions of dollars. IV Autumn turned to winter and the site began to clear. The limits of my language are the limits of my world, said Wittgenstein. The realization-the state of the physical world depends on shifts in the delusional thinking of very small groups. One of Garfinkle's patients tripped over a severed foot while evacuating the Stock Exchange. Several others saw the first plane pass right next to the almost floor length windows of their conference room. "When I'm not working, the last thing I want to do is talk about it," said one policeman, who, like many of the city's uniformed officers, is still working a schedule of twelve hours on, twelve hours off . . . Shoes, books, wallets, jewelry, watches, some of them still keeping time . . . The congressman says he can't say for sure there isn't a suitcase with a nuclear bomb floating around out there. Everything immense and out of context. The large item in the mud, one of the motors that powered the Towers' elevators. "It's intense"- says Lieutenant Bovine-"no photographs! This is a crime scene!" What happened was one floor fell on top of another, as many as ten floors compressed into a foot of space. What fell was mostly metal . . . The cement vaporized . . . The Night Watch was what the laid out scene looked like. The fences around the wreckage covered with T shirts, teddy bears, and memorial banners signed by thousands of visitors; tourists snap pictures, and, subject to the way the wind is blowing, the air is tinged with an acrid smoke . . . "Lost/Missing Family 1 866 856 4167 or 1 212 741 4626 . . ." A Web Exclusive, the poet will speak about poetry and grief . . . The smells of burning wiring, dankness from the tunnels, the sharp and sweet cherrylike smell of death. At eight ten on Friday [474]
two more bodies are found in a stairwell of the South Tower. Work, again, stops, and the ironworkers, who have been cutting steel beams, come out from the hole. The work goes on until well past midnight. More debris is removed, another body recovered. A group of ironworkers stands on a gnarled beam, one end of which juts over the pit like a gangplank. Three 35 millimeter movie cameras are placed on top of nearby buildings, each programmed to take a picture every five minutes, day and night. A bugler slips onto the site and plays "Taps." V That period of ten or eleven years- concerning it I can express myself briefly. At some point, in collective time, electronic space turned into time. The miraculous multiplication of loaves was restricted to the rentiers. A grappa in a black, pyramid shaped bottle was taken cognizance of, and, with no resistance, for the most part, no guarantees were made for the slow, the meek, or the poor of spirit, who, for reasons unexplained, allowed themselves to disappear into the long, red evenings, nights early gray blues. VI Screaming-those who could sprinting-south toward Battery Park, the dark cloud funneling slowly- there are two things you should know about this cloud- one, it isn't only ash and soot. but metal, glass, concrete, and flesh, and, two, soon any one of these pieces of metal, glass, or concrete might go through you. As she turns to run, a woman's bag comes off her shoulder, [475]
bright silver compact discs sent spinning along the ground, a man, older, to the right, is tripping, falls against the pavement, glasses flying off his face. VII Have I mentioned my grandmother, my father's mother, who died long ago but who visits me in dreams? It's to her, mostly, I owe the feeling that, in cases of need, those transfigured in eternal love help us certainly with eternal, and, perhaps, also, with temporal gifts; that, in eternal love, all is gratis- all that comes from eternal love is gratis. VIII My father?-my father was a worker. I can still hear him getting up in the morning to go to work. Sadness, too, has to be learned, and it took my father time to learn it, but he did, though when he did his tears were never chronic. As for the economies on which my parents' lives depended, they won't be found in any book. IX It's the details that dream out the plot. Rearrange the lies, the conceits, the crimes, the exploitation of needs and desires, and it's still there, the whole system's nervous system-inside it, at times, a dreamer at work, right now its me. The air not yet too cold with winter, at a sidewalk table at the Cornelia Street Café- a dream, it's a dream, the dream [476] of a dream song, the dream of a dream, a glass of Sancerre on the table, re visioning, in a purple mist, a tugboat, practical and hard, as it approaches a freighter, black, with the red lettered name BYZANTIUM. X Capital? Careful! Capital capitalizes, assimilates, makes its own substance, revitalizing its being, a vast metabolism absorbing even the most ancient exchanges, running away, as the cyberneticians put it, performing, as it does, its own anthropomorphosis, its triumph the triumph of mediation- and, let's not forget, it organizes, capital organizes, capital is "an organizing," organizing social forms. XI Pink above the Hudson against the shadows lingering still, the sky above an even blue and changing to a pale gray and rose. A coat of snow in the park on Tenth Avenue, clumps of grass sticking out of it, late afternoon, in Druids, Sam Cooke on the jukebox, lines from an obscure tune from the box set, "even my voice belongs to you, I use my voice to sing, to sing, to sing to you . . ." The lives of the two or three others who pass through as close to you as the weather. Walking back, the dotted lines of the lights on the Bridge, the sun blotted out by a burst of vermilion. XII I remember it-the gold burnt into gold, the gold on gold and on white and yellow, [477]
an incandescence condensing the sunlight, outburning the sunlight, the factory molten, the sun behind it, in it, thin, gold, pig iron, a spray of fire, flywheels revolving through the floor, rims almost reaching the roof, enormous engines throwing great pounding cylindrical arms back and forth, as if the machines are playing a game, trying to see how much momentum can be withstood before one or the other gives way. I remember-down Sixth to Downing, to Varick, down Varick, downtown. A cat is in the rubbish in the street. The sun over Jersey. The gap at the end of West Street, the sun on the clock tower. The melancholy induced by the pressure of time, the wavering ambitions, failed ideas, time wasted. The unexpected breeze, warm, the sense of the river. The sky blue, dark blue yet pure in color, not blackened or tarnished, above the low, old buildings, like a painting of something solid rather than the solid thing itself, a high and low composition. But what light there is in that landscape . . . [478]
That Too A long walk up West Street along the piers. The sky-right now the sun, the clouds, a few seconds of light yellow. The deepest being being a longing to satisfy the longing for a solitude of two. Gertrude Stein's "Composition as Explanation," that too. Surely the blacks and golds are the depth of a late October afternoon. Surely the blues and greens fired by crimson are the sea. [479]
The Game Changed The phantasmic imperium is sec in a chronic state of hypnotic fixity. I have absolutely no idea what the fuck you're talking about was his reply, and he wasn't laughing, either, one of the most repellent human beings I've ever known, his presence a gross and slippery lie, a piece of chemically pure evil. A lawyer- although the type's not exclusive to lawyers. A lot of different minds touch, and have touched, the blood money in the dummy account in an offshore bank, washed clean, free to be transferred into a hedge fund or a foreign brokerage account, at least half a trillion ending up in the United States, with more to come. I believe I told you I'm a lawyer. Which has had little or no effect on a certain respect I have for occurrences that suggest laws of necessity. I too am thinking of it as a journey-the journey with conversations otherwise known as the Divina Commedia is how Osip Mandelstam characterized Dante's poem. Lebanon? I hear the Maronite Patriarch dares the Syrians to kill him, no word from my grandfather's side of the family in the Shouf. "There are circles here"- to quote the professor of international relations and anthropology-"Vietnam, Lebanon, and Iraq . . . Hanoi, Beirut, and Baghdad." The beggar in Rome is the beggar in Istanbul, the blind beggar is playing saxophone, his legs covered with a zebra striped blanket, the woman beside him holding an aluminum cup, beside them, out of a shopping bag, the eyes of a small, sick dog. I'm no pseudoaesthete. It's a physical thing. An enthusiasm, a transport. The melancholy is ancient. The intent is to make a large, serious portrait of my time. The sun on the market near Bowling Green, something red, something purple, bunches of roses and lilacs. A local issue for those of us in the neighborhood. [480]
Not to know what it is you're breathing in a week when Black Hawk helicopters resume patrolling the harbor. Two young men blow themselves up attaching explosives on the back of a cat. An insurgency: commandos are employed, capital is manipulated to secure the oil of the Asian Republics. I was walking in the Forties when I saw it- a billboard with a background of brilliant blue sky, with writing on it in soft edged, irregularly spaced, airy white letters already drifting off into the air, as if they'd been sky written-"The World Really Does Revolve Around You." The taxi driver rushes to reach his family before the camp is closed- "There is no way I will leave, there is no way- they will have to kill us, and, even if they kill every one of us, we won't leave." Sweat dripping from her brow, she picks up the shattered, charred bones. She works for the Commission on Missing Persons. "First they kill them," she says, "then they burn them, then they cover them with dead babies . . ." Neither impenetrable opacity nor absolute transparency. I know what I'm after. The entire poem is finished in my head. No, I mean the entire poem. The color, the graphic parts, the placement of solid bodies in space, gradations of light and dark, the arrangements of pictorial elements on a single plane without a loss of depth . . . This habit of wishing- as if one's mother and father lay in one's heart, and wished as they had always wished-that voice, one of the great voices, worth listening to. A continuity in which everything is transition. To repeat it because it's worth repeating. Immanence- an immanence and a happiness. Yes, exquisite- an exquisite dream. The mind on fire possessed by what is desired-the game changed. [481]
Once Again The esplanade. High summer. The sea is beyond the sunset's light- the shapes amassed, the sky a current carrying us along, heavy with that green and that black. Fate's precisive wheel revolving, force's writhing wheel- the stealing, the killing, accomplished by new types of half monsters- it's what I said- the poem is the dream, a dream technique; the primary soul substance on which our attention is fixed- supernal, metaphysical-in other words, a representation, as we have seen, of mythical origins. Something felt, something needed- as much as we needed; a woman, a man, love's characters, the myth their own. We are agreed. The moon is low, its silent flame across the garden of roses, almost level with the harbor. We place our hands on the silence and, once again, repeat the vow. [482]
Lawrence Joseph was born in Detroit in 1948. He was educated at the University of Michigan, where he received a B.A., and at Cambridge University, where he received a B.A. and M.A. He obtained his law degree at the University of Michigan Law School. He clerked for Chief Justice G. Mennen Williams of the Michigan Supreme Court, taught at the University of Detroit School of Law, and practiced law with the firm of Shearman & Sterling in New York City. Since 1987, he has taught at St. John's University School of Law. Joseph has also taught in the Council of the Humanities and Creative Writing Program at Princeton University. Joseph is the author of four collections of poems, Into It (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), Shouting at No One (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1983); Curriculum Vitae (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988); Before Our Eyes ( Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993). His earlier collections have recently been republished under the title, Codes, Precepts, Biases, and Taboos: Poems 1973-1993 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005). He is also the author of Lawyerland (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), a book of prose. Joseph is married to the painter Nancy Van Goethem and lives in New York City. |
