This is something different.
I sit, but do not wait.
There is too much to wait for,
I must have something now.
I worked constantly,
I loved constantly,
all constantly past.
Now I worry,
also constantly.
I have precariously:
house, children, some of wife,
job, surprisingly,
more an anchor than a living:
festering catastrophe.
I lose by not gaining,
by letting acquisition slip away.
I have much to save of me:
that which I’ve become
from someone I have left behind
begetting who I never was,
a new creation: Me.
I cannot afford the loss of all I am
in gamble to conserve my core.
To safeguard my best
I risk losing most of me.
You can lose
what you’ve never had securely,
also its future memory,
This thing I’ve made at last, what is it?
It will remain with you, a teasing
unlikely to escape your mind,
or burrow too far in.
It is a question that will torment,
whose answer I’ll take with me
to my destination: silence.
Lest you think too well of me,
I’ll take the question, too.
Life gnaws at my stomach
like George Orwell’s rats,
survival bites;
my fingers seem prison bars
pressed upon my face.
Numbness is a blank screen
upon which nervous spasms
are projected, also tics,
cramps and twitches,
aches and sores
ascending into serious pain,
but deadness is a barrier to suffering,
impervious also to dreams
and hopes and wishes,
so before you build that wall
or permit it to be built,
tell your architect
that you want doors
and windows in it.
Unexplored -
National Geographically -
my well-worn street
might be antipode
across the world from me,
for all the comfort here.
Australia one way,
up or down another,
no one-way ticket punched,
if round trip, ‘twas imagined
or in the twinkling of an eye
for I’m still stuck in place
Whatever former guaranteed,
latter reneged upon.
Warranty’s integrity is in foreign hands
forging signatures in translation.
Because of wartime rationing,
what countries do I want to own
besides the one I barely have?
There is something in a scent
to trigger vivid memory
that photograph or art can’t conjure.
If this were image of a knife,
be careful: it can cut you.
Let us construe the use of it,
concoct it from surrounding air.
I could not support my life,
and it would not sustain me.
I was factory without a product,
so now the doors are closed
the labor force is shiftless.
I dissolve in vacuum leaving nothing
for my will’s bequeathment,
no pen, no hand to sign
no final testimony.
This thing I’ve made,
this resolute creation,
residue at the bottom of my pot
after lifelong distillation,
is obviously not still me -
I’m gone.
Millenium 15 -- Tigran Tsitoghdzyan
The National Geographic Society, headquartered in Washington, DC, is one of the largest nonprofit scientific and educational institutions in the world. It sponsors and funds scientific research and exploration and maintains a museum. Its media arm is National Geographic Partners, a joint venture with 21st Century Fox, which publishes magazines, books, school products, maps, and internet and film products in numerous languages that reach more than 280 million people monthly. In 1888, 33 explorers and scientists gathered at the Cosmos Club on Lafayette Square to organize "a society for the increase and diffusion of geographical knowledge." Two weeks later the National Geographic Society was incorporated. Its first president was lawyer Gardiner Greene Hubbard, the first president of the Bell Telephone Company, the son of a Massachusetts Supreme Court justice, a descendant of the founder of the first English settlement in New York (Gardiners Island between the two peninsulas at the east end of Long Island remains in the family); his son-in-law, telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell, succeeded him in 1897. Two years later Bell's son-in-law Gilbert Hovey Grosvenor became the first full-time editor of "National Geographic" magazine; Bell and Grosvenor devised the successful marketing notion of Society membership and the first major use of photographs to tell stories in magazines.
ReplyDeleteEric Arthur Blair wrote literary criticism, poetry, fiction, and polemical journalism. His first major work, "Down and Out in Paris and London" (1933) was a brutal look at the lives of the working poor and of those living a transient existence. After T. S. Eliot, an editorial director for Faber & Faber rejected it, Blair took it to Victor Gollancz, who wanted to call it "Confessions of a Down and Outer" before adopting its present title. Not wishing to embarrass his family, Blair also sought to use an alias (he had already used "P.S. Burton" on tramping expeditions). After considering "X," "Kenneth Miles," and "H. Lewis Allways," Gollancz suggested "George Orwell." A year before his death he published the dystopian novel "Nineteen Eighty-Four" about omnipresent government surveillance and public manipulation overseen by Big Brother. The novel's working title was "The Last Man in Europe," but Orwell's publisher Fredric Warburg suggested that he choose the alternative "Nineteen Eighty-Four" (permutation of 1948, the year of composition) because he thought it was was more commercial.
The protagonist, Winston Smith, was a rewriter of old newspaper articles and other documents, and deleting references to unpersons and burning the originals in a "memory hole" for the Ministry of Truth ("Minitrue" in Newspeak) so the historical record always supports the party line, but he secretly hated the system and dreamed of rebellion. He fell in love with Julia, who maintained the ministry's novel-writing machines and, a covert "rebel from the waist downwards," shared his loathing of the Party. They were apprehended by the Thought Police and sent to the Ministry of Love (Miniluv) in charge of identifying, monitoring, arresting, and converting real and imagined dissidents. Under electroshock torture, Winston confessed the thought crimes he was accised of, but without implcating Jula.
ReplyDelete"At each stage of his imprisonment he had known, or seemed to know, whereabouts he was in the windowless building. Possibly there were slight differences in the air pressure. The cells where the guards had beaten him were below ground level. The room where he had been interrogated by O'Brien was high up near the roof. This place was many metres underground, as deep down as it was possible to go.
"It was bigger than most of the cells he had been in. But he hardly noticed his surroundings. All he noticed was that there were two small tables straight in front of him, each covered with green baize. One was only a metre or two from him, the other was further away, near the door. He was strapped upright in a chair, so tightly that he could move nothing, not even his head. A sort of pad gripped his head from behind, forcing him to look straight in front of him.
"For a moment he was alone, then the door opened and O'Brien came in.
"'You asked me once,' said O'Brien, 'what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.'
"The door opened again. A guard came in, carrying something made of wire, a box or basket of some kind. He set it down on the further table. Because of the position in which O'Brien was standing. Winston could not see what the thing was.
ReplyDelete"'The worst thing in the world,' said O'Brien, 'varies from individual to individual. It may be burial alive, or death by fire, or by drowning, or by impalement, or fifty other deaths. There are cases where it is some quite trivial thing, not even fatal.'
"He had moved a little to one side, so that Winston had a better view of the thing on the table. It was an oblong wire cage with a handle on top for carrying it by. Fixed to the front of it was something that looked like a fencing mask, with the concave side outwards. Although it was three or four metres away from him, he could see that the cage was divided lengthways into two compartments, and that there was some kind of creature in each. They were rats.
"'In your case,' said O'Brien, 'the worst thing in the world happens to be rats.'
"A sort of premonitory tremor, a fear of he was not certain what, had passed through Winston as soon as he caught his first glimpse of the cage. But at this moment the meaning of the mask-like attachment in front of it suddenly sank into him. His bowels seemed to turn to water.
"'You can't do that!' he cried out in a high cracked voice. 'You couldn't, you couldn't! It's impossible.'
"'Do you remember,' said O'Brien, 'the moment of panic that used to occur in your dreams? There was a wall of blackness in front of you, and a roaring sound in your ears. There was something terrible on the other side of the wall. You knew that you knew what it was, but you dared not drag it into the open. It was the rats that were on the other side of the wall.'
"'O'Brien!' said Winston, making an effort to control his voice. 'You know this is not necessary. What is it that you want me to do?'
"O'Brien made no direct answer. When he spoke it was in the schoolmasterish manner that he sometimes affected. He looked thoughtfully into the distance, as though he were addressing an audience somewhere behind Winston's back.
ReplyDelete"'By itself,' he said, 'pain is not always enough. There are occasions when a human being will stand out against pain, even to the point of death. But for everyone there is something unendurable -- something that cannot be contemplated. Courage and cowardice are not involved. If you are falling from a height it is not cowardly to clutch at a rope. If you have come up from deep water it is not cowardly to fill your lungs with air. It is merely an instinct which cannot be destroyed. It is the same with the rats. For you, they are unendurable. They are a form of pressure that you cannot withstand, even if you wished to. You will do what is required of you.
"'But what is it, what is it? How can I do it if I don't know what it is?'
"O'Brien picked up the cage and brought it across to the nearer table. He set it down carefully on the baize cloth. Winston could hear the blood singing in his ears. He had the feeling of sitting in utter loneliness. He was in the middle of a great empty plain, a flat desert drenched with sunlight, across which all sounds came to him out of immense distances. Yet the cage with the rats was not two metres away from him. They were enormous rats. They were at the age when a rat's muzzle grows blunt and fierce and his fur brown instead of grey.
"'The rat,' said O'Brien, still addressing his invisible audience, 'although a rodent, is carnivorous. You are aware of that. You will have heard of the things that happen in the poor quarters of this town. In some streets a woman dare not leave her baby alone in the house, even for five minutes. The rats are certain to attack it. Within quite a small time they will strip it to the bones. They also attack sick or dying people. They show astonishing intelligence in knowing when a human being is helpless.'
"There was an outburst of squeals from the cage. It seemed to reach Winston from far away. The rats were fighting; they were trying to get at each other through the partition. He heard also a deep groan of despair. That, too, seemed to come from outside himself.
"O'Brien picked up the cage, and, as he did so, pressed something in it. There was a sharp click. Winston made a frantic effort to tear himself loose from the chair. It was hopeless; every part of him, even his head, was held immovably. O'Brien moved the cage nearer. It was less than a metre from Winston's face.
"'I have pressed the first lever,' said O'Brien. 'You understand the construction of this cage. The mask will fit over your head, leaving no exit. When I press this other lever, the door of the cage will slide up. These starving brutes will shoot out of it like bullets. Have you ever seen a rat leap through the air? They will leap on to your face and bore straight into it. Sometimes they attack the eyes first. Sometimes they burrow through the cheeks and devour the tongue.'
ReplyDelete"The cage was nearer; it was closing in. Winston heard a succession of shrill cries which appeared to be occurring in the air above his head. But he fought furiously against his panic. To think, to think, even with a split second left -- to think was the only hope. Suddenly the foul musty odour of the brutes struck his nostrils. There was a violent convulsion of nausea inside him, and he almost lost consciousness. Everything had gone black. For an instant he was insane, a screaming animal. Yet he came out of the blackness clutching an idea. There was one and only one way to save himself. He must interpose another human being, the body of another human being, between himself and the rats.
"The circle of the mask was large enough now to shut out the vision of anything else. The wire door was a couple of hand-spans from his face. The rats knew what was coming now. One of them was leaping up and down, the other, an old scaly grandfather of the sewers, stood up, with his pink hands against the bars, and fiercely sniffed the air. Winston could see the whiskers and the yellow teeth. Again the black panic took hold of him. He was blind, helpless, mindless.
"'It was a common punishment in Imperial China,' said O'Brien as didactically as ever.
"The mask was closing on his face. The wire brushed his cheek. And then -- no, it was not relief, only hope, a tiny fragment of hope. Too late, perhaps too late. But he had suddenly understood that in the whole world there was just one person to whom he could transfer his punishment -- one body that he could thrust between himself and the rats. And he was shouting frantically, over and over.
"'Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia! Not me! Julia! I don't care what you do to her. Tear her face off, strip her to the bones. Not me! Julia! Not me!'"