LIFE DURING THE COUP
Gore on Oprah. Favorite movie?
Local Hero. Novel? The Red and the Black.
What other career? Science. Hobby?
“I paint.” Who influenced you most?
“My art teacher in school.” Favorite quote:
“Those who are not busy being born
are busy dying.” Bob Dylan. Season:
spring. Rock group: The Beatles.
I wear Banana Republic clothes to now live
in the mother of all banana republics.
When America sneezes, pandemics
are unleashed upon the world.
The ten-day Christmas Bach Festival on
Columbia University radio station
goes on as planned. Ich habe genug.
We watch 2001 in the first days
of 2001 on our laser disc player.
Boy slips under turnstile, begins Bush II.
“Well, we’ll have another Gulf War,
and a recession, and I’ll just reuse
my old columns about his idiot father.”
Bush: “It sure would be easier if I was a dictator.”
I attend a performance of
Mahler’s Das Klagende Lied.
A cold and beautiful queen
will marry only the man who
brings her a magical flower
hidden in the forest. Two
brothers find it. One kills
the other, marries the queen,
and becomes king. Wandering
a poet finds a beautiful bone
and makes a flute. When he
plays it, it sings of the murder.
It is a bone of the dead brother!
The poet takes his knowledge to
the capital, and plays his song:
“The king is a murderer!”
The kingdom collapses.
On the subway, people are reading books.
I did not know it was Good Friday.
If God exists, he must be getting better.
On the street, I think, “If wealth is theft...”
then stop and look around... Everyone,
everyone is involved! Acchh! O wei! Oy vay!
Cold War: It was a world of two worlds.
I went through it in a dream, trying to
break through the illusion, the lies.
Bush is coming to New York finally.
The two Democratic senators
pose with him in lower Manhattan
in the brilliant sun. “How do you
like our beautiful city?” a reporter asks.
“Nice weather,” sniffs Shrub, snippy
at us voting two-thirds Gore.
I hear chirping. Inside the stoplight
live a family of sparrows!
The angels play only Bach in praising
God because she is Bach. They
only play Mozart for themselves
because they are silly (holy).
If we are here, having to destroy even by
existing—walk “like an Indian,” to
at least not scare everything to death.
August 11, 2001:
The world will never be the same.
Everything is now a lie.
They had done it.
No one could trust anyone again.
It was the jungle.
Things continued as before.
The 24-hour news cycle
spewed forth phony scandals.
The coup leaders overturned
treaties honored for decades.
You and I had to make a life
in this circumscribed world.
There would be much less for us now.
The beast had been unleashed and was
devouring everything in sight.
It was only now realizing its power.
We pledged to be together forever.
The moon lit our naked bodies
six times a month. The New
School’s Orozco murals shone through
many nights. I wait for the red-tail hawks
to come again. People with will but no
intelligence won. If we follow the hawks
high up up the Avenue
of the Americas then east to
roost on the Chrysler Building’s eagles,
my love, for four or eight years,
we will be, alas, four or eight years older.
Once we are there, we will peer in
at the empty ballrooms of the 1930s.
They will fill with people from Diego
Rivera’s Man at the Crossroads—the old
ogres of Wall Street, played by the coup
leaders, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld.
Quetzalcóatl with his giant wings will
smash though the windows and devour
some of those, but not all, alas, who
have everything but do not share it.
All the world’s artists will follow Q
on a star stream through the jagged windows
and dance on the bones of the oppressors.
Allende and Neruda and Pasolini
and Welles and Sartre will
live again. They will go through
the pockets of the wealthy dead and evict
the landlords even if they call themselves
anarchists (with inherited property!).
September 4, 2001:
Arthur Waley’s biography of
eighth-century Chinese poet Li Po:
“The Ming T’ang (Hall of Light)
was a magic building symbolizing
and giving power over the universe.
Ancient monarchs were supposed
always to have one, and the Confucian
Classics contain many indications
as to how a Ming-t’ang should
be built, but the different passages
are always at variance.” The original
Ming T’ang was really a small
thatched hut, but the new T’ang
ruler built it 300 feet tall, and it came
to symbolize overweening pride.
Soon the country was torn apart
by a terrible civil war. I think of
Bush and his missile shield,
the abrogation of treaties, etc.
In her fifteen-year reign she also
instituted the requirement that
bureaucrats be good poets.
Which in its turn inaugurated
a golden age of poetry. Of course
the two greatest poets, two of the
few we still read, were not rewarded
by this system. Tu Fu kept failing
the exams, Li Po didn’t even take them.
September 10. I read Gary
Snyder: “In Avatamsaka/Hua-yen/
Kegon thought there is an
enlightened condition of the universe
that is ‘all phenomena interacting
multidimensionally without obstacle.’
In Japanese this is jiji mu-ge.”
September 11:
We are getting ready for the day.
It is one of Miguel’s late days,
so we slept late. I am about to vote.
The phone rings. Paty calling from
Mexico City: “Are you all right?”
“Yes, how are you?” “Turn on the TV.”
One tower is burning. A plane hits
the second. It is happening.
It is happening a mile south.
Outside, the most beautiful day
of the year. Woman in business suit
walks by covered in ash, making
hair spiky, Butoh Laurie Anderson.
We walk to Avenue of Americas,
and see two dust clouds that minutes ago
were towers. A river of people pouring
north, no one knowing what is happening,
if there will be more. I see a very tall man
walking south, the only civilian going
toward the site: Ramsey Clark, who opposed
the Gulf War as I did. He who has
grappled with the meaning of the world
as few others have or could have.
Outside the post office, closing, a black man
is saying, shaking his head, “I try to have
love for everyone...” I look in the eyes
of those I may never see again.
Surely goodness and mercy shall
follow me all of my days, and I
shall dwell in the Village forever.
Days pass. I am confused in thought, word and act.
Soon, we begin thinking the unthinkable.
Bush let it happen to New York,
which he hates (“Nice weather!”).
He hates democracy. He let our
guard down so the terrorists could strike.
Bushites stole the election.
They destroyed our democracy.
Now they are throwing us
into war and depression.
In Dante’s time, in Florence,
the Guelphs would destroy the towers of
the Ghibellines, who would retaliate.
We may be at the end of days.
If we are lucky, we may be at
only the end of industrialism.
If not, the animals will take up
our song, the birds will eat
our glowing carcasses and sing,
“We miss you but you are dee-lish!”
[NORMAN MACAFEE, CONTINUED ON PAGE 9]
