Dear Hannah and Scout,

I have a sense of conclusion, that things are ending. Someone asked me if it feels like I’m at the end of my ‘chapter.’ I just ended things with my lover, my mfa thesis is imminently due, and the landlord company that raised my rent beyond what I can reasonably afford has been increasing the showings of the property I still inhabit. When I woke up this morning, I took out all the shelves of the fridge and scrubbed them in the kitchen sink while the water for my coffee boiled on the stove. I rested the wet plastic on the clean parts of the counter and then looked in the fridge bereft of its structure. 2 heads of cauliflower and several bottles of nearly empty sauces, a rubber-banded bunch of parsley in a little mason jar, the few eggs left in the 18 pack I bought at Hyvee. There is a sense of impending completion; there is a feeling of unfinishedness.


There is a way they contradict each other and a way these feelings are each others’ janused face. When things are over it feels like there is still so much to be done. My lover, so mature, kind, and unattached to me, of course was gentle in his acceptance. He said (over text) he’d ‘always be there’ if I ever wanted to talk but would understand if I never wanted to again. My decision to end things felt inconsequential and unnecessary; I could have said nothing. Once since, I’ve seen him notice me a few blocks away, walking in the brisk cold and make no effort to speed towards me or adjust his route to avoid me. Instead I’ve made the choice to speed past, thinking I’d escape having to look at him, thinking he might feel more inclined to look at me if my acknowledgement of his attention was not at stake. All of this —distinctly in the mind with no chance of external proof. A desire for clarity only for the fact of division, to hear distinctly the musical difference of things.

I have, though, for maybe the first time in my life, felt certain of my feeling of dread. My certainty comforts me, it feels adult. I think about how it floats along, sometimes materially memorable from my dreams. I remember a dream recently of dropping hundreds of dollars on the ground while running through some neighborhood and needing to rely on the finders to return it to me. I remember one of the finders, a young boy who clutched a few hundreds and teased me with a strong reticence to return the money. My anger, when grabbing and opening his wrist, tugging out the crumbled bills, his shocked face, stuck in the shadow of a laugh still. Most dreams recently though I wake up from un-remembering.

When I think about Laila Riazi’s piece, On the Dream concerning the documentary al-Manam ( in English, “The Dream”), I am struck again by dread of another kind. Comprised of interviews with Palestinians living in refugee camps in Lebanon during what Riazi accurately summarizes as “during key years of the revolutionary movement for a Palestinian nation,” the film asks the crucial and unexpected question of the film’s interviewees undergoing Zionist aggression and the existential discomfort of separation from homeland, “What do you dream about?” The answers are varied and the answerers are anonymous. The anonymity lends a sense of connection between me and the dreams, and better cements the dreams as poems in my mind. As pure voice, they both are and aren’t encapsulations of Palestinian consciousness, which sometimes allows, more than many ethno-consciousnesses, the collapsing of the individual for the sanctity of the whole.

One of the translated dream-poems, from a young girl who survived the Shatila massacre, which killed an uncertain 1,300 or 3,500, feels particularly daunting, real, and important:

I dreamt I arranged a coup d’état

I told them that the first thing we had to do

Was to take over the headquarters of the secret police

Then I had to write a declaration

The paper was huge— H U G E!

The pen was huge

I saw myself writing in enormous letters  F O R   D E M O C R A C Y

The paper was so large it made me dizzy

Riazi, in her careful translation of the poem from colloquial Palestinian Arabic to English and from dreamspeech to poemlanguage, represents a literally huge vision: the paper is not just “huge,” but “H U G E!” as the dreamerspeaker clarifies. The spaces inset in the speech feels correct for how the poem heavingly declares itself. Every line stands on its own “arrange[ment].” There is a largeness, and for the dreamerspeaker, there is a sense of dignity and righteousness in writing about writing I don’t always feel. The little girl, face shadowed and standing tall, in an empty classroom surrounded by desks with the windows open and the light streaming in, feels to be speaking not just the dream of an individual, but a premonition of the future. Riazi writes of this dream, “the horizon of possibility is — crushingly — delimited by the dreamer’s unconscious knowledge.” Yet I feel too its looming opposite, the little speaker is hefting a dream so large it shadows all, the biggest to the smallest alike, everyone, even the IDF would be made miniscule by the big-ness of her vision.

Riazi herself acknowledges the “chiastic” role the dreamerspeaker can play in the politics of a political documentary. She writes of a different dreamer:

One interviewee confesses that, When I was imprisoned I used to dream that I’d been set free.

Yet, a chiastic reversal is just as true: When I was set free, I started dreaming that I’d been imprisoned. al-Manam reminds us that Palestinian unfreedom is the political form that conditions all dreaming.

Riazi’s loving attention to the “I’s” role in the creation of the poem, as both author and speaker, feels attended to in Terrence Arjoon’s two poems “L’imprimerie de Mickey 3.” and “L’imprimerie de Mickey4. Horace’s Horsecollar.” In the former:

I fell through the blueprint.

I fell over the anvil, and I fell over the foreman.

I fell over the hammer.

The “I” — which, up to this point in the poem, has been bereft of any physical action — is now a bodily actor. “Falling” as a verb feels accidental, incidental, until we address what the “I” falls over. How does one fall “through the blueprint,” except through metaphor? The “I” is denied the literal “blueprint” and we instead step into the dreamlogic of “blueprint” as metonym for systemic urban development. The “anvil” and “foreman,” the “hammer,” the tools of production and the lackey that wields them. How do we imagine the politics of the “I”? Are these tools material, or symbolic? At the very least, the “I” is affected by these emblems, and is put into a position of discomfort: no one chooses to “fall.” These same tools for construction are inside the body:

But everyone

back then had inside them a plank

and a screw, and a wheelbarrow or two;

These tools disrupt the speaker, who is also a disruptor. In falling, does the “I” jostle and upset the hammer, does he annoy the foreman and pause his labor, even briefly? I feel now the connection between these two pieces, in an “I” that is both part of a whole and not a part of a whole, separated by the nature of their commentary, their ability to commentate. That the “I” can speak and dream the direct and true lived past reality that also, simultaneously, reaches beyond itself into an immense and powerful future.

I don’t think I can really put into words to you both how enduring this Palestinian identity feels and has felt. From the beginning, as early as I can remember, it has always been that my sister and I must remain Palestinian to the bitter end. We must dream there is never an end. There is no equivocation, no hiding, even for the sanctity of our comfort, jobs, or lives. The stakes have always been talked about in this way. My dad has always told us it would be better for us to die than to denounce this thing. I’ve cringed and felt enmity at the intensity sometimes, in my childishness at this wish placed upon us, sometimes so much like a burden, to never shy away or compromise, even in the height of our American privilege, away from any real chance of genocide at the hands of the Israeli state, we must always do our best to feel it happening and crave return even to what more and more resembles hell. I am struck by how this season’s writing of Common Place seems to crave hell, or at least does not denounce it. It is a difficult thing.

Love,
Samira



Dear Samira and Scout,

To crave a return to hell. Samira, I am imagining your child self growing into the duty your father passed to you. You were like that “little speaker” you describe, “hefting a dream so large it shadows all,” compelled to carry the weight of a heavy vision you cannotdrop. It reminds me of the story from the Bible when Uzzah, carrying the Ark of the Covenant, touches the Ark to steady it, because the oxen is stumbling. As soon as Uzzah touches the Ark, God strikes him down dead. God seems harsh and merciless here, unforgiving. But by touching the Ark, even in an attempt to protect it, Uzzah had violated God’s law. It would be better for us to die than to denounce this thing. Your uncompromising adult-Samira self generates love and reverence in me. You face down this difficulty with graceful intensity, becoming a self that is both you and beyond you, absorbed into a history.

The photo of your bereft fridge, I know this sight well. I’ve been working on making sure I have more vegetables to hand. Here it is today, a bit weird. Parsley under a bag, old dried up herbs, a jar of pickles I haven’t been eating. Underneath that silver dome, the remainders of a cake.



Last night I dreamt of concrete, wading through it. Later, I watched a pastoral dance. The girl who was dancing, I had met her in the concrete. We needed to repair the concrete, since our wading had ruined it. Inside of the concrete were hollow passageways our legs had made, and our long poles would remedy this. We had to stir the concrete and make it continuous, so that it would become a complete river. We were cultivating a concrete river. That girl, she lived in “England,” and we had an aerial view of long fields. Her dance was operatic, and she sang quietly the lyrics of an old song. I think I wished I knew how to sing.

Yesterday, I had been thinking about memory as discontinuous, full of gaps. Perhaps the concrete river was my memory itself, with its hollow passageways in need of repair. A discontinuous, fragmented stream I labored to make whole. Why, in this task, did I need the help of that girl?

In Carolyn Ferrucci’s “No longer here,” a group also gathers around a concrete figure for memory, the “silver stream”:

Without us, the silver quarter will be a memory

Like a film of a car on fire

Everyone gathering around it

Put her fingers in the silver stream

As the implicit silver screen of “a film of a car on fire” becomes a “silver stream,” the poet makes the movements of the streaming cinema, and of “a memory,” concrete. The group gathering around the “silver stream” are both entering the movie from the theater and also inside it, gathered around the car and dipping their fingers into its silver flames. The “silver stream” is something around which, together, we can gather and touch. This articulates an involved and tactile form of remembering. We are both watching memories and becoming integrated with them, and we remember together.

We remember together. This scene of gathering spectators reminds me of what you wrote, Samira, of the “everyone” in Terrence Arjoon’s poem and its “I” reaching beyond itself. Ferrucci’s poem also speaks of an “everyone,” an “us.” The memories of this “everyone” are not discrete, but become continuous with the memories of the whole world: “My memory could be anyone’s, the world’s, and the woods.” This line helps me better understand both my dream and the function of memory.

The girl who helped me cultivate that concrete stream was also invested in its repair, because her memories, too, cohered within it. Our memories joined and were integrated in that “silver stream.” They became “anyone’s, the worlds, and the woods.” Poems help make “anyone’s” memories the memory of everyone, without believing that they can ever be retrieved, or that we can return to a concrete origin. Like concrete, memories can be mixed, and altered, taking the shape of the container that holds them. They are in the process of becoming a structure.

I count my blessings that I will be sleeping in the same structure as you two later this week in New Orleans, where we will be celebrating everyone’s poetry and everyone’s memories, including the woods and the worlds.

Love,
Hannah



Dear Samira and Hannah,

You’ve written, Hannah: Like concrete, memories can be mixed, and altered, taking the shape of the container that holds them. They are in the process of becoming a structure. Yes. Always in process, memories deploy their shapes around the available day. In my apartment, memories live on none of my objects but in the negative space surrounding them. Does this image make sense? I wish I liked to draw. I think I could demonstrate this feeling better that way, in an image.

This winter, Calum Jensen passed away. Calum was a composer and doctoral student in the Department of Music at the University of Chicago. I did not know Calum very well. We spent nine weeks together in a seminar reading Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, and then another few weeks in a seminar on the work of the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich in January, just before his death. He was my classmate. In putting together this issue, I am required to reflect upon winter. The sudden loss of Calum to this world is at the center of that reflection. At his remembrance gathering at school, held a few days after his death, many people talked of their desire to speak with Calum, and their loneliness at the loss of this speech. The huge pain of his death contains within it many particular kinds of pain. One of them: the pain of the loss of Calum’s words. The loneliness of having to read and think without Calum was everywhere in the Recital Hall.

I don’t know what to say about this inexplicable and horrible event, the death of Calum. I am aware of my distance from the event, and from his life. But I remember him and his words. In The Mirror of Simple Souls, Leah Flax Barber writes of the chance to “think in public.” I live in debt to the thinking of others, made public in poems, scores, and classrooms. I trust others with my thoughts and try to remember theirs. Memories are like you say, Hannah. Full of gaps and requiring tactile attentions. How to operate as a scribe, pressing into one’s mind the thoughts of others, is my question. Maybe being a classmate means this to me. Learning how to be with the thoughts of others. 

When I was a child, my mother used to say that as long as she thought her grandmother’s name everyday, speaking it aloud in the mind, her grandmother would remain “here.” I wonder if she remembers telling me that. Or if she knows that ever since she told me this, I have tried to think of everyone's name every day, the name of everyone I want to stay “here.” In writing, I believe this gesture gains power doubly.

In “WITHOUT WORDS,” Patty Nash writes:

The comfort of human touch.

I would wager my land on it.

What land?

You feel so good, I cooed to Patrick, who replied, no,

Patricia, you feel amazing. The brief moment

Elided, but we had felt an amplified sense

Of what we feel every day.

I choose to read this as an ars poetica. The poem as the place where the extreme feelings of being are not produced anew, nor merely reproduced, but undergo various amplifications. And in such amplifications, we gain a serious sense of “what we feel every day.” It is in the act of the amplification that the normal movements of our affective conditions become obvious to us. Such feelings arise within and work to compose an environment not exclusive to ourselves, but one intimately constituted by the presence and activity of others. Landless, our back-and-forth cooing constructs an ephemeral domain. We belong, but only to one another. No property in sight. Even the “wordless” have a say in this interplay:

So in an idealization I make the train

And there’s a clean blue square for me

Where I can sit with the baby

Who wants to kick me

Where it can kick me. Hello baby.

Quite literally “without words,” the kicking baby works to compose their relational environment. The baby’s will works efficaciously, even without language. The “clean blue square” of the seat is selected with the baby’s kick in mind, is selected because of and toward the possibility of this kick. The kick is another amplification of the wordless will, one we remain in possession of even when we have nothing to speak of, or no words with which to speak. “Hello baby.” I find this poem to be joyful, funny. Though even so, in the poem’s “gesture of amicability,” the serious weight of love, of one’s love of the demanding and kicking-other, is made present.

How can we remain alert to these kicks, and to the “demands” upon us, when the demands really do matter? How to refuse false boundaries. How to use our memories on behalf of someone else. You write, Samira, of the will to never shy away from the hell of terror. Our real distance from the violence done to others might encourage this shy-ing. The will to return to hell is equally the will to turn against false shynessness. The difficult craving. I agree. This is also what poetry gives us.

I like these fridge pictures. Though yours, Samira, concerns me. Please go to the store. The poet CAConrad has a refrigerator ritual: record the contents of your refrigerator, read its manual, listen to its hum, acquaint yourself intimately with its insides, which will soon be the insides of you. Thank you for showing me your insides.



Love,
Scout