THE HARMATTAN by Padraig Rooney

A Harmattan is a West African trade wind picking up fine dust particles on its passage over the desert; meaning ‘tears your breath apart’.

The lawn was frosted.
Some rabbit or hare
had marched across it
and printed there

his early morse,
gone by noon.
A stabled horse
sent a plume

of morning breath
across the canal.
News of a death -
my brother Cathal

killed at seventeen,
so long ago
I believed in heaven.
Frost or snow?

I laid my hand
on a cold bonnet
and felt that sand
had landed on it,

lifted overnight
by prevailing wind.
Could that be right?
Had I lost my mind?

A northern frost
the night he died
and wind-borne dust
filming the car red?

It little matters
at this distance.
Time scatters
details in a dance

of grief and art.
A whirlwind air
descends to tear
your breath apart.

                          -- originally published in Wales Arts Review

What is Life?

An interesting look at the evolution of life from a bio-chemical perspective.

What Grief Isn't Like

Last night, I took this survey from Slate asking readers to describe their experiences of grief. First, I was asked to identify which persons near to me had died, when, and how I'd felt. There were comment sections, but mostly check boxes that presumed some measure of grief. This became quickly awkward for me since, in my case, I hadn't known the people well (g'mother on dad's side, g'father + uncle + aunt on mom's) and the impact of their passing on my life was minimal to say the least. 


What got to me, mostly, in the initial period, was the don't speak ill of the dead rule. I felt slightly bad for having made so much fun of some of them while they were alive (comic routines based on the few interactions I'd had with them) but my take on my g'mother was so spot on, that what I probably most regretted losing was one of my best lines of family comedy. Later on, though, I started feel like I had missed out on the opportunity not just to know them, but to learn more about my own parents' childhoods - from an adult's perspective. Plus the whole family history thing, which my parents completely de-prioritized. 


I started thinking about them more, and had dreams about them. In the dreams I got rebuked, or imagined whole conversations, rich with detail and understanding, and woke up feeling robbed. I suppose you can't call this grief, and it will pale dramatically in comparison with the death of my parents, to whom I am deeply attached, but it's my experience of death so far.


To be honest, the worst I've felt when something died was when, after 10 days of frantic searching, I discovered my hamster dead at the bottom of glass jar in the back of the pantry. The thought of this sweet, engaging animal, whose cage I'd forgotten to close, dying of thirst in a pile of its own shit, just killed me. I was f-ing depressed for a month.


At the end of the survey, I was asked a series of questions about what people had said or done to support me; did people sympathize with my loss or try to help me get past it? In the case of the relatives, the point was moot. Their deaths, once announced, rarely came up. Death, it seems, is less tragic than inevitable for people you don't know well - or don't like. In the case of poor hampy, my cover was too much work; to claim otherwise seemed almost too ridiculous. In retrospect, I should have held a funeral.  


27. What was the most helpful or supportive thing that people said or did to help you while you were going through your loss?


"Yeah, I killed a hamster once."


28. What was the most unhelpful or unsupportive thing you experienced from others as you were going through your loss?

"I was six."

29. Did your loss teach you anything about yourself? About life?

Don't leave the cage door open.

30. Did anything positive come out of your experience of grief? If so, please describe.

I bought a new cage. And a new hamster.

Because Every City is a City

How many people are in your network?


No, I don't mean on Facebook, or Twitter, or LinkedIn ... or whatever. I mean, how many people do you actually know? And by know, I mean can tell something about them other than their name or what they do (which is easy if you work together, or if they work for you). This is not to discourage your sense of popularity.


The point is purely rhetorical, and relates to the question I've been asking myself. Which is, why do I want to live in New York? Sure it's bigger, brighter, louder and more (socially? culturally?) important (what does important really imply?) than Prague, where I live. But what kind of access will I really have to all that it offers? Sure, the museums are open to everyone, but if I'm looking for social engagement, yearning to be part of something (ah, the tangible desire for the intangible!) and being in depends on who you know, then I've got to ask, who do I really know? And who would I actually meet?


A few minutes ago I finished reading an online post by Ben Widdicombe of the NYTimes, in which he describes all the cool parties he's not invited to, and details his distaste for hipsters. (Full disclosure: I've been known to make, and have made, on several occasions, snide remarks about hipsters.)  While I'm not terribly interested in the mechanics of true coolness, or whether being cool requires you to attend the coolest events, I am interested in what it means to be a part of something, and why so many of us not just want, but need to live in cities like New York, which are often described as having their own sense of gravity.


On this point, Widdicombe makes an interesting observation. He writes:


"One quality many people who move to New York have in common is that we hate to miss anything. That’s why we live here, in the capital of the empire. But it seems like every week there is some ultra-cool enclave going on to which we’re not invited."


Which brings me back to my original question. Why do I want to live in New York? Because lots of amazing/famous writers live there? Great. I'll just look them up in the phone book, or you know, friend them. I suspect my experience of New York, or any other city, would governed by much the same factors as drive me (occasionally) crazy in Prague. The thing is, I can say fairly that I know quite a lot of people in Prague. Not all as well as some, of course, but it's hard to keep up. And there are about a million other people I don't know.  So why do I feel confined by Prague's "limitations" as a small city? Is it me, or the city itself? Is my problem that it's too provincial, not enough part of the larger cultural pulse to make me feel that, by default of osmosis, I, too, am somehow connected to whatever it is I need to be connected to.  


As the capital of a small European republic, Prague dominates its surrounding villages and makes smaller cities (i.e. other small European capitals and those big enough but too down-on-their-luck to rank industrial towns with shadows of urban centers) shiver with envy. But for all its majestic Medieval architecture and gleaming baroque church spires (or maybe because of it) Prague often feels little bigger than a village itself. This has its charms as well as its drawbacks.  The city is arguably calmer than New York, but is dense enough to feel urban in a residential sort of way, and so jam packed with tourists you might mistake it for a multicultural environment.


Yet New York gleams across the water. The few visits I've had over the past few years have been brief - a few days here, a week there - but glamorous. Exploring the glittering heights from the comfort of my friend Ben's sofa, the pull of the city, it's promise and allure, were beyond palpable.   But even then, after a few days, I was ready for my own bed, the comfort my own things, my own life. And my life being what it is, hustling business, trying to find time to write, what kind of people would I likely meet, and how would my relationships with them (or with the city itself) be any better than what I've got here?  Sure, there are more people, and the cast of potential friends is bigger, but that's just mathematics. 


In reality, I'm not temperamentally suited to knowing more people that I already do, or going to more events than I already do. I can name a dozen events in the past month that I planned/wanted/thought about/said I would go to but didn't in Prague. And then there's Berlin. Three hours drive from Prague, Berlin offers all the accoutrements of, say, Brooklyn (hipness, artiness, museumness) minus the ridiculous prices, and yet I find myself going there less and less often. 


Perhaps my current desire to live in New York is not fueled by a desire to be in a "real" city, with all the scene-stery things that it implies, but by my growing desire to live in an English-speaking place where I would have greater possibilities for work and my ability to achieve some sense of cultural integration would be more easily fulfilled. And New York, because, well, I have a complete lack of imagination about what other city I could possibly live in. I mean, New York's where it's at, right?


Maybe, but as Widdicombe points out, how much of it would I really see?  

PERIPHERY

- by Joshua Mensch

Except in the new myth, it’s Daedelus

down in the water. Neither can the salt

support his genius,

nor the wide wax float his body back to shore:

There, his son plays in the sand,

prodding a smaller crab with a feather.

The cool sun sinks deep

into the cup of his back.

His parent is out there, somewhere,

explaining himself to the fish. His story

is a sad one already, not a failure

of physics but a miscalculation in planning,

the kind of math that will inspire analogies

for generations of school children: future

inventors and engineers, pilots and

astronauts; or later, actors playing

pilots and astronauts, brave men

who will know, in addition to the horrors

of the wolf, not to fly to close to the sun.

Perhaps while searching

for a place to rest, the scientist

simply forgot the indifference of the air

to his need for sleep, his limbs

tired of their unusual task; or, like a lost

pilot, the sight of land as last

disturbed him, so he fell,

the broad bowl of his wings

lapsing under his loose grip…

It’s a sad one already. In the new myth

Icarus makes it;

Daedelus-the-dreamer doesn’t.

His smaller body buoyed by the currents,

he races gulls and cormorants to the shore.

If it is a shore close to where people live,

Someone will find him there, eventually,

absorbed in the torture of a small animal

with a rock or stick, grown already

out of the wings that had brought him there;

the wax bent, blasted by the surf

feathers falling out like loose hair

He’s done something no one else can relate to.

On this tiny beach,

the boy’s become a kind of god,

or worse: a miracle.

Its brainless animals

are already afraid of him. He’s the terror

they don’t understand;

they scurry from the prick of his thumb.

And he has a secret, terrible and mean,

a disease he would give you

if it weren’t for the drought in his lungs.

So let’s go back to the beginning;

to the dream unwound:

to the part of the story where a father

teaches patience to his son.

His hand gentle on his shoulder,

He guides the boy through the plan.

It is the beginning of trope, perhaps,

or a process: blind,

blue flight into the fable of a fall.

Dad’s been up for hours,

planning their escape —

he should know. And he’s decided

he’ll fly behind the boy,

correct his course with calls of caution

to the sea, the sun.

Dad can’t imagine himself lagging.

The boy is still young.

If he has forgotten the air already,

but he hasn’t.

If already he is a part of the cliffs

that wander like strays

in and out of the water, but he isn’t.

If already his father is tired and

willing to strip loose the straps

from his arms,

Icarus’ interest in the air

already keener

and more crazed than his own,

but it isn’t. His son’s still blowing out

the whimper of infants’ dreams;

they won’t even crease

sun-wrecked air before real heat

sets hard upon the fever of the Island.

And like all boys his age, Icarus

is turning into something

he won’t make sense of for years.

Still the small muscles, the thin lines

running rampant down his arms.

He sees them and wonders about them

sometimes, his pliant mind

dutifully forming questions. Except

it’s still dark,

and all the boy wants is to wander…

For fun, let’s say the myth isn’t a myth at all,

but a transference of the Tragic

to the less-than-Tragic; to the merely tragic

accident that delivers us, gurgling,

from dumb feeling to universal principal

and puts the lump where it belongs:

in our throats.

The analogy still holds. Crawling in a line

past a highway accident that may or may not

have been fatal, we recount our losses: if sorrow

scored for music makes tears; if the song

doesn’t fit: turn the radio off.

No matter how fun or fake the storyboard,

full of dumb mistakes and retarded Fates,

this one’s got it all: death, cruelty, atonement,

and a failure

spectacular in its delivery. Somehow,

the characters have gotten caught in lives

very much like our own, inchoate and

full of feeling, and worst of all, they’re all alone.

And do how they get out?

It hasn’t been worked out.

“It’ll take a miracle, for sure,” says one writer.

“Yeah, like wings that work,” adds another.

But that part comes later. Right now,

bad things are happening in the plot.

This is the climax, no one will care about

the before

after, and they’ve written a twist

to make things worse:

the wrong character survives.

So what if it were Daedalus, say,

who drowned instead of his son?

Except this before he inhaled air

and exploded from the water

rose into the weather

assembling feathers the wax firming

on his arms

the flight to the Island ass-backwards

followed as he should have been

by his son

down the dim valley of a maze

its way out still unsolved

no wings no fantastic crafts

feathers still stuck to birds the reeds

still in their stalks nothing plucked

so that not even the sand remembers

what the sea forgot.

(originally published in Bordercrossing Berlin, Issue 2, 2007)

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