Tallahassee - Part 3

Read last night at a place called The Warehouse. Wonderful crowd—100 or more, people sitting on the floor, that sort of thing. Brian Turner, former infantry team leader for a year in Iraq with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team and Infantry Division, and author of the fabulous and necessary book, Here, Bullet “warmed up the stage” for me, as he put it. Set it on fire, more like. His reading was passionate, saddening, troubling, and inspiring. Here is the title poem, which he recited by heart to start off his reading, riveting the audience:

Here, Bullet

If a body is what you want,
then here is bone and gristle and flesh.
Here is the clavicle-snapped wish,
the aorta’s opened valves, the leap
thought makes at the synaptic gap.
Here is the adrenaline rush you crave,
that inexorable flight, that insane puncture
into heat and blood. And I dare you to finish
what you’ve started. Because here, Bullet,
here is where I complete the word you bring
hissing through the air, here is where I moan
the barrel’s cold esophagus, triggering
my tongue’s explosives for the rifling I have
inside of me, each twist of the round
spun deeper, because here, Bullet,
here is where the world ends every time.

My work and reading made for an interesting contrast, much more interior, skeptical, cerebral. Whereas his work’s subject is the irrational and tragically animal carnage of war—the horrendous injustices at the margins of The Imperium—mine is about the always calculating, clinical, and disembodied subjectivity at its cold and focused center.

The pairing prompted me to think about the mechanisms of hegemony—for soldiers or others in the working and middle classes, some of the clumsier mechanisms of hegemony (economic hardship, lack of more appealing alternatives, pure force) will do; for the upper classes, however, hegemony has to be achieved in other ways—through therapy, media, corporate protocols such as year-end and compensation reviews, etc. During the reading—during this entire recent period of economic psychosis and political ineptitude—I kept thinking about Yeats’ famous lines: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity.” A riddle—jogging the intellect. Yeats is asking: how to act?

The New York Times today remarked: "The economy was in deep pain."

Here is a picture I took earlier in the day while searching fruitlessly for a drug store before the reading. Tallahassee was not designed for pedestrians by any means, and it would have been a mile or more walk over a highway just to find a CVS:



Tallahassee: weeping flag and weeping trees.