Carla Harryman: from a Journal [March 18, 2003]

Thickening

It is March 18, exactly 4:00 by my watch , which means 3:57 by the school’s clock, as I unlock my office door. The phone rings. Hello this is S. He is asking if I would be a reference for a federal job. Of course, what’s the job. The job is to assist in archiving an Islamic library in Dearborn. What have you been doing he asks. I’ve just returned from witnessing with Asa an act of non-violent civil disobedience.

We agree to meet for coffee after the war begins. Perhaps we should meet at the zoo. I am thinking about Victor Shklovsky’s Zoo or Letters Not About Love. What happens when one becomes a correspondent from a distance? Shklovsky, the herding animal, wanted above all to get back into his country. I am a migratory creature, one who has little means to travel, but I manage to see enough to bring back some news to my students confined in the unwieldy metropolis. The Middle East is not in my flight path except through the poets, faculty, and students I know here on the ground.

I would meet at the butterfly exhibit. Would you? With butterflies from all over the world. We could talk while meditating on fragility and its opposite, prolific regeneration. Within this beautiful container we could discuss the problem of violence. And the way that violence, gives us, like it did Shklovsky, poetic devices.

Let us consider, for example, the path of the butterfly crossing the path of the automobile. Let us consider the potential fragility of the automobile in the path of a bomb. Or consider a bomb, which can not regenerate in the prolific manner of the butterfly.

Or a body instead of a gun.

S. tells me about the Koran, that the intellect is more important than the heart. Is that because one doesn’t have to wait for a “good” or “powerful” feeling to make an ethical judgment? That one can act ethically toward others without having to know them or have any particular feeling for them? This begins with one’s transcending of one’s fear of Allah.

He lives in the paradox between idealism and pragmatism. This is something he considers deeply.

Then he said, there are not enough people who can act ethically. It is human nature to forget. The people who retain the memory to act correctly are too small in numbers.

Right now I am thinking about shoes and boots. Black boots laced up above the calves of a large man in a black uniform with an insignia, federal marshal, on the pocket lapel. He stands in front of a gray-haired man, who, dressed in black trousers and a black t-shirt printed with the insignia pax cristi, is lying on the Federal Building steps. There are about ten people similarly dressed lying down on the steps. Behind them more marshals and federal agents. People are stepping over the bodies. People who have business in court. Lawyers. Clients. Our lawyers also. At this entrance there are about 35 or so supporters at first, until the people, perhaps 17 of them, on the other side are arrested. Then all of the supporters are here: we’re possibly two hundred in number, watching the die-in and singing, carrying anti-war placards, and waiting for the people doing the action to get arrested. It is going to be a federal criminal charge, blocking a federal building.

Last night Bush declared his pre-emptive war on Iraq in the guise of a preposterous demand. We are at the Federal Building today announcing our non-compliance with his war and with his refusal to obey international law. We indict him for intention to commit genocide.

Also at the Federal Building is the first day of the trial of four or is it three? people accused of being terrorists. It is no accident that the jury for this historical trial is being selected the day after Bush has made his baby furious declaration.

We are all being taken care of by a furious baby. Papa baby, who decided to side with the hawks, playing the role of their commander. Where shall we go today hawks? Iraq? Iran? Saudi Arabia? North Korea? When I was quite small, I used to watch the hawks in an empty field near my house and contemplate their vast travels. How glorious it would be to be a baby in charge of hawks, and by extension the baby parent of everyone, including my own father and sister Elizabeth, who must be at least in her 80’s seated in her wheelchair abutting the steps of the federal building.

But what I want to emphasize is how ordinary everything feels and looks. It is only the mind that tells me anything extraordinary about these events. It is cold. We are shivering. Most of us didn’t wear winter coats. Time is passing. Some of us are lying down on hard steps. Some of us are singing. And time is passing. There are a lot of cameras, all sorts. No butterflies, few birds. But it is all very quiet. And no one is in a hurry to get anywhere. We are just here, being. But H., H., who wants to be a lyric poet, has already been arrested on the other side. Everything is simple. Ordinary. The day goes by. I am standing alone at a garage entrance looking out for official vehicles carrying those who have already been arrested. A federal agent in a brown suit passes me. How are you, he asks? I’m okay. And yourself? We are actors with a script, and off stage, we are simply people at work.

At last, federal marshals carefully bend over the bodies on the steps. They ask them to get up. One by one people refuse to get up and one by one they are put under arrest. It is a small ceremony. Quiet, a tap here or there, and another person in black street clothes walks up the steps slowly with a marshal or two marshals in black uniforms on either side of them. They disappear into the Federal Building one by one. Some, who refuse to get up, are carried up, gently, as a civilian casualty might be carried by a medic in a war zone. We are all at the funeral together. Goodbye Judith, goodbye Bill, goodbye Billie. And this part is over.

Posted by Brian Stefans at March 31, 2003 06:49 PM