This Connection of Everyone with Lungs (4 page)

We did not speak about the December 24 deployment of twenty-five thousand soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines to the Gulf Region.

We do not speak about the loading of M1 Abrams tanks, Apache helicopter gunships, and other equipment on two roll-on/roll-off ships, the
Mendonca
and the
Gilliland
, in Savannah, Georgia.

We do not speak about the
Seay
loaded with Patriot antimissile batteries and wheeled vehicles in Fort Bliss, Texas.

We do not speak about the
Constellation
in the Persian Gulf and the
Harry S.Truman
in the Mediterranean each with forty fighter jets on board, including F/A-18 Hornets and F-14 Tomcats, and about forty other aircraft.

We do not speak about the thousand-bed hospital ship
Comfort
that has left Baltimore for Diego Garcia and is waiting for orders.

And today, I am back with yous, beloveds, and still we do not speak about yesterday’s deployment of sixty-two thousand soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines to the Gulf Region that included seventeen thousand and five hundred marines and pilots, mechanics and additional warplanes, combat engineers, logistics support and loading crews.

What we heard as rumor a few weeks ago has become a listing in the daily news.

An endless refueling and slipping out of port in the night.

We do not speak of it and instead press up against one anothers reveling in the pleasure of being back together.

January 20, 2003

Some say thronging cavalry, some say foot soldiers, others call a fleet.

Some say an army of cavalry, others of infantry, others of ships.

Some say horsemen or footmen or rowers.

Or a troop of horses, the serried ranks of marchers, a noble fleet, some say.

Some say one hundred and twenty Challenger Two tanks, or infantry, or a fleet of ships.

There are those who say a host of cavalry, M1A2 Abrams tanks, and others Bradley fighting vehicles.

Some say others of infantry, and others of ships, and others of 155 mm Howitzers.

Some say thronging Warrior combat vehicles, some say foot soldiers, others call a fleet the most beautiful of sights the dark earth offers.

Some say that the fairest thing upon the dark earth is a host of antiarmor AH-64 Apache attack helicopters, and others again a fleet of ships.

Some say that the most beautiful thing upon the black earth is an army of AS90 self-propelled guns, others infantry, still others ships.

On this dark earth, some say the thing most lovely is the thirty thousand assault troops from Britain today joining the sixty-two thousand from the US mobilized in the past ten days and a further sixty thousand from the US on their way.

On this black earth, over the coal-black earth, some say all of this and more.

But I say it’s whatever you love best.

I say it is the persons you love.

I say it is those things, whatever they are, that one loves and desires.

I say it’s what one loves.

It’s what one loves, the most beautiful is whomever one loves.

I say it is whatsoever a person loves.

I say for me it is my beloveds.

For me naught else, it is my beloveds, it is the loveliest sight.

I say the sight of the ones you love.

I say it again, the sight of the ones you love, those you’ve met and those you haven’t.

I say it again and again.

Again and again.

I try to keep saying it to keep making it happen.

I say it again, the sight of the ones you love, those you’ve met and those you haven’t.

January 28, 2003

Yesterday the UN report on weapons inspections was released.

Today Israel votes and the death toll rises.

Four have died in clashes in the West Bank town of Jenin.

Yesterday, three died in an explosion at a Gaza City house.

Since last Monday US troops have surrounded eighty Afghans and killed eighteen.

Protests against the French continue in the Ivory Coast.

Nothing makes any sense today beloveds.

I wake up to a beautiful, clear day.

A slight breeze blows off the Pacific.

It is morning and it is amazing in its simple morningness.

I leave the house early so I miss the parrots but outside the door I stop to listen to the ugly song of the red-bottomed bulbuls.

It is so calm here and yet so momentous in the rest of the world.

Amid ignorant armies and darkling plains, the news has momentarily stopped trying to make sense and the stories appear with a doubleness.

Israel said the four killed today were armed men and were killed in a series of clashes.

Palestine claims they were shot in running battles.

Palestine claims the bomb explosion in Gaza was caused by a missile from an Israeli helicopter.

Israel claims it was a Palestinian bomb that exploded prematurely.

In the Ivory Coast some schoolboys sing, “France for the French, Ivory Coast for the Ivorians. Everyone go home. We are xenophobes and so what.”

Others carry signs that say “Down with France, long live the US” and “No more French, from now on we speak English” and sing “USA, USA, USA” against the French.

Later today Bush will speak.

How can we be true to one another with histories of place so deep, so layered we can’t begin to sort through it here in the middle of the Pacific with its own deep unsortable history?

I left our small apartment that is perched at the side of a dormant volcano that goes miles down to the ocean floor, perched on layer after layer of exploding history.

It wasn’t just our history of place but the contradiction of the US taking unilateral military action to rid Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction that entered our two small rooms and we just wanted to leave and get on with the day’s mundanenesses—email and photocopies and desk chairs and telephones.

While driving away from our small apartment, beloveds, I turned on the radio.

Today on the radio, Christie Brinkley exists and her worries about Billy Joel’s driving abilities exist.

A lawsuit exists where Catherine Zeta Jones and Michael Douglas are suing
Hello!
magazine for publishing poor-quality wedding photos.

U2 spy planes exist flying over the Koreas.

Supermodel Gisele Bundchen’s plan to eradicate hunger in Brazil exists.

Heart disease in women exists.

John Malvo’s trial exists.

Aretha Franklin exists and a subpoena for her exists.

Hackers of the Recording Industry Association of America website exist.

Thalidomide exists.

Zoe Ball exists.

And Fatboy Slim exists but now without Zoe Ball.

Bronze Age highways in Iraq, Syria, and Turkey continue to exist.

Renée Zellweger and Richard Gere, lead actors in
Chicago
, exist.

Cell phones and tunnel vision exist.

Cable problems exist in a crash in Charlotte.

A dismembered mother, the shoe bomber’s letters, Scott Peterson’s wife and girlfriend, Brian Patrick Regan’s letters to Hussein and Gadhafi, nineteen thousand gallons of crude oil in the frozen Nemadji River, all of this exists.

The world goes on and on, spins tighter and then looser on a wobbling axis, and it has a list of adjectives to describe it, such as various and beautiful and new, but neither light, nor certitude, nor peace exist.

February 15, 2003

Here is today.

Over eight million people marched on five continents against the mobilization.

Here is today.

Three million in Rome.

Two million in Spain.

One and a half million in London.

Half a million in Berlin.

The list goes on.

Millions.

And if not millions then hundreds of thousands.

People in London, Dublin, Edinburgh, Reykjavik, Paris, Berlin, Leipzig, Stuttgart, Amsterdam, Brussels, Madrid, Seville, Andalusia, Barcelona, Girona, Granada, Rome, Bern, Stockholm, Gothenburg, Warsaw, Lisbon, Porto Codex, Bucharest, Moscow, Athens, Thessaloniki, Budapest, Helsinki, Ankara, Kiev, Belgrade, Sarajevo, Istanbul, Cape Town, Johannesburg, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Amman, Beirut, Rafah, Ramallah, Karachi, Lahore, Rawalpindi, Babylon, Baghdad, Bombay, Calcutta, Delhi, Srinagar, Hong Kong, Dili, Kuala Lumpur, Manila, Jakarta, Seoul, Bangkok, Damascus, Canberra, Newcastle, Melbourne, Sydney, Auckland, Christchurch, Wellington, Calgary, Buenos Aires, Rosario, Bogotá, Mexico City, Guadalajara, Santo Domingo, Guatemala City, Tegucigalpa, Anchorage, Arcata, Fresno, Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Francisco, San Jose, Santa Monica, Vallejo, Portland, Santiago, Lima, Caracas, Chicago, Normal, Detroit, Lansing, Minneapolis, Las Vegas, Santa Fe, Austin, Salt Lake City, Bellingham, Seattle, Tacoma, Toronto, Raleigh, Philadelphia, Ottawa, Quebec, Brasilia, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Quito, Montevideo, San Jose, San Juan, Havana, gathered.

Even those on Antarctica gathered together.

Even we on this small island gathered.

Of course other things happened.

Dolly the cloned sheep was killed yesterday owing to premature aging.

A bomb exploded an Israeli tank and four were killed.

Cardinal Etchegaray visited Saddam Hussein but neither would say what they discussed.

Child protection campaigners called for the removal of Polanski’s
The Pianist
from the Oscars because of the fugitive director’s child sex conviction.

But mainly people gathered.

March 5, 2003

When I wake up this morning the world is a series of isolated, burning fires as it is every morning.

It burns in Israel where ten died from a bomb on a bus.

Yesterday it also burned in the Philippines where twenty-one died from a bomb at an airport. And then it burned some more a few hours later outside a health clinic in a nearby city, killing one.

It burns and the pope urges everyone to fast and pray for peace because it is Ash Wednesday.

It burns in Cambodia, which has closed its border with Thailand.

It burns in a fistfight between delegates at the Islamic emergency summit.

It burns in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

It burns in the form of Israeli-imposed closures that cause severe economic problems for Palestinians.

It burns in North Korea.

This is the stuff of the everyday in this world.

In this never-ending twentieth-century world.

This burning, this dirty air we breathe together, our dependence on this air, our inability to stop breathing, our desire to just get out of this world and yet there we are taking the burning of the world into our lungs every day where it rests inside us, haunting us, making us twitch and turn in our bed at night despite the comfort we take from each other’s bodies.

Beloveds, weeks ago the doubleness of the news broke me down and I stopped writing and stopped loving all humans, mainly myself.

Heriberto wrote in his blog that US citizens should leave like German citizens should have left Nazi Germany.

I spent days thinking on this one.

Whether we could do anything here with others.

Or whether it was better for all of us to leave the nation to whatever strange fever has overtaken it.

The unanswerable questions of political responsibility.

The call to act despite the lack of answers.

As I thought about this, life went on.

As I thought, the shuttle crashed on its return home, North Korea restarted its plutonium reactors, two close friends broke up, another tried to kill himself, another checked himself out of rehab for the third time in order to return to his ice habit, and water continued to be wantonly used despite warnings that a lack of water will probably lead to severe crop shortages across the globe in the near future.

Beloveds, before all my hope is burnt up, I should also remember that eleven million people across the globe took to the streets one recent weekend to protest the war and this gave us all a glimmer.

We talked on the phone about this glimmer.

We read each other’s reports.

We said optimistic things.

Those who broke up suddenly discovered new lovers and their new sensualities in this glimmer despite all the burning.

Friends got arrested for posting signs and they were suddenly heroes.

After the protests, I flip through as many images from as many different cities as I can find on the Internet.

Picture after picture, crowd after crowd.

The images differ only in the surroundings.

City streets or town squares; bright light of heat or the clear light of snow; naked or clothed protestors; mittens or halters.

Those on the space shuttle sent back images of the calm quietness of the planet before they crashed.

Those images give the comfort of distance, a lack of detail.

These images of the protests are busy, detailed with all the glimmers of individuals.

There are crowds covering blocks of city streets and squares, taken from above.

I imagine the bodies of friends in the crowds of various cities, feel moments of connection with the mass as I imagine it down to individuals.

March 11, 2003

Beloveds, the UN resolutions and counter-resolutions have become so endless that I can’t make sense of them anymore.

One day Turkey will not open its doors to US troops, the next day there is an election and negotiations start all over again.

Our hopes that the inevitable will not come true are endlessly dashed.

Bush keeps saying he will go it alone if he has to.

Huge protests continue, protests without alone and against alone.

It is the word alone, beloveds, the word alone.

When I speak of alone I speak of how there is no alone as Pakistan claims it is moving in on bin Laden, as Iran’s nuclear plant is nearing completion, as Oscar organizers announce that the show will go on in the event of war.

I speak of how there is no alone even with fuel cells and the deloder worm and the car lover’s brain.