Dove sta memoria

I am, as so many are, shocked, appalled, frightened, dismayed by the re-election this week of a convicted felon & rapist who views the Presidency of the United States as his own private fiefdom. I’ve also been grappling again with Pound & his legacy. This wrote itself last night, for a book of prose I’ve started to build, on the theme of fascism, & complicity, & refusal of same.

Dove sta memoria

I remembered this morning in a flash two days after re-election to the office of the Presidency of a moral idiot, a man to call whom a sociopath would give sociopaths a bad name, a moment in the fields of St. George’s, the private boys’ school in Vancouver I attended awhile, the moment I finished a round of push-ups, one I was weakly armed for & had been decreed for me as part of a detention I may have, I can’t remember how, I was an awfully obedient boy, I may have earned, a moment my tormenter, a redheaded boy whose face & name have long since disappeared from view, said, yeah, okay, you’re done, I remembered this as I stood peeing – the toilet a site of introspection almost as rich for me apparently as the long indulgent showers I have long resorted to in retreat from an inner life that feels at times an onslaught – I remembered the rush crush & cascade of gratitude I felt, a sudden grateful self-abasing love for him, that moment, the boy who’d owned & commanded me, for ten ordinary moments, when I had to do what he said. Fascism is built out of such unexceptional surrenders. ¶ Let us never use the word detention again except historically. ¶ Yesterday morning I found myself sitting crying for children I had never met & could hardly imagine watching their parents shoved onto planes for locales they had for good reason fled, & those children to follow, once the notion that they belong here by birthright has been evacuated by men who can shit but not give life. ¶ This evening on the subway home an orange more orange than I’ve ever seen rolled down the aisle. I put out my foot & stopped & picked it up & walking home took a route by the liquor store where a gaunt-faced woman around my age in a puffy white coat was sitting against the building, as I thought she might be, and I asked would she like it. She said sure yeah thanks. Only thing I’ve done since the felon’s re-election that has felt meaningful as response. The world does not make sense but it does rhyme.