Carla Harryman 

Dialogues (against War) in Pandemic Time

Text, Photo, Audio

The End

It’s not the end. That’s the problem. But the dream was finite: we were at work on-line and I was commenting on the quality of the presentations, the visual displays all about political economy. Rosie was amused that I was that impressed. Then we heard someone saying seven billion British holidays are in the wash. We were very concerned. The person to get more intel from was referred to as Timothy Tim.

That really is a dream. I’m sure it didn’t happen that way.

What way did it happen if not that way?

We have to cancel our trip.

It’s not the end of the trip because it never started.

No, we will be here in whatever this is. Not a trip.

Consult Timothy Tim.

Maybe we are they.

Or him.

Who? There is no Timothy Tim.

Did you hear what happened to Smolny?

That is an end.

And futures people carry with them.

It goes on like that for quite a while.

What I can’t tell a witness—

May I quote you?

When?

Myth

The message offered in the image of young women fleeing to an unwelcoming border in terror, sadness, desperation via the spectacle of digital color photography is not a message about their loss of power but of abandonment. The morning begins in the kind of grief one can experience sitting at a picnic bench under the shade of a black and white striped umbrella.

Let’s call the picture—

“Women need to take up arms.”

I never thought I’d hear you say that.

I can’t bear the thought of holding a gun.

And yet you say—

“We have done it before,” taken up arms.

Who will train us?

We need to find defectors from the U.S. military who will go into hiding and tunnel us into cool cavernous spaces with plenty of water and provisions.

The borders are thick as prison rebellions.

And therefore we shall appear as phenomena. Incoherent to the guards. The helicopters will mistake us for wildfires and mirages snarled in heatwaves. Out of the glow of the red orange factory spewing dust and debris as colorful as headscarves and nonwestern clothing trapped in western camera lenses, the figure of a monstrous male rises: and that is us. Of course, all the guards see is the male form. Even if it is draped in munitions and visions of boundary violations to the degree that it takes up so much space you can’t see the body at all. 

Is this what they call a “projective stalemate?”

No, it’s “the regeneration of Sirens.”

Does one have to become a woman to screw you?

I am screwed and you too. Already.

I mean.

I know a dirty word that frees the mind.

Yes. Though you will need to protect your mind from that mind.  And this isn’t possible.  You’re already screwed. The architecture of everything we need to draw on to defend ourselves is based on cooperation and struggle, ensnared in violence coursing through the digital feed. And in it, that dirty word is “forbidden.”

The “fruit” served to seduce future entrepreneurs and engineers is a delusional shelter, a fete of permits. Allowed brief entry into the sanctuary, we believed in small futures. And now under the umbrella of a tree-lined urban street in an interior region stolen before the age of aviation, we fly to someone else’s aid with nothing to offer.

“With only the clothes on their backs”—

“The weapon of thought”—

“When faced with annihilation”—

Vehicle

How to be a table top in a pile of cottages.

It’s not that Kyiv is full of cottages.

We don’t know the city.

And how to be a table top.

That’s what you want to be.

Something smooth.

In the crippling of towns on the Eastern Boarder.

Those words without legs.

Who is speaking now?

Five men on the words of legs.

They spoke against the grain—

Of the wood.

Patterns flow, tap—

Trap.

Tap.

Trap—

The words’ legs.

Five men speak now in a pattern flow.

Woman enters—

With tourniquets.

Having arrived at the Polish border.

There were five of them, I wonder.

And men, I wonder how she was able—

To get to the Polish border.

And how a table top without legs could be a vehicle.

To Russian/Ukrainian Poets

—checking email every five minutes for an answer. I got it I got the answer and it didn’t make me look so good.

Pounding on your own goodness sounds a bit tarnishing.

Say stinging.

Have a latke.

The smell of onion in the vapor of potato reminds me of the Russian poets in our kitchen drinking vodka at a somewhat earlier hour than this.

They did not sleep.

They do not sleep much now either.

Up all night in your fantasy. Some of them dead.

No not in mine. In mine they sleep willowy sorts of idealisms smothering vast plains sequestered in small farms and mushroom gathering.

They are almost all gone now, but there are more.

Some. Alexi. Others too are lauded on the lips of the still living.

Alexi turned vitriol blue.

Hmmm. I thought it was a reference to hydrated copper.

Ukrainian rubble recalls each dead poet in Russia as Ukrainian. 

They have to be careful now. That rubble disseminates in the elements spreading across the globe.

As ever but more so.

Tabling the turn and turning.

So. Let them leave as they did.

They leave again and again.

So and so is arriving.

A ways off.

They are arriving.

We break hearts with them when they arrive with stoic pretense.

And then we get out the vodka.

They have not yet slept.

We keep the vodka in the freezer in case someone is looking for it.

I confess I didn’t understand entirely, these males. But Alexi—

Now understanding, forget.

—I was a poet in the company of Alexi.

The point is disbursed in rubble—

Yes, forget understanding.

—and never made again in the same way.

That’s right. It’s missing varnish.

—March 20, 2022

Why I Am Not a Poet

You remember that track?

The one about painting? Sure. I remember.

It does that substitution thing, when one thing is substituted for another.

But they are not equivalent, are they?

No. It just makes negative attribution proliferate.

Kitschy hearts flying out of storm drains.

And into cracks.

Meanings slip through as they do now in a time of war.

When there wasn’t one—

A time of war? You think there wasn’t—

No, you interrupted that I was going to say we weren’t alive.

Ad infinitum. So we don’t know what to grease, oil, or paint—

How to brush stroke in the battleground of thoughts—

When poets haven’t studied war sufficiently—

“Ain’t gonna study war no more” remember? It felt good.

To sing.

To have some fervor in the work of protest.

That hot and dull straggling of the poetic, so-called.

Then the body got left out of the picture at the end.

Of conscription? So that the picture slams into the returning soldier’s front door.

It’s still morning. And who’s the straggler now?

In Mali their light switch flipped—

—onto nothing can be known.

Though it can be described. Names named, denials met.

There is something I wanted to say about Ukraine because—

The taste of war strikes in the neighborhood and one can say the window—

Imagined the subject, returning to face the hearth.

Singing accusations.

While the poet has to be cosmopolitan and know everybody.

While envisioning peace without leaving you out of the poem.

Your characterization is likely to piss someone off.

You know I’ve been thinking about the inside and the outside.

The soldier’s window slammed into the front door picture, yes.

And the painting of the shards they pull out of their arm, the drops of cartoon red.

The cherry market.

I’ve been thinking about those pissed off poets.

Throwing poems to the wolves.

That wasn’t my point. I was thinking about the inside and the outside, not plucking at sentiment.

Is the scale we use in conversation appropriate to the sounds we wish to make?

 —when one can’t tell how far apart one is to another’s thought. Is it near or far? And how does that reflect on one’s internal processing mechanisms and what one finally finesses into a response or blurt. This of course follows after a certain amount, never enough, reading of informed articles and analysis, which delineate certain areas of the authors’ expertise:

Authoritarian censorship in Russia and China.

Proliferation of private militias.

Threatened maternity.

A center for disabled refugees.

The psychology of this tyrant and then that in the white world.

Debates about empire.

Demand for autonomy.

The decline of the petroleum-based economy.

Who said that?

It’s a synthesis just like everything else on this list.

It emits a bit of perfume.

Or species oil under capitalism.

Harryman’s Audio Recordings

Author Notes: I recorded each of the three audio pieces on my MacBook while in quarantine in a third floor apartment in Berlin in early July, 2022. The recordings were done next to open windows and doors in order to capture as much ambient sound as possible. I recorded “Myth”in the bedroom, which faces onto an acoustically vibrant courtyard. In addition to my voices and ambient sounds, “Myth” incorporates noise-making kitchen objects and a book. “The End” and “To Russian/Ukranian Poets” is read with Barrett Watten and recorded at the dining room table next to an open balcony door that faces a playground and street.

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Texts and acknowledgements: The five dialogue poems selected for Chant de La Sirene are taken from  the last two parts of “Good Morning Trilogy: Dialogues in Pandemic Time.” The three parts of the trilogy are: Good Morning, published in PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art (link here); Cloud Cantata, published by Pamenar Press in June 2022 (link here); and "Scales.

"The End" was written in June 2021. It's a somewhat goofy piece that mentions Smolny, which is the college at the Petersburg State University that Putin condemned as a terrorist organization.

"Myth"  was written in September 2021.  It is a response to an image of Afghan women fleeing the country published on the front page of the New York Times

"Vehicle" was written in March 2022: and is a swift response to what begins to happen in Ukraine then.

"To Russian Ukrainian Poets" is the only piece with a date marking the composition: March 20, 2022.

"Why I am Not a Poet" was written in April, 2022.

I gratefully acknowledge Ghazal Mosadeq, editor of Pamenar Press,  for first publishing “The End” and “Myth” in Cloud Cantata, and Barrett Watten for his timely uploading of and commentary related to “To Russian/Ukranian Poets,” in Document 96 @www.barrettwatten.net