from “War Diary”

Susan M. Schultz 

Text & Photos

Contemplation and Power

3 April 2022

Contemplation and power are connected, like freeway spaghetti, fly-overs whose destination you can only guess, though you keep your foot on the pedal; when you get to the other side, you’re still lost, but at least not racing through air like a pilot. I have time this morning to look at photographs of the dead in Bucha. Men in drab brown pants, their hands tied behind their backs, lying on hard concrete. Dead women in trenches. (Flashback to previous massacre.) A man in a well, sunken. Death isn’t sleep, because damaged objects don’t rest. They’re scattered as trash in a now liberated city, amid the grinning skulls of apartment buildings. Dwell on that.

Take an inventory of your responses. None of them has currency; they’re as starved as the ruble. Feelings trapped in a container, the air going out of it. Perverse squash court of anger, disgust, nausea. None of it a whit of good to them. Say your mantras, John told me; they work. I’d say now they work at rather than on. I can’t push them hard enough to get them to Kyiv. And pushing is precisely the wrong tack.

Nine people shot in Sacramento, more in Texas. Tomorrow the day MLK was shot dead on the balcony of a motel. Lorraine. I remember the name, and that of his assassin. What’s memory for? It’s this iteration that involves me. I hold to it, try to let it go, fail, then assume the burden of simply watching. Watch it, watch out, watch for. In the sitcom, Zelensky regards a watch Putin wears and turns his back on it.

The wind is up in Ahuimanu. Maeve stalks something on the deck. She sniffed my armpits in the night. No perfume, Walt, sorry. It’s the stink of post-modernity, or post-post, or late late capitalism. It’s my comfort, sitting in this chair like someone in a Stevens poem, reading. We refuse to speak the cause of a poet’s death. We abhor the president’s words against Putin. How do we mediate silence, when we talk our way out of conflict? Conflict makes you smarter, I saw somewhere.

The rose is no more beautiful than the rust on an old container in a field. We can cut a rose, but not a band of rust. We can buy a canvas, but not sheet metal anchored to earth. We can see the rust, the rose, the dead bodies in the street, their geometries turned this way and that, face down, bodies bent as if posed. Neither my anger nor my grief reaches that street, though it may touch my screen. The screen is a way in, but also a walling out. One poet cites another poet on yet another poet and we’re reassured by the echoes. We think of them as wisdom.

Dear Y, who tweets from Ukraine. Your window view turns white with snow. Your voice alludes to massacres. Your tweets have made a community of the meek. We’d better inherit this earth.

A Note from the Meek

 8 April 2022

The way the word “form” surrenders to “format.” The format of my thoughts has no curves or textures beyond this flat screen. Everything that matters lives off-screen, the ginger cat casting her yellow eyes from the brown railing, the other cat crying, the third cat seated on his favorite chair. For these are our stations. Over 50 dead at a train station in the Ukraine. The “after” photograph shows no human beings, just their bags. Insouciant objects, pink flashing the absent presence of a girl child.

Believe only what you see cedes to believe only what you believe. The loss of old theories (religious ones) leads us to these tabloid conspiracies, lacking candles or altars or wine. I wrote about suffering; she referred to my Incandescent Whiteness. Witness. She offers her ass to Nice White Women. I’ll kiss my own.

Palm sounds are not percussion, though not yet melody. What does that make them, in the wind? The myna’s song lacks melody, but is not siren. Low rumble of traffic an indistinguishable bass line. It’s the microphone that makes them cohere, or the pre-chant of the ear.

The museum creates a form, or is it format?

What shall we put in this museum of our feelings? The love one feels at night when one or the other cat nuzzles; the elation at reading poems that are more comrades than words; the early morning texts about the weather? If the weather is a problem, I suggested, take your photographs of the weather. What you cannot control will be your subject, and you its mirror. iPhone image flipped around so you can comb your hair. The i is small, the Phone is not.

The feeling of loss turns to one of accumulation. I have added my losses together, until they’ve become a blanket to hide myself under. We remember these times, don’t we, when we hid from parents under things. Blankets, beds, anywhere. My mother saw men building shelters out of cardboard at Dachau. If poetry is a con, why do we attend?

The email reported an “incident” and was signed “Student Housing.” It urged students to take care of themselves and each other. Student Housing wrote with a heavy heart. Student Housing is there to talk. Student Housing cannot say what the incident was, though someone died. Student Housing refers students to Student Counseling, which is to be distinguished at this institution from Student Health. Student Housing has reached out. Student Housing has an office in the dorm where the student died. Into Student Housing we pour our hopes and fears. God save Student Housing.

There is so much to see beyond this patch of pixels, this white space inside a gray space, framed by black. When asked what gets in the way of my practice, I said “memory.” Writing is the practice of putting them in the queue of this day’s events. It’s a peculiar neurosis, this need to put memories in containers and place them on the platform to be sent away. Others talk about planning, making lists, worrying about the day’s tasks. I worry that memory is my task, one I can’t put in any out box, demanding my attention, like morning glory vines overtaking a forest. See that koa tree? You can’t see it, just its format, covered as it is by the green blur of vines choking it off. There’s some punctuation in this sentence, the pale purple flowers to suggest that the vine wants something more than empire.

The leaf blower starts up; one cat comes forward, then walks past; I'm stationed on the floor. My back hurts. Have my muscles twisted like morning glory vines, becoming the very thing they want to escape? In response to the world, we hurt ourselves. There must be a word for that.

Committee Work

11 April 2022

Memory as dream work, if it’s work at all. Tell me how to modulate my voice out of this anger, another death on campus, forgotten in advance “because of privacy issues.” Privacy’s a form of active forgetting, as if by not attaching a name to our death, it had not happened, at least not in that way. The approved ways include heart attack and car accident. We have not yet gathered as a committee to discuss the feasibility of approving suicide, whether it is committed or merely completed. To define success in this instance would be to mandate a cloak be placed over the frail bosom of information. It’s not an act against God but against information, and so it’s suppressed.

The difference between bathos and tragedy, my friend suggests, might lie between self-pity and a dialogue that leads to it. If I give my dog a voice in this sequence, she will have none in editing it. So I leave her to her silences, her barks of greeting, warning, and pleas for help when tangled up on her long leash. What I can’t translate I might still write down. A writer divorced from her translator cannot read herself. Type in your sentence about a blocked pipe and get back the word “evacuation” in French. Those who can’t evacuate do not become refugees. They may lie in the rubble of Mariupol. They’re fighting to hold a city that no longer exists.

They’ll drop just enough chemical weapons to push at the boundaries of military protocol. If war is a game, then one side is bombing the board, destroying its plastic houses and hotels, passing go without taking money, then writing “for the children” on their bombs.

If the bombers write that, does that make them the dark parents of those children, aiming their metal sperm-shaped ordinance at a train station, one that gives and receives cars full of human beings? No one is fleeing now. If you stay you’re likely to die, but if you leave you’re likely to die, so why not stay in the ruins of the city you remember from your childhood?

I am so far away from Mariupol, but so are those who write from Kyiv.

Maeve head butts me, snuggles with me at night, then attacks Claude with ruthlessness. He sits on the old red chair, stained, sagging, and licks at his wounds. The cats have their own wars and peaces. Warning: graphic images. Please do not show that image of abuse ever again.

“Whatchu doing taking pictchas of my fucking house? Erase that shit from your phone,” a young man hisses at me in Kalihi. I don’t put up the photo of his house, with the ad beside it for Dyke’s Market, which takes EBT and says so on a sign covered with images of beer cans. He follows me up the street, but I turn away from him and walk. The next photos are of Bob Marley, a walk-up apartment with a tiny American flag flying on a stick.

Flag Ships

15 April 2022

So that’s what flagship means, says the child-self to the curmudgeon watching the news: the commanding officer carries the flag on the lead ship. Not to be confused, in this instance, with leadership. A cartoon shows mermaids underwater beside a gun turret, marveling at how they always wanted to see Moscow. Ship stands in for, sinks for, the place, which stands in for the nation, sinking. In the line-up of rhetorical tropes, only one commits the crime.

So that’s what a flagship is, a metaphor on top of a symbol on top of a military reference. The provost of our flagship university writes to a woman who told him about her mother’s suicide, “there is simply no truth to this.” After the vice chancellor, on reading my email about a suicide on campus responded, “Enjoy your retirement!” one noted that the exclamation point was shrapnel.

One cat attacks another cat. Second cat taken to vet, where he bites a tech. Vet tech taken to the hospital. Second cat sits on the left side of the lanai. First cat moves from right to left side, stares, her tail wiggling. Words wouldn’t end this hostility; they never do. “Should we take Putin seriously when he warns of unpredictable actions?” No, says the pundit.

Offending cat drinks from the deck, dawdles before she stares. The cats are more interested in each other than in the birds. Offending cat leaps on the table under a folded umbrella, sniffs the plants. She turns her stare toward me.

Age creates a gap between cause and effect. Get your certificate in self-detection. Trace back the symptom (wrenched back) to cause (pulling morning glory vines) as if to freshly discover a link. The pundit knows better. It’s a proxy war, ginned up by NATO. There is always someone at the controls, even when the ship sinks. It’s genocide, if that word means anything. It’s a series of war crimes, as if one did not mandate the next. It’s something we can name, because naming it marks it like a flag. The unmarked graves are lines on a map, as are the convoys of trucks through a forest. But lines used to make sense. The historian geometer gets out her ruler and traces patterns. Lines become angles become triangles become shattered squares. Lines cross the map like a Trail of Tears; one of them is the Trail of Tears. Ain’t no real big secret all the same.

Y’s new photo looks out from the middle of a giant skyscraper on other looming apartment blocks. The new photo is as banal as the old, just taken from higher up. She’s back in Kyiv, inviting us to share her #warcoffee. The offending cat has come in from the deck to eat the other cat’s food. The other cat sits beneath a railing, out of sight. What he can’t see won’t hurt him.

 A friend lashes out about platitudes. Life is suffering, he says, and no prayer to end it will ever succeed. He’s suffering, and that becomes his title, because titles comfort us. Another friend reminds me that a dog talks in Anna Karenina. A third friend doesn’t name his dog Tolstoy. My screen fills with other peoples’ flowers, cherry blossoms mostly. Gratitude is one of these platitudes, but like any, it’s harder to breathe in than to spit out.

—for Patrick P.

What I Thought Was Short Cut Proved to be Bog

16 April 2022

What I’d thought was a short-cut proved to be a bog. Sunken nearly to my knees, I looked to my right and saw the large pipe, the bridge, evidence of an occasional stream. My sandals sit by the door, hosed down, still smelling of Hau`ula peat. I walked barefoot--except for the mud--to one of three memorials on the beach: three for two men. A name in the tree, “Ku.” A banner, flags. More likely, there three for one man, Braddah Ku, shown twice, younger and older, on one banner. I find him on-line. He was 48.

At another beach park I find a tree decorated with water floats; underneath is a red chair, looking out to sea. In the tree’s crook, faded photos of a woman and a boy. Under the tree, on the ocean side, sit empty wine bottles and a small pair of red tennis shoes. This was not a drowning but a car crash.

Bryant says his friend is depressed; they talk nearly every day now. His daughter leaves for college soon, and his parents are old, a thousand miles away. Last night they talked about tanks getting killed in the Ukraine. How when a tank gets hit, it’s repaired. A crew goes in to clean out the dead’s pieces, to make the tank seem new, except there are always stains in the cracks. Like hotel staff, they clear the armored room for another set of occupants, precarious in their hutches. Everyone knows it. “When I died, they washed me out of the turret with a hose." I send the link. For god’s sake, talk next about flowers.

The need to know, to understand these waves of political and military history, set against the need to stay above water, to not drown. To make memorials inside our conversations, as we look at the white-topped waves of a large blue ocean. To confront the axis of linear and circular time, without leaping into its saw. See saw see saw. Saw sea.

On-line, I find a photograph of the car’s wreckage, a story about the mother and her son and two visitors from Utah who survived their end of the accident. I find a photograph of the young woman who died at Crouching Lion, a video of her grieving friend. My research is my remembrance, made whole-cloth of others’ words and pictures, a memorial of a memorial. What good does this do to me or to anyone? Not evidence of war crimes, or memories cherished for the families; not altars made to poetry, or even prose. Could I not simply drive past?

I drove back home, feet and trousers black with mud, sandals in the trunk of the car. The trip smelled of mud. In the photograph, my foot appears sculpted, toe nails outlined in mud, the bluish straps mere suggestions. It’s the smell of earth, of death becoming life, of sweet water so close to the salt ocean. “Is that Hawaiian mud?” a cousin asks. The `aina, rich with stink, my toenails still black with it. Clean and unclean memory. The flowers, the ones that had not faded, were bright. For “Papa,” a red lei and yellow sunflowers, hanging from a palm.

All photos by Susan M. Schultz