Who Can Stay the Bottles of Heaven?

Loneliness is a rising music of

A space I can only go to without

You. The love-god says she’ll devote

A moment to make it up to me, move

Me back to your dance of spells, then above

To your pincushion eyes of light. She doubts

Anything can be done soon, she’s not about

To change her schedule for one lousy love.

I miss your cello voice, your midnight lows,

The color of your hair, and dancing blue

To blue-violet. I miss your until tomorrows,

The shape of your wrists, even the way you

Say loneliness can be cured with just two

Things only you and the love-god can know.

-From, Discography, by Sean Singer.

Installed by former President Bush’s administration in 2006, the crimson addition to the diplomatic post was billed as a way to circumvent censorship and “offer hope and freedom to Cubans oppressed by a brutal regime”. Five-foot-high red letters that ran across 25 windows on the outside of the fifth floor streamed news, political statements and messages blaming Cuba’s problems on the country’s communist system and socialist economy.

After the United States launched the ticker, Cuba erected obstructions so it could not be seen, inciting increasingly negative “dueling billboards”.

Fidel Castro accused the U.S. mission of becoming “headquarters of the counterrevolution,” which he said violated diplomatic protocol. He led a million Cubans to protest in front of the mission in 2006, and erected 138 black flags (later traded for Cuban flags) to block the view of the ticker from those passing.

U.S. State Department spokesman Ian Kelly told reporters in Washington that the news ticker was turned off in June.

The Obama administration believes the ticker was “really not effective as a means of delivering information to the Cuban people”, and was “not serving the interests of promoting a more productive relationship.”

Pause.

Really?

I need a moment here to pause and be grateful. I live a wonderful life, and these are the things I am thankful for today:

1. Oatmeal cookies when I come from work.
2. Air in my bicycle tires.
3. A President that doesn’t humiliate me, or make me sulk in American despair.

Whether or not you’ve ever been a fan of President Obama or his politics, maybe some can agree on this point. Let’s not broadcast hate speech on our diplomatic posts.
Let’s not.

Spokesman Kelly noted that the Cubans had dismantled “a few very negative billboards and graffiti” around the facility and the United States viewed their removal as “a positive gesture.”

The result of over a decade-long field study, Righteous Dopefiend follows the lives of several heroin addicts living under Edgewater Boulevard, a freeway overpass in the picturesque city by the bay. The authors’ approach to the project is one that self-consciously “suspends moral judgment.” The challenge to both the writers and the audience is to set aside opinions on urban vice associated with homelessness and addiction, enabling the narrative to emerge from the people who live these lives.

The self-conscious decision to make a critical yet sensitive study is conveyed through the distinct style of the book. The risk of confirming negative stereotypes through “jarring photography” is of the upmost concern to the authors. Bourgois and Schonberg thus create a dialogue between rich black-and-white photographs, vivid excerpts from their field notes, and critical social theory. Excerpts from the fieldnotes give context for images which the audience may not readily comprehend.

By accompanying the photographs with fieldnotes and scholarly analysis, the impression of addiction becomes multi-faceted, ensuring that the addict experience is not pigeonholed. They remark, “as anthropologists studying people who live under conditions of extreme duress and distress, we feel it is imperative to link theory to practice. Otherwise, we would be merely intellectual voyeurs.” Bourgois and Schonberg’s balance between image, word, and theory reflects their research methods, inviting the audience to witness and experience, rather than analyze , this community.

The community created through drug use is the centerpiece of their study. The authors depict aspects of street life through the voices and meditations of various people living under Edgewater Boulevard. The personal relationships between addicts create a distinct community with its own particular moral and ethical rules. Dopesickness, for example, an ailment encompassing the severe physical symptoms of heroin withdrawal, is an experience that fuels the “moral economy of sharing.” Being sick elicits empathy among members who are both friends and enemies. “It is considered unethical,” the authors observe, “to leave a person stranded when he or she is dopesick unless one is openly feuding with that person.”

Assuaging dopesickness is one of the few instances where ethnic and racial boundaries may be crossed. Although the power of addiction may appear to overwhelm racism, division along racial and ethnic lines is part of everyday life on Edgewater Boulevard. When Bourgois asks Hank, one of the white dopefiends, why the scene is predominately white, Hank replies, “You’ll see very few black people homeless…because they’re knocking out kids on welfare.” Several members harbor mistrust and stereotypes of dopefiends from differing ethnic backgrounds despite being intertwined in a network of dealing and dependency.

Besides delving into the shadows of street life, the authors also explore the evolution of love between residents of the camp. One couple, Tina and Carter, develop a surprisingly domestic and committed relationship despite personal histories of abuse, homelessness, and addiction. Bourgois and Schonberg also follow Hank and Petey, best friends and lovers who struggle to live in a homophobic, yet fraternal, environment. Their turbulent relationship is tempered by the impediments that surround them: possible eviction, pan-handling, hospitalization, methadone treatment, and death.

Bourgois and Schonberg preserve the dopefiends’ humanity while simultaneously excavating the grittiest aspects of life on the street, managing to keep their commitment to put aside moral judgment. Reminiscent of an evocative documentary film, their book is beautifully shot, intelligent, and engaging.

Photography by Jeff Schonberg

Novices and pundits alike, Fallopia has a place for you. As we begin to formulate the life of our website over the coming months we’re looking for others interested in similar ideas,  provocative contradictions, creative outbursts, and anything our readers might find thought-provoking and worthy of sharing with the world.

A branch of initiate connects to us all.

Connect the dots.

EMVY.

Whipped piston shot and photogenic bloody jaw are at the
midnight eyebrow bar-steeping like the sassafras of jarred petals
in the windowsill.

Bustling the round robin on a cardinal night-cliff-a blister popped
the balloon I gave you on your Birthday. I’m sorry about that.
We clouded up in the rock-shift of amber stars, naked whiskey,
& sifted melon. Caking hills with sweet, bitter, milked flames.

These lines, contributed by Victoria Sroka, conjure up images of impossible form and texture, a recycling of terms that makes language feel like a pallet of colors susceptible to our impulsive desires of a young child who has not yet learned how to mix the hues properly. These images are at once incredibly vivid and rich while at the same time nebulous and distant. Our eyes and minds cannot comprehend what we see.

But wait, these phrases do not make any sense to us privileged native speakers, readers, and interpreters of English. Precisely. This is where innovation starts.

As a reader and interpreter of texts, I have always made a case for literature’s artistic qualities, admiring how a writer paints the canvas of the imagination within the limits of syntax and precise diction. But how can literary works embody or replicate the same artistic expression that a visual image can? How can we experiment with the color wheels of language, inventing new hues and tints, that resonate with the old words we know but leave us with the metallic taste of something new?

Magnetic poetry, indeed, might be a way, chopping up sentences into morsels of words, mixing them up, and putting them back together again in disarranged fashion. Taking words out of the context and obligation of logic and proper grammar, words become something new again—something to create with. Language, as something that composes us and that we encounter everyday, is a challenge to paint with. It takes a physical action, somewhat, to force ourselves into stepping outside the limits that structure the life of language. This is why I see magnetic poetry as a beneficial practice to all crafters and artists of our language. It enables us to tacitly reconstruct our words, touch them, and treat them like building blocks to create with.

Doing this we may, indeed, create seemingly senseless phrases as we stand back and look at the portrait of words on the wall (or fridge). This provocative experience is oddly charming though. To consider the audacity of phrases, adjectives and conjunctions, transforming nouns into adverbs, yet still understanding something of the lines, illuminates something about the layers of meaning in language that are often overlooked in polished, grammatical form. After all, we can still feel something emerge from the mish-matched words and improperly used predicates. What we sense is something more held in language than purely pragmatic use, reflective of the sentiments that visual art radiates. In the end, we understand something of the relationship between ourselves and our language that was impossible to render through everyday, or even scholarly, use.

No matter how we chop it, it is never foreign. It still has the power to be something greater than itself and the rules we have to make it efficient. Finally, maybe we are able to paint with words.

-Andrew Bird, from “Words Will Tell.” NyTimes, March 2008