Sometimes There's Nothing But Despair

I’m in the bath with greasy hair. 

My swimsuit on the towel rack, 

is printed with Jacques Louis David’s 

The Death of Socrates.

I drape one arm over the edge of the tub

and toss my head back like a despondent mare.

Now I look like Jacques Louis David’s 

The Death of Marat, 

staring up at Jacques Louis David’s 

The Death of Socrates.

Was it Marat’s propensity to wrap his hair? 

Or, did David wish to paint him like a noble revolutionary from a foreign land? 

I remember the importance of drapery

 from Fine Art History 

One-O-One

With Professor Michael Koortbojian.

He gave me my first A

on an essay 

at U of T

But cautioned me 

to start using a dictionary. 

Not as much for spelling, 

as for unnecessary verbosity. 

I never really listened. 

Except! When he asked repeatedly,

“How best to know the intention of a free-standing sculpture?” 

Then he would answer himself each time diligently ...

“You walk around it.”

And that I heard because,

what a lovely discovery 

in the second slide of

the pensive 
Farnese Hercules

(Three tiny apples cradled in massive fingers behind his back)

Now, I’d reach around for the shampoo

But, when I went to the zoo,

a bottle of the same brand

was in a case by the orang-utans

beside it, an actual orang-utan hand 

posed as an ashtray, 

to illustrate the devastation 

our use of palm oil wreaks. 

Sometimes there’s nothing but despair. 

Beast of Burning (Published in the Boulevardier May 2014)

Freud suggested monsters are external, anthropomorphic manifestations of the internal threats we are too fearful to face. Originally applicable to the boogeyman beneath our beds, crafted in the likeness of an individualized anxiety, his theory was later applied in the analysis of cinema. When dialogue surrounding serious social problems becomes terror-induced taboo, a filmic menace appears in the creeping shadow of our unspoken uncertainty.  

For six decades, Godzilla has been the gamma-rayed mammoth storming the room where the ills of nuclear capacity have been swept under the carpet. The overarching message of the franchise is clear: humanity has unleashed a scourge into the environment. The unified body of the beast itself, however, is a nuanced cumulus of emotions and associations.  

On March 1st, 1954, a Japanese fishing boat happened into the path of a hydrogen bomb test being conducted on the Marshall Islands by the United States government. One immediately ailing crew member described the scene to Time Magazine: 

"We saw strange sparkles and flashes of fire, sparks and fire as bright as the sun itself. The sky around them glowed fiery red and yellow. The glow went on for several minutes--perhaps two or three--and then the yellow seemed to fade away. it left a dull red, like a piece of iron cooling in the air. The blast came about five minutes later (with) the sound of many thunders rolled into one. Next we saw a pyramid-shaped cloud rising, and the sky began to cloud over most curiously. The thought of pikadon flashed through my mind, I think, but we were busy and i went back to our nets." 

Only months later would Godzilla be introduced to the world, appropriately destroying a fishing boat in the Pacific Ocean. 

As intangible as the shell casing after a detonation and ephemeral as the moment of an explosion, the monster remains unseen in its first film attack.  Directly analogous to the bomb, its presence is represented by a blinding light reflecting from the seawater it boils and signs of devastation on the deck of the boat engulfed in flames. Godzilla as a pitiless byproduct of human engineering is a notion fortified in later scenes, where the creature first becomes visible. Ingesting energy from electric towers or readying itself to spew heat, the flame-shaped plates along the monster’s spine glow and buzz as routinely as a coil element. Physically revealed, however, the monster generates another layer of meaning.  “Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.” wrote Kahlil Gibran. If there is a case to made for endowing the literally massive character of Gojira, as he was first known, with the enduring soul of the Japanese people, it is indeed found in his searing scars. Keloid scars are growths created when collagen inhabits a wound and spreads beyond the wound’s original boundaries. Godzilla’s skin was designed to appear a blanket of such cicatrix, unifying him with the similarly marred survivors of the 1945 atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.   The beast may represent the machine but the ghost that begins to emerge is a human spectre. 

Once personified, Ishiro Honda’s Godzilla roars a swath of cathartic rage through the very real and repressive silence of censorship in Allied Occupied Japan.  As per Professor Yamane’s lament in the film, that the kaiju or “strange creature” should be kept alive and studied, scientists harnessed nuclear power to replace fossil fuels. Godzilla’s gestational period in the Art Department of Toho Studios, Tokyo coincides with the birth of world’s first nuclear power plant opening on June 27th, 1954 in Obninsk, Russia. While the apocalyptic possibility of nuclear war remained a palpable threat throughout the remainder of the 20th century, the actual calling card of nuclear catastrophe came, time and again, as a result of in our inability to keep nuclear energy wholly contained within reactors around the globe. That the 60th anniversary of the Godzilla franchise be marked by a fresh installment seems appropriate. That the milestone film follows in the wake of the Fukushima Daiichi meltdown-- irradiating the waters of the Pacific Ocean since March 11th 2011--seems painfully synchronistic.   

Long-term environmental repercussions at Fukushima, and the potential for similar disasters elsewhere, are topics seldom trending in social media feeds. Progress reports of the clean up effort in Japan are rarely offered by mainstream media outlets. An edition of PBS’s Frontline, “Nuclear Aftershocks” is aptly subtitled “Have We Turned Our Backs on Nuclear Energy?” When asked in the documentary whether renewable sources of energy will ever replace nuclear power, MIT Professor Ron Ballinger, though admitting his bias as a nuclear engineer, suggests that “unless we become a pastoral society where the energy use density is low enough” atomic energy will always be necessary to gird the grid.    

With no new nuclear facilities having been approved when the documentary aired in January 2012, Charles Ferguson, Physicist and President of the Federation of American Scientists, shed light on the tentative approach to fueling the future. Ferguson suggests nuclear power will be phased out only by default, as many of the 104 nuclear plants in the United States must retire in the next 20 years and new reactors are not approved. Sustaining the industrial and technological based lifestyle we want, without the energy we fear, remains an impossibility. Fuse desire with dread and the result is often a paralyzing reluctance to face the crux of a difficultly head-on.    

Whereas 1950’s Godzilla is featured in film posters bombastically dead-on, planted in the forefront of a cityscape in full out offensive mode daring the viewer to defuse his glare, his most recent antecedent seems less far less cocky. Publicity for Gareth Edwards’ highly anticipated 2014 iteration of Godzilla shows the behemoth with its back to the audience. While, undoubtedly, in part to heighten anticipation and bolster box office for the big, filmic reveal come May 16th; the ambiguity of presentation mirrors our current ambivalence towards the nuclear threat. Godzilla is now fully entrenched in the midst of a metropolis on fire. The flames burn brightest directly in line with his torso and the viewer is left to make the educated guess that it is Godzilla who fuels the inferno. As the warm golden light from smaller fires diffuse into the central scene, however, it is difficult to say with 100% surety that it is not the city fuelling the beast.

Carpool Lane

Daniela felt safe in the carpool lane. The windows were fogged. The head rest of the passenger seat was up high. A tall man could be sitting in front. She mimed conversation. If the police pulled her over, she’d introduce them to ‘Harvey.’ 

Few cops would step outside in a rainstorm for a carpool violation.  Then again, it was as warm out as it was wet.  She held her breath every time the lines between lanes opened to allow her to merge, back, into regular traffic. Every time she thought about doing so, a trail of red brake lights glared through the mist. 

A sign above read, “Slick conditions, drive slow.” The tail of a jackrabbit stuck up from a puddle of guts. She looked straight ahead and pressed down on the gas. Empty white diamonds on the black top slid under her car. 

Breaking this little law kept anxiety at bay. She remembered thinking that if everyone were allowed to break little laws, they’d be less likely to commit the big crimes that anxiety caused. That was the last thing she remembered thinking before being lulled by the rhythm of the windshield wipers.

Utilitarian orange of a Home Depot sign crept into the corner of her eye. She took a swig of coffee and turned the radio on. The DJ was giving away a trip to Manhattan. She turned the radio off again. She tried to separate the parts of  New York she knew from experience, and the parts she remembered from watching The French Connection.        

Popeye Doyle racing through Bensonhurst in a slick brown ride that would have been considered a beater by the time Daniela was born ... Robert in grey corduroys stepping out of a yellow cab onto Eighth Avenue. A rush of heat fogging his glasses. He polished his lenses with a corner of his checked shirt tail and squinted into the sun.  In that moment she knew she could love him. The fact they were already six-months married was an irreconcilable shame. 

When the lines broke again, a motorcyclist crossed in front. His taillight looked like two apostrophes forming a heart. A heart, or the nose of an animal’s skull. Nostrils on a human skull looked more like lungs. She realized it had stopped raining, turned the wipers off and took another breath.  A sugary scent in the car made her feel sick.  She glanced down to crack the window open. When she looked up, an SUV jerked from the traffic jam, out across a block of double lines ahead. 

If the driver had checked their mirror, the motorcycle had been in their blind spot. The bike hit the SUV at full speed. She didn’t remember swerving, but she knew she must have swerved when she hit the brakes. There she was stopped on the median of the carpool lane, alone in her car, with a man on the hood. 

His hands were closed as though he were still steering the bike. His body shook and the ring on his finger tapped on the broken glass.

 “We’re born with our fists clenched ...”  

A taxi driver once said as they drove around Columbus Circle. 

“... the closer we get to death, the more our hands fall open.” 

“He must still be alive.” Daniela thought. 

But the rider’s eyes were open wide and fixed on nothing.