The Needle's Eye Page 2

  —Julia Kristeva, This Incredible Need to Believe

  Can something unknown be in-known at the same time by the same person? Can our dreams carry us to an alien but earthly place? Is the new horizon the sky if no one sees the hills anymore or the bend of the sea?

  Some people believe that we go through a series of resurrections in our lives. If only the youthful years were set aside for the children to try out being a boy one day, a girl the next, an angel the day after, a monk or an astronaut on the following days. If only Kristeva didn’t use definite articles so often.

  Adolescents take pleasure in imagining worlds where there is meaning because thought is their most precious possession, and like a secret trove of carnelian, oranges, and emerald, each thought is aflame though inactive. No wonder the kids believe that they will get to Paradise, no matter what. And so do the old people because the longer they live, the more incomprehensible any permanency becomes. Thought bounces on their shoulders like an infant traveling wherever they do and arriving too.

  Kristeva suggests that an adolescent is by nature a believer. Out of disappointment, disgust, or rejection of his parents, he sets up a more marvelous object to revere, and imagines an actual paradise without grown-ups.

  Sometimes a person will believe (without being conscious of this) that she and God are alone together in the world and this will carry her through the loneliness of her life.

  An adolescent may feel this way also. Metamorphosis is the girl’s condition. She knows all about sex and pollen, pupae and butterflies, and is happy to play with them. She is also at their mercy.

  Goethe noticed that the Greeks didn’t yearn for eternal truths, but felt at home on earth. So did unknown women who stood up from their labors to watch the sun go down. They looked on the present as if it were a cemetery teeming with full-bodied spirits who hadn’t noticed they were already gone. These women cooked for everyone whom they welcomed into their house. And washed the bodies that would be buried in dirt.

  Isn’t remembrance part of childhood too? The air, like short sucks of helium, is lovely and soft, and the children are always trying to capture this breath with poems and paint.

  The unformed mind at play is the most interior, half-submerged, and elusive figure we have, expunged and redrawn. What is always left is the longing for the figure, to be able to locate it with the words “I recognize you.”

  As if this submerged figure is still watching us through the thickets of experience; through the physical body that has covered it over and shed its cells by the seventh year.

  The child becomes a new person between eight and twelve years old, years that are often hard for people to remember.

  That’s because the figure of this child, as empty as it is light, is renamed, reconstituted, sexualized, and hardened bone by bone into a man or woman.

  The figure of the divine child is sometimes an infant, but not always; the divine child can continue as a preteen, an international boy or girl poised before vanishing into the lost years between nine and thirteen.

  The child’s resistance is futile, no matter how hard it struggles to stop its evolution into a grown-up.

  To this child we pay homage with our deeds and our choices and tasks, because it remains forever potential. It haunts us not as the fixed past but as something we gave up too casually because there was no other way.

  The crowds told Jesus a little girl had died and asked could he bring her back to life. He looked at the girl and said she was just sleeping. Then he said, Little girl, get up! And as soon as she did, he told the others there to feed her.

  The evidence of a successful miracle is the return of hunger. Mint, salt, bread, and leg of lamb. The child must have an appetite.

  An uncreated child would be a god, dissolved, remembered as a fleeting bundle neither male nor female. A mist and transparency would hold her for a moment, before she turned into a world breeze, whose breathing preceded her.

  A boy looks out a car window. The river. The strong citizens practicing for marathons. Rowing, running. Americans always look as if they are bursting, he notices, they are gushing out of their own bodies with an appetite that can never be sated.

  Lights bob like coins and orbs of divine origin. The Charles River, which flows eighty miles through Massachusetts, and from Hopkinton to Boston Harbor, travels the route of the marathon.

  Faroukh, in the movie, chooses the way of the old man who follows the birds. Those aeronautical dinosaurs obedient to every wave of air current. The almond tree with its white blossoms teaches him that fruition is a sign of completion, the moment of failure to which everything aspires. The trees have fulfilled their cycle, turn white, click off, and die.

  How to postpone failure? Imitate the swallows, keep going, avert your face from violence, learn one of the arts.

  Sixteen is a year of revulsion toward grown-ups. Adolescents announce themselves in a way that is both ingratiating and righteous; they have a kind of blindness toward consequences, so every act of daring is suicidal, point blank.

  The April 2013 bombing in retrospect is like an accident where a train goes off the rails in a village, but of course it isn’t exactly that, because it was intentional. It’s more like a drone that hits Afghan toddlers playing. It’s like a little skirmish off to the sides of the thundering warriors. It’s like youth suicide, honor killing, self-sacrifice, war.

  North America is part of the global war being fought by the young on rampages across the deserts and mountains, Iraq and Syria. So no wonder red blood sprays all the way back to Boston’s tar and dust and leaves, it turns the stones brick red over time, and spreads in the pollen of spring. You can’t wash it out before the red sinks in. The stain seeps into the human shoes and is carried around town and over the billions of bones scattered by pillage underfoot.

  Avenging ancestors scratch at the soles of your feet when you cross the Cambridge Common where General Washington gathered his troops for battle.

  The reaction of the Boston brothers to their parents’ complaints and nightmares might have unleashed the catastrophe, a need for revenge, implosion primed by inner ancestors, the dispossessed genetic materials, where deeds, traumas, and sorrows are said to glue themselves to each newborn’s bones and blood.

  What is free choice anyway? For one, is it remorse to the point of dying, and for the other rejoicing on the path of martyrdom?

  One runs away from his murderous action; another includes himself in it.

  The poet Faroukh carries the Qur’an with him and reads that it should be enough to have a loaf of bread, wine, and a friend to be happy in this world. He is sure this is true. So am I.

  This is the near poem Dzhokhar wrote in the boat, his pencil marks dribbling with his own blood and his sentences pocked with bullet holes now set off in brackets:

  God has a plan for each person.

  Mine was to hide in this boat and shed some

  light on our actions I ask Allah to make me a

  shahied to allow me to return to him and

  be among all the righteous people in the highest levels

  of heaven.

  He who Allah guides no one can misguide

  A [hole] bar! …

  Now I don’t like killing

  innocent people it is forbidden in Islam

  but due to said [hole] it is allowed.

  All credit goes to [hole].

  None of his friends knew he was religious. He didn’t care about his friends. None of them had ever heard him speak with the accent he had at eight years old. However, in his written apology to the people he had injured, he spoke in a thick Russian accent and referred constantly to his love of Allah. Many others believed he was not sincere when he wrote this apology:

  Now, I am sorry for the lives that I’ve taken, for the suffering that I’ve caused you, for the damage that I’ve done. Irreparable damage…. Allah says in the Qur’an that with every hardship there is relief. I pray for your relief, for your healing, for your well-being,
for your strength.

  Boston people didn’t believe this apology was sincere, maybe because it reads like a translation of wisdom literature. They felt throughout the trial that he was without shame or common feeling, that he was an outsider, a stranger to them and to his own acts. His apology had the overrevised quality of a trauma victim avoiding direct memory, or of a child’s recitation.

  Simone Weil called pure thought impersonal, which for her was the highest achievement: a state of impartial attention.

  Some people still believe that words are gods and must be given their due. These beliefs are inactive.

  The poet Hölderlin experienced the disappearance of the gods as the end of meaning. Humanism would be both not enough and too much for him for many years. The more he wrote of his world-horror, the more his poems became strange. Those who have been born secular humanists, and skeptics since the middle of the twentieth century, might not understand why the ancient gods mattered so much to a poet a hundred years before the two catastrophic world wars.

  J. M. Coetzee wrote about Hölderlin’s last poems, which have been interpreted and translated many times and ways. He was unsystematic with his drafts, using random pens and inks and placing versions of the same poem next to each other. He plundered and sacked one version and wrote it again from the ground up. He seemed to value fragments and incomplete notes and didn’t date them. “Might Hölderlin,” Coetzee wondered, “have been feeling his way toward a new aesthetics of the fragmentary, and an accompanying poetic epistemology of the flashing insight or vision?”

  In the first draft we find evidence of a lost language, the original thought in passing, unsaid, unrecoverable, but always called back again …

  Its existence is sustained by the search for it.

  Can you ever find even the outline?

  The voice in this case comes after the form it will take. The form stands swallowed among the high rocks but its song is elsewhere.

  Russia is one continent with Asia both east and west and has eleven time zones. It’s like a clock reflecting sky. It is unlike other countries that are heterogeneous. Russians come in many skin tones and bone structures, but are hyperconscious of any ethnic differences that are unabsorbed. Russia, like India, is a name that could be used as a metaphor for “the farthest reaches.” You are on Russia, instead of “in it,” and so a devotion to resurrection is natural to Russia. Figures cannot be erased from their places. The skies, the snow, the white birches, the domes, the springs and canals, the poems from the steppes and the “stans” and the nineteenth century are ineradicable. As in the Gospel of Truth: “[These] are not vowels nor are they consonants, such that someone might read them and think of emptiness, but rather they are the true alphabet by which those who recognize it are themselves expressed.”

  Tsarnaev, who didn’t blow himself up on Boylston Street in Boston, was sentenced to die in Colorado’s supermax prison.

  The American Supermax Prison

  The Inmates: Most of the inmates are Arab Muslims convicted of terrorism. But there are also men who are black Muslims who have been disciplined for alleged radicalization elsewhere. And then there are men they call “balancers” who are not Muslim. Some are tax resisters, one is a member of the Japanese Red Army, others come from Colombia and Mexico, adding up to seventy-one men.

  Location: Executions are performed at the U.S. Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana. A judge may choose to relocate the execution to a state where the death penalty is legal if that would be more convenient for victims and family members to access.

  Last Meal: Between three and twelve hours before death, those condemned to die receive a last meal of their choosing, cooked by prison staff. Alcohol is not allowed.

  Clothing: The condemned individual is dressed in khaki pants, a white T-shirt, white socks, and slip-on shoes.

  Method of Execution: Lethal injection is the only approved method of execution for the federal government. Other options could be considered in the Justice Department’s review.

  Witnesses: Up to eight victims or victim’s family members can watch the execution. The condemned individual can choose one spiritual adviser, two attorneys, and three family members or friends to be present. They are located outside the execution room and can watch through a window.

  Media: Ten members of the media are allowed to watch the final moments through a window. No cameras or recording devices are allowed in the building.

  Last Words: The prisoner set to be executed is allowed to give a “reasonably brief” final statement. It is then transcribed and given to media members.

  The Signal: The U.S. marshal says, “We are ready.” The executioner delivers the lethal drugs.

  Time of Death: The execution takes place in the early morning, and the exact time of death is recorded. Jones was executed at 7:08 a.m., McVeigh at 7:14 a.m., and Garza at 7:09 a.m.

  Responsibility for Remains: The death row inmate is allowed to designate a person to handle the disposing of the body after death.

  Mixed in sunset colors, the snow

  Seen closer is a pox of pebbles.

  And that wind across the brick

  Spun the bird’s nest over

  Until it became a tunnel

  Of straw and dangling string.

  The F School

  The F School is circled by neighborhood gangs wearing different colors.

  The F School is a middle school that stays locked until six.

  The F School is a swearhole and still a place to learn to shake hands.

  The F School is a safe house for abused and depressed kids.

  The school song is: F, F, F! Or just say, Fah!

  The F school forbids the word Fk. It hates that word and the C word for females.

  It hates the word Bitch. Bastard is allowed. And kids can say “Buh.”

  Claire Denis and Jean-Luc Nancy are students at the F School.

  They all study war, the human body, the look up from under.

  I am looking today for a boy named Louie. My aunt was named Louie

  so I want to meet him. He is a stunted boy, ashy, his hair uncombed, his smile

  is ear to ear crushed, and his eyes are black onyx that you could sell for grass.

  The F School should be a boarding school.

  The children would eat well.

  They would sleep and wake in the halls of the F School.

  I am told Louie sometimes falls asleep outside the library

  on his coat on the floor. Then you can stand and study his burns.

  His father uses the F word all the time, except he isn’t his real father.

  F, F, F, Fah!

  Alina Tsarnaeva

  On her way to court in her headscarf,

  She is too beautiful for crime.

  But everything she does is f--ked

  Since she was kicked out of her home.

  A canary will always be yellow and small.

  You can cage it or set it free.

  It will be stirred by each condition

  To either sing or nothing. But its name will not change.

  Her brothers first fled to Watertown

  Where the Arsenal mall degrades its workers.

  No windows for them.

  The health of workers is in decline.

  Outside water and boring frogs

  a ravine and a corpse flowered with marijuana.

  Skull dog and white length of the snow.

  She said I never learned how to judge.

  She was speaking of men

  And his odor of penetration

  Of her part unknown.

  Alina, you don’t have the sensitivities

  you had as a child.

  You don’t have a hole torn through your head.

  And you don’t feel the blood spreading around the neighborhood.

  Or maybe you do and that’s why you left.

  She begged for a revolution

  But got a drugged, greedy, and angry brother.

  She b
egged for a flying nothing

  And got a fist that she never dodged in time.

  “My brother was very nice when he was young.”

  Fighting in peace the brothers were at their best.

  They felt sorry for themselves and Brendan Mess.

  One’s white fur hat and silver boots

  And boxing gloves helped distract him from

  His father’s madness.

  The father who shouted from Dagestan to Cambridge

  After he got smashed on the head

  With a bar in a neighborhood bar.

  His brain was all one thing, but not his son’s

  Whose cranium split into two whole brains

  Each one thinking aloud to the other:

  Father to son.

  Not that every girl who is pregnant

  Or ready to die is as romantic as

  Alina Tsarnaeva.

  For they had already faded away.

  Her precommunist ancestors

  Angrily asking their offspring

  What did you want from us?

  Come home at once

  Came the answer. Shut up.

  Cook that cabbage, rice, cumin, eggs, and beets.

  Kill a salmon and gulp it down until you smell like fish

  And swim with them.

  Drink the cow and chew the grass stuck in its cud

  Roll up the mud

  For a house and garden, rub

  The mud into your skin when you wash yourself off.