BEGINNING THE STUDY OF THE PRESENT

BEGINNING THE STUDY OF THE PRESENT

After cycling, the coffee. After

cycling, Karen and coffee. After the lonely

night with Bonhoeffer, sunshine,

and Karen says, “Should we go get our shots?”

Yes, Let’s go. Flu and Covid. I carry

two copies of Harper’s—two essays

I read separately, ending summer, beginning

fall, each read twice, and a third time

at the pharmacy, 22 days before the election.

Yesterday’s Men, the Death of the Mythical

Method by Alan Jacobs, and Glimmers

of Totality, on Fredric Jameson at 90,

by Mark Greif, spelling correct. Quick

note: Jameson just died, on the third, after

a fall. Yesterday’s men, mine really, our

generation—Northrop Frye, Joseph Campbell--

didn’t know Giam Battista Vico, writing in 1725--

shorten the reign of barbarism. Jameson’s a Marxist,

his two characteristics of America: hypocritical

and shallow. After the second read,

transferred favorite sentences to notebook,

downloaded the e-book (couldn’t wait):

Inventions of a Present: The Novel

in its Crisis of Globalization. Here’s a sentence

from Greif: “Every intervention, rereading,

and retrospection by Jameson is about the present

and the wish to shape the future.” Our pharmacy’s

still locally owned, believe that? Karen takes

both shots in her left arm, and I take mine

in the right. Tieton Village Pharmacy. We’ve

known the pharmacist for years. Two years ago

when we had Covid at Christmas, he got us

going with Paxlovid. Karen quit after two pills.

I asked our guy to talk about virus and bacteria,

both in the context of Covid and composting.

“It’s been years since I had a microbiology class,”

he says, “bacteria’s more complex in cell structure.”

I just want to know how the worms get into the compost.

From Tieton we stop at Ace on our way home.

Karen wants purple and orange LED lights

for the porch during Days of the Dead.

White neighborhoods coming from Halloween

and commercial costume parties are catching up,

especially with skeletons—aka calaveras,

in the dominant culture in our town. I’m not

the Stage Manager. North America’s importing

ten-foot skeletons that fill lawns and houses--

no places to store these bones so large

there’s no place to store them. One neighbor

dresses hers according to the seasons. No one

knows the ancestors here, and to take them down

she’d have to take bedrooms from her children.

Skeletons come from computers don’t eat first.

How could these people ever tell a story?

Karen’s anxious to get back to her quilt.

Let me tell you what happened last night.

That night read with Bonhoeffer: Living

in community. “Whoever cannot stand being

in community should never live alone.”

A year like this.

Just after 2, my arms reach out, she’s gone.

Karen, I shout from bed. “I had an idea,”

she says from the other room. “I want to put

the chain fence behind Chuck’s portrait.”

Chuck’s a baseball coach. Women’s Fast Pitch

at the college. A memorial quilt. His wife died.

He brought by a stack of jerseys his arms

couldn’t hold. Karen’s been dreaming this

documentary into art for five months.

“You’re going to put a chain around Chuck?

How is that a vision?” Now we’re both up

walking around fabric. My brother’s

coached baseball for half a century.

How the day starts from dreaming. From

Jameson. Jameson’s goal: If you want to be

a fully dialectical thinker, you can’t be satisfied

with just the statement of one side.”

Nearly the size of a bedspread, Karen says

Chuck can never put it there. “He has dogs,”

This must be hung, it’s a statement about time.

Jameson’s voice is one of courage, implacable,

“...aware of the degree to which radical

efforts of late capitalism have been

conservative and traditionalist.”

Converted and re-functioned.

“He Names the System We’re Still Fighting,”

His obituary in The Nation headlines.

The Marxist is never safe he learns

after he champions a writer who turns

him into the FBI. “For, to be sure," Jameson writes in

Inventions of a Present, “our bodies themselves

are sick and poisoned with all the industrial waste

of the market civilization, which we relive

in the taste in our mouths…” And no one is better

his obituary states, than Jameson. He remains.

Today is National Indigenous Day,

and despite her fame, America doesn’t know

the Poet Laureate Joy Harjo. How could it recognize

her poem, Remember, when put on Facebook?

22 billion dollars is what it will cost Los Angeles

to end homelessness in a decade, L.A. Times reports.

45,000 homeless in the city. 29,000 unsheltered.

Less than 7 billion budgeted. Some want less expensive

strategies. In Seattle, Danny Westneat reports

in the Seattle Times that the Hope Factory’s tiny homes

sit empty where they’re built, 500 of them hammered

by volunteers, sent out as “colorful, 100-square foot

missionaries to get people off the ground.”

No one has a straight answer, he reports. Some like them

too much. Some call them shacks in Shantytowns.

The Hope Factory. In Yakima we have Camp Hope,

and tonight is our turn to serve dinner. Pulled pork

sandwiches, barbecue sauce, cole slaw, home-made

cupcakes. West Coast homelessness. Camp Hope

dinners in the army green tent. Marion tells me

to watch how much slaw I load on my spoon

as we’re expecting more people due to cold

weather. Sunny and beautiful, but cold.

Covid shots, flu shots, egg shells in compost

aids photosynthesis, strengthen cell walls in plants.

Jim Bodeen

14-16 October 2024