Broken Protest
I received the following letter from a fan:
Sparrow,
Here is my new protest. Whenever something breaks — a can opener, a plate, a refrigerator — wrap it and mail it to the White House. On the package, write: “You have broken the Constitution, the budget, and the nations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Here is a broken toaster for you.”
Let us flood the White House with broken objects.
Sincerely,
Ernest G.
Monument
I believe every American should design a monument for the World Trade Center. Here are my three proposals:
- Nothing. (Nothing is the one proposal which captures the solitary terror of September 11.)
- A flagpole so high one cannot see its flag.
- Fascinating conversationalists are hired to stand on the site and talk. Anyone who comes may speak with them. This will be the first monument composed entirely of people.
How To Make A Decision
The New York Times is called the “Gray Lady,” which sounds like a corpse. The “factual” dullness of the Times can make anything — even heavy-metal music — dreary. (“The guitarist, who calls himself ‘Spongeface,’ preferred loud arpeggios in the higher register.”)
Nonetheless, there are moments when sublimity, and even wisdom, appears in the New York Times.
For an article about last February’s South Carolina Democratic primary, Elisabeth Rosenthal talked to two sage persons — the Reverend James Jeffcoat and his wife, Bethelma, both “around eighty” — as they left their rural polling place:
The minister wore an elegant gray suit with a fedora. His wife, who uses a cane, wore heels and a floral dress with a long pleated skirt. “Voting is a very important responsibility, and we take it very seriously,” Mrs. Jeffcoat said. “The country really has to get together now.”
Her husband added that he encouraged both of his rural Baptist congregations to come out and vote, although he never endorsed a particular candidate.
After much debate both Mr. and Mrs. Jeffcoat decided to vote for John Kerry, they said.
“We listened to them all, but he just rested in our minds,” Mrs. Jeffcoat said.
I love that phrase, “he just rested in our minds,” which I had never seen before. I imagine it as a form of contemplation. The phrase presents a picture of the Jeffcoats and how they conduct their lives:
They are religious people, yet notably they do not say, “We prayed for an answer.” Instead they use their minds, engaging in “much debate.” After the debate came what I imagine was a waiting period.
Being rural, they have more time to think than most Americans. They give themselves the luxury of thoughtful time. And as they sit, they notice which thought “rests” in their minds.
In this case it was the candidate Kerry.
Snow
Snow falls on my face, and dissolves. Being alive, my face has the power to melt snow.
Confessions Of A Secret Smoker
I first smoked in the spring of 1970, when I was sixteen years old. I found a pack of cigarettes in the hallway of my high school, the Bronx High School of Science. It was a box of Marlboros. I hesitated for a moment, then reached for it. The pack was more than half full.
Cigarettes were quite rare at Bronx Science. My schoolmates were mostly studious and college-bound. They had no time for self-destructive habits.
I hid the Marlboros in my book bag and rode home on the bus. Soon I would smoke Cigarette No. 1 of my life!
That night I stole some matches from the kitchen and went for a walk through the streets of Inwood, the northernmost neighborhood of Manhattan. I had already tried marijuana, so I smoked cigarettes the same way: inhaling deeply into my lungs.
I was surprised by the blandness of cigarette smoking. This widespread, addictive habit seemed based on Nothing. Cigarettes were like pot without the pot. The whole ritual was useless, except for its aesthetic beauty. In the black night I became a point of red light — like the light the Great Gatsby watched from the end of his dock. (Or was the light blue?)
Also I enjoyed the smoke, rising up against the tyranny of gravity, twisting with light agility. Psychic researchers sometimes photograph disembodied “spirits” that exactly resemble this smoke.
For several evenings I smoked and wandered the nighttime corridors of Inwood. I felt I was walking downward with my burning ember, deeper into some dark crevasse. One night it rained, a misty spring rain. I walked, hatless and toking, through the reflective streets. When I finished a cigarette, I would toss it down, and its red light would spark on the wet pavement.
Smoking is minimalist: the white of the cigarette, the red of the burning tip, the gray smoke. Red, white, and gray are the colors of the smokers’ flag, a flag that has never flown over any nation.
I smoked eleven cigarettes in all. If I had continued to receive free cigarettes — if I’d worked in a cigarette factory, for example — I may have smoked my entire life.
I smoked my twelfth cigarette in Ithaca, New York, in 1973. I was living in a collective called the Green Lantern Co-op, sharing a room with Joan, my girlfriend. Earlier that year I had flunked out of college; now I was “a writer.” (My actual job was sweeping up at a construction site.) In the evening I would sit at Joan’s desk, writing. One day someone gave me a cigarette, which I smoked at this desk.
My poetry at the time was lighthearted, consisting of verses such as this one:
Ingredients
With my every action an animal comes out of me. This morning, when I smiled, two white ducks waddled out. Whenever I cry, an aged flamingo stands by me. Even as I write this poem a donkey appears, braying. I add him, with the others, to the list of my ingredients.
Nevertheless, within the curling smoke of my Winston, I became what the French call un vrai poète — a real writer: solemn, infinite, ardent. Though I was just twenty years old, I felt forty — even forty-six. I puffed very little, allowing the smoke to rise on its own. The smoke bent around my head, curious. (This was the first cigarette I had smoked indoors.)
My next cigarette came nineteen years later, in 1992. The Unbearables, a group of bohemian writers, had organized a poetry reading on the Brooklyn Bridge. Afterward we held a party at Tzaurah Litzky’s house in Brooklyn. It was the same building in which Hart Crane had once lived. As we stood on the rooftop, talking and viewing the East River, someone offered me a cigarette.
I held the cylinder in my right hand and discovered that I need not puff. I watched the cigarette, a Camel, slowly diminish, as if by magic. The wind was smoking my cigarette. I felt free and lofty.
Will I ever quit tobacco? No. My habit is unbroken. Since 1970, I have smoked thirteen cigarettes — slightly less than half a cigarette a year. It has been eleven years now since my last one. Quietly, I prepare for my next cigarette. I refuse to stop smoking.
“Broken Protest” and “Monument” originally appeared in the Hudson Valley journal Chronogram (www.chronogram.com). “Confessions of a Secret Smoker” was first published in the New York Observer.
— Ed.
