Desolation for our times: a Nobel laureate speaks

 

                                      They're selling postcards of the hanging

                                         They're painting the passports brown

The beauty parlor is filled with sailors

The circus is in town

Here comes the blind commissioner

They've got him in a trance

One hand is tied to the tight-rope walker

The other is in his pants

And the riot squad they're restless

They need somewhere to go

As Lady and I look out tonight

From Desolation Row.

Cinderella, she seems so easy

"It takes one to know one," she smiles

And puts her hands in her back pockets

Bette Davis style

And in comes Romeo, he's moaning,

"You belong to Me I Believe."

And someone says, "You're in the wrong place, my friend

You'd better leave."

And the only sound that's left

After the ambulances go

Is Cinderella sweeping up

On Desolation Row.

Now the moon is almost hidden

The stars are beginning to hide

The fortune-telling lady

Has even taken all her things inside

All except for Cain and Abel

And the hunchback of Notre Dame

Everybody is making love

Or else expecting rain

And the Good Samaritan, he's dressing

He's getting ready for the show

He's going to the carnival tonight

On Desolation Row.

Ophelia, she's 'neath the window

For her I feel so afraid

On her twenty-second birthday

She already is an old maid

To her, death is quite romantic

She wears an iron vest

Her profession's her religion

Her sin is her lifelessness

And though her eyes are fixed upon

Noah's great rainbow

She spends her time peeking

Into Desolation Row.

Einstein, disguised as Robin Hood

With his memories in a trunk

Passed this way an hour ago

With his friend, a jealous monk

NOW, he looked so immaculately frightful

As he bummed a cigarette

Then he went off sniffing drainpipes

And reciting the alphabet

You would not think to look at him

But he was famous long ago

For playing the electric violin

On Desolation Row.

Dr. Filth, he keeps his world

Inside of a leather cup

But all his sexless patients

They ARE trying to blow it up

Now his nurse, some local loser

She's in charge of the cyanide hole

And she also keeps the cards that read

"Have Mercy on His Soul"

They all play on the penny whistle

You can hear them blow

If you lean your head out far enough

From Desolation Row.

Across the street they've nailed the curtains

They're getting ready for the feast

The Phantom of the Opera

In a perfect image of a priest

They are spoon-feeding Casanova

To get him to feel more assured

Then they'll kill him with self-confidence

After poisoning him with words

And the Phantom's shouting to skinny girls

"Get outta here if you don't know"

Casanova is just being punished for going

To Desolation Row.

At midnight all the agents

And the superhuman crew

Come out and round up everyone

That knows more than they do

Then they bring them to the factory

Where the heart-attack machine

Is strapped across their shoulders

And then the kerosene

Is brought down from the castles

By insurance men who go

Check to see that nobody is escaping

To Desolation Row.

Praise be to Nero's Neptune

The Titanic sails at dawn

Everybody's shouting

"Which side are you on?"

And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot

Fighting in the captain's tower

While calypso singers laugh at them

And fishermen hold flowers

Between the windows of the sea

Where lovely mermaids flow

And nobody has to think too much

About Desolation Row.

Yes, I received your letter yesterday

About the time the door knob broke

When you asked me how I was doing

Or was that some kind of joke?

All these people that you mention

Yes, I know them, they're quite lame

I had to rearrange their faces

And give them all another name

Right now I can't read too good

Don't send me no more letters no

Not unless you mail them

From Desolation Row.

They're selling postcards of the hanging
They're painting the passports brown

Here Dylan immediately establishes a macabre atmosphere of heartless exploitation. Human execution has become the subject of postcards, a cheap and superficial means of communicating usually associated with vacations. Passports are similarly associated with travel (being "transported") and escape, a theme running through the entire lyric. That the passports are painted brown means that they are blurred, defaced, shat upon, or otherwise rendered invalid. Might it also be a weird twist on "painting the town red'? 

The beauty parlor is filled with sailors
The circus is in town

The sailors swarming the beauty parlour might be there to ogle women, or to become them, transforming themselves in garish drag. It's our first hint of a sense of dislocation: no one seems to be in the right place. "The circus is in town" is a familiar cliche (and let's not forget he grew up in a small town, in which the circus was a very big deal), which Dylan turns on its head: this motley parade will lead us to a hellish place from which there is no escape.

Here comes the blind commissioner
They've got him in a trance
One hand is tied to the tight-rope walker
The other is in his pants

It's worth mentioning that "they" are never identified. I remember hearing someone say, "They've shot John Lennon." Facelessness and blank masks and constantly-shifting identities inflame the lyric's rampant paranoia. The "blind commissioner" is some sort of deposed authority figure reduced to dragging along helplessly behind a circus performer walking a tightrope, while simultaneously masturbating.

And the riot squad they're restless
They need somewhere to go
As Lady and I look out tonight
From Desolation Row.

The police are out there and looking for trouble, hoping for a good riot. Like juvenile delinquents, they're hanging around waiting for something to happen. Desolation Row seems forever on the point of exploding in apocalyptic violence. "They need somewhere to go" speaks of a lost traveller, one of the many figures in this song who is dislocated and "a stranger everywhere". "Lady and I" adds a sudden incongruous but very Dylanesque romanticism: or is it Our Lady, Mother of God that he speaks of?

Cinderella, she seems so easy
"It takes one to know one," she smiles
And puts her hands in her back pockets
Bette Davis style

Cinderella portrayed as good-time girl is remeniscent of a line from an Auden poem: "And Jill goes down on her back." Bette Davis gives her a touch of old Hollywood glamour, but we can see her posturing as if her body is for sale. And hey, how about that line "it takes one to know one"? Just what is she implying about the songwriter - has he similarly sold himself to the public - or does it have nothing to do with him?

And in comes Romeo, he's moaning,
"You belong to me I believe."
And someone says, "You're in the wrong place, my friend
You'd better leave."

Enter Romeo, stage left. But doesn't he belong with Juliet? Apparently not, but he doesn't belong here either. "Someone", that notorious "they", is telling him to leave. Wrong play, perhaps? And doesn't Romeo end up dead? Whereas Cinderella ends up transformed. In a manner of speaking. And who is the "someone" telling Romeo to get lost? Some stray Prince who's just as much out of place?

And the only sound that's left
After the ambulances go
Is Cinderella sweeping up
On Desolation Row.

"Ambulances" implies twenty-nine harrowing violent movie scenes that we never get to see because we don't have to - it's all condensed down into a couple of lines, a few sirens wailing (and after the fact - they've already gone). "Something" has happened, but we're never told what. Cinderella is like the fairy tale in reverse: she ends up sweeping the street, back to her rags and tatters, and tricks.

Now the moon is almost hidden
The stars are beginning to hide
The fortune-telling lady
Has even taken all her things inside

Dylan does this, he suddenly and dramatically varies the tone so that the lyric is shot through with beauty. The fortune-telling lady is a magical, almost paranormal figure, her palm-readings and Tarot cards (more about that later) predicting a future that seems, at best, uncertain. But it's so late, so dark, so spooky out that even she has to protect her wares.

All except for Cain and Abel
And the hunchback of Notre Dame
Everybody is making love
Or else expecting rain

Impenetrable lines, but they inexplicably work, like all genius does: Biblical references pop up constantly in Dylan's writing, so Cain slew Abel, perhaps raising Cain in the process, and the hunchback is just another grotesque soul seeking "sanctuary". And the next two lines are Dylanisms just as surely as "he not busy being born is busy dying". They seem to say: choose life/Eros, or choose dullness and the conventional life with its boring expectations, where everything is "right as rain".  Or is this really about Noah's flood and its inevitable culling of the sinful?

And the Good Samaritan, he's dressing
He's getting ready for the show
He's going to the carnival tonight
On Desolation Row.

Another Biblical reference, but a sardonic one: the figure whose name is synonymous with selfless help and even personal risk is now reduced to just another performer, donning the motley for the "show". And Biblically, the Samaritan was at the bottom of the heap socially, almost an untouchable, which is what gave Jesus' parable such punch.

Ophelia, she's 'neath the window
For her I feel so afraid
On her twenty-second birthday
She already is an old maid

This is a strange one, but then, the characters on Desolation Row just get stranger. Unlike Cinderella who turns tricks, Ophelia goes crazy while Hamlet seduces his mother. And 'neath the window - is that some sort of weird inversion of Romeo and Juliet? (By the way, what DID happen to Romeo?) This is someone who has apparently died before she even had a chance to live.

To her, death is quite romantic
She wears an iron vest
Her profession's her religion
Her sin is her lifelessness

"Lifelessness is the Great Enemy & always wears a hip guard—he is very hipguard,"Dylan wrote in Tarantula, and if you can figure THAT out, you've nailed these lines. The iron vest sounds like medieval torture, or else kinky. This whole poem/song is about the sin of lifelessness or, perhaps, the deathwardness of the eternal Show. "Her profession's her religion" is a little too opaque for me to fathom, as her profession isn't the same as Cinderella's. 

And though her eyes are fixed upon
Noah's great rainbow
She spends her time peeking
Into Desolation Row.

Ah, Bob! You know more about the Bible than the average monk or Catholic priest. "Expecting rain" may well be a reference to the Great Flood, but here the flood is over and the rainbow has appeared.  "Peeking into" means that Ophelia has been cast out and has to "peek in", as in some great existential peep show. Funny that both she and Romeo stand beneath windows, on the outside looking in.

Einstein, disguised as Robin Hood
With his memories in a trunk
Passed this way an hour ago
With his friend, a jealous monk

You can try to pull this apart or leave it alone, but it pulls apart like a wishbone and spills weirdness like a cornucopia. 

Einstein, being the ultimate enigmatic genius, is headed for the carnival dressed up like Robin Hood, some sort of ancient folk hero who fires arrows, robs from the rich and gives to the poor. But he's already gone, folks, he passed this way an hour ago and you missed him. Memories in a trunk - another version of the iron vest, the lifelessness of self-suffocation? And why is his friend so jealous, and of what (and why is he a monk? Maybe it just scanned, we don't know.)

Now, he looked so immaculately frightful
As he bummed a cigarette
Then he went off sniffing drainpipes
And reciting the alphabet

This implies some sort of hobo in disguise, a fraud, somebody who gets off on sniffing sewer gas or else is a kind of health inspector. Reciting the alphabet implies childishness, or the failure of the greatest mind in human history.

You would not think to look at him
But he was famous long ago
For playing the electric violin
On Desolation Row.

Interesting that Einstein really was a quite gifted violinist. That line "famous long ago", three little words, Bobby, you really can spit them out, became the title of a book, and everybody knew where the title came from, it was just self-explanatory. The author of e=mc2 is now nothing but a musician standing on a street corner in a neighborhood which might be called degraded.

Dr. Filth, he keeps his world
Inside of a leather cup
But all his sexless patients
They are trying to blow it up

This stanza really chills me. It is past grotesque: it's harrowing. Who the fuck is this Dr. Filth, why are his patients (like Ophelia) so sexless? Where is the riot squad when you need them? Is the leather cup sort of like Baudelaire's image of a woman's vagina (so stomach-turning I can't reproduce it here)? For surely the literate Dylan would have read Baudelaire. And it's obvious that sexlessness is next to lifelessness.

Now his nurse, some local loser
She's in charge of the cyanide hole
And she also keeps the cards that read
"Have Mercy on His Soul"

There are those who would say this is Joan Baez, the great unnamed saint of the Row. Even Joan Baez thought it was Joan Baez. Calling her "some local loser" (and what in fuck's name is a "cyanide hole"? That's quite possibly the worst thing I ever heard of) seems harsh, but then come those two impossibly tender lines, which Baez quoted in Daybreak as "I also keep the cards that read have mercy on his soul". She might also be the same person as the fortune-telling lady taking all her things inside (because it might rain?). In the song She Belongs to Me, which as usual might be about Baez or might be about his first wife Sara Lowndes, Dylan portrays a lady full of mystical power ("she can take the dark out of the nighttime and paint the daytime black"). 

They all play on the penny whistle
You can hear them blow
If you lean your head out far enough
From Desolation Row.

"Blow" could be taken a couple of ways. Sexual? A drug reference? Or just "blow"? Pennywhistles imply innocence, childhood, and being too poor to afford a real instrument. Pennywhistles are irritating, shrill and unmusical. It's also never clear whether we are ON Desolation Row, looking INTO Desolation Row, or trying to get the hell OUT of Desolation Row. Dylan's camera darts all over the place.

Across the street they've nailed the curtains
They're getting ready for the feast
The Phantom of the Opera
In a perfect image of a priest

Who is whom here, and whom is who he appears to be? No one. The curtains are already nailed up for this ghastly dumbshow (and remember how in old gangster movies they say "it's curtains for you"?) Nailed-up curtains certainly aren't fancy and won't open and close like normal ones. They're crude, and - nailed in place like so many of the crippled characters. But it is also, as in the Catholic Church, a feast day, a holy celebration. And thus the Phantom, some sort of spiritual kin to the aforementioned Hunchback of Notre Dame, is wrapping himself in priestly raiment. Enough clergy here to start a monastery.

They are spoon-feeding Casanova
To get him to feel more assured
Then they'll kill him with self-confidence
After poisoning him with words

The cast of this thing grows ever bigger, and each character is somehow laden. Spoon-feeding Casanova might allude to cooking heroin, or it might not. It might allude to feeding a baby, or it might not. He is traditionally a legendary lover and seducer. There's a weird take on sexuality in the song, of exploitation (the blind commissioner whacking off, Cinderella selling herself, Ophelia in her kinky iron maiden) and the uglifying of something that should be beautiful, even sacred. (Dylan is nothing if not a romantic.) And we're back to that amorphous, vaguely disturbing "they". Whoever they are, they are not too damn friendly.

And the Phantom's shouting to skinny girls
"Get outta here if you don't know"
Casanova is just being punished for going
To Desolation Row.

If Romeo has been cast out, if he's in the wrong place, my friend, then surely Casanova is going to be out on his ass soon. The skinny girls are - what? Models? The Andy Warhol crowd Dylan hung out with? I wonder if this whole thing isn't about being tossed out of Eden, except that this is nobody's idea of the garden. Or if Casanova really is a heroin addict, perhaps the law has caught up with him?

At midnight all the agents
And the superhuman crew
Come out and round up everyone
That knows more than they do

Here we get into the most delicious paranoia, a macabre vision straight out of a sweating, gasping film noir/spy movie. Who ARE these people - part of the unnamed "they"? Agents of WHAT? And I love that line "come out and round up everyone that knows more than they do". Are these people - "everyone" - really smarter? Or do they just carrying a burden of subversive, secret knowledge? 

Then they bring them to the factory
Where the heart-attack machine
Is strapped across their shoulders
And then the kerosene
Is brought down from the castles
By insurance men who go
Check to see that nobody is escaping
To Desolation Row.

The heart-attack machine is the most sadistic thing I have ever heard of: not a defibrillator, but the opposite, something that GIVES you a heart attack. And then the kerosene. . . This is like "after the ambulances go", a couple of words slamming us against the wall. No mention of a fire or of someone starting a fire, but we don't need that, we already know. Insurance men in their dull facelessness seem to foreshadow the infamous, soulless figure, Mr. Jones, the epitome of the "establishment'. And let's not get into "escaping to", it's just too convoluted.

Praise be to Nero's Neptune
The Titanic sails at dawn
Everybody's shouting
"Which side are you on?"

Nero is the one who fiddled while Rome burned. The Titanic is a mite obvious, but like all of this bizarre imagery, it works. "Everybody" is "nobody" and could be anybody, and the question they're shouting, "which side are you on?", is one Dylan heard and had to try to answer or ignore for his whole life. And is no doubt still dealing with. (What do the lyrics mean?)

And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot
Fighting in the captain's tower
While calypso singers laugh at them
And fishermen hold flowers

This seems like a blatant contrast of intellectual elitism with simple, life-loving joy, not so much a mockery as a dismissal of violence and hate: so that yes, even in this song there is some sort of breath of hope. I see the fishermen and calypso singers all jumbled in with the mysterious ugly horrific vivid incendiary images of the song as in a Picasso painting, where everything is happening at once. But if you really want to dig (man), the singers do the same thing Bob does, and the fishermen echo Jesus' famous words, "I will make you fishers of men." Holding flowers is either a hippie thing, or a garden thing, take your choice.

Between the windows of the sea
Where lovely mermaids flow
And nobody has to think too much
About Desolation Row.

Unlike Ballad of a Thin Man, this song does have unexpected beauty strewn through it. Is Desolation Row a choice, a punishment, a purgatory leading on to greater glory, or to eternal damnation?  Is it just the bizarre baffling imagery of a genius on acid who hadn't slept in about 45 days? We know it is compelling, and hard to get away from. But it's not over yet. As with all great works of music, there is a coda. 

Yes, I received your letter yesterday
About the time the door knob broke
When you asked me how I was doing
Was that some kind of joke?

I am virtually certain, though I cannot provide proof, that he chose "broke" to rhyme with "joke". But then, a broken doorknob does imply not being able to get in or out. "Was that some kind of joke?" dismisses all possibility that the asker even cares, or only cares in order to get something. The question has a sardonic Positively Fourth Street feel to it. What's it to you? You got a lotta nerve.

All these people that you mention
Yes, I know them, they're quite lame
I had to rearrange their faces
And give them all another name

Thus does the artist casually create and destroy his own universe, so that all the characters come out looking like versions of himself. As for "give them all another name", remember his nickname in high school was Zimbo. The old saw "all the characters are really me" is even more of a stretch than what I'm doing here.

Right now I can't read too good
Don't send me no more letters, no
Not unless you mail them
From Desolation Row.

It's well-known that Bob really can't read very well, he's always been blind as the proverbial fruit bat, so maybe this is one line we can take literally. Don't forget "here comes the blind commissioner/They've got him in a trance." But "don't send me no more letters, no" means he's cutting himself off from contact with people. And - oh, this is a good one! - what was in the very first line of this thing? POSTCARDS. But typical of Dylan, they aren't sending postcards, but selling them. So the old saw "I'll send you a postcard" becomes, sardonically, "I'll sell you a postcard."

Bob Dylan's masterpiece, if that's what this is, reflects his profound ambivalence about the vertiginous and devouring carnival of fame, his own fame in particular: he lied about working in carnivals as a boy, then found himself IN one, magnetically attracting a horde of sycophants, sociopaths and losers.

But which character IS he, anyway? The most likely contender, in my mind (and this is MY essay, so I can surmise if I want to) is Einstein disguised as Robin Hood: genius in the guise of folk hero. Costumed poseur, lost troubadour shifting from identity to identity, the figure comes closer than any of the others to a self-portrait of the most unlikely Nobel winner in the history of the prize, that enigmatic gift to the world, Bob Dylan.

The Red Diary - a cycle of poems inspired by the diary of Anne Frank (Part four of four)

 The Red Diary

A cycle of narrative poems inspired by the diary of Anne Frank 

by Margaret Gunning

Part four of four

To the memory of Anne Frank

Happy

Tears:  sometimes

it is too much for you,

you fold up and sob,

trying to keep it quiet,

contained:  but your grief will split you

if you don’t give it room,

so you draw up your knees

and convulse silently

in the stale attic room

in the dark.

Yet, you write of being happy;

I believe it.

In the midst of all,

in raw raging hell,

in boredom, in despair, in fury with the adults,

in all this, a shy happiness blooms inside,

delicate as white petals,

protected,

held inside your heart

like a sweet secret:

you are happy as only the doomed can be happy,

this day sufficient,

this moment of precious silence,

this sense of God stealing near. . .

warm against your skin,

tender presence, stirring,

life itself,

insistent,

miraculous,

conquering all

by a single intake of breath:

the act of breathing,

beating,

being.

 Not my diary

Then:  a break-in, burglars rattling

suspiciously downstairs, police on the trail,

and a frozen night of terror,

eight hearts pounding. . . all of you

lying on the floor, afraid to move,

a wastepaper basket for a toilet,

and whispers:  hide the radio!

What’s the use?  If they find us,

we’ll have no need for it.

Hide the diary.

No!  burn it –

not my diary!

(“If my diary goes,

I go too!”)

What shall we say to the Gestapo?

Impossible conversations.

Rehearsing for doom.

A raw smell of sweat, of feces.

One night spent crammed together

in a stinking airless room,

bodies churning with fright.

When the threat passes,

suddenly you’re older, years older,

forced through another grinder,

and you write, like one who has lived through

a thousand years of torment,

“We’re Jews in chains,

chained to one spot,

without any rights,

but with a thousand obligations.”

But like the psalmist

who howls in loneliness and anguish,

you still say, “God has never

deserted our people.”

In the midst of all,

you stand; you stand.

“If God lets me live,” you declare

with the faith of a thousand generations,

“I’ll make my voice heard.”

 Doubt

And yet.

In the next breath, the doubt:

you wonder if anyone will ever want

to look at “this drivel”:  your rapt, fascinating

account

turns to dust before your eyes.

Now I know you are a writer,

twisting, impaled on doubt

that never ends,

pressing on in the face of it,

surely the ultimate task.

 Peter

They call it knutscherei:

stolen kisses, closeness, body heat

your heart swaying,

Father worrying, yes, worrying

that you could get pregnant,

all that time spent there in the attic, alone together –

and then what would you do;

but fear and shyness

keep you from venturing further

than a chaste kiss, a caress,

yet this glancing touch

makes your legs turn to water,

you want to surrender,

to press for more,

but jump back from the might of it:

forces unknown,

hungers

stirred, but never satisfied,

wild forces

repressed,

mysteries never probed –

Peter, whom you never would have

given the time of day

if your world had been normal,

now becomes your prince,

your heart’s companion,

your only.

Each day (an interlude)

We are given, each day

only enough to get through;

never more.

We may call this

manna

in the wilderness of our own lives,

with nothing left to gather

at the end of the day,

and only trust

to help us open our eyes again,

face the howling uncertainty

once more.

If the world should end today,

if this should be our last, our final day,

we would not know it;

the unknowing

is a blessing of sorts,

the thing that helped me go to school each day,

keep the secret confined

within my small body,

only revealed after decades

of numbness

and oblivion,

a strange, raw flower

blooming like the spread of blood

in water,

a blossom of despair, of damage

swelling purple like a contusion,

a truth,

surging upward like a germinating seed,

mysterious,

inexorable –

but because true, then unstoppable,

even a gift of sorts,

a reanimating of that which had died,

a return to a wholeness I had never known,

a birth into completeness.

I was given back my life;

yours was taken.

The loss is a slap,

or worse, an amputation –

I want you back,

these words are not enough,

this account is not enough,

we need you here –

I know how the story ends

and hate the ending,

hate this waste, this waste

magnified six million times

until it is beyond

what I can even imagine.

 Afraid

“I’m afraid of myself,” you write,

afraid of what wells up inside you:

you speak of your period,

red hope spreading

from your place of secrets;

you know there is a connection

between this bright bloom

and your passion in the attic:

Father looks concerned, he wants to protect you,

knowing your loneliness,

your fear:  you write,

always in hope,

“I feel liberation drawing near.”

You write:  “Why should I despair?”
There are only three months left

until they take you:  but you do not know that,

or you could not live.

 Stop

Stop the train:  the end of this

I cannot bear;

stop –

 The Annex

Twenty-five months;

a protected time,

suffocating,

hard:  but nothing to what will come;

the cattle car, the uniform

the shouted orders,

Auschwitz:  but never tell me,

for I cannot bear it –

not my Anne,

not this one, but: yes, they all, all –

 Final passage

Sixty years ago, this week. . .

a weariness,

a sense of being overwhelmed,

yet I must read on,

finish it, my heart split

with the effort,

yet how dare I grieve,

how dare I – so far from this,

so safe –

In the midst of all,

not knowing how close you are

to the end of the story,

you study the classics:  “Orpheus, Jason

and Hercules

all waiting to be untangled,

since their various deeds are running

crisscross through my mind

like multicoloured threads in a dress.”

You clothe yourself with knowledge,

still and focused

in your attic room,

deadly calm,

your studies a form of sanity,

of steering –

You dream of a book of your own,

The Secret Annex,

perhaps a novel

based on your time of hiding.

The chestnut tree

outside your window

bursts into bloom, it is May,

the world insists on continuing,

your father receives

three eggs for his birthday,

and you write,

“unless you’re a Nazi,

you don’t know what’s going to happen to you

from one day to the next.”

You see the abyss between

daily pleasure

and perpetual terror:  “that gap,

that enormous gap,

is always there.”

Sometimes you hope for the end,

no matter how terrible,

just to resolve the grinding anxiety;

you wait,

you wait,

the radio your hope,

D-Day, the invasion,

Churchill’s voice,

and everyone glancing at each other,

wondering how to feel,

what to allow,

heads bent, intent,

everyone sweating

in the airless room:  when, when –

and somewhere, in all this

your girlhood has been lost,

stolen by fear

and crowding,

stolen forever:  my heart pounds,

I feel sick,

I want to run,

I want to put the book away,

but it insists, it insists,

listen to me, it says across the gap

of sixty years,

listen to how it was with us,

to how it was –

 Good at heart

Then comes the statement the world remembers,

“I still believe,

in spite of everything,

that people are truly good at heart.”

And a full stop:

ANNE’S DIARY ENDS HERE.

But not the story; not the story.

One day in August, the door bursts open,

and it is over.

Requiem

Mr. Van Daan:  gassed to death in Auschwitz.

Mrs. Van Daan:  dead; date and place, unknown.

Peter:  died in Mauthausen (Austria), three days before liberation.

Dussel:  died in Neuengamme.

Mother:  died from starvation in Auschwitz-Birkenau,

all her bread hoarded for her girls.

The sisters:  taken to Bergen-Belsen

where they sickened and died,

their young bodies

dumped in a mass grave.

A few weeks later the troops arrived.

 The survivor

Pim lived on,

lived to be immensely old,

lived with his memories,

the diary his legacy, his hope;

he married a woman

who came through Auschwitz,

and perhaps

they did not need to talk,

perhaps

the number on the forearm

was enough.

 Miep

An old, old woman is left,

the keeper of the diary,

the one who snatched it from oblivion

in a moment of prescience.

I realize, with shock

that she is still alive,

though nearing a hundred.

Is it difficult to die

when you hold so many secrets?

When Miep speaks,

the world listens.

What she has waited to say

is just as true,

sixty years on.

“Most of humanity

did not even want to know what was happening.”

She speaks simply.

Slowly.

Choosing her words.

No wasting.

An ordinary woman

in an impossible time,

she did what was necessary,

daily,

daily,

for more than two years.

When she speaks, the connection is completed,

the little girl in the closet,

cowering,

the woman afraid to admit

she has suffered

because so many millions suffered more;

it all comes clear in a single, simple statement:

“Anne stands for the absolute innocence

of all victims.”

 To come through

Absolute innocence:

my eyes are opened.

Take away the differences; there are none.

This is what it is to be human:  to be held captive

against your will,

to be persecuted,

hunted down,

violated,

vulnerable; this is what it is

to endure,

to hold on

to integrity,

to hope,

to stay human

through atrocity,

to remain merciful when punished without mercy,

to “be”, to carry on,

to remarry,

to have another child,

to tell the story

over and over

in simple words, direct and compelling,

leaving out no detail

for it all counts toward glory,

to open our eyes

each day

in an ultimate act of courage

to the same light,

yes, the same light she knew

through the merest crack

in the blackout curtain,

hope spearing through the shade,

illuminating:

and this is the lesson,

daily,

daily,

pledged beyond reason

to a future that may never be,

for this is all we have,

and all we require:

the need to breathe

in an airless room,

the need to imagine and plan

beyond a suffocating confinement,

the need to see past the day of despair,

to live beyond,

to pick up the bleeding threads

and make a life,

to lift up our hands

in supplication

and praise

and gratitude

for what is left,

for the valour

and the honour

and the stubbornness

and the grace

to come through.

The Red Diary: a cycle of poems inspired by the Diary of Anne Frank (part three of four)

 The Red Diary

A cycle of narrative poems inspired by the diary of Anne Frank

by Margaret Gunning

Part three of four

To the memory of Anne Frank

Winter

Another turn of the seasons:  it can’t be,

but the ordeal is not yet over,

not even half.  You write

that you take ten drops of valerian

to fight the anxiety and depression,

the sense of no hope

that oppresses your soul.

“The atmosphere is stifling, sluggish,

leaden.”  You feel weighed down.

“Sometimes I think God is trying to test me,”

you write, and who could blame you;

you move towards darkness,

and we know the end of the story,

though you are oblivious:

I know,

and want to weep.

 Suffering

I know nothing of this level of pain.

Just opening your diary

is an effort, to bring myself

to the pages,

their import immense,

too crushing for a girl,

any girl,

even you.

Had you made it to England,

to America,

we never would have heard of you,

and you might be alive today,

a mother,

a grandmother, perhaps:

known for something else,

some other work,

or maybe not,

your life longer, but so much more ordinary.

The medal

 I see a film about a Nazi doctor

who cut off the heads of children,

put brains in jars,

won a medal for his work,

then retired in comfort,

never paying for his crime,

because,

because,

they looked away – all, all,

all looked away;

my mother didn’t come, she didn’t come

when I was ripped,

I know how this can happen,

I bear the scars,

there is a tear, I carry it still

in my body’s darkest place,

a place where flesh split:

but I dared not cry out.

The oblivion is like a drug,

it seeps down the generations,

and children are attacked;

in the film, the survivors

made me weep,

trembling with rage

that this doctor, this doctor –

should win a medal,

should carry on his “work”, should lie

that he remembered nothing;

my mother’s face, blank and null,

it mocks me,

she was supposed to love me,

I was split,

I was split,

I could not help myself

or get away:  but it did not happen.

There are two stories always,

double-faced,

one side

smiling and null,

the government hanging a medal

around the Nazi doctor’s neck

while everyone is smiling, smiling:

brains in jars,

emaciation,

horror,

death:  awards

to the guilty,

suffering to the innocent:  Anne!

In some ways,

you were fortunate to die.

 Alone

“I have an intense need to be alone.”

And you are.

But not in the way you need.

You live inside yourself.  Like all outsiders,

you observe.

Your insight is devastating:  “Father’s not in love.”

You see the lack of love

in your mother’s coldness to you,

and it’s deadly, the way you cut to the truth.

You scare me.  Your writings are disturbing,

they are far more than an account of the war,

they are a merciless assessment,

an evaluation

in which everyone is found wanting.

Then you go to your little corner

and bend your dark head

over movie magazines

smuggled in by Miep,

and daydream about Peter,

and new clothes

and the future. . .

an ordinary, brown-eyed girl.

Sinking

I am sinking

in this material:  every day
I am swallowed,

yet compelled.

I must go in.

I breathe the air of the Annex, thick with anxiety

and the smell of cats.

How much food is left?

How many cans of milk; how many pounds of rice?

Will the Germans blow up the dikes?

Will we drown?

Don’t go in there.  I hear my mother’s voice.

I hear it, urgent.

I hear it in my mind.

I always went in. I could not help myself.

I entered a hell of my own making.

Scenes were scalded into memory.

Horror is a kind of flashbulb,

ensuring a permanent image,

an imprint

on the flesh.

I stand in the Annex; I cannot breathe.

The air is absolutely still,

packed with hostility, with

unexpressed venom,

vibrating with arrested sexual energy,

reverberating

like a distant roll

of what might be thunder,

unless organized into gunfire,

man-made menace

never silent,

never still.

Listen

Listen:  I will attest to the fact

that a little girl suffered,

she could not breathe,

her breath was stopped

by an unspeakable act:

no one would believe the things that were done,

and so it did not happen.

Truth can be undone.

Do you think I do not know this?

Hate, and its first cousin, fear

rip the skeins, unweave

the fabric of what is real:  my flesh

is not enough,

a healed tear

in my body,

 a memory is not enough,

it’s false, it’s implanted:

Listen to the girl.

She knows what she is talking about.

The diary is forged, a fabrication,

the whole thing was exaggerated,

not that many Jews died,

we all know what they’re like,

they dramatize,

they blow things out of proportion:

when I was small,

my breath was stopped

by an unspeakable act.

It went so far down my throat

that I was silenced

for fifty years.

The truth twists my head around

and I fervently wish these memories were false;

I wish those times of dissolution

never happened,

the shock wards,

the detox,

the grinding hell of therapy –

but for some,

truth will never come out,

too impacted by fear,

too heinous to be real,

and so it isn’t,

truth is booted in the face

and shoved in a back ward

lobotomized,

brain circuits cut

to stop the telling.

Tell:  Anne.

Tell.

Tell the story, in your own words

again and again;

tell your most ordinary day,

smiling under the heel of oppression.

I need every word, 
I grasp at it, desperate

for such skeins of truth, woven

into the clothing

of reality.

 Don’t think I’m in love

Tears leave dark spots

on the red of your apron.

You wonder if Peter even likes you,

you agonize,

you yearn,

for what, you do not know.

You wonder if anyone loves you,

or if anyone can see you

at all.

Yet you pray, and thank God

for the small irreplaceable gift

of each day,

the immutable fact of Creation,

and all that you

hold in your heart.

In this, you are happy.

It is as if the forces of the War

(the masses of grief, the megatons

of despair)

have compressed you into a gemstone,

made shining amber

from the bleedings of a wounded tree,

the running sap

of sorrow.

Fiery as cognac

warm as your eyes,

it reflects your radiance

and holds your heat.

Tuesday, March 14, 1944

“The food is wretched,” you write,

“and so are we.”

You’re down to rotting potatoes,

pickled kale that has spoiled,

no bread, no milk, no oil –

tell me, do you ever get frightened?

Do you ever fear your helpers will get caught

and there will be no food left

at all?

Miep gets sick; a hole in the safety net.

Terror crowds in from the outside.

It is constant, unrelenting.

You keep your balance by writing:

a death-defying act.

Slowly,

you and Peter become closer,

you speak of sex, while still not touching:

you wonder if you are in love,

what love feels like

or if he cares for you at all

beyond comradeship,

the two of you thrown together

by random circumstance.

You long for more than conversation

but can barely comprehend the feeling,

where it is coming from,

some ancient instinct,

the secret internal workings of hormones,

one drop, then two

coursing in your blood,

nature’s imperative to mate

set alight in your thin fourteen-year-old body.

Like all of us, you are whole,

you have a clitoris, and a womb,

and blood courses through you,

and you ache to touch him, hold him

smell his secret smells,

be one flesh,

yet you know there is danger,

that such congress is forbidden,

a leap into the overwhelming world of

sensation

and response,

the oldest response in the world:

a paroxysm of pleasure,

new for each person,

a spasm of amazement

that life can feel this good

in captivity,

that God does not forget,

that there is compensation for the pain

and misery

of this endless confinement:

the shining joy, the giddiness

of being lifted off your feet

with desire, pulled out of yourself

and every nerve ending

atingle with pleasure

and readiness, for what you do not know,

yet your body knows:  girlish,

yet womanly

and ready or not, these feelings are here,

here in the stuffy attic room

so powerful you forget your growling stomach,

your disgust at the bathroom smells,

the stale perspiration

of constant subdued panic,

the tedium of each day

repeating seven hundred and fifty times

until you believe it will never end.

We know what happens; you don’t,

and this faint hope keeps you alive

when loneliness threatens to devour you,

when the future goes dark,

when your parents become unbearably critical

(and just imagine their anxiety

for your safety):  You have this diary,

these words, this process

sacred,

daily,

your sanity

in a world unmade by fear.

The thing is, Hitler did not win –

we know, because your words survived

beyond yourself,

the frail vessel

that held your essence

dying of despair, yet your words, your words

preserved

for the eyes and minds of the yet unborn

who would draw hope from you

in a million different places.

 By then

By then, at fourteen

when I first read you,

I was a veteran

of hiding,

I knew how to elude the danger,

except that it pressed in on me,

constant,

constant,

and I skipped and smiled like any girl,

and hid my fears,

and absorbed the terror

by day

and by night

and lived on,

amazed at your words:

wondering how anyone

could survive

such a war,

such a war.

 Inside

You write of your inner parts

with surprising frankness:

marvelling that a man could fit inside,

or a baby come out.

There is no one there to tell you anything,

so you work it out for yourself:

this is what I look like,

this is what I see;

this, here, this sensitive place,

this is called a clitoris,

though my mother will not speak of it,

pretending ignorance.

Your body, too, is fair territory

for your limitless curiosity,

your probing intelligence,

your intense need to know.

You realize that every part has a function,

that there is design in your deepest being,

that womanhood, all mysterious,

is nevertheless knowable,

as knowable as God,

that desire is rolling forward

over the barriers

and flooding you,

that your little talks with Peter

are becoming more intimate:  how the air

vibrates with promise,

heavy with the unknown,

a tension you can nearly see.

 The diary

You know much, but not everything:

the voice on the radio

speaks of the value of war diaries,

and everyone looks at you:  Oh, Anne,

you’ll be famous some day,

and secretly you are pleased.

With the sheer nerve of youth,

the optimism, the resilience,

you just assume you will live to see it,

to savour it;

you rewrite your passages, refine them,

ever the writer,

so at home with your gift:  how I envy you.

You report, with the assurance

of a war correspondent,

“Hungary has been occupied

by German troops.

There are still a million Jews

living there; they too are doomed.”

They too?

Does it slip through, then, a deeper awareness

that threads through your courage,

your bright red valour,

does a darker thread permeate the fabric,

does a cold old hand grasp your shoulder

in the night:  we too are doomed?

How do you live with doom,

how do you hold it away from you

so you can breathe, eat, smile,

and continue to write, and write;

what must it take

just to live another day

of the hundreds, and hundreds

pressed behind  the walls

of the factory,

shut into fifty square metres

of stuffy space, blackout curtains

sealing out the day,

doom trembling

around the edges of consciousness

like a subtle earth tremor,

leaving cracks in the foundation,

weakening your resolve.

Daily you rise, and live.

Mr. Van Daan’s birthday

does not go unnoticed:  there is always a cake

made with bad flour and no butter,

and a few small presents,

a tin of sardines, a luxury,

a tiny serving of coffee,

a few tulips from outside:  oh,

outside. . . the smell of flowers

intoxicates you,

and you yearn, and yearn,

but keep yourself in hand,

believing you will live,

and knowing you will die.