Month: June 2019

In Latin America, there is a long history of poets becoming diplomats. I learned this recently through Lovely, who learned about the life of Neruda during her trip to Santiago. It is a beautiful concept – an acknowledgement of the value of well-thought words and the powerful tie between art and culture.

The same day I learned about this, I also learned about the abstract-expressionist painters who were corralled by the CIA for the culture wars against Russia. What a better deal, one might imagine – that these painters were not tasked to be actual diplomats the way that the Latin American poets are. They were not required to wear suits with lapels and to be stationed in other countries. They could simply do what they were good at, with slight (or drastic) slant toward nationhood.

I was hired as a curator as a poet, as well. It does not read as romantically in my mind as the biography of Neruda – it was more of a “gigs are running dry and I need a job” tale. Often, I wonder if I abandoned one life for the others. Despite my verbose curatorial statements and flowery keynotes, where does poetry still sit in my life? Can I still call myself a poet?

Lately, I’ve found myself in a lot of historic homes, which are meant to capture the legacy of their residents. Right now, roaming the earth without an address, I wonder what becomes of all the temporary residences? Will the legends of today be tracked by their Airbnbs and gentrifying luxury condos? How much does it matter where you laid your head, the spaces where I do the documenting but which I hardly ever document?

I don’t know why I’ve been contextualizing my self-image in the scope of the great and the famous again – they have led to some of my greatest disappointments, my most flagrant underestimations and under-appreciations of myself. After all, when we follow the hype all the way through, all the CV-building and social media output, isn’t it all to leave breadcrumbs for a legacy of greatness? Or am I just taking everything too seriously, too literally?

I’ve been in DC this past week. The difference is, for the first time in six years I’m not a resident. Our lease ended in May. We packed our belonging up into two shipping containers and jetted off to Europe. On our last day out, I managed to catch our super. He wandered the empty apartment like an empty maze, smiling in that kind of way that only expresses disbelief. “Six years!” he proclaimed. “Aiight man, good luck.”

It felt weird landing in Dulles, opening up Lyft, and not clicking the “Home” button. We’ve been staying with our friends Oscar and Les, their basement recently became an empty nest while their son is gallivanting in Seattle. I feel like I’m unpacking every time I fish out a sock. Out suitcases are splayed out on the floor like a massacre of clothing and toiletries. I can’t find shit. Every once in awhile, I scout for something before realizing that’s it’s squished up against furniture pads and boxes, somewhere out there in the jurisdiction of the shipping company.

Oscar and Les’ place is amazing. There’s a deck to catch sun and look out at the backside of the very-DC houses (something I always envied). They graciously stocked up on eggs and bread and condiments. Even our old house plants that they adopted are situating themselves in their new digs. They told us to make ourselves at home, and by all purposes, we have.

But feeling at home isn’t so much in those moments of intention. It helps to have a stocked kitchen, a comfortable bed, your partner at your side, and a considerable amount of your own shit around. But it’s in those moments between – feeling around for light switches, the foreign temperature of the floor on your bare feet, negotiating with unfamiliar shower faucets and their fickle temperature settings. These are not complaints, but rather observations – observations of things that fall into the subconscious when you’re actually at home.

But over the next few months, we will have no address. We will be living out of our suitcases, even if we are able to stuff our shirts into various closets and drawers during the lengthier stays. There’s an excitement about being somewhere new, and I usually most enjoy it when stepping outside. Discovering cafes and bakeries, encountering local flora, noticing the slightly-different hue of blue in the sky. If I can approach the inside life with the same curiosity, this era of vagabonding could be an easier pill to swallow.

I’m not sure if having no expectations is the same as expecting nothing, but the latter might better describe how I approached last week’s trip to the Vatican. It’s not a place that’s ever been on my bucket list, but perhaps one of the perks of being a husband is acquiring inlaws and their pilgrimages. Lovely’s family members are devout Catholics, and so it only makes sense that, when the opportunity arose for their first family vacation abroad, the Holy City was a no-brainer.

You’re thinking too much about it tends to be the answer to my questionings of God. My own parents met in Bible study, and I spent my early summers in Jesus camps. Like so many others whose worlds revolved around Christ Almighty, the topic of religion was inevitably the first area of interrogation when my mind developed into a critical one. I spent college writhing in spiritual confusion, and my early twenties coming to peace with my agnosticism. But the past few years have been a confluence of spiritual complications – visits to Muslim-predominant societies like Turkey and Indonesia, encounters with infamous Buddhist temples in Asia, intimate experiences in the context of Navajo and Hawaiian belief systems – all while Christianity has become an encroaching synonym for fascism.

That last thought feels both blasphemous and unpatriotic, and those two might also be synonyms.

The halls of the building where the Sistine Chapel sits are stacked with statues of gods and Gods. Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Judeo-Christian. Staring up at a sculpture of Oden outside the Vatican giftshop, one wonders if he’s put there to be worshiped or to be mocked for having been tamed, acquired, catalogued into the collection of another Creator’s museum. Long before seeing an actual depiction of Jesus or Mary, I lost count of the Anubises and Zeuses. Opening acts to the headliner.

In the parts of Vatican City where tourists have access, there is no space for solitude or quiet. Everything is so immaculate that you can’t stare at any single thing without someone in front of you raising their camera at it, or you yourself raising your camera at it. 30,000 visitors on a Tuesday. You can hardly hear the sound of your own voice, not to mention God’s.

By the time I reached Michelangelo’s famous ceiling, my feet and phone battery were zapped. Packed shoulder to shoulder, I raised my eyes to the ceiling and flipped on a Moses Sumney track to drown out the guards shouting at the crowd to quiet down. I stood directly under the iconic image of Adam touching fingertips with God. Time froze for a single moment. God looked so much smaller in person.

I left in awe of the ability of people to be motivated so deeply by their own notion of their own God that they could erect such structures. Paint such murals. Alter such history. I thought about the societies that fell at the hands of people who believe in this God, whose own gods are universally assumed falsified by virtue of the fact that they did not win against the swords and guns that bear the cross. None of those other gods get to be proper nouns, or have a church that’s actually a city that’s actually a country. I thought about the fact that Michelangelo did all of this for almost free. I thought about the fact that God did all of this for almost free.

How I know that Capitalism has me tightly by the throat is that I return from a weeklong vacation harboring a sense of guilt for not having journaled/posted each day/at all. That’s not the behavior of someone whose life is supposed to be remembered. For the past few days I was on an excursion – a passive one in the form of a bourgie family cruise – but an excursion nonetheless. I learned/recalled about myself that, there is no pure form of relaxation. Even in the “do nothing” environment of a floating resort, my mind is constantly racing (and also looking back to ensure I’ve most poetically retraced each step). Coasting through the Mediterranean, I literally had all the time in the world. That’s how Lovely and I could afford the hours to meander the streets of Naples just find the perfect pizza. It wasn’t an expensive meal – 6 euro per person meant that it was less than the tip for Domino’s delivery. But the residual cost is the droning voice in the back of my head that I didn’t document the moment well, post it on the internet, journal about it, catalog the day or any others. How will the world know this mattered? My mind flashes through the biographies and biopics of all the greats, the curatorial statements sprinkled throughout retrospective exhibitions of those who deserve to be remembered. In Barcelona we shuffled through the Picasso Museum, and it seemed as if every shit the artist shat was synthesized into a dozen sketches, each to be studied ad infinitum by generations of art scholars. I docked in six ports and all I have to show for it are a bunch of crooked iPhone shots that don’t even deserve the gram. To think/know that I’m the one who cares the most about these crumbs of documentation is jested only more by recognizing how little I myself care about them. What is it about the lust for attention that makes me concerned not for a great life but for biographers who will obsessively write my gospel or at least my wikipedia entry? Is that what it is to be recognized? Is that impact? Is that legacy? To experience something passively, but for that something to then echo in history, ever bigger as time carries on? While being herded through the Vatican, it occurred to me that Jesus probably never wrote a single word about himself – was it because he knew that every breath he took would be theorized about by others for eons to come? Or because he was just a dude who was none the wiser to his infamy in wait? Maybe if I was a baseball player or a tightrope walker, it would be the least of my concerns for my life’s most impressive moments to be self-documented. But I came into my sense of significance as a writer. Not a writer about trees or the spirits that dwell in them, but of myself. The first time I ever felt truly proud came after I stood in front of a mic with my journal and described myself in cadence. As a writer, I’m not only supposed to live that great writerly life, but I am also burdened with the self-expectation to pen it better than anyone else – as if it actually matters whether anyone else will even remember who I was in three generations’ time. If there’s anything I’m taking away from my week on the Great Lethargic Boat, it’s that significance is most probably overrated. It might be better to quietly phase out of existence, void of a lingering reputation, or else let your ghost forever worry that someone’s going to dig up or concoct a scandal in an age when there no longer lives any eye-witnesses to testify on your behalf. To be Homer or Odysseus? At a certain point, how many people can even tell the difference?