WEBVTT

00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:00.600 align:middle line:90%


00:00:00.600 --> 00:00:06.750 align:middle line:84%
I had the fortune or
misfortune to be traveling

00:00:06.750 --> 00:00:14.520 align:middle line:84%
in Central America when the
Jonestown Massacre took place

00:00:14.520 --> 00:00:15.420 align:middle line:90%
in the airport.

00:00:15.420 --> 00:00:20.670 align:middle line:90%
Actually in Merida, Mexico.

00:00:20.670 --> 00:00:22.440 align:middle line:90%
Trying to get out.

00:00:22.440 --> 00:00:23.760 align:middle line:90%
This is basically.

00:00:23.760 --> 00:00:25.665 align:middle line:90%
This poem is built around that.

00:00:25.665 --> 00:00:30.966 align:middle line:90%


00:00:30.966 --> 00:00:32.549 align:middle line:84%
It's called Anywhere
Out Of The World.

00:00:32.549 --> 00:00:35.920 align:middle line:90%


00:00:35.920 --> 00:00:41.010 align:middle line:84%
And then there are places no
one ever expects to arrive.

00:00:41.010 --> 00:00:45.510 align:middle line:84%
From San Francisco once, a
man led hundreds of followers

00:00:45.510 --> 00:00:48.810 align:middle line:84%
to Guyana, uncharted
cargo ships.

00:00:48.810 --> 00:00:51.270 align:middle line:84%
Though later, he
would instruct them

00:00:51.270 --> 00:00:55.470 align:middle line:84%
to swallow sugar water
laced with strychnine.

00:00:55.470 --> 00:00:59.400 align:middle line:84%
It was a clearing of
simply carpentered houses,

00:00:59.400 --> 00:01:04.739 align:middle line:84%
of covetous mongrels, nicknames,
clean laundry, and off

00:01:04.739 --> 00:01:06.750 align:middle line:90%
key singing.

00:01:06.750 --> 00:01:11.970 align:middle line:84%
Kool-Aid, a communal settlement
in the jungle, a town that

00:01:11.970 --> 00:01:14.670 align:middle line:84%
after an accretion
of re-enactments

00:01:14.670 --> 00:01:19.620 align:middle line:84%
on television and in the pitying
words of various commentators

00:01:19.620 --> 00:01:27.240 align:middle line:84%
became a mind collapsing in on
itself, finally dense enough.

00:01:27.240 --> 00:01:34.470 align:middle line:84%
And isn't each of us rich enough
with losses, with disasters?

00:01:34.470 --> 00:01:38.220 align:middle line:84%
When I first heard
the name Jonestown,

00:01:38.220 --> 00:01:43.530 align:middle line:84%
the news was handed me with
Mexican shock and skepticism

00:01:43.530 --> 00:01:49.520 align:middle line:84%
by a janitor sweeping the
airport lounge in Merida.

00:01:49.520 --> 00:01:54.680 align:middle line:84%
Should I say I felt
remorse, or disgust, rancor,

00:01:54.680 --> 00:01:57.050 align:middle line:90%
or just a little shaky?

00:01:57.050 --> 00:02:00.950 align:middle line:84%
November in the
Yucatan, short of cash.

00:02:00.950 --> 00:02:05.630 align:middle line:84%
I had slept the night in a stony
field outside the terminal,

00:02:05.630 --> 00:02:09.199 align:middle line:84%
barely nodding off,
sweating ferociously

00:02:09.199 --> 00:02:12.140 align:middle line:84%
in a down mummy bag
as inappropriate

00:02:12.140 --> 00:02:16.940 align:middle line:84%
for the lowland heat as
the shirt I'd been wearing,

00:02:16.940 --> 00:02:22.070 align:middle line:84%
a heavy, ornately woven
cloth dyed violet purple

00:02:22.070 --> 00:02:25.670 align:middle line:90%
by Mayan mestizos.

00:02:25.670 --> 00:02:31.240 align:middle line:84%
It had cost me a week of
haggling in an Atitlan mercado.

00:02:31.240 --> 00:02:35.290 align:middle line:84%
That morning in the men's room
after stripping off the shirt,

00:02:35.290 --> 00:02:41.650 align:middle line:84%
I found my chest and arms tinted
a translucent purple, red paper

00:02:41.650 --> 00:02:42.280 align:middle line:90%
towels.

00:02:42.280 --> 00:02:45.990 align:middle line:84%
And liquid soap
couldn't scrub off.

00:02:45.990 --> 00:02:48.600 align:middle line:84%
So that the words
the janitor spoke

00:02:48.600 --> 00:02:54.180 align:middle line:84%
seemed then to have made my
body glow like a particle shot

00:02:54.180 --> 00:02:56.790 align:middle line:90%
scraping through dense air.

00:02:56.790 --> 00:03:01.500 align:middle line:84%
One of the brief phosphor
red sparks thrown off

00:03:01.500 --> 00:03:05.775 align:middle line:84%
by an emery wheel while
someone sharpens a blade.

00:03:05.775 --> 00:03:09.650 align:middle line:90%


00:03:09.650 --> 00:03:12.620 align:middle line:84%
I have no idea actually
where Jonestown

00:03:12.620 --> 00:03:17.060 align:middle line:84%
is on the cultural
geography of our times,

00:03:17.060 --> 00:03:18.965 align:middle line:84%
whether it's been
absolutely forgotten about.

00:03:18.965 --> 00:03:21.890 align:middle line:90%


00:03:21.890 --> 00:03:24.590 align:middle line:84%
It is absolutely
strange incident.

00:03:24.590 --> 00:03:27.380 align:middle line:84%
It's part of the
background noise.

00:03:27.380 --> 00:03:29.150 align:middle line:84%
It seems to me, of
the culture that we

00:03:29.150 --> 00:03:33.980 align:middle line:84%
live in incidents like this seem
to simply not disappear so much.

00:03:33.980 --> 00:03:38.600 align:middle line:84%
But they vanish into the white
noise of media information that

00:03:38.600 --> 00:03:40.040 align:middle line:90%
constantly surrounds us.

00:03:40.040 --> 00:03:45.760 align:middle line:84%
And in a way that poem
is about that experience.