If I think about what it means for me
to try to arrange consonants and vowels to make pictures
of this place and try to associate with all
the works of art I admire or what seems to be worth thinking
about in this world of atrocities
and brilliant works and all the other things,
I suppose it's to look at the--
I don't know that word to use for it.
I would say history or culture or everything
that underlies the ordinary things that had meaning for me
when I was a child.
The meaning comes from some-- it comes from history.
That sounds too heroical word.
But the very language in which I'm addressing you,
it's the product of rape, invasion, expropriation,
its richness, immigration in the case of many of us in the room.
And everything to put it in one phrase
is a beautiful evocative ruin that one
of the traditions of poetry as you look at a ruin.
And you think, Oh, once it was this, once it was that.
Well, the computer is a ruin.
If you get what I mean.
It stinks of us.
It would be different if we had a different history.
The way we've designed it.
The way its insides work.
The whole concept of it.
And every object you look at is a color
or a shape where you see it away that comes from the past.
And just as my body is the product of two people
but behind them four.
And its geometric progression.
Then, there's eight people just a couple of generations back.
And you get into the thousands by the Renaissance,
by Shakespeare's time.
How ridiculous to anybody say my ancestors?
So thousands, Tens of thousands.
We are indeed all cousins.
So we're all a product of this immense fan behind you
that comes down to this moment.
You say, "You're going to the party?"
I don't think starting to study.
It at all is behind it.
just as my body has that ancestry.
My words and my ideas and my objects
have the ancestry, which is not to say that I'm not free.
It's not a deterministic thought.
I'm free to do things with it.
But it is an immensity.
It's a bigness behind everything.
Never more than when I'm completely unaware of it.
That's when it's most operative on me.
I tried to think of an image to represent that immensity
of good and bad things in time.
And I thought of the lights of an immense city
if you're coming down in an airplane
or if you're in a very high place.
And every bowl is a human being that is either
the literal ancestor of your body,
or the ancestor of your speech, or your dress, or your music.
And it's-- "The City Dark."
"The City Dark"
"In the early winter dusk, the broken city dark
seeps from the tunnels.
Up towers and in dusty alleys, the mathematical veil
of generation has lit its torches
to light the rooms of the mated and unmated.
The two fated behind you and four
behind them in the matrix widening
into the past, 8, 16, 32.
Many as the crystal dream cells illuminating the city.
Even for those who sleep in the street there are lights.
Like a heavy winter sleep, the long flint cold of the past
spreads over the glinting dream blisters
of the sleep, asleep or awake.
As if the streets were an image of the channels of time with 64,
128.
The ancestral net of thousands only a couple of centuries
back with its migrations and fortunes and hungers.
Like an image of the city, where the star dispelling
lights have climbed and multiplied
over the tenements and outlying suburbs.
Like a far past of multitudes behind us
in the glittering web of strands crossing thousands and Tens
of thousands of lives coupled with their games, passions,
misfortunes.
Somewhere, in the tangled alleyways or rape.
Somewhere, a spirit diffused wings like blind
along the stretched wires branching the dark city air
or bundled under the streets coursing surely
to some one face.
Like an ancient song, do, re, re, la, so, so.
Somewhere, misfortune.
Somewhere, recognition.
Back here, one died of starvation.
Here, one thrived.
Descendant, the bitter city work and
the shimmering maternal burden of music uncoil
outward on the avenues through smoky bars
by televisions beyond sleepers.
While the oblivion of generation radiates
backward and then forward homeward to the one voice
or face.
Like an underground pool through its delicate light
shaft moonlit a cistern of light.
Echoing in a chamber cellared under the dark of the city
pavement, the faintly glittering slabs."
Ever since I was a kid, I've always
loved the way the pavement has--
I guess, its bits of flint in it, and a certain lights
that glitter.
And little kids go laughing, giggling to pick them up.
You know, everyone does.
Any horror you can imagine happening
in a city or any horror you can imagine.
Everyone has an ancestor who died of starvation.
I'm sure.
Just as everyone probably has an ancestor
who was a king and a slave.
And we're all the products of rape.
I sometimes worried that people misunderstand
when I use the word rape several times in these recent poems.
That they think I'm sexually interested by it.
I find it not at all interesting.
In fact, really quite appalling idea.
But it's interesting to me as an image of who we are.
That one is the product of calamity.
Some ethnic groups more recently than others perhaps,
or some families more recently than others.
If your grandmother lived through the Armenian nightmare
or whatever.
But still we all do do share that.
Just as in our ingenuity that makes beautiful colors.
And music that this light that comes here.
The same ingenuity does produce germ warfare and interrogation
of people when you put electrodes
in their testicles or the fillings in their teeth.
It's all our cleverness.
Just like the heroic couplet, Charlie Parker.