Rufi Cole

California Poem

For Pasha (who I never call that)

 

That is the way you like to look at me, California.

When you have taken the sentence,

half out of my throat, and I suck

on your finger instead. I know you

can see me there, California.

 

Through your eyelashes,

in the dark.

 

Oh California! Miles upon miles

of asphalt. Oh, bouquets of perfect legs!

Your sands hide fake diamonds,

your coves are like Barbie feet.

 

You people my dreams with strangers

and release amnesia in your sunlight.

Your nights are ridged as muscle shells

by the intoxicated laughter of sea lions.

 

Your palm trees are crazy scepters

made to look like friendly penises.

They line the streets like soldiers,

erect and numb.

 

Just like you, California,

like you.

 

Even your dirt is a priori, California,

a priori of death. Let’s go shopping, California!

Let’s play tennis or get abortions!

Take my memories, California--

 

dash my little ones against the rocks.

 

That’s just the way you like to look at me, California:

Through you eyelashes,

like spider legs,

through your lovelessness,

in the dark.

Animals

    Let me say first, that my editor teases me constantly because every time he calls me I have a new animal story. I tell him about how I am hand feeding a malnourished tortoise, or about how my cat likes to go on walks with me and my dog, often traveling with us for several miles, or about the raccoons that make mayhem of the fountain in our back yard, washing the avocadoes from our tree until the entire fountain is a pond of soupy guacamole. I have a lot of animals and I think about animals a lot, though which is the consequence of the other, I would be hard pressed to say.

    Animals in fiction are difficult. They are often used symbolically, as the rabbit is in For Whom The Bell Tolls, or humorously as in Flush. My early work was riddled with animals. I couldn't write a story without one. But why? The animals were hardly ever central to the story line, and yet they kept appearing. In The Violin Face, there is a praying mantis named Henry. Eddie gives it to Thora as a gift, and towards the end of Chapter 1, she thinks: "I thought about Henry, and his complicated jade body, and the box with the mesh lid. And it seemed like there was something terribly sad about it because he was supposed to mean something because he was a gift, but he didn’t because he was just a bug and alive, and he couldn’t take all the weight of having to mean something on top of that. Like we were trapping him, not just in the box, but by making him be a present at all."

    This snippet of Thora's thinking is as close as I have come in my work to expressing my own feelings about animals, which are in turn deeply indebted to the work of J.M. Coetzee. Not only do animals provoke for humans memories of another life, a life without consciousness, without ego or id. But they represent, in much of Coetzee's work and in mine, the unknowable face of the Other in a Levinas-ian sense. The thing that can never be incorporated into the Same, into the Self. The speechless thing that nonetheless sees, feels, understands, but which cannot and will not share its experience with you. The part of creation we cannot communicate with.

    In this way, animals represent for me, not only in fiction, but in life, the central mystery of the universe. They challenge the ontology of Heidegger by their very voiceless presence. They complicate theories of subjectivity and objectivity. They thwart most systems of thought. If you don't believe me, look up C.S. Lewis's answer in the Screw Tape Letters to the question of animals in an afterlife. I learned early on that systems of thought that ignored or unsatisfactorily answered the question of animals, were ignoring other important things as well. Any ethical thinking must take animals into account, or as Levinas makes so evident, there is a danger of treating humans like animals. Thus slavery, thus the Holocaust, thus the Armenian Genocide. I believe for myself, and I think Coetzee would agree, that until we change our fundamental thinking about animals, genocide will not become an anomaly but a recurring historical norm. After all, what do we really mean when we say, "treated like an animal"?

    If we use the phrase about the treatment of a human being, we mean that the human's dignity will be violated. When we use it about animals, we mean that our own purpose for the animal will override the animal's purpose for itself. A cow is not free to be a cow, but will instead be treated as and transformed into Beef. Even the custodial thinking of Green Peace-ers, while certainly less objectionable, reflects a worldview that assigns animals the role of retarded children: innocents needing proper care from the capable hands of the human race because they do not have the capacity to understand or control the events of the world to arrange what would be best for them in the long run. They propose, in fact, that animals become wards of the state. Anyone who has ever resided, even for a short period, in foster care would warn you that this model is deeply flawed and never works out well for the ward.  

    I think cats are a good place to start when considering animals. If you have ever spent a good amount of time with domesticated cats, you will appreciate that they aren't quite like any other animal and that whatever their experience of reality is, it departs almost entirely from human experience. It is impossible to look into a cat's eyes, those otherworldly globes, even as you stroke it, even as it lies on your chest, drooling from pleasure, and not know that you have no idea what the cat truly is. Cats may be angels in disguise or demons. But they are the least terrestrial of domesticated animals and their relationship to the world is the most evidently mysterious. Which is why cats are associated with witches, and also why, at least I think so, they recur time after time in Murakami's work, usually as the instigation of a descent into the unreal or the otherworldly.

    I am most interested in cats because people don't have very much desire to tell them what to do. Cat-worship, in an Egyptian sense, has died out and yet the current relationship between humans and domesticated cats is very close to such a practice. You care for a cat, you stroke it and you feed it and what does it give you in return? Not obedience, not even loyalty really. It does not help you hunt or track or protect like a dog would. While a well trained dog would never attack you or bite you even under duress, a cat thinks nothing of clawing or biting if it feels its autonomy is being violated. You do not teach cats tricks to prove your mastery over them nor do you dress them up in human clothes, as has become the fad with small dogs.

    If you are a cat lover, you have a cat simply because you want a cat around. Because you love them and you are honored that in their own mysterious way they love you back. I often think that if aliens were ever to come to this planet, they could not possibly be as alien as cats are. As strange and removed from the world of ideas and logic.

    So I think it is a good idea, if you are writing fiction, to think about cats and make sure that the world you write about accommodates cats. If there is no room for the otherness of a cat, then you are writing a fantasy, a purely human dream created to reconfirm your own suspicions of the world. For myself, in my attempts to write a new version of magical realism, cats are really the only way I can think about it. I have no interest, as Murakami does, in descending into the world of cats. Of leaving the terrestrial in favor of the other worldly, cats being the most evident portal to other worlds. Instead, I want to build a realism that accommodates both humans and cats, both the self and the other. Whatever the gap is between reality and our perception of reality, I want my work to make it begin to glow and become more visible. I want the static of the gap to fill the work until it is vibrating, pulsing, and eventually combustible.

    In closing, I must tell you, the tortoise I have been carefully nursing back to health, hand feeding three times a day, rubbing with tinctures and ointments, swaddling with heat lamps and towels, has died.

    I don't know where she's gone now that she is no longer in her strange little body. That wrinkly skin, that unreadable face. But now it's my job to bury her in the garden. My job to mourn for a creature I never understood and face a world that is far more mysterious than we will ever accept.

The Predestination of Plot

Sometimes things happen in my life that feel novelistic. So novelistic, in fact, that you could never write it in a novel. In fact, it's not just sometimes, it's almost all the time. I can't tell if it happens this often for other people, but I suspect so. As the old adage has it, “Life is stranger than fiction”. What exists in my life as strange, disconcerting and possibly meaningful coincidence, in fiction, becomes just one more cheap trick. But what then can the fiction writer do to bring these strange, wildly improbable events into her fiction? In trying to become more realistic, her writing becomes more and more contrived, precisely because the reader is in on the joke: the whole thing is made up. As far as I can tell there are five main categories:

1. Just as she was thinking of him, she saw... (The Passing Sign)

For a period of three days, as I hesitated on the precipice of a major life decision, my room filled with moths. Surely it was just some sort of moth breeding season, surely there was a biological imperative for their gathering. Surely it had nothing to do with my decision or my life.  They gathered around my bed, even when I had the light off, and waited patiently on my bedside table, along the walls above my head. In the morning they would be completely gone. But from 10 at night until around 2 am, my bedroom was filled with moths. What was most staggering about their presence was that it was not one variety of moth, but many, some as large as the palm of my hand, some hardly bigger than my pinky nail. I had never seen moths so large or beautiful in Southern California before. Anyone who knows me will tell you that I adore moths, and pin moths and butterflies myself. So I found the visitation of the moths incredibly comforting. And as little as their visitation had to do with my life decision, I cannot say that the moths didn't influence me. In fact, they were probably the largest factor in my decision. How could I not feel differently about the world when these gorgeous, dusty creatures surrounded me, their wings making the same sound as pages turning in a book, emitting the same slightly intoxicating dust as leaves of old parchment?

        Were I to write of this time of the moths in a novel, it would be two things: It would be magical realism, or bordering on such, and it would seem contrived. As a writer, in order to lessen the feeling of contrivance, I would have to erase the lapidopterical inclinations of the character of myself. Even still the reader would set down the book, going, "Come on! That's too easy! Couldn't you come up with something better? Moths? Are you serious?" And yet it was true. It was absolutely not contrived. It was factual. Just as fucked up as the news papers.

As a subcategory to “The Passing Sign”, there is a subtler motif I think of as the "Convenient Image." Without a doubt if something truly terrible happens to me, there is a thunderstorm or some sort of other anomalous weather. If I am thinking about love, I am sure to see copulating flies throughout the day (how romantic ;). If I am feeling out of control in my life, I am sure to misplace for an afternoon a ring my grandmother gave me; a perfect physical mirroring of my mental predicament. The problem with the “Convenient Image” is that there is absolutely no way of saving it in fiction. If anything, to give a greater "realist tang" to their work, writers have begun to incorporate the "Inconvenient Image." If someone has just died, they will make it sunny, children all around will be playing, etc.

 

2. Give me a break. (The Long Shot Coincidence)

This happens all the fucking time. Right when you are thinking about someone they call you on the telephone or you run into them at the supermarket. When you need a job, for instance, all of a sudden you run into someone you haven't seen in years, just at the metro station, and they tell you about this great restaurant. You think: maybe I should apply there for a job. No sooner do you visit the restaurant to apply, but you discover the brother of your childhood sweetheart is the hiring manager. In just the same way, if you are having an affair with a married man, it is guaranteed that the first time you brave going out in public together, choosing the most remote area where neither of you know anyone, you are sure to run into his wife's pilates instructor. Every single one of you knows for sure that if you go out of the house looking like shit, you are bound to run into the person you have been thinking of sleeping with, and if you leave the house looking fabulous you will run into no one that you know all day.

Most difficult for the fiction writer, is the role coincidence plays in larger, more dramatic events.

 

3. And then she did what? (The Bizarre and the Stereotypical)

Related to “The Long Shot Coincidence”, is the problem of “The Bizarre”, which is perhaps the greatest problem facing the fiction writer. Life is incredibly bizarre. It's just the way it is. It is also, at one and the same time, stereotypical. For instance, my great grandfather decided he wanted to build a plane in his backyard during the Great Depression. And so he did. And he enlisted all of his sons to help him and they made a fortune during the Great Depression flying that plane to the middle of the country, buying up people's heirlooms for pennies, then flying to New York and selling their loot for dollars. They were like sky pirates. This actually happened, these are my people, this is who I come from. And yet, if I gave some similar background to a character, every one would call foul: the work would seem so highly romanticized that it would lose its impact. People would say, "Wouldn't it be nice if life were actually that dramatic and bizarre?" And yet life is.

        For instance, I have a friend who was kidnapped. The details of his kidnapping are so bizarre and filled with so much coincidence that it simply could never be converted into a successful story. For instance, when they take him to his business so he can empty the vault, he has to call the security system from a payphone, so that the alarm won't go off because it is the middle of the night. Of the three men who abducted him, two very large and burly black men, and one tiny, almost bantam-sized white man, who is it who walks him to the payphone? It is the tiny white guy. And does he stand close to my friend at the payphone, holding a gun to his head, making sure he doesn't alert the security system? No, he hangs back about thirty feet, so that my friend can tell the operator everything, thus bringing the police, thus bringing rescue and salvation. Obviously, some of this is not coincidence, but simple stupidity on the part of the abductors. But the fact remains: in fiction, criminals must be smart because otherwise it isn't "realistic" enough. "How convenient," the reader says, "that it's the tiny white guy, and how convenient that he hangs back thirty feet. Fat fucking chance. That would never happen." But of course, that is exactly what happens. All the time. 

Another example: the story of my birth. My mother was already two weeks overdue. My father was not in the picture. So it's winter, in Dallas,TX,there's snow on the ground. My mother is unloading groceries. She sees a black man approaching her in the snow. (Yes, I'm sorry, a black man—this too would have to be changed in fiction to avoid the stereotypical.) She goes, "Who are you?" (Why? Even she doesn't know.) He says nothing. (Wouldn't he have to think of something to say? Wouldn't it just be too nightmare-like in fiction to have him remain silent?) And then he pulls out a switchblade. My mother, coincidentally, has just bought an o-cedar mop. A brand new mop, with the plastic still on the head of it. And when he gets in range, he is still silent, approaching, she is still shouting, "Who are you?": she begins to beat him about the head and shoulders with the mop. (In fiction, a woman would never do something so dangerous and bizarre when nine and a half months pregnant.) As she is beating him with the mop, and he, while parrying with his switch blade, is kept pretty much at bay by the length of the mop, the man says, "Lady please, just give me your purse." And so she pauses. Sets down the mop. Throws him her purse. He runs away. She continues unloading groceries. (You could never pull that off in a story, and yet in most real stories the people in them do the most improbable things: like worrying about getting the chicken in the fridge after you've just been mugged.) She calls the cops. The cops come, the cops leave. Friends come, friends leave.

She decides, at around midnight to eat a bowl of ice cream and watch her soaps she has recorded from the week. So of course (too easy!) her water breaks. She just puts down a towel and keeps watching her soaps because she isn't have labor pains. (Oh, yeah, like anyone would ever do that.) Yada, yada, skip some boring parts, she is in labor for thirty-six hours. In the middle of it, my mother's agent (who was also coincidentally my father's agent) bursts into the delivery room in a fox fur coat (in a story, she would have to be wearing something painfully normal, a pea coat perhaps) and insists on signing me at birth because she believes I will be a child star. (Why? Neither of my parents were famous. There was never any hope of me becoming a child star.) To top it all off, the agent's name was "Ivette Stone." (You simply can't make shit like that up.) Then, of course, my grandmother, who is low voiced anyway, is incredibly drunk and is calling the hospital over and over again, harassing the staff. Her voice is so low and gravelly, that the nurse comes in and says to my mother, "Can we release information to your father." "My father is calling?" my mother asks. "He's on the line now," the nurse says. "If he's calling," my mother said, "go ahead and tell him whatever he wants to know." Because, of course, her father had been dead for about seven years.

There are more funny parts to the story, but they will have to wait for a later date. But the fact remains, this real life story reads like a John Irving novel. It's almost cutesy in the same way that much of Chuck Palahnuik borders on the cutesy. "It's so stylized," the reader says, "that I have a hard time caring about the characters. It just doesn't feel real."

 

4. What's my motivation? (The Problem of Whim)

Most of my mother's life could not be written down because no one would believe it. Not only are the characters who have peopled her life almost improbably bizarre, the coincidences just disgustingly convenient, and the symbolism over-fucking-wrought with significance: the motivations of herself and the other people in her life are completely unclear. In order to get a character in a story to do something, especially something big and dramatic, you have to really convince the reader that they would do it. You have to make it inevitable. But of course, people in life hardly ever make decisions in such a conscious manner and they tend, if anything, to be unclear on why they did things. Why did my mother decide to keep the baby (me) when she accidentally got pregnant? She doesn't really know. It just felt like the right thing to do. But hadn't she had abortions before? Yes, of course, but somehow this was different. How was it different? She doesn't know. There isn't really a reason. She was a few years older, she thought: Well, why not have it?

Why did I decide not to finish high school and go to college instead? Because a girl I knew joked that I should. And I thought: Why not? Why did the college actually let me in? Even they were unclear on that point. Why did I just move to California? I have no fucking idea. All my friends were in Virginia, I had a good job, a cute little apartment, I loved my life, I even had a very promising romantic interest. But I just sort of felt compelled to move to California. Even I don't know exactly why. It's “The Problem of Whim”.

Whim can absolutely not be used in fiction. Otherwise, the characters start to feel like puppets, and the whole thing feels like the author's idea and the reader can't take it seriously anymore.

 

5. It's not just in Hamlet anymore, folks. (Supernatural Phenomena)

Everyone I know pretty much has had some uncanny experience or another. I saw a ghost once. In my restaurant. It was the middle of the afternoon, I just saw him walk by. He didn't say anything spooky to me, he was just going about his ghost-business. I got a very strange feeling of vertigo, the vertigo of looking into the past. It is the same feeling I get when looking at pictures of my mother before I was born. Similarly, my boyfriend and I often dream the same dreams. In the morning, he'll call me and say, "Whoah, did you have this dream too?" And usually, though not always, I have had the same dream. They are not particularly significant dreams, often we are vacationing or simply cooking dinner. Many of my friends, even buttoned-up types, have seen ghosts, had presentiments or precognitive dreams. Yet, if I write about these things, it is called "magical realism." Why? Why isn't it just realism?

In my thesis, for graduate school, I had a story about a girl who kept dreaming about angels. They weren't pretty, cherubic angels. The angel that appeared to her was first in the form of a blue box made of skin that had no opening and was very heavy. And then it came to her as a museum security guard. All in a day's work, I thought. Really, I know people who have had much stranger dreams than that! But it wasn't that simple in my defense. One of my professors asked me, "Do you believe in angels?" I said I didn't think that was really to the point. But he got very up in my face about it. He asked me again, so I said, "Well, I can't really rule things like angels out. I do believe other people believe in them and that means that I admit they may exist, if only in people's minds. So yes, I believe in angels. I believe in all sorts of things I've never seen like molecules and black holes." But for my professors, and I have to believe they were correct, for they have very fine taste, a story about a girl dreaming of angels, even angels in the shape of boxes or security guards, made the work feel contrived and lessened it's impact. "Can't you just take out the angels?" they asked me.

And I told them the truth: No. I was really only interested in the angels and without them I would not have written the story.

 

In all these examples, it seems fairly evident to me that our idea of the Real has diverged significantly from our experience of the Real. The problem of the Imagine Author, the reader's very complicity in agreeing to suspend disbelief and read something "fictional," has created a subcategory of experience called "the realistic." Now, I have "realistic" days all the time. But not the important days. My everyday days are completely realistic. But you can bet that if something important is about to happen shit's gonna start getting weird. I don't feel satisfied leaving the weirdness of my life out of my fiction. And yet... and yet...

            If you include the oddities of life in fiction, you enter the terrain of either "bad" fiction (story is contrived, character's don't have clear motivations, etc.) or you enter the land of magical realism. The problem with the land of magical realism, as far as I'm concerned, is that it implies that the magical events of the story are the conceit of the author, are all part of a big symbolic plan. It takes the random and names it the preordained and the whole thing becomes a giant symbol—or, if it's not a symbol... it becomes the realm of fantasy. It loses its literary weight and becomes simply entertainment.

            Is there a way of building a fiction that doesn't take the fantastical all the way to the lengths of Murakami, but lets the unreal live alongside with the real. Is there room in this world for a new realism?

            It's a mighty big world, folks. You probably know which way I'm betting...