In the spirit of Charlie Hebdo (= ; – > ), and not being the greatest draftsman in the world, I offer the following “conceptual comics” or “imaginary cartoons.”
1. The five Charlie Hebdo cartoonists who died on January 7, 2015 – Cabu, Charb, Honoré, Tignous, and Wolinski – are in heaven, standing at the foot of the Almighty’s throne. The Archangel Gabriel, looking sullen and embarrassed, is standing with an open ledger and a quill near a sign that reads “Department of Indemnities.” The cartoonists look bewildered and amazed. Cabu speaks: “Could you repeat that again? We get 70 virgins each?”
2. The five cartoonists are in heaven; they have become angels, with halos and wings, and are floating about, cracking up over their new status, pointing and jeering at each other, plucking each other’s halos, looking up each other’s shifts, generally behaving like a bunch of out-of-control scamps. Cabu speaks to a puzzled angel standing nearby: “And then I said, ‘You mean, he does exist!?’”
3. The five cartoonists in heaven, each of them surrounded by 70 virgins: Cabu: “The Old Man sure has a sense of humor.”
4. The murdered cartoonists, surrounded by choirs of angels singing on fluffy clouds, meet in heaven the three dead terrorists killed by the French police. Cabu speaks: “Bet you didn’t expect to see us here.” “No, we get the virgins.” “Instead of the virgins, you get us.” “ … and you get the first read on all of our cartoons forever!” “Oh, I get it. Our heaven – your hell!”
5. The terrorists are tied up and faced with the cartoonists, who menacingly raise their pencils and sketchbooks, ready to draw. They look terrified and whimper, “No! No! Anything but that!” _____
Christopher Bernard is a regular contributor to Synchronized Chaos Magazine.
“It’s Christmas eve,” the burly motel owner said.
“Nobody’s got any rooms.” “Damn all,” said the man.
“It’s all right, Jay,” the wife, hardly a teen, replied,
looking at the owner. “Oh!” He, suddenly sheepish,
saw the problem: nine-months due,
the little body was swollen, a perfect sphere
at her tummy. “Well,” he added reluctantly,
“we’re not supposed to, but there is a corner
we sometimes rent in the garage. It’s not legal,
you know, so we have to charge more…” “More?
Man! For a garage?” sputtered the man.
“We get to sleep on cement?” “No, there’s a cot—
two cots, and blankets, a table, a utility sink,
and a ceiling light.” It was snowing outside.
Jay cursed. “We’ll take it,” he grumbled. “Come on, Myra.”
Myra exhaled. An hour later they were settled
in a cold room half hidden behind a row of cars
under a naked bulb. “If we weren’t black,”
said Jay, “he’d’ve let us sleep in the lobby,
the white bast—!” “Jay, don’t,” said Myra.
“We’ve got a roof for the night.” She heard the wind
blowing the snow down from Shasta’s peak.
“Be thankful, Jay.” “I’ll be
damned first,” he retorted. He pulled a cot
away from the wall. Myra lay very quiet on the other.
“You all right?” he asked. Myra had a scared look
on her face where she lay near the wall. She tried to
pull herself up. “Jay … Jay … oh … Jay ….
I think it … I think it’s …” “Holy shit … Not here, not now…!”
A clutch of teens were passing a joint behind Sal’s.
The snow was still falling, though lighter. “Hey man,
this stuff’s so strong, I can see Santa coming
over Redding.” “That’s no Santa, that’s a drone,
and he’s comin’ after yo’ tight ass.” The others giggled.
Suddenly someone appeared they didn’t know.
He wore a dark raincoat, which didn’t make much sense.
The boys stopped and stared. “It’s a narc,” one whispered.
“Or some transgender weirdo,” another sneered.
It had the figure of a man but a woman’s face,
it spoke softly but locked their eyes with its own:
each thought the figure looked at him alone.
“None of the above,” it smiled. The boys
were suddenly frightened. “Don’t be afraid. I have news.
Across the alley there’s something you should see.”
It pointed to a garage where a light was burning.
“Hey, it’s late, man. And it’s Christmas. I gotta get home.”
“I bring glad tidings. Go. Look. What have you to lose?”
He looked benignantly at them. “Peace to you.” Then he
seemed to disappear. They looked at each other.
“Man, that stuff is strong,” one of them said.
But they went anyway to the garage. A black man and woman
looked up from a little black baby in a towel and a blanket,
and lying in the sink. From a hole in the wall came a sound
of pigeons, their heads looking down. A stray dog
sat nearby, a cat was curled up on the table,
staring silently at the infant,
who lay watching the boys curiously,
in the unfocused way babies have;
seeming to be wondering where he was.
The boys, still high, fell to their knees.
Sometime after, there was a knock,
and three old men, one with a beard,
one with a funny hat, the third with his fingers
covered with shining rings, came in. “I told you
I was right,” said the one with the hat. “He’s the one.”
“How can you tell?” But the first was silent. The ringed
man nodded deeply to the mother. “Please excuse us.
We’ve come a long way to get here.” Myra smiled shyly,
fatigued from the labor, uncertain, yet taking
these strange happenings as they came. The man removed his rings
and placed them near the baby, their brightness
glimmering like his eyes. “Why are you ….?” she asked,
astonished. The man shook his head and smiled.
The two other men also left small offerings—
the most precious items, it seemed, that they possessed:
a vial of cheap perfume, a handful of costume jewelry.
“We cannot stay,” they said, then with a deep
bow to the child, they left. The man with the beard
said to the bewildered parents, “You do not know
who he is? It isn’t for me to say … But you
will know,” then departed.
“What are they
talking about?” said Jay. Myra wearily
shook her head, then took her newborn baby
who was at last beginning to cry, and opening her blouse,
let him feed greedily. Jay went outside—
the snow had stopped, the sky was deep, empty and clear—
and he looked up. The biggest star he had ever seen—
brighter than the moon on the brightest night of the year—
hung like a beacon, brilliant, straight and motionless, above him.
_____
Christopher Bernard is a novelist, poet, editor and journalist living in San Francisco. His books include the novel A Spy in the Ruins; a book of stories, In the American Night; and The Rose Shipwreck: Poems and Photographs. His novel Voyage to a Phantom City and a new collection of short fiction, Dangerous Stories for Boys, are scheduled for publication in 2015. He is co-editor of Caveat Lector (www.caveat-lector.org) and a regular contributor to Synchronized Chaos Magazine.
The First to Escape
Poems by Clara Hsu
The Poetry Hotel Press
134 pp, $18.00
“It is always better, the ‘other world’
where each motion is a still frame,
perfectly all right to linger in.”
—Cafe Delirium
These lines may stand as a motto for the eloquent collection they encapsulate. We are not here the first, nor are we likely to be the last, to escape into the “other world” embodied in Clara Hsu’s poems, where we too can linger, perfectly right in the ever-widening senses of the term. Poems like these are enchantments to spirit us away, partly to help us escape the bitterly real world but above all to give us distance where we can see more clearly that world from which we have, from which we must, escape if we are to breathe, to live. Hsu’s poems are both entrance and egress, a welcoming and a bon voyage, a palpable breath of the morning air crossing our way across the white page, embers of candle ash in the snow.
“Begin with sadness that permeates
since the feverish hands cooled
Looking beyond
it must have been the wind”
—Wandering Night
Often the reader will find here a deep joy, sometimes delicately, sometimes wildly sensual; sometimes homey, domestic, calm; sometimes hard, with the earthy candor of genuine love, the deep affection that spurns euphemism. But sadness, the exhaustions of love and the instability of even the most modest happiness, also has its rights, to say nothing of its sacraments.
There is the questing for the self, that elusive necessity of being:
“the dreamer
doesn’t know it is she who commands
the dream to appear. It is she who has
been wishing. It is she whose wish takes
form tapping code into the great
unknown. It is her words….”
—Wandering Night
The modern world, that devil’s bargain …
—E.M. Cioran
The devil came to a man one day
and told him: “I will grant to you
undreamed of knowledge, wealth and power;
every hope mankind has known
will real become, or seem to be
on the verge of reality
tomorrow or, at the very most,
the next day, marvelously.
You will dominate the earth,
take your first steps toward the stars,
walk on the mountains of the moon,
touch the sands on the plains of Mars,
weigh the ice on Saturn’s moons,
on your fingers wear her rings,
weigh the universe itself
in the scales of your great mind,
measure its length, its breadth, its age,
its time to come, death and old age,
you will be so sage.
You’ll count the smallest elements
that make it up – the quarks, the strings,
the genes, the chromosomes of all things –
and play with them
to make new worlds, new life, new minds –
you’ll learn
the origin of space and time,
the source of life, the cause of thought,
everything that can be known
you, and you alone, will know.
New York poet Philip Fried’s new book of poems has a bitter humor, an angry sarcasm just this side of despair:
The multi-chemical Lethal is a classic
And one of America’s best-loved cocktails, due
To its featured role on cable’s Death Row show
With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino
—Mixology, a Madrigal
But the bitterness is well earned, as every day – and, with the multiversal bedlam of the internet, sometimes every minute – we are granted yet another example of our continuing descent into barbarism and moral chaos.
Fried’s poems often use a device that has become increasingly common in modern culture, both American and European: they take on “the voice of the devil” in an attempt to shake the reader out of their usual passiveness:
Galloping with his drum, the singer
Rides in a split second over
Plains that outdistance their tympanum sky,
And all by the song’s power.
Ideology gallops the story.
What values spur the teller?
—Ballad
Fried’s poems work their angle and edge from the insanity of our gun-worship:
O portable and concealed god, barely visible
As a bulge, yet guardian of halcyon skies
And mountain majesties from your home in a pocket-,
Pancake-style-belt, or shoulder-holster.
—Prayer to the Small-Arms Deity
to our national narcissism:
First, assemble the Manifest Destiny engine,
…
Fasten the Shining City to the Hill,
… With the Leveraged Capital
Rubberband, stretch an elastic liberty
Until it nearly snaps, from sea to sea.
—Grammar as Glue
to our infatuation with technology, our paranoias over transgressed borders, our feverish materialism, our dehumescent humanism – but above all, to our scattering moral obeisance to the gods of war, our morphing into the labile dictatorship of terror:
We are soliciting bids from a divine
entity for a Full-Protection Covenant,
with renewal options in perpetuity,
to shield the homeland and its future seed.
—The Department of Defense (DoD) Request
for a Covenant (RfC)
The language of these poems blends the schizoid paranoia of military officialdom and the meretricious smarminess of corporate diction with the majestic cadences of the King James Version of the Bible (frequently quoted) and the sleek, solemn latin of the Vulgate, in a mashup of dictions meant to shock with awe at the “sinister giddiness” of our official culture.
Have you brought forth the Predator Drones? Have you armed them with
Hellfire missiles and fledged them with glycol-weeping wings?
….
Does the Killer Bee fly by your wisdom and initialize its missiles? Does
the DarkStar launch at your command, deployed from invisible havens?
…
Whatsoever is under the whole of heaven is mine.
—On the Record
Who is this that comes from the wilderness like pillars of smoke,
perfumed with lambskin and burnt gunpowder?
…
His legs are as pillars of marble, clad in flame-resistant trousers. His head,
crowned with bulletproof Kevlar, is as a watchtower looking toward
Kandahar.
—Canticles
Shimmering with anorexic allure,
these supermodels have learned to stroll with intent,
reinventing themselves up from the balls of their feet.
The Lil Saunder Voluminous Total Jacket
seamlessly encloses a lead core,
including the base, in brass or a suitable metal.
—Catwalk
Other poems combine street-vetted vernacular with quotes from Thoreau and Emerson, museum-ese with the disingenuous customer-friendliness of instruction cards, Victorian-esque translations from the Greek tragedians with the utterances of a Siri app named Sybil, the thuggish inquisitory of a black-site interrogator, chronicles from the dark ages of the future in the stumbling diction of an anonymous monk, and the prim hysteria of newspaper headlines.
The bitter brilliance of these poems should not hide from us the deep compassion and the furious optimism that burns at their heart. Fried’s poems are a poetry of denunciation and warning, as old as Micah and as new as the whispering drone peering in at your window. The anger of these poems is the anger of love. And a determination to seize mind, heart and body and shove us away from the bloody abyss into which we seem so intent on plunging, as though we believed we shall grow wings if only we fall hard enough.
If I have any criticism of the book, it is that I came away with no clear understanding of Fried’s notion of “the good” – aside from building and molding language into fortresses of intention and villages of words. His vision of our time’s evils is eloquent almost to a fault: I hunger to hear his vision of good – even of our time’s “goodness” (only the dark Pollyannas of cynicism refuse it any goodness at all); I’d like him to occasionally drop the sarcastic mask, the much-dented postmodern shield, and show a glimpse of the naïve spirit without the defensive clutch at cleverness.
Not the least of the ironies associated with this book is that it (like Fried’s previous books) is published by a foreign press – to whom thereby we owe many thanks. The elegant design is grateful to both eye and hand – it’s a handsome production all around. But it is one more nasty little self-imposed humiliation to our seemingly unending national list that this much-needed voice had to go beyond the country’s borders, its ever-shrinking, ever-thinning skin, to find a publisher.
_____
Christopher Bernard is a writer, poet, editor and journalist living in San Francisco. His books include the widely acclaimed novel A Spy in the Ruins; a book of stories, In the American Night; and The Rose Shipwreck: Poems and Photographs. His work has appeared in many publications, including cultural and arts journalism in the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Bay Guardian, Philadelphia Inquirer and elsewhere, and poetry and fiction in literary reviews in the U.S. and U.K. He has also written plays and an opera (libretto and score) that have been produced and radio broadcast in the San Francisco Bay Area. His poetry films have been screened in San Francisco and his poetry and fiction have been nominated for Puschcart Prizes. He is co-editor of Caveat Lector (www.caveat-lector.org) and a regular contributor to Synchronized Chaos Magazine.
Llyn Clague’s new book of poems is a charmer. It does what poetry, long expected to do, seems these days to do less and less: it tries to build a bridge – tenuous, delicate, easily breakable as it must be – between the individual and society at large, between the reader and the world.
…. Why
when it is so widely dismissed
as “all about me” – why poetry
about India?
…
… can poetry –
more allusive than analytic
daemonic than descriptive –
in flashes of India reveal landscapes
inside you?
Subjectivism has long been the presiding curse of modern poetry, to say nothing of modern culture, which has turned self-centeredness from the acme of sin into society’s prime motivator.
The philosophical roots of subjectivism go back to the idealism of modern thought, beginning with Descartes but finding its strongest support in Kant, who convinced many thinkers up to our time that “reality” is not directly accessible to us, that the only access we have is to the thoughts in our minds – although today even the word “mind” is suspect, and only “the brain” is scientifically correct, although even the doughtiest neuroscientist has yet to locate a thought in the brain.
Rheims Cathedral, burning during the early days of World War I (G. Fraipont, 1915)
The Beast and Mr. James (an excerpt)
A play about Henry James and World War I, by Christopher Bernard
Act 2: 1914
London. Evening. A lobby in Covent Garden with stairs sweeping upward in the background; “Libiamo” from Verdi’s La Traviata is playing in the background.
HENRY JAMES is anxiously pacing the lobby, occasionally chewing a thumbnail. His hat and cane lie on a nearby lobby bench. He is dressed, with subdued elegance, for the opera – dark suit, light vest, elegant cravat, patent leather shoes, etc.
The music fades a little; a box door has closed.
HENRY JAMES (to himself): What did dear, kind Edith call me? A nervous nelly, with the imagination of disaster. Oh fie! I’m as nervous as a young cat. The worst can’t possibly be upon us – not now. They must settle something between them. They can’t be so mad as not to. They must see the stakes. Our countries are no longer run by lunatics and the brain-dead spawn of in-bred families. Common sense must have come to count for something in this bloody epoch.
USHER enters.
USHER (with a deeply reproving look; very loudly): Please, sir, be quiet so that the members of the audience can enjoy the music! Thank you, sir!
He leaves with a departing scowl at HENRY JAMES, who glares after him.
BURGESS, JAMES’s valet, dressed in outdoor ware, enters, carrying a newspaper.
HENRY JAMES (with a flushed hope, takes the paper; in a loud whisper): Thank you, Burgess, forgive me for driving you out in the middle of the night, but I just could not … (At sight of the front page, he lets out a cry, almost a shout.) No! … The Kaiser, that … no, no! …
He reads the column with moments when he pauses and stares over the top of the paper in despair, as the music continues in the background.
HENRY JAMES (with no attempt to be quiet): He’s mad! They are allmad!
He then takes his hat and cane and leaves hurriedly, with a gesture to BURGESS to follow, as the USHER re-enters, looking like thunder at them as they depart. “Libiamo” swells to a climax and ends, with wild applause.
