#Tomato Paste Factory China | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

castielchitaqua · 3 years ago

Text

kaddish, allen ginsberg

I Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village. downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I’ve been up all night, talking, talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues shout blind on the phonograph the rhythm the rhythm—and your memory in my head three years after—And read Adonais’ last triumphant stanzas aloud—wept, realizing how we suffer— And how Death is that remedy all singers dream of, sing, remember, prophesy as in the Hebrew Anthem, or the Buddhist Book of Answers—and my own imagination of a withered leaf—at dawn— Dreaming back thru life, Your time—and mine accelerating toward Apocalypse, the final moment—the flower burning in the Day—and what comes after, looking back on the mind itself that saw an American city a flash away, and the great dream of Me or China, or you and a phantom Russia, or a crumpled bed that never existed— like a poem in the dark—escaped back to Oblivion— No more to say, and nothing to weep for but the Beings in the Dream, trapped in its disappearance, sighing, screaming with it, buying and selling pieces of phantom, worshipping each other, worshipping the God included in it all—longing or inevitability?—while it lasts, a Vision—anything more? It leaps about me, as I go out and walk the street, look back over my shoulder, Seventh Avenue, the battlements of window office buildings shouldering each other high, under a cloud, tall as the sky an instant—and the sky above—an old blue place. or down the Avenue to the south, to—as I walk toward the Lower East Side—where you walked 50 years ago, little girl—from Russia, eating the first poisonous tomatoes of America—frightened on the dock— then struggling in the crowds of Orchard Street toward what?—toward Newark— toward candy store, first home-made sodas of the century, hand-churned ice cream in backroom on musty brownfloor boards— Toward education marriage nervous breakdown, operation, teaching school, and learning to be mad, in a dream—what is this life? Toward the Key in the window—and the great Key lays its head of light on top of Manhattan, and over the floor, and lays down on the sidewalk—in a single vast beam, moving, as I walk down First toward the Yiddish Theater—and the place of poverty you knew, and I know, but without caring now—Strange to have moved thru Paterson, and the West, and Europe and here again, with the cries of Spaniards now in the doorstoops doors and dark boys on the street, fire escapes old as you -Tho you’re not old now, that’s left here with me— Myself, anyhow, maybe as old as the universe—and I guess that dies with us—enough to cancel all that comes—What came is gone forever every time— That’s good! That leaves it open for no regret—no fear radiators, lacklove, torture even toothache in the end— Though while it comes it is a lion that eats the soul—and the lamb, the soul, in us, alas, offering itself in sacrifice to change’s fierce hunger—hair and teeth—and the roar of bonepain, skull bare, break rib, rot-skin, braintricked Implacability. Ai! ai! we do worse! We are in a fix! And you’re out, Death let you out, Death had the Mercy, you’re done with your century, done with God, done with the path thru it—Done with yourself at last—Pure—Back to the Babe dark before your Father, before us all—before the world— There, rest. No more suffering for you. I know where you’ve gone, it’s good. No more flowers in the summer fields of New York, no joy now, no more fear of Louis, and no more of his sweetness and glasses, his high school decades, debts, loves, frightened telephone calls, conception beds, relatives, hands— No more of sister Elanor,.—she gone before you—we kept it secret—you killed her—or she killed herself to bear with you—an arthritic heart—But Death’s killed you both—No matter— Nor your memory of your mother, 1915 tears in silent movies weeks and weeks—forgetting, aggrieve watching Marie Dressler address humanity, Chaplin dance in youth, or Boris Godunov, Chaliapin’s at the Met, hailing his voice of a weeping Czar—by standing

room with Elanor & Max—watching also the Capitalists take seats in Orchestra, white furs, diamonds, with the YPSL’s hitch-hiking thru Pennsylvania, in black baggy gym skirts pants, photograph of 4 girls holding each other round the waste, and laughing eye, too coy, virginal solitude of 1920 all girls grown old, or dead, now, and that long hair in the grave—lucky to have husbands later— You made it—I came too—Eugene my brother before (still grieving now and will gream on to his last stiff hand, as he goes thru his cancer—or kill—later perhaps—soon he will think—) And it’s the last moment I remember, which I see them all, thru myself, now—tho not you I didn’t foresee what you felt—what more hideous gape of bad mouth came first—to you—and were you prepared? To go where? In that Dark—that—in that God? a radiance? A Lord in the Void? Like an eye in the black cloud in a dream? Adonoi at last, with you? Beyond my remembrance! Incapable to guess! Not merely the yellow skull in the grave, or a box of worm dust, and a stained ribbon—Deathshead with Halo? can you believe it? Is it only the sun that shines once for the mind, only the flash of existence, than none ever was? Nothing beyond what we have—what you had—that so pitiful—yet Triumph, to have been here, and changed, like a tree, broken, or flower—fed to the ground—but mad, with its petals, colored, thinking Great Universe, shaken, cut in the head, leaf stript, hid in an egg crate hospital, cloth wrapped, sore—freaked in the moon brain, Naughtless. No flower like that flower, which knew itself in the garden, and fought the knife—lost Cut down by an idiot Snowman’s icy—even in the Spring—strange ghost thought—some Death—Sharp icicle in his hand—crowned with old roses—a dog for his eyes—cock of a sweatshop—heart of electric irons. All the accumulations of life, that wear us out—clocks, bodies, consciousness, shoes, breasts—begotten sons—your Communism—‘Paranoia’ into hospitals. You once kicked Elanor in the leg, she died of heart failure later. You of stroke. Asleep? within a year, the two of you, sisters in death. Is Elanor happy? Max grieves alive in an office on Lower Broadway, lone large mustache over midnight Accountings, not sure. l His life passes—as he sees—and what does he doubt now? Still dream of making money, or that might have made money, hired nurse, had children, found even your Immortality, Naomi? I’ll see him soon. Now I’ve got to cut through—to talk to you—as I didn’t when you had a mouth. Forever. And we’re bound for that, Forever—like Emily Dickinson’s horses—headed to the End. They know the way—These Steeds—run faster than we think—it’s our own life they cross—and take with them. Magnificent, mourned no more, marred of heart, mind behind, married dreamed, mortal changed—Ass and face done with murder. In the world, given, flower maddened, made no Utopia, shut under pine, almed in Earth, balmed in Lone, Jehovah, accept. Nameless, One Faced, Forever beyond me, beginningless, endless, Father in death. Tho I am not there for this Prophecy, I am unmarried, I’m hymnless, I’m Heavenless, headless in blisshood I would still adore Thee, Heaven, after Death, only One blessed in Nothingness, not light or darkness, Dayless Eternity— Take this, this Psalm, from me, burst from my hand in a day, some of my Time, now given to Nothing—to praise Thee—But Death This is the end, the redemption from Wilderness, way for the Wonderer, House sought for All, black handkerchief washed clean by weeping—page beyond Psalm—Last change of mine and Naomi—to God’s perfect Darkness—Death, stay thy phantoms! II Over and over—refrain—of the Hospitals—still haven’t written your history—leave it abstract—a few images run thru the mind—like the saxophone chorus of houses and years—remembrance of electrical shocks. By long nites as a child in Paterson apartment, watching over your nervousness—you were fat—your next move— By that afternoon I stayed home from school to take care of you—once and for all—when I vowed forever that once man disagreed with my opinion of the cosmos, I was lost— By my

later burden—vow to illuminate mankind—this is release of particulars—(mad as you)—(sanity a trick of agreement)— But you stared out the window on the Broadway Church corner, and spied a mystical assassin from Newark, So phoned the Doctor—‘OK go way for a rest’—so I put on my coat and walked you downstreet—On the way a grammarschool boy screamed, unaccountably—‘Where you goin Lady to Death’? I shuddered— and you covered your nose with motheaten fur collar, gas mask against poison sneaked into downtown atmosphere, sprayed by Grandma— And was the driver of the cheesebox Public Service bus a member of the gang? You shuddered at his face, I could hardly get you on—to New York, very Times Square, to grab another Greyhound— where we hung around 2 hours fighting invisible bugs and jewish sickness—breeze poisoned by Roosevelt— out to get you—and me tagging along, hoping it would end in a quiet room in a Victorian house by a lake. Ride 3 hours thru tunnels past all American industry, Bayonne preparing for World War II, tanks, gas fields, soda factories, diners, loco-motive roundhouse fortress—into piney woods New Jersey Indians—calm towns—long roads thru sandy tree fields— Bridges by deerless creeks, old wampum loading the streambeddown there a tomahawk or Pocahontas bone—and a million old ladies voting for Roosevelt in brown small houses, roads off the Madness highway— perhaps a hawk in a tree, or a hermit looking for an owl-filled branch— All the time arguing—afraid of strangers in the forward double seat, snoring regardless—what busride they snore on now? ‘Allen, you don’t understand—it’s—ever since those 3 big sticks up my back—they did something to me in Hospital, they poisoned me, they want to see me dead—3 big sticks, 3 big sticks— ‘The Bitch! Old Grandma! Last week I saw her, dressed in pants like an old man, with a sack on her back, climbing up the brick side of the apartment ‘On the fire escape, with poison germs, to throw on me—at night—maybe Louis is helping her—he’s under her power— ‘I’m your mother, take me to Lakewood’ (near where Graf Zeppelin had crashed before, all Hitler in Explosion) ‘where I can hide.’ We got there—Dr. Whatzis rest home—she hid behind a closet—demanded a blood transfusion. We were kicked out—tramping with Valise to unknown shady lawn houses—dusk, pine trees after dark—long dead street filled with crickets and poison ivy— I shut her up by now—big house REST HOME ROOMS—gave the landlady her money for the week—carried up the iron valise—sat on bed waiting to escape— Neat room in attic with friendly bedcover—lace curtains—spinning wheel rug—Stained wallpaper old as Naomi. We were home. I left on the next bus to New York—laid my head back in the last seat, depressed—the worst yet to come?—abandoning her, rode in torpor—I was only 12. Would she hide in her room and come out cheerful for breakfast? Or lock her door and stare thru the window for sidestreet spies? Listen at keyholes for Hitlerian invisible gas? Dream in a chair—or mock me, by—in front of a mirror, alone? 12 riding the bus at nite thru New Jersey, have left Naomi to Parcae in Lakewood’s haunted house—left to my own fate bus—sunk in a seat—all violins broken—my heart sore in my ribs—mind was empty—Would she were safe in her coffin— Or back at Normal School in Newark, studying up on America in a black skirt—winter on the street without lunch—a penny a pickle—home at night to take care of Elanor in the bedroom— First nervous breakdown was 1919—she stayed home from school and lay in a dark room for three weeks—something bad—never said what—every noise hurt—dreams of the creaks of Wall Street— Before the gray Depression—went upstate New York—recovered—Lou took photo of her sitting crossleg on the grass—her long hair wound with flowers—smiling—playing lullabies on mandolin—poison ivy smoke in left-wing summer camps and me in infancy saw trees— or back teaching school, laughing with idiots, the backward classes—her Russian specialty—morons with dreamy lips, great eyes, thin feet & sicky fingers, swaybacked, rachitic— great heads pendulous

over Alice in Wonderland, a blackboard full of C A T. Naomi reading patiently, story out of a Communist fairy book—Tale of the Sudden Sweetness of the Dictator—Forgiveness of Warlocks—Armies Kissing— Deathsheads Around the Green Table—The King & the Workers—Paterson Press printed them up in the ’30s till she went mad, or they folded, both. O Paterson! I got home late that nite. Louis was worried. How could I be so—didn’t I think? I shouldn’t have left her. Mad in Lakewood. Call the Doctor. Phone the home in the pines. Too late. Went to bed exhausted, wanting to leave the world (probably that year newly in love with R my high school mind hero, jewish boy who came a doctor later—then silent neat kid— I later laying down life for him, moved to Manhattan—followed him to college—Prayed on ferry to help mankind if admitted—vowed, the day I journeyed to Entrance Exam— by being honest revolutionary labor lawyer—would train for that—inspired by Sacco Vanzetti, Norman Thomas, Debs, Altgeld, Sand-burg, Poe—Little Blue Books. I wanted to be President, or Senator. ignorant woe—later dreams of kneeling by R’s shocked knees declaring my love of 1941—What sweetness he’d have shown me, tho, that I’d wished him & despaired—first love—a crush— Later a mortal avalanche, whole mountains of homosexuality, Matterhorns of cock, Grand Canyons of asshole—weight on my melancholy head— meanwhile I walked on Broadway imagining Infinity like a rubber ball without space beyond—what’s outside?—coming home to Graham Avenue still melancholy passing the lone green hedges across the street, dreaming after the movies—) The telephone rang at 2 A.M.—Emergency—she’d gone mad—Naomi hiding under the bed screaming bugs of Mussolini—Help! Louis! Buba! Fascists! Death!—the landlady frightened—old fag attendant screaming back at her— Terror, that woke the neighbors—old ladies on the second floor recovering from menopause—all those rags between thighs, clean sheets, sorry over lost babies—husbands ashen—children sneering at Yale, or putting oil in hair at CCNY—or trembling in Montclair State Teachers College like Eugene— Her big leg crouched to her breast, hand outstretched Keep Away, wool dress on her thighs, fur coat dragged under the bed—she barricaded herself under bedspring with suitcases. Louis in pajamas listening to phone, frightened—do now?—Who could know?—my fault, delivering her to solitude?—sitting in the dark room on the sofa, trembling, to figure out— He took the morning train to Lakewood, Naomi still under bed—thought he brought poison Cops—Naomi screaming—Louis what happened to your heart then? Have you been killed by Naomi’s ecstasy? Dragged her out, around the corner, a cab, forced her in with valise, but the driver left them off at drugstore. Bus stop, two hours’ wait. I lay in bed nervous in the 4-room apartment, the big bed in living room, next to Louis’ desk—shaking—he came home that nite, late, told me what happened. Naomi at the prescription counter defending herself from the enemy—racks of children’s books, douche bags, aspirins, pots, blood—‘Don’t come near me—murderers! Keep away! Promise not to kill me!’ Louis in horror at the soda fountain—with Lakewood girlscouts—Coke addicts—nurses—busmen hung on schedule—Police from country precinct, dumbed—and a priest dreaming of pigs on an ancient cliff? Smelling the air—Louis pointing to emptiness?—Customers vomiting their Cokes—or staring—Louis humiliated—Naomi triumphant—The Announcement of the Plot. Bus arrives, the drivers won’t have them on trip to New York. Phonecalls to Dr. Whatzis, ‘She needs a rest,’ The mental hospital—State Greystone Doctors—‘Bring her here, Mr. Ginsberg.’ Naomi, Naomi—sweating, bulge-eyed, fat, the dress unbuttoned at one side—hair over brow, her stocking hanging evilly on her legs—screaming for a blood transfusion—one righteous hand upraised—a shoe in it—barefoot in the Pharmacy— The enemies approach—what poisons? Tape recorders? FBI? Zhdanov hiding behind the counter? Trotsky mixing rat bacteria in the back of the store? Uncle Sam in Newark, plotting deathly

perfumes in the Negro district? Uncle Ephraim, drunk with murder in the politician’s bar, scheming of Hague? Aunt Rose passing water thru the needles of the Spanish Civil War? till the hired $35 ambulance came from Red Bank——Grabbed her arms—strapped her on the stretcher—moaning, poisoned by imaginaries, vomiting chemicals thru Jersey, begging mercy from Essex County to Morristown— And back to Greystone where she lay three years—that was the last breakthrough, delivered her to Madhouse again— On what wards—I walked there later, oft—old catatonic ladies, gray as cloud or ash or walls—sit crooning over floorspace—Chairs—and the wrinkled hags acreep, accusing—begging my 13-year-old mercy— ‘Take me home’—I went alone sometimes looking for the lost Naomi, taking Shock—and I’d say, ‘No, you’re crazy Mama,—Trust the Drs.’— And Eugene, my brother, her elder son, away studying Law in a furnished room in Newark— came Paterson-ward next day—and he sat on the broken-down couch in the living room—‘We had to send her back to Greystone’— —his face perplexed, so young, then eyes with tears—then crept weeping all over his face—‘What for?’ wail vibrating in his cheekbones, eyes closed up, high voice—Eugene’s face of pain. Him faraway, escaped to an Elevator in the Newark Library, his bottle daily milk on windowsill of $5 week furn room downtown at trolley tracks— He worked 8 hrs. a day for $20/wk—thru Law School years—stayed by himself innocent near negro whorehouses. Unlaid, poor virgin—writing poems about Ideals and politics letters to the editor Pat Eve News—(we both wrote, denouncing Senator Borah and Isolationists—and felt mysterious toward Paterson City Hall— I sneaked inside it once—local Moloch tower with phallus spire & cap o’ ornament, strange gothic Poetry that stood on Market Street—replica Lyons’ Hotel de Ville— wings, balcony & scrollwork portals, gateway to the giant city clock, secret map room full of Hawthorne—dark Debs in the Board of Tax—Rembrandt smoking in the gloom— Silent polished desks in the great committee room—Aldermen? Bd of Finance? Mosca the hairdresser aplot—Crapp the gangster issuing orders from the john—The madmen struggling over Zone, Fire, Cops & Backroom Metaphysics—we’re all dead—outside by the bus stop Eugene stared thru childhood— where the Evangelist preached madly for 3 decades, hard-haired, cracked & true to his mean Bible—chalked Prepare to Meet Thy God on civic pave— or God is Love on the railroad overpass concrete—he raved like I would rave, the lone Evangelist—Death on City Hall—) But Gene, young,—been Montclair Teachers College 4 years—taught half year & quit to go ahead in life—afraid of Discipline Problems—dark sex Italian students, raw girls getting laid, no English, sonnets disregarded—and he did not know much—just that he lost— so broke his life in two and paid for Law—read huge blue books and rode the ancient elevator 13 miles away in Newark & studied up hard for the future just found the Scream of Naomi on his failure doorstep, for the final time, Naomi gone, us lonely—home—him sitting there— Then have some chicken soup, Eugene. The Man of Evangel wails in front of City Hall. And this year Lou has poetic loves of suburb middle age—in secret—music from his 1937 book—Sincere—he longs for beauty— No love since Naomi screamed—since 1923?—now lost in Greystone ward—new shock for her—Electricity, following the 40 Insulin. And Metrazol had made her fat. So that a few years later she came home again—we’d much advanced and planned—I waited for that day—my Mother again to cook & —play the piano—sing at mandolin—Lung Stew, & Stenka Razin, & the communist line on the war with Finland—and Louis in debt—,uspected to he poisoned money—mysterious capitalisms —& walked down the long front hall & looked at the furniture. She never remembered it all. Some amnesia. Examined the doilies—and the dining room set was sold— the Mahogany table—20 years love—gone to the junk man—we still had the piano—and the book of Poe—and the Mandolin, tho needed some string, dusty— She went to the backroom to lie down in

bed and ruminate, or nap, hide—I went in with her, not leave her by herself—lay in bed next to her—shades pulled, dusky, late afternoon—Louis in front room at desk, waiting—perhaps boiling chicken for supper— ‘Don’t be afraid of me because I’m just coming back home from the mental hospital—I’m your mother—’ Poor love, lost—a fear—I lay there—Said, ‘I love you Naomi,’—stiff, next to her arm. I would have cried, was this the comfortless lone union?—Nervous, and she got up soon. Was she ever satisfied? And—by herself sat on the new couch by the front windows, uneasy—cheek leaning on her hand—narrowing eye—at what fate that day— Picking her tooth with her nail, lips formed an O, suspicion—thought’s old worn vagina—absent sideglance of eye—some evil debt written in the wall, unpaid—& the aged breasts of Newark come near— May have heard radio gossip thru the wires in her head, controlled by 3 big sticks left in her back by gangsters in amnesia, thru the hospital—caused pain between her shoulders— Into her head—Roosevelt should know her case, she told me—Afraid to kill her, now, that the government knew their names—traced back to Hitler—wanted to leave Louis’ house forever. One night, sudden attack—her noise in the bathroom—like croaking up her soul—convulsions and red vomit coming out of her mouth—diarrhea water exploding from her behind—on all fours in front of the toilet—urine running between her legs—left retching on the tile floor smeared with her black feces—unfainted— At forty, varicosed, nude, fat, doomed, hiding outside the apartment door near the elevator calling Police, yelling for her girlfriend Rose to help— Once locked herself in with razor or iodine—could hear her cough in tears at sink—Lou broke through glass green-painted door, we pulled her out to the bedroom. Then quiet for months that winter—walks, alone, nearby on Broadway, read Daily Worker—Broke her arm, fell on icy street— Began to scheme escape from cosmic financial murder-plots—later she ran away to the Bronx to her sister Elanor. And there’s another saga of late Naomi in New York. Or thru Elanor or the Workmen’s Circle, where she worked, ad-dressing envelopes, she made out—went shopping for Campbell’s tomato soup—saved money Louis mailed her— Later she found a boyfriend, and he was a doctor—Dr. Isaac worked for National Maritime Union—now Italian bald and pudgy old doll—who was himself an orphan—but they kicked him out—Old cruelties— Sloppier, sat around on bed or chair, in corset dreaming to herself—‘I’m hot—I’m getting fat—I used to have such a beautiful figure before I went to the hospital—You should have seen me in Woodbine—’ This in a furnished room around the NMU hall, 1943. Looking at naked baby pictures in the magazine—baby powder advertisements, strained lamb carrots—‘I will think nothing but beautiful thoughts.’ Revolving her head round and round on her neck at window light in summertime, in hypnotize, in doven-dream recall— ‘I touch his cheek, I touch his cheek, he touches my lips with his hand, I think beautiful thoughts, the baby has a beautiful hand.’— Or a No-shake of her body, disgust—some thought of Buchenwald—some insulin passes thru her head—a grimace nerve shudder at Involuntary (as shudder when I piss)—bad chemical in her cortex—‘No don’t think of that. He’s a rat.’ Naomi: ‘And when we die we become an onion, a cabbage, a carrot, or a squash, a vegetable.’ I come downtown from Columbia and agree. She reads the Bible, thinks beautiful thoughts all day. ‘Yesterday I saw God. What did he look like? Well, in the afternoon I climbed up a ladder—he has a cheap cabin in the country, like Monroe, N.Y. the chicken farms in the wood. He was a lonely old man with a white beard. ‘I cooked supper for him. I made him a nice supper—lentil soup, vegetables, bread & butter—miltz—he sat down at the table and ate, he was sad. ‘I told him, Look at all those fightings and killings down there, What’s the matter? Why don’t you put a stop to it? ‘I try, he said—That’s all he could do, he looked tired. He’s a bachelor so long, and he likes lentil

soup.’ Serving me meanwhile, a plate of cold fish—chopped raw cabbage dript with tapwater—smelly tomatoes—week-old health food—grated beets & carrots with leaky juice, warm—more and more disconsolate food—I can’t eat it for nausea sometimes—the Charity of her hands stinking with Manhattan, madness, desire to please me, cold undercooked fish—pale red near the bones. Her smells—and oft naked in the room, so that I stare ahead, or turn a book ignoring her. One time I thought she was trying to make me come lay her—flirting to herself at sink—lay back on huge bed that filled most of the room, dress up round her hips, big slash of hair, scars of operations, pancreas, belly wounds, abortions, appendix, stitching of incisions pulling down in the fat like hideous thick zippers—ragged long lips between her legs—What, even, smell of asshole? I was cold—later revolted a little, not much—seemed perhaps a good idea to try—know the Monster of the Beginning Womb—Perhaps—that way. Would she care? She needs a lover. Yisborach, v’yistabach, v’yispoar, v’yisroman, v’yisnaseh, v’yishador, v’yishalleh, v’yishallol, sh’meh d’kudsho, b’rich hu. And Louis reestablishing himself in Paterson grimy apartment in negro district—living in dark rooms—but found himself a girl he later married, falling in love again—tho sere & shy—hurt with 20 years Naomi’s mad idealism. Once I came home, after longtime in N.Y., he’s lonely—sitting in the bedroom, he at desk chair turned round to face me—weeps, tears in red eyes under his glasses— That we’d left him—Gene gone strangely into army—she out on her own in N.Y., almost childish in her furnished room. So Louis walked downtown to postoffice to get mail, taught in highschool—stayed at poetry desk, forlorn—ate grief at Bickford’s all these years—are gone. Eugene got out of the Army, came home changed and lone—cut off his nose in jewish operation—for years stopped girls on Broadway for cups of coffee to get laid—Went to NYU, serious there, to finish Law.— And Gene lived with her, ate naked fishcakes, cheap, while she got crazier—He got thin, or felt helpless, Naomi striking 1920 poses at the moon, half-naked in the next bed. bit his nails and studied—was the weird nurse-son—Next year he moved to a room near Columbia—though she wanted to live with her children— ‘Listen to your mother’s plea, I beg you’—Louis still sending her checks—I was in bughouse that year 8 months—my own visions unmentioned in this here Lament— But then went half mad—Hitler in her room, she saw his mustache in the sink—afraid of Dr. Isaac now, suspecting that he was in on the Newark plot—went up to Bronx to live near Elanor’s Rheumatic Heart— And Uncle Max never got up before noon, tho Naomi at 6 A.M. was listening to the radio for spies—or searching the windowsill, for in the empty lot downstairs, an old man creeps with his bag stuffing packages of garbage in his hanging black overcoat. Max’s sister Edie works—17 years bookkeeper at Gimbels—lived downstairs in apartment house, divorced—so Edie took in Naomi on Rochambeau Ave— Woodlawn Cemetery across the street, vast dale of graves where Poe once—Last stop on Bronx subway—lots of communists in that area. Who enrolled for painting classes at night in Bronx Adult High School—walked alone under Van Cortlandt Elevated line to class—paints Naomiisms— Humans sitting on the grass in some Camp No-Worry summers yore—saints with droopy faces and long-ill-fitting pants, from hospital— Brides in front of Lower East Side with short grooms—lost El trains running over the Babylonian apartment rooftops in the Bronx— Sad paintings—but she expressed herself. Her mandolin gone, all strings broke in her head, she tried. Toward Beauty? or some old life Message? But started kicking Elanor, and Elanor had heart trouble—came upstairs and asked her about Spydom for hours,—Elanor frazzled. Max away at office, accounting for cigar stores till at night. ‘I am a great woman—am truly a beautiful soul—and because of that they (Hitler, Grandma, Hearst, the Capitalists, Franco, Daily News, the ’20s, Mussolini, the living

dead) want to shut me up—Buba’s the head of a spider network—’ Kicking the girls, Edie & Elanor—Woke Edie at midnite to tell her she was a spy and Elanor a rat. Edie worked all day and couldn’t take it—She was organizing the union.—And Elanor began dying, upstairs in bed. The relatives call me up, she’s getting worse—I was the only one left—Went on the subway with Eugene to see her, ate stale fish— ‘My sister whispers in the radio—Louis must be in the apartment—his mother tells him what to say—LIARS!—I cooked for my two children—I played the mandolin—’ Last night the nightingale woke me / Last night when all was still / it sang in the golden moonlight / from on the wintry hill. She did. I pushed her against the door and shouted ‘DON’T KICK ELANOR!’—she stared at me—Contempt—die—disbelief her sons are so naive, so dumb—‘Elanor is the worst spy! She’s taking orders!’ ‘—No wires in the room!’—I’m yelling at her—last ditch, Eugene listening on the bed—what can he do to escape that fatal Mama—‘You’ve been away from Louis years already—Grandma’s too old to walk—’ We’re all alive at once then—even me & Gene & Naomi in one mythological Cousinesque room—screaming at each other in the Forever—I in Columbia jacket, she half undressed. I banging against her head which saw Radios, Sticks, Hitlers—the gamut of Hallucinations—for real—her own universe—no road that goes elsewhere—to my own—No America, not even a world— That you go as all men, as Van Gogh, as mad Hannah, all the same—to the last doom—Thunder, Spirits, lightning! I’ve seen your grave! O strange Naomi! My own—cracked grave! Shema Y’Israel—I am Svul Avrum—you—in death? Your last night in the darkness of the Bronx—I phonecalled—thru hospital to secret police that came, when you and I were alone, shrieking at Elanor in my ear—who breathed hard in her own bed, got thin— Nor will forget, the doorknock, at your fright of spies,—Law advancing, on my honor—Eternity entering the room—you running to the bathroom undressed, hiding in protest from the last heroic fate— staring at my eyes, betrayed—the final cops of madness rescuing me—from your foot against the broken heart of Elanor, your voice at Edie weary of Gimbels coming home to broken radio—and Louis needing a poor divorce, he wants to get married soon—Eugene dreaming, hiding at 125 St., suing negroes for money on crud furniture, defending black girls— Protests from the bathroom—Said you were sane—dressing in a cotton robe, your shoes, then new, your purse and newspaper clippingsno—your honesty— as you vainly made your lips more real with lipstick, looking in the mirror to see if the Insanity was Me or a earful of police. or Grandma spying at 78—Your vision—Her climbing over the walls of the cemetery with political kidnapper’s bag—or what you saw on the walls of the Bronx, in pink nightgown at midnight, staring out the window on the empty lot— Ah Rochambeau Ave.—Playground of Phantoms—last apartment in the Bronx for spies—last home for Elanor or Naomi, here these communist sisters lost their revolution— ‘All right—put on your coat Mrs.—let’s go—We have the wagon downstairs—you want to come with her to the station?’ The ride then—held Naomi’s hand, and held her head to my breast, I’m taller—kissed her and said I did it for the best—Elanor sick—and Max with heart condition—Needs— To me—‘Why did you do this?’—‘Yes Mrs., your son will have to leave you in an hour’—The Ambulance came in a few hours—drove off at 4 A.M. to some Bellevue in the night downtown—gone to the hospital forever. I saw her led away—she waved, tears in her eyes. Two years, after a trip to Mexico—bleak in the flat plain near Brentwood, scrub brush and grass around the unused RR train track to the crazyhouse— new brick 20 story central building—lost on the vast lawns of madtown on Long Island—huge cities of the moon. Asylum spreads out giant wings above the path to a minute black hole—the door—entrance thru crotch— I went in—smelt funny—the halls again—up elevator—to a glass door on a Women’s Ward—to Naomi—Two nurses buxom white—They led her out, Naomi

stared—and I gaspt—She’d had a stroke— Too thin, shrunk on her bones—age come to Naomi—now broken into white hair—loose dress on her skeleton—face sunk, old! withered—cheek of crone— One hand stiff—heaviness of forties & menopause reduced by one heart stroke, lame now—wrinkles—a scar on her head, the lobotomy—ruin, the hand dipping downwards to death— O Russian faced, woman on the grass, your long black hair is crowned with flowers, the mandolin is on your knees— Communist beauty, sit here married in the summer among daisies, promised happiness at hand— holy mother, now you smile on your love, your world is born anew, children run naked in the field spotted with dandelions, they eat in the plum tree grove at the end of the meadow and find a cabin where a white-haired negro teaches the mystery of his rainbarrel— blessed daughter come to America, I long to hear your voice again, remembering your mother’s music, in the Song of the Natural Front— O glorious muse that bore me from the womb, gave suck first mystic life & taught me talk and music, from whose pained head I first took Vision— Tortured and beaten in the skull—What mad hallucinations of the damned that drive me out of my own skull to seek Eternity till I find Peace for Thee, O Poetry—and for all humankind call on the Origin Death which is the mother of the universe!—Now wear your nakedness forever, white flowers in your hair, your marriage sealed behind the sky—no revolution might destroy that maidenhood— O beautiful Garbo of my Karma—all photographs from 1920 in Camp Nicht-Gedeiget here unchanged—with all the teachers from Vewark—Nor Elanor be gone, nor Max await his specter—nor Louis retire from this High School— Back! You! Naomi! Skull on you! Gaunt immortality and revolution come—small broken woman—the ashen indoor eyes of hospitals, ward grayness on skin— ‘Are you a spy?’ I sat at the sour table, eyes filling with tears—‘Who are you? Did Louis send you?—The wires—’ in her hair, as she beat on her head—‘I’m not a bad girl—don’t murder me!—I hear the ceiling—I raised two children—’ Two years since I’d been there—I started to cry—She stared—nurse broke up the meeting a moment—I went into the bathroom to hide, against the toilet white walls ‘The Horror’ I weeping—to see her again—‘The Horror’—as if she were dead thru funeral rot in—‘The Horror!’ I came back she yelled more—they led her away—‘You’re not Allen—’ I watched her face—but she passed by me, not looking— Opened the door to the ward,—she went thru without a glance back, quiet suddenly—I stared out—she looked old—the verge of the grave—‘All the Horror!’ Another year, I left N.Y.—on West Coast in Berkeley cottage dreamed of her soul—that, thru life, in what form it stood in that body, ashen or manic, gone beyond joy— near its death—with eyes—was my own love in its form, the Naomi, my mother on earth still—sent her long letter—& wrote hymns to the mad—Work of the merciful Lord of Poetry. that causes the broken grass to be green, or the rock to break in grass—or the Sun to be constant to earth—Sun of all sunflowers and days on bright iron bridges—what shines on old hospitals—as on my yard— Returning from San Francisco one night, Orlovsky in my room—Whalen in his peaceful chair—a telegram from Gene, Naomi dead— Outside I bent my head to the ground under the bushes near the garage—knew she was better— at last—not left to look on Earth alone—2 years of solitude—no one, at age nearing 60—old woman of skulls—once long-tressed Naomi of Bible— or Ruth who wept in America—Rebecca aged in Newark—David remembering his Harp, now lawyer at Yale or Srul Avrum—Israel Abraham—myself—to sing in the wilderness toward God—O Elohim!—so to the end—2 days after her death I got her letter— Strange Prophecies anew! She wrote—‘The key is in the window, the key is in the sunlight at the window—I have the key—Get married Allen don’t take drugs—the key is in the bars, in the sunlight in the window. Love, your mother’ which is Naomi— Hymmnn In the world which He has created according to his will Blessed Praised Magnified Lauded

Exalted the Name of the Holy One Blessed is He! In the house in Newark Blessed is He! In the madhouse Blessed is He! In the house of Death Blessed is He! Blessed be He in homosexuality! Blessed be He in Paranoia! Blessed be He in the city! Blessed be He in the Book! Blessed be He who dwells in the shadow! Blessed be He! Blessed be He! Blessed be you Naomi in tears! Blessed be you Naomi in fears! Blessed Blessed Blessed in sickness! Blessed be you Naomi in Hospitals! Blessed be you Naomi in solitude! Blest be your triumph! Blest be your bars! Blest be your last years’ loneliness! Blest be your failure! Best be your stroke! Blest be the close of your eye! Blest be the gaunt of your cheek! Blest be your withered thighs! Blessed be Thee Naomi in Death! Blessed be Death! Blessed be Death! Blessed be He Who leads all sorrow to Heaven! Blessed be He in the end! Blessed be He who builds Heaven in Darkness! Blessed Blessed Blessed be He! Blessed be He! Blessed be Death on us All! III Only to have not forgotten the beginning in which she drank cheap sodas in the morgues of Newark, only to have seen her weeping on gray tables in long wards of her universe only to have known the weird ideas of Hitler at the door, the wires in her head, the three big sticks rammed down her back, the voices in the ceiling shrieking out her ugly early lays for 30 years, only to have seen the time-jumps, memory lapse, the crash of wars, the roar and silence of a vast electric shock, only to have seen her painting crude pictures of Elevateds running over the rooftops of the Bronx her brothers dead in Riverside or Russia, her lone in Long Island writing a last letter—and her image in the sunlight at the window ‘The key is in the sunlight at the window in the bars the key is in the sunlight,’ only to have come to that dark night on iron bed by stroke when the sun gone down on Long Island and the vast Atlantic roars outside the great call of Being to its own to come back out of the Nightmare—divided creation—with her head lain on a pillow of the hospital to die —in one last glimpse—all Earth one everlasting Light in the familiar black-out—no tears for this vision— But that the key should be left behind—at the window—the key in the sunlight—to the living—that can take that slice of light in hand—and turn the door—and look back see Creation glistening backwards to the same grave, size of universe, size of the tick of the hospital's clock on the archway over the white door— IV O mother what have I left out O mother what have I forgotten O mother farewell with a long black shoe farewell with Communist Party and a broken stocking farewell with six dark hairs on the wen of your breast farewell with your old dress and a long black beard around the vagina farewell with your sagging belly with your fear of Hitler with your mouth of bad short stories with your fingers of rotten mandolins with your arms of fat Paterson porches with your belly of strikes and smokestacks with your chin of Trotsky and the Spanish War with your voice singing for the decaying overbroken workers with your nose of bad lay with your nose of the smell of the pickles of Newark with your eyes with your eyes of Russia with your eyes of no money with your eyes of false China with your eyes of Aunt Elanor with your eyes of starving India with your eyes pissing in the park with your eyes of America taking a fall with your eyes of your failure at the piano with your eyes of your relatives in California with your eyes of Ma Rainey dying in an aumbulance with your eyes of Czechoslovakia attacked by robots with your eyes going to painting class at night in the Bronx with your eyes of the killer Grandma you see on the horizon from the Fire-Escape with your eyes running naked out of the apartment screaming into the hall with your eyes being led away by policemen to an aumbulance with your eyes strapped down on the operating table with your eyes with the pancreas removed with your eyes of appendix operation with your eyes of abortion with your eyes of ovaries removed with your eyes of shock with your

eyes of lobotomy with your eyes of divorce with your eyes of stroke with your eyes alone with your eyes with your eyes with your Death full of Flowers V Caw caw caw crows shriek in the white sun over grave stones in Long Island Lord Lord Lord Naomi underneath this grass my halflife and my own as hers caw caw my eye be buried in the same Ground where I stand in Angel Lord Lord great Eye that stares on All and moves in a black cloud caw caw strange cry of Beings flung up into sky over the waving trees Lord Lord O Grinder of giant Beyonds my voice in a boundless field in Sheol Caw caw the call of Time rent out of foot and wing an instant in the universe Lord Lord an echo in the sky the wind through ragged leaves the roar of memory caw caw all years my birth a dream caw caw New York the bus the broken shoe the vast highschool caw caw all Visions of the Lord Lord Lord Lord caw caw caw Lord Lord Lord caw caw caw Lord Paris, December 1957—New York, 1959

#im a collector im a maniac #poetry #not mine

8 notes · View notes

liliaeth · 4 years ago

Text

Rules: List the first lines of your last 20 stories (if you have less than 20, just list them all!) See if there are any patterns. Choose your favourite opening line. Then tag 10 of your favourite authors!

Well the one pattern I can see is that I have way too many wips, damn my flighty muse

I’m tagging anyone willing to do this one

1. The Weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh (Nicolò di Genova/Yusuf al Kaysani, The Old Guard

Yusuf wasn’t even sure what he was doing, taking the invader with him. He should have left the man behind after the Franks took the city, but when he’d seen the look on the Christian’s face, that thousand mile stare in the other’s eyes, he’d been unable to do so. There had been a plea in the way he knelt there, not even reaching for a weapon, though he and Yusuf had killed each other dozens of times by now. Almost as if he wanted Yusuf to kill him. That might have been why he stayed his blade at first, that notion that he couldn’t give the other what he wanted, not after what the Franks had done. But then he’d seen the man’s eyes and he hadn’t been able to stop himself from feeling pity for him.

2. The Body Remembers (Scott McCall/Theo Raeken, Teen Wolf

He had flinched.

3. We come from Warriors (gen fic, with some Nicky/Joe , The Old Guard)

Solomon hesitated as he reached the door. He didn't want to go in. Not now, not when Mom would have prettied up the room, trying to achieve holiday cheer, desperate to pretend things were normal, that there wasn't another empty chair at the table. He was about ready to just turn around, to take his gifts back to the car and leave, go to a bar, and drink soda after soda, until he got on too much of a high and had to head out in his car, driving till the carbohydrate high was out of his system.

4.Artefacts of history (Nicky/Joe, Andy/Quynh, Nile, The Old Guard)

His first thought was ‘another one’.

5. Sinking Down (Gen, Andy and Booker, The Old Guard)

Booker wasn’t even sure why he was in this damn room, with these people, none of whom had a clue who he was, or what he’d done. They all had their issues of course, and he wasn’t stupid enough to assume that anything he went through was worse than what they went through.

6. Tomatoes, lettuce and a burger (Gen, Dean and Sam Winchester, Supernatural)

Dean wasn’t sure what it was that made it feel like his heart was torn to pieces. Sam was sitting right there, mere inches away from him. Reading, writing, Dean wasn’t sure what his brother was doing as Dean himself was cooking.

7. A Soldier goes marching on (gen, Nile Freeman, and Jay, The Old Guard)

Jay stared at he empty bunk. Dizzy wouldn’t even look at her. Jay would have screamed at her, but she knew it wasn’t fair, since her anger was aimed as much at herself as it was at Dizzy. And neither would do any good.

8. New Wolf in the Old Guard (Teen Wolf/The Old Guard crossover, Scott centric)

Scott woke up gasping for air. It was the third time this week that he had the dream of drowning. The other dreams were weird, and scary, but he’d have any of them over the ones where he drowned.

9. Good Little Milker (Dean Winchester, Supernatural a/b/o au)

Dean was still sulking. Sam could see it in the poor Omega cow's eyes, the way he glared at the both of them, when he thought Sam or Dad weren't looking. Oh sure, he was playing nice after the rough spanking Dad had given him. Dad had had no choice after Dean's initial tantrum when John had mentioned what was going to happen. It hadn't really been a surprise to anyone but Dean himself, when Sam's younger brother had presented as an Omega. Even during the first signs of his first heat, the boy had still been hoping to present at least as a beta if not an Alpha. But both Sam and John had known better. Dean was a brat, but he'd always been at his happiest when Dad or Sam told him what to do.

10. Clean (JDM/Jensen Ackles, spn rps, non-con)

Jeff couldn't believe his luck. The notion that this perfect piece of slave flesh had never once been fucked was probably the biggest waste of a slave's body he'd ever seen in his life.

11. Light in the Basement (Jensen Ackles/Jared Padalecki, spn rps, non-con)

Jensen wasn't even sure what had happened as he slowly woke up face down on a dusty floor. He stared up at the room he was in. It was dark, stuffy, like there was something in his throat making it hard to breathe. There was a pervading smell of shit and mold hanging around the place, like he was in a badly cleaned toilet in one of the factories he'd been working at over the past few months. He crawled up into the dark

12. The Treaty (Jensen Ackles/Jared Padalecki, spn rps, a/b/o, dub-con)

Peace. After ten years of war, it was long awaited, and even from the throne room, Jared could hear the celebrations spreading across the capitol city. Jared wished he could join the people, spend time with his loved ones and hold his mother, but all he could think of was his father's face as he'd died in Jared's arms.

13. the Wolf who Ran with Hunters (gen Teen Wolf/Supernatural, Scott-centric)

Scott shivered as he woke up. He didn’t want to open his eyes, because once he did, he’d have to accept that he was all alone in some crappy motel room. Outside the window, he could see the dusty town in Oklahoma which he didn’t even know the name of.

14. Covered in Bandaids (Scott McCall/Isaac Lahey, Teen Wolf)

Isaac wasn’t quite sure what he was doing at the field. He shouldn’t even care about lacrosse any more. He was strong now, and lacrosse had been something he’d done because his father wanted him to be more like Camden.

15. Breaking Point (Scott McCall/Theo Raeken, Teen Wolf)

The place was cold. Even with the increased body heat of a werewolf Scott shivered in the corner of the cell. He wished he’d been wearing more than a tank top and his jeans when the cops had burst into his room. They hadn’t told him what he was being arrested for, or what they wanted, which as far as he knew, was not the norm.

16. Kindness for the Devil (Lucifer Morningstar/Scott McCall, Lucifer/Teen Wolf)

It was a night like any other. Things were a bit too quiet over at Lux, but then it was early, and it seemed to make Linda happy, making her more likely to stay instead of having her take Charlie and leaving.

17.Can’t Always hold him back (Stiles Stilinski/Derek Hale, Teen Wolf)

Scott looked down at Stiles, carefully listening to his friend’s heartbeat, pushing out the distraction of outside noise. Nurses and visitors talking in the hall outside, the beeping of the machine monitoring Stiles. He desperately tried to follow the pattern. It scared him, how hard his friend’s heart was working just to keep going, how difficult Stiles’ breathing went even with the oxygen mask covering his mouth and nose. Scott had finally managed to get the sheriff to go downstairs to have something to eat, maybe even take a shower if Mom could slip him into the staff showers. They all knew that their stay here could end up being a marathon that might last days more than it already had.

18. Beloved (Btvs/Angel, co written with @spikesheart)

Sitting at one end of a fully laden table, Buffy looked at the appetizers piled on the finest bone china sitting atop platinum charger plates, studied her matching platinum silverware, and wrangled with the finely woven silver linen napkin in her lap – patently avoiding her lover’s gaze as he sat at the other end. Only the best of everything life had to offer was laid out before her. A wide variety of catered pasta, meat and vegetable dishes filled every square inch of space in between them, yet nothing caught her fancy.

19. Parent Wolf (Teen Wolf, the parents)

She woke up in an endless white room, found her head leaning against the bark of an old tree trunk, staring up and noticing several other men and women waking up alongside her.

20. Missed Shot (gen, teen wolf, Scott-centric)

Scott stared up at the men coming closer and at the man who had just shot him with an arrow. Derek Hale, the creepy guy who’d lured him here in the first place, tried to grab him and pull him loose, but seconds later he was down on the ground as well with arrows in his leg and back. Scott stared around in fear, pulling at the arrow, too scared to think of breaking it free.

#Teen Wolf #the old guard #supernatural #supernatural rps #fanfic meme

3 notes · View notes

spamzineglasgow · 5 years ago

Text

(ESSAY) ‘BodiesTM: Poetry. City. Whiteness.’ by Elliot C. Mason

A provocation on whiteness, futurity, capitalism and the fricative movements of racialised and gendered embodiment in contemporary poetics, by Elliot C. Mason.

> Capitalism keeps time in a centrifugal swirl that expands as space. The myth of the future is sucked in to the endless present of working time, the working day that never ends but rather blurrily recalibrates its always-changing relation to the past (the time before Capital, that horrific barbarism which could be called Communism, Africa or Keynesian Social Capitalism, depending on the context) and the future. The mythical future is total temporal accumulation, when the life-times of the disenfranchised are finally worth nothing and the life-times of the Tech-Execs, the Winners, the Exemplary Individuals are worth so much time that they have reached secular eternity: a capitalist immortality. The working time of people is pulled into the blurring vortex, this weightless phantasmagoria, and it expands imperially, ideologically, a waxed leg in steel-capped boots, over geographical codes. The move is architectural, strategically ordering bodies under spatial blocks and signs.

// James Nixon / Ars Poetica #5 //

> The violent horror of this vortex is that it is not there at all. We cannot see it. Our way of seeing is mutually constituted with what we see; Capital’s expansion is simply our sight. Precisely what makes capitalism so different to other ways of organising money and people is that it takes over everything. It destroys religion and becomes God itself. It makes every interaction geared towards accumulation. Dating is like opening a betting account, like browsing estate agents’ windows. The end of a relationship in 2019 is not when you stop seeing each other – it’s when you find each other on a dating app. But this has been happening since the beginnings of this system. Modern sciences are ways of justifying slavery, which Capital needed to produce far more than feudal farmers ever could; the city and its divisive architecture are a response to the need to keep laborers close to factories, to houses given by the factory-owners, to food provided by the factory-owners: to the total subsumption of life in a single Capital. In the beginning there was nothing, and then we traded commodities to accumulate labortime in the imperial movement of endlessly expanding architecture.

…

our new home has cockroaches. an exterminator came –

…

it’s smart how the poisoned gel spreads through the colony by cannibalism. he explains that they will eat their family, that the poison will spread faster that way.

/ AK Blakemore / nymphs //

> The creation of the body and its technological assemblages that constitute race and racial thinking are necessary components of these movements. The body in other systems is dependent on context: there is the body on the farm who picks tomatoes, the body in the family who teaches children how to speak, the body in the factory who welds iron, the body at war who receives bullet holes; the body is alive, and at any moment, for any misdemeanour, the lord or the law can kill it. The body in capitalism is always a laboring body, always awaiting work: we ask why that mother doesn’t have a job, why that homeless man isn’t working, we ask children what job they want and lament the misery of our jobless friends, hoping only that one day they will enter an office and reproduce some capital; the body is at work, and if it resists work, at any moment the economy can force it to stay painfully and agonisingly alive until it makes some fucking money! This is the totalizing development of the body as a machine of money-production in capitalism, in which each one of us is a camera for capturing space, pushing those architectural movements of Capital a little further on.

look, i’m not going to manufacture any more sadness. it happened. it’s happening.

America might kill me before i get the chance. my blood is in cahoots with the law. but today i’m alive, which is to say

i survived yesterday, spent it ducking bullets, some flying toward me & some trying to rip their way out

// Danez Smith / every day is a funeral & a miracle //

> The white body can never quite die, though, because whiteness is ownership. The white body is coded as the proper owner of Capital. The Black body is coded as property, and it belongs to the white body. The Indigenous body is coded as a misuser of property, the body that doesn’t know how to turn the land into an industrially productive machine and property into an expansive force of racialization. In the racial architecture of capitalism, the white body is property-ownership, the racialized other body is property. And so what this way of seeing in the vortex consuming time does is maintain a spatial boundary between bodies allowed into one racial category and bodies relegated to another, and this space creates existence: the white body lives and must die; it is narrated as the pinnacle of History and its property must be inherited, passed on to the next imperial body in the patriarchal line – it must become a statue marking space in the city. The racialized other body dies and must live; it is always on the periphery of every narrative, of History, of Capital, of wars and events and statues and the school syllabus (EUROPEANS INVENTED EVERYTHING), always on the edge of existence (AFRICA NEEDS HELP), always in the past (CHINA IS BECOMING WESTERN), and yet it can never die, it must work more, it must join the factory, get a loan from a bank, invest in property, make a classic slapstick YouTube clip, date on a narrowboat with fruity IPA and be saved by the bloody claws of white saviourism.

I chose my brother over my desire To be invisible.

We thought your brother was dead… He is.

And his death made you Visible?

You only see me When I carry a man on my back.

// Jericho Brown / The Interrogation. Part ii: The Cross-Examination //

> Seeing is capturing. The city sees, and in the racializing city the police maintain the neat division of which body captures and which is captured, which is inside the wall, which outside, which is allowed into the private park and which is not, all the while keeping up the imperial distraction of the ceremony: nothing to see here! Some bodies are allowed protection from this capturing, and must work endlessly for that protection. To have a body becomes a war, an endless body-on-body battle for superiority, the superiority of more accumulated Capital. Some bodies are accumulated, others accumulate. There is no longer any option but these two, and both these options are endless war. To see – to have a body – is not a secret war, a war by other methods: it is war. The very language and code of being becomes the body-on-body bloody war.

Language has no body. The message is a virus. The message cannot be killed.

// Jackie Wang / THE DEATH THAT IS NOT A DEATH BUT IS THE BIRTH OF EVERYTHING POSSIBLE //

> Time is taken into this fight, stolen from the bodies in their endless war, and more space is made. Space pushing forwards into open land, making it a battlefield. Space-as-Capital conquers everything and then moves upwards, scanning the land with drones now that the whole world is a warzone. As the drone indiscriminately flies above the areas of extraction, every speck of life everywhere is a possibility, another battlefield for producing profit. Every space is coded as beforethe present of American Capital, and every space needs to be violently hauled into now. Everywhere that was unspeakable in the grammar of Capital is retroactively certified as nothing but primordial barbarity always awaiting benediction by Capital, a zone marked for extraction, for abstraction, into the language of spatial domination and the force of being defined as a racialized body with no purpose but reproduction.

I was one burnt daughter in a genealogy. Stepped into the oil spill like a siren emerged dyed black backed with the wings of a tanker’s logo jangling stranded in the outer ocean

// Rachael Allen / Apostles Burning //

> This force is whiteness, and it is everywhere because it is unspeakable. Language cannot speak itself. Like the Law that opens everything but itself to condemnation, the centre cannot be self-seen, cannot be captured by the capturing mechanism of the photographic eye that functions only dialectically – the holder of the camera, of the eye, looking at the object and creating subjectivity through the object-status of the other. There is necessarily always an exemption to the rule, and the expansion of white supremacist Capital is exempted from its own language. It is a violence that constantly labels everything, but which disappears when turned to. A violence that abstracts itself as immovable/unspeakable myth above the rest, God to the Apostles, approachable only through the mediation of the myth itself.

Where are you I am not there for You. I’m morning in the milkiest decade

of all, a piece of white snow in a snow dome. Make happy, make ache vanish or dispel well

out on the winter’s wish well well well well

// Amy De’Ath / Holey //

> The Law can only focus on repairing a wound without realizing that the Wound precedes and creates the Law. Without the Wound there is no need for the Law. The Law is a force of imbalanced power that functions to maintain the divisions and differentiations of the Wound. People for millennia have traded in the inequality of bodies, but it was not until Caucasian capitalism that the racialized divisions were retroactively inscribed as the entire ontology (way of being) and epistemology (way of knowing) of life. Every defender of capitalism loves to eternalize power imbalances: Greeks had slaves; feudal farmers were fucking miserable. Obviously. But only in Caucasian capitalism has the racial code become a reproductive dogma, inscribing racial power imbalances in the ideology of time and constructing nothing but the liberal futility of the Law to enforce change, so that regardless of what anyone does, regardless of which laws are passed or who is voted into seats of power, the racial code will survive because to undermine it, the entirety of being, knowing, space and time have to be destroyed. Only in Caucasian capitalism is an ideology of “nature” a homogeneous hegemony. Time, space, being, nature, life: all are bound to Capital. No other system has ever been so self-obsessed. That is the problem with City Everywhere.

If Black Lives Matter, then that means the destruction of America. The entirety. That vibrates deep down into the core of the earth, to emerge and destroy Europe and the imaginings of it.

I’m the angel knocking on yr door To let disease in The place that I fit in doesn’t exist, Until I destroy it.

// Jasmine Gibson / Hollow Delta //

> The greatest show imaginable of the whiteness of the Wound in the terrifying horror City Everywhere is the ejaculating white male. The man staring at his laptop screen, pixels tied around the form of feminized bodies, jizz-spilt, spunky teens, the man in his endless war strumming, rubbing time into this spatial production. Rub, rub, rub, make space, man. Spill it over the time you have used, man. The first act of masturbation is Onan in Genesis, who spills his seed on the ground to protect his property. Wanking, like Capital, captures space. But does wanking steal time? Or is wanking its own kind of temporality? It is circular, endless, it goes on and on and never changes and rewrites all time as itself (while wanking, all you want to do is wank forever…) – just like Capital and the shiny shitshow of the white supremacist city. But in ejaculation there is no promise of a Future. Capital must promise a greater Future, the time when value is accumulated entirely in the Tech Execs and the Supreme White Bodies of the Law and the Economy. Wanking is the cancellation of the Future. It is labor that produces no value except the value of itself as a valueless act. It is the spillingof the Future, the cut in flows of Capital. Wanking is the brief moment of calm in the endless war of body-on-body. The body is still producing spatial codes as it spunks up its Future. Ejaculation is the waste of white supremacist Capital.

// Fuck Parade / Wank Against Capitalism //

> And poetry is so spatial, it’s such a rubbing force, collapsing the solidity of structure and yet being so structural, bound so strictly to the past and its ordered forms. The words rise up, the imperial power of language limiting thought to its own centrifuge, restricting knowledge to its own mythology. Poetry clearly shows the impossibility of Wittgenstein’s famous “Whereof one cannot speak”. One is always already speaking, regardless of what one says, whether or not sound is made. In the language of late liberal Capital, everything is said by the code of value accumulation and racializing modern sciences. Poetry is the spatial performance of language, cutting up pages and fetishizing the blank spaces not yet marked in the ink of languages. It is, as it has been thought since Ancient Greece, a mimesis of the city. It is the towering code of privileged space, placing monumental statues as celebrations of imperial domination and the pride of extracting materials to produce more space which creates the architectural/poetic language of words and buildings versus not-yet-conquered land, which is codified in Capital as white bodies versus bodies of colour. Everything about poetry is a battleground of racialized bodies. I keep speaking to people about this and they keep waving me away. But poetry swirls the myth of poetic time into more poeticized space, turning everything into it while it removes itself. Poetry is the city, and the city is whiteness. For how long can we just pretend that raciality and its violent colonial ideologies that construct divided bodies are not inherent in poetry? We’re walking through the city all the time, picking up new spatial codes that break the seamless ease of futurity, spunking out predictable Futures, and so we are complicit in the divisions and the violence.

We drill through to our body’s core with quack psychoanalysis, drawing ancient oils to conflagration. And it all starts with a tug on the sleeve: desire to be known.

But what we discover in the cistern of our history is pure horror.

// Oliver Jones / tug on the sleeve //

> I wish I had some kind of solution. All I can think of is writing poetry about whiteness, confront baldly the violence of the city we exist in. To ignore it is to accept the racializing code of the Law. To say it’s not a problem is to presume the spatial divisions of this city are somehow natural or unchangeable. Poets who exist in the category of corporeal privilege called Whiteness (which is the City and the Law) have to undermine the solidity of their bodies by writing it away with new codes of space, spatializing the bodily city in new ways that snap the normative movements of the violent force. Since the white body’s power comes precisely from its self-removal from City Everywhere and its racializing dynamics, it is poets with white bodies that must join the chorus of antiracist poetry by poets with racialized bodies to break the horrible solidity of City Everywhere and its divisive architecture. When poets existing in the privileged category of whiteness recognize that the constitution of their body is precisely the power of the city, when white poets call forth the violence of their oversight that captures while paving over complex temporalities with more white ground, then and only then will a poetry of radically subversive equality be existent. Then there will be a poetry that is not all one, that is not held together by misunderstood pursuits of homogeneous unity and uniformity, but rather a poetry formed of infinite differences in which the meaning of each difference changes every time it is spoken. Poetry distorts the path from sign to signifier, from the thing to what the thing is meant by. When poetry consumes City Everywhere, eating up its tracks and blinding the power of its sight, then black will not mean what black means, indigenous will not refer to that, white will not mean what we all know it does now. There will be difference untied from its singular orbit, unscratched from the hackneyed tracks.

[insert poem]

// you //

// Notes // Citations in the order they appear in the text:

James Nixon, ‘Ars Poetica #5’, from Rimbaud’s Lost Manuscript, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Goldsmiths (2018).

A. K. Blakemore, ‘nymphs’, in Fondue (London: Offord Road Books, 2018), p. 23.

Danez Smith, ‘every day is a funeral & a miracle’, in Don’t Call Us Dead (London: Chatto & Windus, 2018), p. 66.

Jericho Brown, ‘The Interrogation’, in The New Testament (London: Picador, 2018), p. 12.

Jackie Wang, ‘THE DEATH THAT IS NOT A DEATH BUT IS THE BIRTH OF EVERYTHING POSSIBLE’, in Carceral Capitalism (South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e), 2018), p. 313.

Rachael Allen, ‘Apostles Burning’, in Kingdomland (London: Faber & Faber, 2019), p. 70.

Amy De’Ath, ‘Holey’, in Lower Parallel (Brighton: Barque Press, 2014), p. 21.

Jasmine Gibson, ‘Hollow Delta’, in Don’t Let Them See Me Like This (New York: Nightboat Books, 2018), p. 80.

Fuck Parade, ‘Wank Against Capitalism’, photograph taken by E. C. Mason at LARC (London Action Resource Centre, Whitechapel), November 2018.

Oliver Jones, ‘tug on the sleeve’, in Chronic Youth (London: Eyewear Publishing, 2016), p. 27.

The ideas developed in this essay are taken principally from the following texts:

Neferti Tadiar, ‘City Everywhere’, in Theory, Culture & Society 2016, Vol. 33(7–8), pp. 57–83.

Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory to Visuality (London and Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).

Jacqueline Goldsby, A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

Macarena Gómez-Barris, The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).

Sam Ladkin, ‘The “Onanism of Poetry”: walt whitman, rob halpern and the deconstruction of masturbation’, in Angelaki, Journal of Theoretical Humanities, Vol. 2, Issue 4, 2015. pp. 131-156.

Bruce Baum, The Rise and Fall of the Caucasian Race: A Political History of Racial Identity (New York: New York University Press, 2006).

Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin (editors), Futures of Black Radicalism (London: Verso, 2017).

Michelle Wright, Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).

William Rasch, Sovereignty and its Discontents: on the Primacy of Conflict and the Structure of the Political (London: Birkbeck Law, 2004).

Text: Elliot C. Mason

Published 3/11/19

#Elliot C. Mason #essay #essays #race and poetry #contemporary poetry

1 note · View note

shinhoofood · 3 days ago

Text

Why Choose To Buy A Tomato Hot Pot Base?

Those who love hot pot well know the magic lies in the base. When it comes to really great, hearty, and flavorful broth, Shinhoo Food's Tomato Hot Pot Base leads the benchmark. Using premium tomato paste in sachets, this product gives you that delicious tang and sweetness of tomatoes that adds flavor to your hot pot experience.

Why Choose Tomato Hot Pot Base?

Hot pot has been a favorite dish worldwide, considered very customizable, and warm in comfort. And of course, to make a really unforgettable hot pot starts at the base. Shinhoo's Tomato Hot Pot Base gives you a smooth and hearty tomato flavor using only the freshest and reddest tomatoes. With the perfect balance of tart and subtle sweetness, this dish goes well with such lots of ingredients like vegetables, meat, and seafood.

Convenient Sachets of Tomato Paste

Perhaps one of the prized features of this product is its tomato paste in sachet form. Each sachet has perfect portioning in it, bringing you that just-right deal of rich tomato goodness every time. This is not only good for consistency but also keeps the tomato paste fresh until you are ready to use it. Whether you're preparing dinner for your family or you're having a small gathering, these sachets really offer convenience without giving out on the taste.

Versatile and Easy to Use

The Tomato Hot Pot Base is very versatile. It can easily be used in a traditional hot pot setting, or it can take the forms of a flavor that can be set over noodles, rice, or stews. Just open a sachet, add it to boiling water, and you are ready to go. That really leaves no room for hassle in the preparation of hot pot in the comfort of your own home, where you can enjoy hot pot like it should be prepared. A delicious and convenient hot pot experience with Shinhoo's Tomato paste in sachet should hopefully be tried. It comes with sachet forms of premium tomato paste, making its flavor and convenience a perfect combination.

#tomato paste factory china #good quality canned tomatoes #canned tomato paste china #tomato hot pot base

0 notes

orbemnews · 4 years ago

Link

Blistering report alleges Chinese solar panel supply chain tainted by forced labor But new research suggests that much of that work could rely on the exploitation of the region’s Uyghur population and other ethnic and religious minorities, potentially tainting a significant portion of the global supply chain for a renewable energy source critical to combating the climate crisis. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not respond to a request for comment from CNN Business on the report. But asked Wednesday about allegations that forced labor in Xinjiang has tainted solar panel supply chains, Foreign Affairs spokesperson Hua Chunying called such claims “an outrageous lie.” “A few Western countries and anti-China forces went all out to hype up the so-called ‘forced labor’ in Xinjiang’s cotton-growing industry. Now they are turning to the solar energy industry. Xinjiang cotton is speckless and solar energy is clean, but those in the US and the West who are hyping up the issue have a dark and sinister intention,” she told reporters. “They are trying to fabricate lies like ‘forced labor’ to create ‘forced industrial decoupling’ and ‘forced unemployment’ in Xinjiang to suppress Chinese companies and industries to serve their malicious agenda to mess up Xinjiang and contain China.” Allegations have been raised before that forced labor in Xinjiang has been used to produce polysilicon, a key component for making solar panels. But this latest research indicates that the practice is also used in the mining and processing of quartz, the raw material at the very start of the solar panel supply chain. “The global demand for solar energy has encouraged Chinese companies to go to great lengths to make our climate responsibility as inexpensive as possible,” the report states, “but it comes at great cost to the workers who labor at the origin of the supply chain.” The report was co-authored by Laura Murphy, professor of human rights and contemporary slavery at the Helena Kennedy Centre for International Justice at Sheffield Hallam University, and supply chain analyst Nyrola Elimä, who lived in the Uyghur region for 19 years. CNN previously reported on Elimä’s family’s case in Xinjiang, where her cousin has been sent to an internment camp. The report was compiled with the help of “forced labor and supply chain experts fluent in Chinese, Uyghur and English.” It cites hundreds of publicly available corporate disclosures, government statements, state media articles, social media posts, industry reports and satellite imagery, and details their investigation into more than 30 solar products companies to determine whether they may be exposed to forced labor in their supply chains. For years, the US government has claimed that up to two million Uyghurs and other Muslim minority groups in Xinjiang have been imprisoned in re-education camps. Western governments and human rights organizations have alleged that minorities in the region have been subjected to physical abuse, attempted indoctrination and forced labor. Many industries — including tech, agriculture and the hair trade — have faced claims that their supply chains are compromised. Beijing, meanwhile, has repeatedly denied human rights abuses in the region, saying its facilities there are “vocational training centers” where people learn job skills, Chinese language and laws. The report will likely draw additional scrutiny to China’s outsized role in the global solar power industry. The country has between 71% and 97% of the world’s capacity for various solar panel components, according to market research firm Bernreuter Research. Xinjiang alone produces nearly half of the world’s solar-grade polysilicon, and is home to factories for some of the industry’s biggest players. Meanwhile, many countries are betting on solar as a critical form of renewable energy as they work to transition away from more polluting power sources. Renewable energy, led by solar power, could make up 80% of the growth in electricity generation over the next decade, according to an October report from the International Energy Agency. Over the next decade, three times as much solar capacity is expected to be deployed in the United States as was installed by the end of 2020. In the European Union, power generated from renewable sources such as wind and solar surpassed that from fossil fuels for the first time last year, and solar deployment growth is expected to continue. Revelations of the industry’s alleged ties to forced labor in Xinjiang could have huge consequences for those plans. There could also be implications for consumers and corporations that want to contribute to a greener future but may be unwittingly buying products that contain components made with forced labor and from electricity produced by burning dirty coal. Solar panel companies in Xinjiang create “green energy by consuming cheap, carbon-emitting coal,” the report states. They also “sacrifice human labour conditions in the bargain,” it adds. ‘This wasn’t their way of life’ Over the past four years, the Chinese government has faced numerous allegations that it runs huge, fortified internment centers in Xinjiang. Former detainees have told CNN they experienced political indoctrination and abuse inside the camps, such as food and sleep deprivation. On January 19, the outgoing Trump administration declared the Chinese government was committing genocide in Xinjiang. Western parliaments have also passed similar motions despite opposition from their leaders. China has also been previously accused of facilitating forced labor. US Customs and Border Protection recently blocked imports of cotton, tomato and hair products made in Xinjiang over concerns about forced labor, and the United Kingdom and European Union are considering similar restrictions. The Chinese government is open about operating what it calls “surplus labor” programs, which facilitate relocations of minority workers in Xinjiang to industrial centers. By the Chinese Communist Party’s own count, such programs have systematically relocated millions of citizens from rural towns and farms in Xinjiang to factories within the region and around the country to work in labor-intensive industries. Beijing says the programs are necessary for alleviating poverty and tamping down religious extremism. But the researchers who compiled the report on solar panels said they are rooted in a darker truth. “You have to understand that there’s really rabid racism in Xinjiang,” said Murphy, of Sheffield Hallam University. “The basic premise of these poverty alleviation programs is that Uyghur people cannot get themselves out of poverty, or that they want to be impoverished because they’ve been ideologically programmed to believe it’s better.” The “labor transfer” programs also provide cheap labor to solar panel components suppliers, according to the report. Murphy and Elimä said people from small Uyghur villages are forced to move hundreds or thousands of miles to do intense manual labor in industrial centers. After being relocated to work sites, adult couples are sometimes housed in dorm-like bunks with other workers, the report states, citing state media articles about surplus labor programs. “This wasn’t their way of life before,” Elimä said. “We have our home, our garden, we’re living with our parents or sister … and now suddenly, someone is living in one city, their parents living in a nursing home, kids in a separate orphanage. What is going on here?” Uyghur and other minority workers could put themselves and their families at risk of detention in an internment camp if they turn down or leave these labor placements, according to the report. Tainted supply chains One company, Xinjiang Hoshine Silicon Industry, is presented as a “case study” in the report for the trickle-down effect of alleged forced labor on the entire solar panel supply chain. Hoshine is the world’s largest producer of metallurgical-grade silicon, a component created from mined and crushed quartz which is then sold to leading polysilicon makers. The Chinese government places “surplus” rural workers at Hoshine’s factories, the report states. It cites a Chinese state media article from 2017 in which a local government agency said its surplus labor training program could provide 5,000 workers for the company. Hoshine has also received compensation from the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC) — a state-run, paramilitary corporate conglomerate in the region that operates similarly to a prefectural government — for training it provided to “rural surplus laborers,” according to the report. The US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control last year issued sanctions against the XPCC “in connection with serious rights abuses against ethnic minorities” in Xinjiang. Government recruitment efforts on the company’s “behalf depend on coercive strategies that suggest non-voluntary labor,” the report states. Manual laborers at Hoshine’s Xinjiang facility are paid to crush silicon manually at a rate of 42 Chinese yuan (around $6.50) per ton, the report states. Hoshine’s factory is located in the Shanshan Stone Industrial Park, an industrial center located near the city of Turpan in Xinjiang. Hoshine’s factory is in the northern section of the Industrial Park, according to the report, and several miles away, the southern section the park also holds two facilities that have been identified as detention centers for the “re-education” of Uyghur people by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), which has researched alleged abuses against minorities in Xinjiang. The report states that it is not clear whether laborers at Hoshine’s factory in the park come directly from these detention facilities. Hoshine did not respond to a request for comment on the report from CNN Business. The process of purifying metallurgical-grade silicon into polysilicon requires extremely high temperatures and significant electricity consumption. This is another reason why Xinjiang — which has a large, government-subsidized coal industry — has become a solar components hub, according to the report. Because Hoshine is one of the major raw materials suppliers in the area, the report claims that components allegedly made with forced labor at the company’s facility make their way into products sold by many other solar firms. One such Hoshine customer is Daqo New Energy Corporation, a publicly traded company and the third largest polysilicon manufacturer in the world in 2020, according to Bernreuter Research. Around a third of Daqo’s raw materials are sourced from Hoshine, and 100% of its polysilicon capacity is produced in Xinjiang, the report states. Daqo’s deputy chairman has pushed back on allegations that its own Xinjiang facility employs forced labor. In response to a request for comment from the researchers, Daqo’s board secretary and investor relations manager Kevin He said in an email Daqo does not participate in state-sponsored labor transfer programs, and that only 18 of the 2,021 employees at its Xinjiang facility are ethnic minorities. But the report’s authors say that regardless of Daqo’s own practices, the company can’t vouch for its products because it buys raw materials from Hoshine. “[Daqo’s] supply chain is tainted, and nobody’s going to look away from that anymore,” Murphy said. Daqo’s He told the researchers that the company has “sent a formal statement to all of our suppliers in the Xinjiang region, clearly stating our stance of zero tolerance against forced labor, child labor, discrimination, sexual harassment, unfair and unequal treatment of employees.” All of the suppliers provided “formal written confirmation” that they do not engage in such practices, “which are also illegal in China,” He said. “There is a very clear definition of ‘forced labor,'” He added. “We believe that one should not judge if there is forced labor or not simply by if a company has engaged in a particular program or has received certain types of subsidies. There should be clear evidence of violation for such claims to be made against a particular organization or individual.” In response to questions from CNN Business, Daqo on Friday reiterated that it has informed its suppliers in Xinjiang — “including Hoshine” — of its zero tolerance policy. It added that Hoshine accounts for “approximately 30-35% of all the raw materials purchased including silicon powder and others.” Daqo has contracts to sell polysilicon to the top four global producers of solar panels — China’s LONGi Green Energy Technology, JinkoSolar Holding, Trina Solar and JA Solar — among other companies, the report found. Daqo on Friday confirmed that those are its customers. JinkoSolar is Daqo’s second largest customer, according to corporate documents cited in the report, and is one of the world’s largest producers of photovoltaic ingots, wafers and cells, products that make up solar panels (or “modules”). The company produces 42% of its ingots and wafers at its Xinjiang facility, the report states. JinkoSolar’s panels eventually make their way, via distributors, to residential, commercial and utility solar projects around the world. Its website shows the company’s solar panels, for example, in solar energy farms in California and Arizona. However, JinkoSolar’s US division noted that its products sold and installed in the United States do not include components or materials sourced from Xinjiang. JinkoSolar US has implemented measures to audit and review its supply chain “on an ongoing basis” and it has “a zero-tolerance policy for forced labor,” Ian McCaleb, a JinkoSolar US spokesperson, said in a statement to CNN Business. “Jinko has undertaken a number of steps to ensure that the U.S. supply chain will use long-term, contracted polysilicon, and ingot, wafer, cell and assembly facilities from regions where the U.S. readily accepts independent audit results, therefore, Daqo Polysilicon is not part of Jinko’s U.S. supply chain,” McCaleb said. “Jinko strongly condemns the use of forced labor and does not engage in it in its hiring practices or workplace operations.” Renewable power company sPower, which is listed as the owner of several of the solar farms using Jinko panels on JinkoSolar’s site, also reiterated that supplier qualification and traceability protocols implemented by JinkoSolar help ensure that no products sPower buys from it are jeopardized by forced labor in the supply chain. “We are committed to working with solar module manufacturers that align with our principles and ethical standards, particularly in regards to human rights,” the AES Corporation, which owns sPower, said in a statement to CNN Business. Of the other three major Daqo customers, only Trina has a manufacturing plant in Xinjiang, though it is unclear if the company participates in labor transfer programs, according to the report. And even the companies that do not have facilities in Xinjiang, such as LONGi and JA Solar, may be tainted because they source polysilicon from Daqo, which runs a factory in the region and buys raw materials from Hoshine. Trina, LONGi, JA Solar and JinkoSolar’s headquarters in China did not respond to requests for comment on the report from CNN Business. “It is unethical to continue investing there,” Elimä said. “You can’t do business with a country that has internment camps, especially when you know there is a camp in that region.” International response Solar power is central to US President Joe Biden’s plans to transition the United States to a greener energy grid. Biden’s proposed $2 trillion infrastructure package includes a provision that would require every state to generate all of its electricity from fuels that do not produce carbon emissions linked to climate change by 2035. Such a transition is expected to at least double the rate of spending on solar and wind power. Europe has similar ambitions: In its 2030 Climate Target Plan, the European Commission will aim to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to at least 55% below 1990 levels by relying on alternate energy sources such as solar. And China has its own net-zero carbon emissions goal of 2060. The accelerating adoption of solar raises the stakes for ensuring that the industry’s supply chain does not involve forced labor. White House climate envoy John Kerry told lawmakers Wednesday that the Biden administration is considering sanctions against China over allegations that forced labor is involved in solar panel production in Xinjiang. Congress is currently considering a bill called the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act that, if signed into law, would ban goods from Xinjiang unless the company importing them could prove that they were not made with forced labor (a slightly different version of the bill passed the House of Representatives on a bipartisan basis last fall). Since the bill’s introduction, solar trade group the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) has urged US solar companies to avoid sourcing components from Xinjiang, according to John Smirnow, the association’s vice president of market strategy. “There have been concerns about forced labor tied to the solar supply chain [in Xinjiang] … it makes products from that region very high risk,” Smirnow told CNN Business. “The only way to address that risk is to show that there is no forced labor, but you need an independent, third party audit to do that, which you can’t do in the region.” The association last month released the Solar Supply Chain Traceability Protocol, a tool to help solar companies demonstrate to customers — and potentially US Customs — where the components in their goods are sourced. “We wanted to give our companies a tool to provide assurances that the goods being imported in the US don’t include inputs from the [Xinjiang] region and don’t include inputs produced with forced labor,” Smirnow said. A call to action written by the SEIA in December to “ensure that the solar supply chain is free of forced labor” has been signed by nearly 250 solar companies, including JinkoSolar’s US division, JA Solar, LONGi Solar Technology’s US division, Trina Solar’s US division and sPower. The commitments suggest “a nearly industry-wide commitment to addressing the problems,” raised in the new report. But many of the signatories “would have to make significant changes to ensure that they are not purchasing raw materials made with Xinjiang forced labor,” it states. The report is intended in part to help companies implementing the SEIA’s protocol to identify potential issues in their supply chains, the authors said. Experts say there are solar panel components suppliers outside of Xinjiang, and even outside China, that could help meet the needs of the United States and Europe, where governments and industry have expressed concerns about the use of forced labor and where there is greater political pressure to challenge Beijing. But these sources could be more expensive, given the Chinese subsidies and other benefits offered for operating in Xinjiang. Still, Xinjiang has become deeply intertwined with the global solar supply chain and fully cutting it out of the system would be difficult. Take JinkoSolar, for example — an executive from JinkoSolar’s US division sits on the board of the SEIA, which has urged American solar firms to stop buying parts from Xinjiang, and Jinko joined the United Nations Global Compact last month. But JinkoSolar still operates a factory in the region, and sources polysilicon from Daqo. In response to a request for comment about whether JinkoSolar has any plans to stop operating or sourcing components from Xinjiang, McCaleb, the JinkoSolar US spokesperson, reiterated that the supply chain for the company’s US division does not source components from Xinjiang. He added: “Jinko has a strong track record of industry-leading workplace practices, which include employment at will, universal premium pay and benefits, and scheduled leave for all employees at our factories.” As the Biden administration considers how to expand the use of green energy in the United States, the researchers and the SEIA’s Smirnow said investing in US solar panel components manufacturing could be a way to ensure that growth happens responsibly. “So long as the Chinese government is running internment camps and forced labor programs in Xinjiang, no company should have a factory or a subsidiary there,” Murphy said. “Period.” Additional reporting by Rebecca Wright, Selina Wang and Ben Westcott. Source link Orbem News #alleges #blistering #Chain #Chinese #forced #Labor #Panel #Report #solar #Supply #tainted

0 notes

hopevalley · 7 years ago

Text

The Food of WCtH: Part I, Spaghetti

This is for @thestubborntortoise, who requested some food meta & wondered about the likeliness of spaghetti being featured on the show.

Things to consider:

the history of spaghetti

how to make noodles

the availability of spaghetti (noodles, knowledge, awareness of) in 1910 in general.

There are, of course, other things we’ll be looking at, but you’ve got to start small by looking at the suspension of disbelief of “spaghetti” being a household name in the year 1910.

Let’s get started!

The very basic history of pasta is as follows:

It’s been around since the 5th century AD

Maybe introduced to Europe during a conquest of Sicily (nobody’s really 100% sure of this but it’s speculated that it came out of China).

In Sicily around the 12th century, the pasta noodles were made thinner. This is spaghetti more or less as we know & love it.

Before the mid-1950s, these noodles were quite long. Our shorter 12”ish noodles are a more recent consideration for the ease of cooking/consumption.

So spaghetti noodles were definitely around! Let’s talk briefly about the crafting of these stringy noodles.

Different flour(s) can be used depending on the area you’re from, but traditionally they’re made with milled wheat flour and water. (For the curious: the pasta is white because the wheat flour is refined.) Nice ‘n simple. Roll the flour out flat, cut tiny little strips with a long bread-cutter or knife if you’re really patient, and you have…noodles for your spaghetti!

If we’re talking regular traditional spaghetti (the dish, not the noodle), it’s most often served with tomato sauce, meat, and/or vegetables. Seems reasonable.

Noodles like this in 1910? Right now it looks plausible enough.

Now for the history of spaghetti:

Spaghetti got popular in Italy after the mid-1800s when the establishment of spaghetti factories allowed for mass production for the Italian market.

In the late 1800s, spaghetti was offered in restaurants in the United States. These dishes likely consisted of noodles cooked past al dente (firm to the bite) with a mild tomato sauce that was flavored with easy-to-get ingredients: cloves, bay leaves, garlic.

It was decades yet before basil and oregano were commonly used.

Spaghetti was definitely “a thing” in 1910. Now that we know that, we can start asking the When Calls the Heart-related questions.

Like, how likely is it that Abigail and Elizabeth would be making spaghetti in Western Canada in the 1910s? And, would it actually look like that if they were making it themselves?

The When Calls the Heart novels, if I recall correctly, feature an Italian mining town. That is fairly accurate. There were a lot of immigrant towns in the west in both the US and Canada, and not because Italian (and other groups) were gung-ho to explore the West, either. Many of them went west because they weren’t wanted in the eastern cities; because they were abused there, treated poorly, and segregated from those who had taken over the area first. (Namely, Cultureless White People, which I’ll get to in a second.

If there was an Italian community in Coal/Hope Valley, it’s not surprising to think that Abigail might be making spaghetti. The recipe would probably have been shared by now, and it might even be a town favorite. But Coal/Hope Valley is very clearly The Land of Well-Dressed White People (Ft. One Token Black Man with a Few Speaking Lines), so…that’s not it.

However, it’s possible that Noah was Italian. We never really get to see him and we don’t know anything about his family. However, Stanton is a very English surname. The chance that Noah is from a Very Italian Family is...minuscule.

So what about Elizabeth? I know that common thought might stray toward, “Well, she’s from a wealthy family so she’d have access to all kinds of cuisine” and I applaud you for this consideration. She dines out in several episodes, and spaghetti has recently been introduced to American restaurants! But being real for just one moment, here: wealthy families like hers wouldn’t associate with, you know, impoverished Italian immigrants. There’s enough logged history out there to support that. She’s unlikely to have eaten spaghetti, and even less likely to have a clue as to how to cook it.

In other words, I find it really difficult to believe that in the TV show When Calls the Heart, that these characters would know how to make spaghetti and would, you know, actually make it. With meatballs, no less. Looking shockingly just like spaghetti we can make out of a box. Ourselves. Right now. In 2018.

Just…no. Those noodles would be homemade at the very least. And again, it’s in a relatively isolated area in 1910 in a town full of Cultureless White People. They wouldn’t be making spaghetti. I’d be surprised if more than five people in the entire town knew the name, let alone what it was.

But wait, there’s more!

Let’s talk about the Spaghetti-tree Hoax of 1957! This was 1957 in the UK, which is just a hop, skip, and a jump away from Italy. The BBC aired an April Fool’s Day joke on their Panorama program—a program that usually aired serious stuffy news broadcasts—that portrayed a family in Switzerland harvesting noodles off of a “spaghetti tree.”

The video is hilarious, made more-so by the fact that…a lot of people didn’t realize it wasn’t real. Calls came in from people asking about how to get and care for their own spaghetti tree. It sounds crazy to us now because information is so readily accessible and spaghetti is pretty much an every-day dish in our world, but in the 1950s in Britain, pasta wasn’t an everyday food! On top of this, spaghetti was known, at best, as something that came in a tin.

As one comment on the YouTube clip states:

Yes, this came after a rationing period, but just think of the general knowledge people had, here (with Italians living right in London and other areas), not just of making spaghetti noodles, but of the uses of olive oil, too!

This takes place more than 40 years after WCtH. With that in mind, it’s really hard to believe that in Western Canada, 1910s, the characters would be so intimately involved in chowing down on spaghetti that they’d have it as a weekly meal with their family.

I mean, this is in an area that doesn’t even have a branch of the railroad, yet, let alone a main line. It shouldn’t even have electricity if we apply an ounce of logic to their location. Spaghetti without a large Italian presence nearby? Out in the middle of nowhere in a coal-mining town? Nah. There’s just no way.

As a funny addendum to this point, I thought I’d include the, uh, modern-looking strainer on the wall, here. Hell, it’s part of a set. See the matching white pan? Probably picked up from Target for 14.99.

Who thought it was a good idea to put that there...?

And hey, while I’m at it, the blue pan probably doesn’t belong there, either. At best it’d be tin, which couldn’t withstand continuous restaurant use and if in the restaurant at all, wouldn’t be hanging up...which implies...continuous...use.

#when calls the heart #analysis and meta discussion #wcth critical #character studies and information #abigail stanton #elizabeth thatcher #history

6 notes · View notes

easyfoodnetwork · 4 years ago

Text

Fake Meat Alone Won’t Save the World

Not as long as factory farming is still a part of the food supply chain, anyway

In the middle of July, Impossible: The Cookbook, a compendium of recipes designed to showcase the plant-based meat engineered by Impossible Foods, was launched with grimly impeccable timing: Four months into the COVID-19 pandemic, meat shortages and revelations about the terrible conditions in meat processing facilities, where the virus had infected more than 25,000 workers nationwide, had cast an unforgiving light on the country’s industrial meat industry.

Impossible insists there is a better, highly versatile alternative to meat consumption, embodied in recipes like Kwame Onwuachi’s Ethiopian spiced meat with hummus and toasted cashews, where crumbled Impossible Burger takes the place of more traditional ground lamb. It is one of 40 recipes from a slew of well-respected chefs that demonstrate that the only limitation to what you can do with Impossible’s faux flesh is your own imagination.

The word “vegan” is conspicuously absent from the cookbook’s introduction, which instead proclaims that the book is “for people who love meat.” This is the kind of crafty messaging that has defined Impossible since July 2016, when the company launched its signature “bleeding” ersatz beef patty: This may be vegan meat, but it is designed to appeal to actual meat eaters. It’s clearly working: By early May of this year, sales of its products had shot up 264 percent since March.

The Impossible Foods story has been told many, many times since the company launched in 2011. It’s become a juggernaut with almost $1.5 billion in funding, a grocery store footprint that is 30 times larger than it was six months ago, and like any good tech unicorn, a proper direct-to-consumer website. Given Impossible’s projected growth, expanding product line (Impossible sausage was introduced in June), and compelling pitch (“We’re making meat,” the cookbook reads, “mouthwatering, craveable, nutritious meat — from plants” that “requires 87 percent less water and 96 percent less land to produce” than a conventional burger), it is tempting to think that plant-based meat is the way of the future. Impossible: The Cookbook suggests that it is not merely a possibility, but an inevitability, the only direction in which progress points. Impossible Foods CEO Pat Brown implied as much in an interview last year. “We are dead serious,” he said, “about our mission to eliminate the need for animals in the food chain by 2035.”

With a subtitle proclaiming “How to Save Our Planet, One Delicious Meal at a Time,” the cookbook — and, by extension, Impossible Foods — is promising no less than a brighter tomorrow that will be built upon patties wrought of soy and potato protein, disgorged on an endless assembly line monitored by contented, fairly compensated workers as happy cows roam on distant fields, free to live out their natural lives.

The strongest case for the vegan supply chain can be made by considering not what it is, but what it isn’t. The vegan supply chain isn’t factory farms, industrial livestock operations that house thousands of animals under one roof, often in miserable conditions that are not only inhumane but also terrible for the environment. Among other things, these farms generate about 70 percent of the country’s ammonia emissions and 14.5 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, contribute to deforestation, and create lagoons of animal waste that pollute the environment and sicken people in surrounding communities. The vegan supply chain also isn’t slaughterhouses or meat processing plants, where low-paid, often immigrant workers toil shoulder-to-shoulder in physically grueling conditions ripe for spreading COVID-19. And, although this should be obvious, the vegan supply chain is not one built upon abject animal suffering and exploitation.

Compared to that, the vegan supply chain looks pretty good, and Impossible Foods is hardly the only voice arguing that going vegan can save the planet. In 2018, the journal Science published the results of a comprehensive analysis of the environmental impact of 40,000 farms in 119 countries. It found that while meat and dairy supplied just 18 percent of food calories and 37 percent of protein, they used 83 percent of farmland — and produced 60 percent of agricultural greenhouse gas emissions. The upshot, as the study’s lead researcher told the Guardian, was that a “vegan diet is probably the single biggest way to reduce your impact on planet Earth, not just greenhouse gases, but global acidification, eutrophication, land use, and water use.” And last year, a report by the United Nations body on climate science concluded that reducing meat consumption in favor of plant-based diets could have a significant positive impact on our ability to fight climate change.

The vegan supply chain is not necessarily the One Weird Trick for solving all of our environmental and moral problems.

But while there is very little doubt that eating less meat and dairy is better for humanity’s chances of long-term survival in our current home, the vegan supply chain on its own is not necessarily the One Weird Trick for solving all of our environmental and moral problems. Like any agricultural supply chain, it is not automatically virtuous, much less neutral in its environmental impact. To examine some of the issues surrounding the vegan supply chain is to understand why a truly sustainable and ethical food supply chain is defined by more than simply what it is not. It is also to acknowledge that reforming the way we grow our food requires a truly systemic approach.

Even if we do accept that fake meat is the way of the more enlightened future, we still have to ask where, how, and by whom each of its ingredients is being grown and then processed, how the factory where it’s being mass-produced is being powered and how much greenhouse gas emissions it produces, and how much greenhouse gas is in turn produced by the different operations that supply the fake meat’s various ingredients, and packaging, and on and on forever more. Every step of the industrial supply chain — vegan or not — is fraught with these considerations, as well as more vexing questions than encouraging answers.

Take, for example, the soybean, a crop whose byproducts are ubiquitous ingredients in processed foods, both vegan and otherwise. The vast majority of the world’s soy — over 70 percent — is grown for livestock feed, which is why the growing demand for meat, particularly in China, has helped to double global soy production in the past two decades. It is soy grown for livestock feed, not vegan foods, that is a driver of deforestation in South America and its concomitant displacement of Indigenous communities and small farmers.

While only a tiny percentage of soy grown worldwide is for human consumption, the presence of soy in many vegan processed foods means that it is still necessary to ask where that soy comes from, and to question the practices used to grow it. Impossible Foods itself has been criticized for its use of soy, specifically the genetically modified soy in its burger. A host of controversies surrounds GMO soy, but Impossible Foods has defended its GMO ingredients by pointing out that its use of genetically modified soy is more environmentally sustainable than harvesting non-GMO soy, and, moreover, is safe for human consumption.

Along with soy, palm oil and cashews are ingredients that regularly appear in many vegan foods. Increasing demand for both presents a conundrum for anyone concerned about sustainable eating. Palm oil shows up in about 50 percent of consumer goods, including processed vegan foods like margarine, cookies, and ice cream. Palm oil plantations have been linked to numerous environmental and human rights issues, such as biodiversity loss and deforestation, and human rights abuses in Thailand and Indonesia.

The cashew, a foundational ingredient in many vegan dairy products, has been linked to human rights violations in Vietnam, the world’s leading cashew exporter. While some of the more egregious practices, such as the use of forced labor at processing facilities, have been curbed, the difficulties of tracking the cashew supply chain (cashews are often grown in one country, processed in another) mean that it’s possible for worker abuses, such as poverty-line wages and the use of child labor, to go undetected. And the cashew isn’t the only nut with issues: Almond production, for example, requires huge amounts of water, a problem exacerbated by the surging market for almond milk products.

In other words, no matter the crop being grown, there is the persistent issue of how farm laborers and the land they work are mistreated: Whether it is agricultural slavery on Florida tomato farms or illegal deforestation driven by Mexico’s growing avocado trade — which has also attracted the involvement and attendant violence of organized crime — the produce industry is rife with its own exploitative and abusive practices. And that doesn’t even begin to touch on the greenhouse gas emissions produced by plant-based agriculture, whether from artificial fertilizers or practices such as tilling the fields or the transport of produce around the globe.

To look at an Impossible Burger, or any industrial food, is to see a myriad of potentially troublesome links in the supply chain. Which is not to say that it’s impossible, so to speak, to have an ethical and sustainable supply chain. But the demands of capitalism — specifically that for food produced cheaply and at great volume in order to yield a profit — frequently undermine that goal. It’s a challenge that is further compounded by the imperative to feed a growing global population, and the varying standards for what it actually means to be ethical and sustainable at every level of the supply chain, vegan or not. Although switching to plant-based meat offers numerous environmental benefits, the companies that make it must find a way to reconcile the need to scale and make money with the practice of how to do so responsibly.

Even if the Impossible promise turns out to be true, that we can indeed have a perfectly virtuous vegan supply chain engineered by a hegemonic tech company, there is still one inconvenient fact: For any number of reasons — whether cultural or economic — the majority of people on the planet prefer to eat meat and will not give it up willingly, and that will remain the case perhaps even after plant-based meat is a truly perfect simulacrum of the real thing.

There are emerging alternatives. While they aren’t vegan, they do have the potential to accomplish the same goals as plant-based meat, perhaps some even more successfully. The need to create more sustainable alternatives to meat, combined with the preference of many people to continue eating it, has created a potentially lucrative opening for the cell-based, or cultured meat industry, whose inherent promise is meat without all of its accompanying demons. The industry began to get attention in 2013, when a Maastricht University professor named Mark Post successfully made a burger from cow stem cells he had grown into strips of muscle fiber. Since then, a number of cultured meat startups have popped up around the world, growing everything from meatballs to gelatin to seafood. Some observers are bullish about the industry’s potential: Last year, the consulting firm Kearney released a report predicting that by 2040, 60 percent of the world’s meat will be lab-grown or plant-based.

The least terrible option for meat eaters is to support farms that raise animals using sustainable and humane practices.

Cultured meat offers many potential advantages over both conventional and vegan meat, sustainability-wise: Whereas similar ingredients are used to produce both conventional and vegan meat (i.e. soy, potatoes, wheat, and water), cultured meat needs only a diet consisting predominantly of amino acids and glucose — ingredients grown in labs, rather than in resource-intensive fields.

The challenge, though, is producing it at scale, and doing so affordably; according to the Kearney report, the cost of cultured meat was $80 per 100 grams in 2018, versus conventional beef’s 80 cents per 100 grams (a number that reflects the way the industrial meat industry benefits from cheap grain, cheap labor, and direct and indirect government subsidies). While industry experts forecast that cost will be cut to less than $4 per 100 grams in the next 12 years, there are still plenty of hurdles to overcome, such as regulatory approvals and consumer acceptance.

Cultured meat may indeed be one way toward a more environmentally sustainable future, but that future remains relatively distant and highly speculative. For now, perhaps the least terrible option for recalcitrant meat eaters who care about the environment and have the privilege of choice is to support the small, independent farms that raise animals using sustainable and humane practices. Nearly 100 percent of most livestock raised for consumption lives on factory farms. There’s little doubt that small farms can be a more sustainable alternative — one that should be combined with an even more sustainable alternative, which is just to eat less meat. Decreased consumption leads to decreased demand and, in turn, to decreased production. But given that global meat production is projected to be 16 percent higher in 2025 than it was a decade prior, this seems as unrealistic as the likelihood of McDonald’s rolling out cell-cultured Big Macs in time for Christmas.

Rather than looking at the sustainable food supply chain of the future as an all-or-nothing scenario — one that either involves animal products or doesn’t — it’s perhaps more practical to take a holistic view, one that acknowledges the dizzying complexities of food production, as well as the varying definitions and measures of “sustainability.�� Put another way, there is no single correct approach to fixing our problems, something illustrated by a 2017 study about the potential of organic agriculture to create a more sustainable food system. A 100 percent conversion to organic agriculture wouldn’t do it, the study found — among other problems, organic farming would require more farmland than its conventional counterpart. A more sustainable scenario, the study concluded, would combine organic agriculture with reductions in food waste and the amount of food used for livestock, along with a corresponding reduction in the production and consumption of meat.

Even supposing there is no magic bullet, there does seem to be one obvious thing we could do to build a more sustainable supply chain: stop factory farming. Because while livestock farming can be sustainable and even ethical, particularly if it’s done on a smaller scale and using practices that favor the environment and human and animal welfare, there is nothing sustainable about the industrial livestock industry. And if climate change, environmental degradation, and worker and animal abuses haven’t given us reasons enough to find a better way forward, then the COVID-19 pandemic has provided yet another compelling reason by highlighting the ways that factory farms, with their overcrowded, unsanitary conditions ripe for spreading disease and promoting antibiotic resistance, may put us at risk for future pandemics.

The call to end factory farming is gaining momentum: Last December, Sen. Cory Booker introduced legislation that would place a moratorium on large industrial animal operations and phase out the biggest ones by 2040. Crucially, the proposed bill also calls for strengthening protections for the family farmers and ranchers who cannot compete with these large-scale operations and are often forced into exploitative contracts with the corporations that control the meat industry.

This kind of support for small, independent farmers is at the heart of what the ethical and sustainable supply chain of the future entails: It is not so much about vegan eating as it is about creating systems that enable farming that is humane for the environment, people, and animals. Plant-based meat can be part of that, and should be — provided that the companies that manufacture it are actively invested in creating a system whose concept of ethics and sustainability goes beyond being simply the lesser of two evils.

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/32O5Kn1 https://ift.tt/34UzD7W

Not as long as factory farming is still a part of the food supply chain, anyway

The vegan supply chain is not necessarily the One Weird Trick for solving all of our environmental and moral problems.

The least terrible option for meat eaters is to support farms that raise animals using sustainable and humane practices.

Rather than looking at the sustainable food supply chain of the future as an all-or-nothing scenario — one that either involves animal products or doesn’t — it’s perhaps more practical to take a holistic view, one that acknowledges the dizzying complexities of food production, as well as the varying definitions and measures of “sustainability.” Put another way, there is no single correct approach to fixing our problems, something illustrated by a 2017 study about the potential of organic agriculture to create a more sustainable food system. A 100 percent conversion to organic agriculture wouldn’t do it, the study found — among other problems, organic farming would require more farmland than its conventional counterpart. A more sustainable scenario, the study concluded, would combine organic agriculture with reductions in food waste and the amount of food used for livestock, along with a corresponding reduction in the production and consumption of meat.

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/32O5Kn1 via Blogger https://ift.tt/2EE8njn

#Blogger #cooking #Eater #food #recipes

0 notes