CAN YOU HEAR THE SUICIDE BOMBER SINGING?

The hummingbird in my heart is a suicide bomber, for the world has placed the poet in Solitude: and, in a world of people falling through the atmosphere without ears, our job now, as Henry Miller says, “is not to generate warmth, but to seek a virus that society must allow itself to be injected with or perish. It does not matter whether the artist preaches love or hate, freedom or slavery; he must create room to be heard, ears that will hear. . . . If through indifference and inertia we can create human as well as atomic bombs, then it seems to me that the poet has the right to explode in his own fashion, at his own appointed time.”

Now, forty-five years after those words were written, the suicide bomber speaks every day on the front page. The metaphor of the artist as a suicide bomber has become literalized, his words unheard except for the screams of his victims and the sirens wailing in his wake. The suicide bomber, it turns out, is a woman who was calmly in her second year of law school, capable, accomplishing goals, when the call came. Serenely, responding to the pearl of dedicated death that was her life, she turned silently within herself, put on her explosive vest and went and blew herself up. That commitment was her counselor, her keel in a wasteland of illusion where people are trying their damnedest to eat everything around them, literally, until the most patriotic thing any American can now do, and any other people subjunctively yearning for the latest gadget, is to get a good Tarzan comic book and sit on a toilet and take a phenomenal Shit. We must shit until we feel life easing from us like a smooth train, endless, carrying away an entire century, carrying the Jews on the way to Dachau, the Cambodians whose skulls have been used as retaining walls, the suburban rainbirds squirting through slats of the rickety railway cars as they pass, snapping shadows in half, squirting into the malls of polished terrazzo, shaking the tinsel in the domed sky lit lobbies at Christmas time as people wrack their nerves with obligations they imagine they have, buying tennis-shoes, ties, cell phones, massage chairs, blankets – every object an objet d’Art - every box of Q-tips and bottle of peroxide, every box of Pampers and every box of Depends, every CD and book and shimmering green shawl, every saw, drill and tool, every notebook and cosmetic compact and tube of lipstick, every brassiere, corset, support hose and bracelet, every atomizer full of poisonous perfume, every bottle of Clorox, every piper cub leaving a nostalgic sound in the atmosphere at every air show, every child trying to eat cotton candy like a snail squeezing together its vulvaic lips to clean algae from the walls of an aquarium, every subway token now in the Smithsonian, carefully encased next to a shoelace made obsolete by Velcro, every powder puff used on the face of a newscaster before his broadcast about every bridge between the hand and the heart collapsing due to adrenal glands that have been exhausted by worry – all this must ultimately pass through the bowels as Tarzan swings through the jungle. Shitting is now perhaps the most patriotic act we can accomplish, patriotic not to the country, for nationalism has been obsolete for decades, but patriotic to the earth herself. Please, Please will everybody, every Muslim on his carpet with his fanny in the air five times a day, every shopper, every Malaysian chipmaker, every plastics worker and turbaned Sheik sitting in the kiosk of an all night gas station in Sunnyvale, please, will everybody, every fourth chair symphony bass player and hip-hop spinning DJ please go at once to the only temple left available to us and take a long meditative shit just to at least, finally, be thoroughly involved in the act of giving back.



Copyright © August, 2007 by Gene Berson. All rights reserved.