Late last night, I found myself at a friend's apartment watching Spalding Gray performing Swimming to Cambodia in the film of the same name (directed by Jonathan Demme). The original stage production of Swimming to Cambodia (for which Gray won an Obie award) was four hours long and was performed over two nights. If you're not familiar with the piece, Gray talks about his experiences in Cambodia during the filming of The Killing Fields (incidentally, Sam Waterson and Ira Wheeler are listed as co-stars, although their only involvement in the film is the inclusion of a short clip from The Killing Fields).
Spalding Gray eventually jumped off the Staten Island Ferry after watching Tim Burton's film, Big Fish. He was 62 years old and had been suffering from clinical depression, which had worsened after an automobile accident in Ireland 3 years prior, for quite some time.
He never, to my knowledge, published any poetry, but he came to mind this morning when I was reading TELL ME WHAT YOU KNOW ABOUT DISMEMBERMENT by Bhanu Kapil Rider (although I might be hard pressed to explain why he came to mind - perhaps the dynamics between Eastern and Western societies that are a theme in both works caused me to find an affinity between the two). Kapil's poem is a whopper, in which she states that she "would never do anything so English as write about art. I said I'd write, instead, the book of blood." She refers to two chapters in the aforementioned book - the first chapter is a description of naked Hindu women being tied to eucalyptus trees by Muslim Indians in 1948 with their "wombs hanging out of their stomachs." This imagery is driven home by Chapter Two as "there is no Chapter Two." Next the voice of the author is reading the Denver Post - presumably in the early 1990's as inside of the newspaper is an article about Serbs raping Croatian women, cutting out their wombs, and hanging them on poles (it should be noted that the author breaks to sip tea before she finishes reading the first sentence of this account). As she transitions into the final stanza of the poem, a meditation on the many different types of rain that fall (possibly an analogy for different cultures and geographical locations as well as ideas of transience / permanence), she tells of a "Punjabi monsoon" and states that the rain reminds her that she is "always facing East; the direction of water: its rapidly dissolving salt." I found myself returning to the first line of the poem at this point, wherein Rider states that "When it rains, the grass is filled with blood." This poem is full of images of rain and blood, just like the name of the book contained within.
When I was living in Surakarta, there was a time during the wet season when much of the city flooded. The irony was the storm damaged a large water pump that supplied our neighborhood (and several others) with running water. Until we found a well in our neighborhood that we could use, my roommates and I relied upon the rainwater to wash our dishes with and bathe in (I still recall taking off my shirt and soaping down in the street). A week or two later we were still without water, and so the water company started sending a truck of water to our neighborhood each day. When the truck came, people would shout and grab any variety of empty containers and run to the truck to have them filled. The atmosphere felt like a party: everyone looked so happy to see the water truck. When the running water was finally restored, I felt a little sad; I missed the water truck and the jubilant environment that it encouraged.
To summarize, I choose to invoke the words of the 16th president of the United States of America:
This one was really enjoyable. I like the links, especially dismemberment.
ReplyDeletereally great!
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