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A
Review of a Review of Robert Olen Butler’s Severance
God is math. Or is it love
is math? Well, let’s find out. Take the inverse, death.
A necessary postulate for either to exist. According to
the scientific method, a human head is believed to
continue in a state of consciousness for one and a half
minutes after decapitation. Take that information and
multiply it by the fact that “in a heightened state of
emotion, we speak at the rate of 160 words per minute”
and you get an answer of 240 words. A voice that must
end. Imagine the tension. This is what every review
should try to do. A confession stopping in mid-sentence
about running over a child’s cat, the blind slippery
babies spilling like beans, trying to scoop them into
the pouch of a Washington Redskins sweatshirt, the
screen door slamming . . .
When I was 10 years old
my uncle taught me how to kill a rooster. It ran around
the yard bleeding as I stood weeping in the grass with a
machete in my hand. God is love, I read on a
giant billboard in Phoenix, Arizona. Because I failed
geometry in ninth grade, I never saw my uncle again. So
what have we learned? Nothing. Which we already knew.
But come on, how cool would it be to see a severed head
in the dirt, talking a mile a minute about God knows
what.
Prussian Dance Steps are Making a Comeback, Or a
Review of a Review of Zoli by Colum McCann
Song is as necessary as
notched bone. Which is another way to say botched joy.
Evidence of a life is all one can ask for. A breatharian
shitting sunlight. Many attribute Russian mysticism to
sniffing glue. Have you ever seen a folk dancer dig a
canal with a sewing needle? A pair of wooden shoes
floating like the coffins of small children that will
never reach the sea. “Otherness” implies a “thisness.”
The qusi-pop narrative
disappointment of the heavy machinery digging up the ash
forest to build a parking lot could not compete with the
hundreds of harps they found buried there, and the
unrecorded story of them listening to the grass grow.
There were some songs left, little flags of culture and
community flying from the barbed-wire, but when they
fell from the official political parties favor, their
holder, we’ll call her Zoli, who imagines a bookstore
without walls, who is a chocolate factory on fire, who
is a conference on memory in Paris, who is the love
between two people who’s god’s have disparaging numbers
of arms, who is tied to a wooden post, who will not say
with her last words “I have sold my voice to the
arguments of power,” but rather, beckon to the firing
squad with something that sounds like a song “come
closer, it will be easier for you.”
A Review of Ms. Pac-Man
1.
The shortest distance
between any two points (people’s lives) is a straight
lie. There’s an old blues tune sometimes called A
Short Life of Trouble, or sometimes A Short Life
and It’s Trouble…the difference is like the
difference between Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man. Between any
two lives, stands a third. Obviously, Ms. Pac-man
embodies that cusp or threshold of uncertainty that is
the “it’s.”
2.
The exception to any rule
is the equivalent of an open window. To indicate
ownership, the it’s turns into a yellow-throated warbler
and flutters into the room, then darts out the window as
quickly as it entered. “See?” she says. “What” he says,
looking up from his laptop. This was back when life cost
a quarter.
3.
Spicer says it’s the
shape we take that causes trouble. She resembles a lemon
meringue pie in which one piece has been eaten. Not a
circle exactly. Like love. Since it travels in a
straight line, this empty space is where her “love must
somehow stop.” Getting fat on ghosts. All of us.
4.
In a dream, the only way
you’d know the bow in her hair was red would be through
muscle memory and the sixth string of an unknown
instrument. This is known as color theory. The ghosts
turn blue. Which makes them more human. Before blue
there was another world. One where trees shot up from
the ground and birds walked around with no sky to fly
in, and the first humans were still green and lived
naked like lizards in the trees, afraid of the ground
and of fire, and they were quick, but nevertheless easy
for larger animals to catch and eat, making
insignificant crackling sounds between their teeth— oh,
but even in a dream, anyone who’s ever been kissed or
bled or eaten raspberries would instantly know the color
of her lips was bright red.
5.
“Gluttony is the
deadliest sin most apropos to Ms. Pac-man” according to
the game show 1 vs. 100, but that's a lie...it’s
actually…— in December 1982, an eight-year-old boy named
Jeffery R. Yee received a letter from U.S. President
Ronald Reagan congratulating him on a worldwide record
of 6,131,940 points [while he was letting 41 known cases
of AIDS (a word he rufused to say aloud for 8 years)
spread into millions by the time he left office], a
score only possible if the player has passed the
split-screen or “blind” level. Whether or not this event
happened has remained in heated debate amongst video
game circles (and Republicans), since a) it would mean,
theoretheically, it was possible to score a perfect
game, which is what makes the game not quite perfect,
which of course, makes it perfect. By which I mean,
real. There is even love, and heartbreak, for example in
“Act 1— They Meet”: Pac-Man is chased by a red ghost as
Ms. Pac-Man is chased by a pink ghost; the ghosts bang
heads, and as the two Pac-people escape, a heart appears
between them, and b) since Reagan got alzheimers and
most of the millions of gay men are already dead,
there’s no one but loved one’s to remember, and we all
know they’re only capable of subjectivity, but maybe I’m
mistaking greed for pride, because the more the crowd of
kids in cool t-shirts swells behind my arcade cabinet as
I reach new levels, the more annoying this little pain
in my heel.
6.
The ghosts come at you
fast. The higher the level, the closer you get to
god. According to Garcia Lorca, someday the fruits (of
Heaven/level 256?) will be bared for all. A hierarchy of
fruit. In any system, there are the haves and the have
nots. In Spanish, the translation of Ms. Pac-Man
is Pac-Woman, which produces a crude sexual connation
and a nod to the paradox of any Ms. Man. She falls into
the category of a creature born without bone. Scientist
say a jellyfish is capable of consciousness (scientists
say nothing about Eve). God says the same thing without
the words. The game changes as we grow, as we get closer
to death. Sometimes the ghosts devour us, sometimes we
devour the ghosts. It’s the same story: we move more
slowly when we’re vulnerable. “That's life in the big
city,” my dad used to say, when I complained or felt
betrayed. A city of points, people’s lives, glass and
nowhere to put it. Ghosts, all of us. “What kind of city
is this?”
7.
I like to whisper to her
as she moves, I like to think that “waka, waka, waka” is
the sound of me walking beside her, I like to lie back
into bodies never touched, count the skins of ghosts,
put my mouth to the screen when she’s down to her last
life, watch the dots blink and ghosts’ wobble, see her
run through a city of ellipsis, always spooked by the
sound when she dies, I’d like to become that sound,
which makes me think of heaven as a place to sit down on
the side of long country road where you watch the sky
for awhile and think of whatever comes to my mind,
“trouble, trouble, trouble,” that's what I told her.
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