Good luck with your move. Let us know what you think of Jerry Ward’s book, The Katrina Papers.

–Camille

Do you think Souter’s failure/refusal to take things out of boxes was an act of empowerment or disempowerment or both? The way the story seems to be playing on the media circuit its as if he never wanted to connect to DC and so never bothered to take his precious things out of their boxes and put them onto DC walls. Souter sounds, in these stories, rather like hang dog, sort of moppy and out of his depth. But was the fact he didn’t unpack act of acceptance or resistance? Was he active or passive?

I just packed a huge container of shells that I’d never even touched since I first moved back to CA. The shells used to be all over all my houses while I was living on the East Coast. You couldn’t hardly come across a shelf or table in those East Coast places that didn’t have a shell or sea rock on it. Each shell would be carefully wrapped and packed with each move then pretty immediately unwrapped and placed somewhere note worthy when I got to the next place. Now that I’m back in California, though, near the Pacific Ocean I love, those shells have been in their container for three years. Untouched. Hardly, actually, even remembered. I think that’s an act of acceptance rather than resistance. Acceptance isn’t always a bad thing.

This is a long response, but I’m actually wondering about this in terms of character or persona development. What can we learn from a person who DOESN’T do something like unpack a box? As much, obviously, as what we can learn from someone who DOES.

–Camille

This weekend I will be flying back home, which is New Orleans. Thank you for mentioning Jerry W. Ward, whose book I will hurriedly read. I was a junior at the time of Katrina and lost all of my books, plus everything else. For a moment I was panicked, but eventually relieved. Wards words that you quote really articulate the reasons why. Though it is true that I am inevitably (being still a college student) building my library up again, though it is true I just shipped two boxes of books home and I can’t wait to open and to shelve those books, what Ward has to say really does make a lot of sense, even if in a paradoxical/oxymoronic way (he has, after all, written and published a book).

Thanks again.

Rickey.

WEARE, N.H. — When he joined the bench of the nation’s highest court, David Souter packed his belongings into a U-Haul and drove down Interstate 95 from his boyhood home in Weare to a rented Washington apartment. But the Supreme Court justice never took to the federal city, and after 19 years, his things are in the same boxes.

“He never unpacked,” said Thomas Rath, one of Souter’s closest friends. “A few years ago, he said, ‘I figured I’d take the pictures out of the boxes and hang them up, but I figured in a few years I’d be coming back to New Hampshire and I’d have to pack them back up, so I might as well leave them in the boxes.’”

Your last two posts have been real treats. The medley of poems and the way you weave them together around your own thoughts, almost inventing a poem in the process. First we had a poem called “The Green Sweater” and now we have one called “Boxes”…are we inventing a new art form here, a new way of reading? Your posts, your readings, accrue through association. There’s levity, gravity, but absolutely no touch of monumentality and along the way we have poems we’ve (I’ve) never read, and snapshots of your own process, your own relationship to memory and loss, the small worries, the large worries and then, inevitably the solution, always in soft focus. Thanks for reminding me about “My Grandmother’s Love Letters” – the only one I knew already in this week’s tapestry.

This whole notion of how significance gathers inside a box, the trauma of boxing, the revelation of un-boxing. I’ve heard said that next to death of a loved one, and divorce, moving house is one of the most stressful things any of us will ever face. That falls into perspective by the end of your post, and of course one reflects upon larger movements: migrations of refugees, moving themselves, their children, the clothes on their backs and an odd assortment of things in a bundle, a satchel, a wheelbarrow. They’ve made choices too, of what to hold onto and what to let go of…objects standing in for bits of memory. Perhaps those choices are what get them through an experience which most of us will never know. Never have to face.

Your meditation echoes in both directions, towards fortune and towards misfortune. And the poems you share with us give us the tools we need to trace that line.

I moved a lot when I was a kid. But I’ve lived in the same city now for twenty-two years. The same house for thirteen years. Of course I travel, but even packing a suitcase is a trauma: those deluxe short-term storage receptacles, boxes with wheels and handles designed to fit neatly in overhead storage compartments – pure unadulterated trauma, until a actually remember how spoiled I am.

Martin

She found a picture
of the grandpa I never knew
and laid it on the lace
atop the bedside chest. Dead
two years before my birth,
expressionless here, his brow
shadowing brown eyes to black.
No menace, just gathering. Wind
splits his tie in two. Sleeves
roll back from his hands
like geese from winter.

He is about to say something.

Best regards,

Colin

Though guilt’s the ghost of failure, dreams remain undaunted.
We’ll live with yesteryear in houses not yet haunted.