Tropical melancholia

I get gloomy as I read Levi-Strauss these days. Perhaps I shouldn’t think of his recent death as I read stories of his days in the thick forest of Brazil. But death looms. I am so used to reading dead white men, I am less used to seeing them arrive at death. A posthumous tale.

The pages of Triste Tropiques, stained yellow with time, seem a shade darker now. A spectre of what has come and gone; the passing of time. He died while I was in the fields of Brazil, and now I chase his shadows in the hallowed halls of academia, in a university he lectured in, the dormitories once described by him “as musty cellars and stale wood embers.”

If only I could conjure his spirit, cast new meanings in anthropology about Brazil; perhaps ask him where my dissertation might go. He will tell me: “into the forest.” I will say “there are so many, which one?” He would say “there is only one that will give meaning.”

It is strange, this exercise of talking with the dead, but I have done it for so long. It seems so normal, so natural to speak to the walls of those I read. I speak to my mother when I look up to the moon. The fog becomes my council.

I could not finish an essay, a few years ago, since Clifford Geertz passed as I was in the midst of a trenchant critique. His death hung heavy over my words. Eerily enough, I had begun the piece with a narrative about the Yale Anthropology department’s annual treck to Malinowski’s grave.

The apotheosis of our star academic forefathers, this idolatry, might indeed, be one of our own rituals, and worthy of analysis. But death struck. I did not know how to make the active passive. I said goodbye, and tucked the manuscript into the recesses of an old hard drive, never to be looked at again.

I don’t think I run from death, but maybe I should run to it. There are so many answers when life is in question.

Forte

Falling,
Falling,
Falling

Found

Speckeled hair caught under the stationary shopping cart
Blue plastic glasses over her deaf blue eyes
Dressed in her house rope and slippers
Keys in hand
Scabs across her arms and legs
Who loved Forte other than the Verizon man who found her?
Other than her lost son?

"Forte, can you hear me?"
"Forte, can you hear me?"

No beat to her stare
No rhyme to her breathing

"Forte, can you hear me? "
"Forte, can you hear me?"

Everyone in sight stands alert to the stillness of her body,
Staging responses for when the "savers" arrive
To announce what we already know:
Forte, left with a sudden blow

Pinching her nose
Pounding her chest
Machines in an apartment hallway;
Rehearsing the way to bring her back
(Is this the way she wanted to close?)

All that remains is the wet denture of an old woman
And a cold body being pulled away publicly

"Forte, can you hear me?"