Author Archives: keeneshort

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About keeneshort

I am a writer in Southern Indiana.

To Whom It May Concern

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Yesterday, while wandering the streets of Galway around the river, I found myself in front of a Catholic church built in the 1800s. I stepped inside, eager to explore a tradition with which I was unfamiliar. I had been in Catholic churches before, but only on guided tours with a camera in my hands and a ball cap on my head. This was different. This was an opportunity to find a new experience.

Church

I was alone inside the old church, and the silence was overwhelming in a city that otherwise was suffocated by the noise of traffic, crowds, and the river. I walked past a statue of St. Francis of Assisi, turned toward an organ, and made my way up the church to the front pew. There, I sat down in silence and looked around the bright room, engulfed in its old and magnificent imagery. The silence was almost alarming, as I had hardly a moment of solitude since my arrival in Ireland. I worried that somebody might come in and tell me I was in the wrong place, or ask me how I got past the Swiss Guard. After a while, though, I closed my eyes and listened to nothing, and managed to stop thinking for a few soft moments.

After a while, I opened my eyes, took out my notebook, and wrote a simple, one-page poem. I wrote it slowly, deliberately, one word at a time. I rarely take such care when writing. It was a brief poem entitled “To Whom It May Concern.” I tore it from my notebook, rose quietly from my seat, and placed it on the altar. After that, I left quickly, afraid that I would be caught.

I do not remember the contents of the poem. After I left it on the altar, it no longer belonged to me. It was a gift to the first person to find it. All I remember about it is that I felt satisfied when I finished it, that it was about light, that it ended with the line “Dona Nobis Pacem,” and I signed it “jk.” Perhaps they will think I was joking, or maybe it’ll be thrown away, or maybe it will be read aloud at Sunday Mass by a curious priest. For me, it was out of the ordinary, but I felt peaceful when I placed the paper on the sunlit altar. I’ll never know what happened to that little poem; all I know is that it set sail for uncharted territory just as I did two weeks ago.

-jk

Kiss Me, I’m Torn by Sectarian Violence

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Church

Many people go to Ireland to drink, look at the lush green landscape, have another drink, and fantasize about ancient Celtic culture as they understand it from Renaissance festivals. Often, the turbulent nature of Irish history, as is the case with much of history, goes ignored. Ireland has suffered tremendous oppression and violence, as well as poverty and disease. This can be seen in the capital city’s cemeteries. Glasnevin Cemetery, in Dublin, holds 1.5 million bodies, and the population of Dublin is 1.2 million; there are more dead Irish in one cemetery alone than there are living in the entire city. For a brief time during the Famine in the nineteenth century, fifty percent of the population of Dublin died before reaching the age of eighteen, dying in the slums which were considered among the worst in Europe.

With these and other atrocities in mind, outraged and lamenting Irish citizens formed organizations to counter and ultimately oust British rule over the island, and as a result, hundreds died in a bloody insurrection in April and May of 1916. A civil war followed the negotiated partition of the country into two halves, and sectarian violence from both Catholic Republicans and Protestant loyalists continued well into the latter half of the twentieth century. Some Irish and Northern Irish citizens were targeted only for their religious conviction, and bombings became commonplace in Ireland, as is the case in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria today.
Issues surrounding commemoration involve a shared place but not a shared memory. Many Catholic citizens have an emotional stake in keeping the memory of British oppression alive, while many loyalists want Ireland to acknowledge that the IRA committed atrocities against innocent Protestants. A historian told me today that when the meaning is stripped away from history, all that remains is a list of the dead, the one universality that all remembrances share. Thousands of people died in Ireland fighting for what they believed was a just cause; the reasons for the conflict are still disputed today, and there is no concurrence regarding who should be blamed, resulting in a society where one figure can be a villain and a hero at the same time, in the same region, even in the same pub. Keeping intact a divided country is still a challenge, and historiography plays a major role.

The Irish façade of beer and merry musicians is a part of Irish history, as my cabby made clear to me when he discussed the many gigs he has played in Irish pubs. But he was also frank in explaining the problems of remembrance, the survival of the Irish language, and the Irish emigration during the Famine years. This is not a place that can possibly live up to the façade for which so many tourists come. This is a place where, as we approach the hundredth anniversary of a century of violence and conflict, the complexity of a shared atrocity across sectarian lines is unavoidable, no matter how many ridiculous T-shirts one buys.

-JK

 

A Nation of Writers

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Irish Books

In a few days, I will depart across the Atlantic and spend a month in Ireland studying its history and literature. In many ways I’ll be a fish out of water. I willingly admit that I know very little about Ireland. The authors I have read have mostly been from the Americas, and the history I’ve studied has mainly been twentieth century conflict and the Cold War. Apart from a small ancestral connection, Ireland has not played a major role in my studies or my life. So naturally I decided to spend five weeks there, because among the few things I know about Ireland, I know it’s a nation of writers.

Four of Ireland’s writers (William Butler Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett, and Seamus Heaney) have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Countless other Irish writers have left the world with outstanding literary works. A handful of the Irish writers includes James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, Oscar Wilde, John B. Keane, Brian Friel, Sean O’Casey, Johnathan Swift, Edna O’Brien, Molly Keane, and numerous others. In contrast to the rich literary tradition, there are few major Irish painters, sculptors, and composers. There is a longstanding oral tradition, and in the past century a theatrical tradition has developed. The essential form of artistic expression in Ireland is the written word.

Ninety years ago, Ireland was engulfed in sectarian violence along religious and geopolitical lines, similar to what is seen today in parts of the Arab world and parts of Africa. A violent uprising and civil war began in 1916 accompanying the First World War, and the country split in two. Meanwhile, the Irish wrote poetry, novels, and plays amid the chaos. Their history is no different from the history I have studied. The Irish have suffered colonialism, violence, and poverty, and have expressed themselves through art and literature the way Russians, Afghans, Indians, Syrians, and Chileans have. I hope to immerse myself in the literature in its original context, to know the ins and outs of literature as thoroughly and intimately as I can.

-JK

London, 1945

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Some flash fiction set in London, late November, 1945.

Umbrella 2Because his favorite pub was closed for repairs, Simon hobbled into a new one, closing his umbrella and dripping puddles onto the hardwood floors. The room was mostly empty, but warm and dry. He set his hat and coat on a rack and leaned the umbrella against the wall, next to four other identical coats and hats, each one drier than the last. Four men sat at the bar drinking a pint and reading copies of the morning paper. None of them spoke or looked up, not even when the news correspondent on the radio described the mess of Poland and Germany and France. It was only when Simon hobbled toward the bar, leaning on his cane for support, that he realized he had forgotten a key element in his post-war life: a newspaper. When he sat down, he leaned the wooden cane next to him and ordered a pint from the barkeep, a gaunt woman with a fat scar on her left cheek.The four other men turned to look at him, each head tilting slowly to the right.

“Forgot my paper,” he mumbled.

One of the men looked back at his own paper, but the other three men, none of whom had completely dried off yet, glared at Simon for several seconds longer, then returned to their reading. The barkeep placed a dark beer in front of him, the foam sloshing over the top and down the side as she set it down.

Simon drank idly and listened to the static-ridden BBC radio from the corner. Radio was only so helpful in describing the ugliness of warfare, Simon thought, but he did not need any help remembering.

“Excuse me,” he asked as the barkeep passed. “Could you switch to something else? I think the London Symphony might be on this evening.”

“The radio?” she asked. Simon was caught off guard by her Russian accent. At the same time, the four men turned once again and glared at him. The one furthest on the left folded up his paper and left two grimy pound coins on top of it, got up, and walked out with his coat, hat, and umbrella.

“Why do you want me to change it?” she asked.

“I just. . . I’d rather listen to music.” Another man got up and left, leaving two more pounds atop his folded, wrinkled paper.

“You don’t want to hear the news?”

“No. I can only handle so much of it.”

When he said this, the last two men stood up and left in the same fashion as the others. The woman paused, then walked toward the radio at the other end of the bar, collecting the pounds two by two as she went. As she turned the dial, static flooded the pub, slowly giving way to more news, more static, and finally an old recording of the London Symphony Orchestra performing Edward Elgar’s cello concerto. It was somewhere in the second movement. Simon closed his eyes and finished the beer in three gulps.

“One more, please?”

“Very well, then.” As she poured him another pint, he squinted in the dark, gray light at the scar beneath her eye. “What?” she asked.

“You’re from Russia, are you?”

“Yes, I came from Russia. Why?”

“Just curious.” Simon took a sip. “Before or after? If you don’t mind, that is.”

She folded her arms.

“I was a soldier, just like you,” she said. “I was in the Red Army. I came here while it was ending.”

The music thrummed against the rain, which grew louder as it shifted direction and pummeled the windows and the door. Taking another sip, Simon paused, closed his eyes again, and listened to the orchestra interrupted by brief pauses of rusty static.

“You are very different,” the barkeep noted. Simon opened his eyes.

“I beg your pardon?”

“You won’t listen to anything about the war or read anything about the war, but you feel free talking about it. Why is that? If you don’t mind, that is.”

“Oh. I don’t know. I can’t help it, sometimes.” He gulped half the beer. “Do you ever talk about it? I imagine the Red Army is much more interesting than just an old British infantry division.”

“Before the war, do you know what I used to do? I was a musician. A clarinetist.”

“You were?”

“Yes. I played all over the country. Then they came and told me I had to fight to save the motherland. So I went and fought. I was in Leningrad for some time.”

“Well, I’m glad you got out of there. I could never play. I was a terrible musician. I still love to listen, though.” He drained the last of the beer and stood up. “Thank you for listening. It’s getting late, though. I need to be off.”

“I’m closing up soon, anyway.”

As he stood up, he dumped a pile of pound coins around the empty glass like presents beneath a tree. He reached for his cane; she collected the coins and picked up the glass. The concerto continued to rise and fall, to lean forward and pull back like dancers. She pulled off her dusty white apron as he slid into his nearly dried coat and hat. Looking around, he turned on the axis of his cane.

“My umbrella is gone. I. . . did one of them take it? I don’t suppose you have a spare?”

“I only have mine.”

“Oh. Thanks anyway.”

“Wait a moment.”

Putting on her own coat and hat, the barkeep stepped out and tossed her own black umbrella to him while she turned stools up onto the smooth wooden top of the bar. She switched the lights off and finally did the same to the radio. Together, they stepped outside; he opened the umbrella while she turned around and locked the door, before they walked up the street. She took the umbrella as Simon limped forward, frowning as she opened the umbrella and swung it above their heads.

“Did you ever play Tchaikovsky?” he asked.

“Oh, yes.” They walked slowly and Simon’s cane clicked against the hard cobblestone with every other step. “I haven’t thought of music since the bombing.”

“Tell me about Tchaikovsky. About music before the war. If you don’t mind, that is.”

Around them, rings of rain slid off the umbrella as they passed empty pubs and shops together.

-JK

Ten Minutes to Tell a Story

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TheaterEvery year, Flagstaff Theatrikos hosts a 10-minute playwriting contest, and this year I intend to enter. I’ve submitted plays in past contests, but they all had one thing in common: there was too much in the plot to fit into ten minutes.

The rules are simple. There can be no more than three characters and the play should be no more than ten pages, and must not involve complicated scenery or props. Apart from the rules there are certain parameters that a ten-minute play should reside within. To move the plot, it is best to have a change in action every two to four minutes. It should be like a short story, with a beginning conflict, a middle crisis, and an ending resolution. Because other people volunteer to direct the plays, stage directions from the writer should be kept to a minimum.

On the surface, it’s just one more writing contest. At the same time, it’s different from short story contests because in this case, the audience watches the story unfold rather than imagines it unfolding. It’s an opportunity for a writer to pack a great deal of information into a thin wedge of time for a live audience. For me, writing plays has always been more difficult than prose. My plots have always been too ambitious, too embedded in history, and had characters too complex to develop in sixteen hundred words. A few years ago, one of my plays was about the Napoleonic Wars; another was about Irish independence from England.

Conversely, the few full-length plays I have written have always been too short, and involved plots and characters more suited for a sitcom. How can I pack conflict, crisis, and resolution into ten minutes and keep it important? Similarly, how can I make a simple story worth telling? The deadline is fast approaching; this will likely be my last opportunity to enter, and I’d like to be able to hone this particular skill, like packing five weeks worth of luggage into one carry-on bag. It’s a unique challenge, and the entire Watergate scandal simply won’t fit into a ten-minute play, no matter how hard I try.

Enough thoughtfulness and reflection. I have a play to write.

-JK

One Final Poem

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Today marks the end of National Poetry Month. Tomorrow, I will begin a short story I have been planning to write since March. For me, this month brought numerous rejections, one after another, including three short stories, several poems, and a complete poetry manuscript. Nevertheless, I have written twenty-two fresh poems, and to make things better, some of them are not too bad. To celebrate the end of April, I will post one more poem I wrote this month, entitled “Carpe Nix.” Enjoy.

April Snowstorm

Carpe Nix

There may be no good days to be useless,
but what use is today
when it snows three inches, when professors

grow pale over glasses of wine,

when coffee shops contract like muscles
as students file in one by one
preparing for public execution
sanctioned by professors
with sharp wine on their breath?

What good is today
over any other day
when we can’t make snow angels together
because there are convoluted superstructures
to deconstruct into postmodernity?

But I insist on today’s uselessness. I lean in
and whisper to you that you need not
sever your ear and mail it to the Dean
of Arts and Letters for inspection.

That can wait, but
snow angels dance only for so long
before curling up in blankets of mud,

just as you and I will curl up beneath six feet
of fattened worms and swollen soil.
Today it snows voraciously

and you spend three hours conducting surgery
on Albert Camus’s footnotes.

Let them soak for a while in Chardonnay.
The snow angels are calling to us,
announcing a need for dance partners
atop their moistened deathbeds.

Today is a fine day to be useless,
even though coffee-stained idols
must be composed for wine-drunk priests
holding the keys to our future.

But what good is a field of grass
beneath three inches of snow,

or a poet beneath a tombstone?
No more useful than warm fingers,
smooth hands, or sloping shoulders
if they freeze holding a pen
tucked indignantly over the nail-solid logic

of how useless it is to be useful for so long.

 

30 Days of Poetry

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Today in Flagstaff, it is likely to be another windy Spring day. One hundred trains will pass through the city and frustrate drivers on Beaver Street on their way to Macy’s. Today, people will drink their coffee, polish their motorcycles, steal away a quick hour of yoga, and hopefully realize that it is the start of National Poetry Month.

Writer's Day Off

For me, poetry is already a fundamental property of my structure. It’s a religion for me. It’s a way to orient my life toward a deeper understanding of myself and my place in the world. I am the first to admit that I am not a great poet, and probably never will be. But most poets are not great. Most write privately for their own purpose, like prayer or meditation, a quiet ritual done in secret. Nevertheless, I strive to become a better poet because I believe it will improve myself as well as my relationship with the world around me. It may not be real magic, but it’s as close to magic as we can get. Stephen King once called good writing is a kind of telepathy. Poetry, to me, is no different.

I cannot become a better poet in a month, short of miracles or cheating. But I can improve my devotion to it. This month, I intend to read and write more. I hope to write at least one poem every day. I’ll be lucky if I get two or three good ones out of thirty, but by the start of May, I’ll have written two or three good poems. Statistically, that would be an improvement. I also hope to spread more poetry using this blog as a venue, certainly not ever day, but regularly enough that people discover a few new poems.

So I wish you a happy April and a good, long month of poetry.

 

A Letter From Ludwig van Beethoven

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Fiddle

On this day in 1827, Ludwig van Beethoven died at the age of 57. He completed nine symphonies, twelve concertos, numerous arrangements, sonatas, trios, and quartets. He was a prolific composer whose impact on the musical world and western art is immeasurable. He was young when be began to lose his hearing, and there was at least one distinct moment when he weighed the burden of his life against the value of his art. At that moment, Beethoven considered the possibility of ending his life.

In 1802, he moved to Heiligenstadt, a short distance from Vienna, to rest while facing the reality of his deafness. In October, he wrote a letter to his brothers Carl and Johann in which he expressed his grief and anguish over his loss of hearing, lamenting incidents when, for instance, a flute played but he could not hear it.  Of these incidents he wrote the following: “Little more and I would have put an end to my life –only art it was withheld me, as it seemed impossible to leave the world until I had produced all that I felt called upon me to produce.” He was twenty-eight years old when he wrote this letter, but kept it secret. It was only made public after his death.

I have always been fascinated and inspired by his reasoning to refrain from ending his life, that the world demanded he keep composing. I think of it as a humble and intellectually sophisticated approach to his struggle; he could not hear music, but his community could, and he felt he had an obligation to contribute. His life could continue so long as his ability to compose remained, even if he could only imagine the music he produced, the applause he received, and the praises of his family.

Although I find it inspiring that he allowed his art to take precedence over his misery, I wonder about other artists, musicians, and writers who chose to commit suicide. Could Ernest Hemingway have written one more novel? Was Sylvia Plath depleted of poems? What more would Vincent van Gogh have painted had he held out a few more years? I cannot speculate about most artists, but I know that if Beethoven had chosen to end his life when he seems to have considered it most seriously, we would not have his third symphony Eroica, his D Major violin concerto, or my favorite of his late string quartets.

I know too many people who contemplate suicide regularly. They are my close friends, loved ones, and colleagues. Today, I think, it is easy to romanticize Beethoven’s life and call him a tortured artist. In truth, there is nothing romantic about considering suicide. Most, if not all, writers who suffer from depression or bipolar disorder will tell you that it’s detrimental to creativity.  But despite the darkness that so many of us inhabit, I know many people for whom art is the only sustenance. I know poets, musicians, painters, and writers who contemplate suicide but feel joy and meaning in their creative outlets. For them, art is a necessity during the worst periods of depression, no matter how difficult creativity can become during those periods.

I don’t know if we can determine that Beethoven suffered depression by current medical standards, but I think more honestly we can say that he found himself questioning the value of life and decided that there existed something more important than, and yet at the same time dependent upon, his life. I think that this is a great paradox for artists: what sustains the artist is a product of the artist’s own efforts. It is a positive cycle. I know that when life no longer feels worth living, I can take comfort in Beethoven’s decision, and like him I can treat my life like the rough draft of a magnum opus.

Alltagsgeschichte

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It’s not gobbledygook. It’s just German. The word Alltagsgeschichte translates into “everyday history,” and refers to a method of historical research connecting everyday citizens or communities with major political or social changes. It’s a way of examining history from a bottom-up perspective by studying the lives of voters rather than presidents and peasants rather than monarchs.

Sapphire Street 2

This method of study was developed by German historians after the Second World War, and ideally fits well with Marxist theory by emphasizing workers and farmers. Although it is still a relatively recent  notion, I think that everyday history is a useful way of understanding a plethora of historical events. It can be applied to populist movements in Latin America, the effects of globalization in western Africa, and women’s rights in Afghanistan through the past century’s regime changes.

Everyday historians can use social media to understand recent events, such as how the protests in Tahrir Square unfolded from the vantage point of the protestors themselves. When women wrote fan letters to Shirley Jackson in the 1940s about how much they enjoyed writing on their own, they produced a collection of documents that enables historians to understand day-to-day life among housewives during that time; through these letters, historians can see that Betty Friedan’s assessment of middle-class women in The Feminine Mystique was accurate two decades prior to its publication. Love letters between soldiers and their spouses give historians access to everyday life on both the battlefield and the home front.

I am drawn to this method of research because I find hope in it. There is something comforting in the thought that the average citizen can exert influence over the state. When I feel that my vote is thrown away, or that my day-to-day life is a waste of time and energy, I can reassure myself that the average person with a pen, a phone, or an instrument has the potential to make a difference, and that the little things, correspondences and recordings and photographs, will up make the bulk of historical documentation long after we are gone. The next great revolution will be the product of our tiniest actions, our minute protests, one by one building up until power has to shift. Everyday life does not impede us. I think, in fact, it empowers us.

There Are Heroes and There’s Pete Seeger

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This week, Pete Seeger passed away at the age of 94. If you are not familiar with him or his work, he was a folk singer who popularized songs like “This Land is Your Land” and “If I Had a Hammer.” He also composed controversial songs such as “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy,” a veiled criticism of the Vietnam War. He was a musician, activist, for a while a communist, and as far as I’m concerned he was a hero. He did not have powers beyond his voice; he could not fly or turn invisible, and he did not hide his identity. Instead, he openly challenged what he viewed as wrong. He was a public figure, not private martyr, as so many heroes are portrayed in our TV and movies today.

Unlike many of our fictional heroes, he was not a cyborg, a CIA-trained assassin, or a mutant from a lab accident. He did not use his fame or wealth to fly around cities beating people up. Instead, he relied on his banjo and his voice to make the world a better place. People like Pete make me wish that our media would create more realistic heroes, activists who use music, art, humor, and speech to save the world, rather than fists, guns, bombs, and money. Such depictions, I think, expose a collective fantasy in which a stranger solves our problems with simple violence. Pete, along with heroes like Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr., and Rigoberta Menchú, saw peaceful activism as the only solution. In stark contrast, the people we often describe as villains are murderers and dictators, those who resort to brutality and violence to bend the world to their will.

I wish we could see more fictional heroes portrayed accurately. I would like to see people use books as weapons. I would like to see heroes replace guns with speeches and super strength with musical talent. Pete Seeger was a hero, and he challenged the world’s villains with nothing more than a few songs and a little determination. If we can learn anything from him, it’s that truly heroic actions are for the commoner, for you and me and everybody else with a little talent and a lot of ambition. We do not need to have been born on Krypton to save the world when traveling with a banjo on our knee will suffice.

So rest in peace, Pete Seeger. You left us with a brighter world than the one you knew.