Letter to the New York Times

To the Editor:

A recent editorial called for tightened security along U.S. borders ("Terrorism and Immigration," editorial, Oct.5) while in his op-ed piece Bill Keller declares, "Adios, amigo, Vicente Fox and your campaign for more porous borders!" ("The 40-Year War," Oct.6) Yet just a few months ago the Times was reporting on how Operation Gatekeeper, the Border Patrol's crackdown on the most heavily-trafficked places of U.S.-Mexico border crossing, was resulting in a skyrocketing death toll without reducing the number of illegal entries. Must this lesson now go unlearned?

The fact remains that the Sept. 11 terrorists did not enter the U.S. illegally, and that any sense of protection we might gain from sealing our borders would probably be illusionary. In the meantime, it will more than likely be Mexican hands that raise whatever building or monument takes the place of our fallen towers. Many of those Mexican workers will be here illegally, working to support their families and build the infrastructure of our country, as they have been doing for so many years.

Adam Rosenblatt
Austin, TX
adam.rosenblatt@aya.yale.edu
posted by Adam at 3:15 PM [edit]

A manual of the music

Scrape the sunlight off this painting with a screwdriver. I know
you have been taught to look for the thing underneath the thing,
because in school this is where they tell us to find truth: the war
is in this simile, don't you see the war?

I don't. I see my foggy breath as my forehead presses against the mirror,
and the strange reshaping of my pupils looking at themselves: now this is the world,
No--
now this is the world. Now this is the war.

You were also taught, this is how you hold the music. You were taught
to use words that describe texture, that describe skin, although the thing itself
is brightly invisible. It is the thing beneath the thing.

As the first notes of this war stare into their own pupils, let us hope they see
not pools, not depth, not a long road which winds into the heart of the optic nerve
(a tree that sheds its leaves each second), but rather the flat and the black.

You will be there on the street, in those impossible shoes that experience each mile
of your step and yet preserve the you above it: beautiful, green. I will be there on the street,
playing crossing guard for the phantoms of friends I've missed. See them in the cafes. See them
as they shine.

The war is sitting there too, like an ugly detective, making meaning out of discarded sugar.
It tells me with its granules and paper, I will take some. I tell it, Over my dead body
but the sound slips over the lip of the mug of my privilege, and as the waves ricochet out
I hear them say in my voice, Please don't, kind sir.
posted by Adam at 3:46 PM [edit]

Two unrelated paragraphs

When I rode by the School for the Deaf yesterday it was so quiet--not because the students couldn't hear, but because school was already closed for the day. These are the times that I ride by the places where laughing is silent. When they are closed, and I have to strain my ears just to catch an echo of the memory of nothing.

I used to live in a nation of broken items on sale. Smoke hung everywhere in the most populous city. Poets of Chile would want to say the smoke hung like history; but they would know in their hearts that history had already eaten them, that their words were done. When you want to escape the smoke, you get on a bus headed south and the smoke of industry changes to woodsmoke, and the smoke of meats being grilled. Here you scratch sweaters under another Chilean sky.

posted by Adam at 11:35 PM [edit]

New Hampshire

On this night, which is for you a faucet
and for me just a slow drip, I want to measure
time together, to stand at the same waterfall
with our hands stretched out at the same place
and let that be the marker of all that we have given,

all that we will refuse because time alone tells us no.
I want to tell you from the open windows, which we create
in poems but never have the luck to actually encounter,
that I have loved loving you like a fisherman most loves
the silent waiting by the shore. I learned it as an activity,

not exactly a habit, because it was you and I, not time,
who made it familiar. I have let other lives fall like the pages
of burned books on a library floor just to see you wake up.
Now you're awake, which means I've lost whatever it is
I was losing things for. As you get up from that shared bed

and peel all the green off of things, you will see below the veins
my request to you: that you tread softly on my memory and save
some wakings just for me. In an earthquake, in your child's sandbox,
in the funny shapes that time makes out of a year--bloated sometimes,
and at other times a cat-gut string--you will consider the rules

we made and have followed into nighttime, this world we knew
we would wake to. Your hands, you will know, are my only guide,
and so you will be gentle with them as you close the window and lock it,
leaving me out here watching ghosts of your fingers.



posted by Adam at 11:25 PM [edit]

The meaning of blue

Every second Monday the prince holds an audience. Anyone can come, from the bickering merchants of Jeweltown Row to the poorest mother of six, whose concerns will be met with sympathy and inaction. It is a time for the discussion of law, the arbitrating of disputes, and, on certain occasions, the questioning of greater truths.

Tomorrow, which is Monday, is one such occasion. A small girl from the outskirts of Pobla has been brought before the prince. People say she is killing people with her questions. They say she should be burned, or worshipped, or both. One way or another a decision must be reached. It falls upon the ruler of this land, on this future Monday, to do so.

The girl comes before the throne wearing a borrowed dress and is about fourteen, with her brown hair tied back carefully by her mother. She is not nervous, however, so much glass and people and lights does hurt her eyes, which she shades with a hand.

The prince says, "Little girl, I have been told that you have been asking many questions. Today, the second Monday, is a day for questions and answers. Why don't you ask me one of your questions, and we'll see if I can answer it."

"Is your throne uncomfortable?" she asks.

"Well, yes, in fact it is."

The little girl falls silent. So does the prince. So does Rotund Raj, who had not been talking anyway.

"I see no harm in this type of question," says the prince at last. "Give her a hot meal and a tour of the castle, and send her home."

"Wait!" cries a voice from the audience, and a small man with small hands pushes forward. "Ask her about the colors! She makes mischief with colors!"

"What is this about the colors?" asks the prince.

She tugs on her borrowed sleeve. "I only wanted to know if perhaps there is a color that we have never seen yet, but if we could in fact see it, it would change all the colors that we do see. I wondered if, for example, it would change the meaning of blue. After all, the meaning of purple is changed by blue. What if there is some color on a mountaintop that we haven't climbed up yet, and that color would change the other colors? And then I wondered, how can I even try to imagine something like that if I haven't seen it? How can you imagine something that is not made up of any of the ingredients you already know? And does that mean, in fact, that all the things we imagine can only be made from different mixes of what we've already seen, and so we can never really think of anything new? Because that would make me feel quite trapped."

The small man with small hands begins to cough and gag. He is aided by a large gay knight.

The prince, like certain other rulers of certain other countries, is not in fact a very profound thinker. Rather, he relies on the presence of certain advisors who, without overtly forming his opinions for him, gently guide him toward their own competing visions. One such advisor is Rotund Raj, a former merchant of ambiguous ethnic background who won favor with the prince by bringing the first mango to the kingdom, and then by inventing dental floss to deal with the after-effects of eating the fruit. Rotund Raj, likeable and cryptic, and has the prince's trust precisely because of his seeming indifference to the future of the kingdom, the government, and the rules of taxation. He looks at every case as it comes up, and only in the context of that particular case. Often he can reach opposite conclusions on two very similar cases, based only on certain particularities. It is not justice, but nevertheless it is quick and often satisfying.

At recess, the prince confers with Raj over honeytea. "Raj," he says, "I think this little girl is simply precociously smart, and unlucky enough to live in a dark time, a time when we still have princes and first mangos. She should be allowed to stay where she is and ask her questions, only it does disturb me that she should be causing so much unrest."

Raj frowns, sips, walks to the end of the room where an ugly painting of the prince's mother hangs, walks back and sips again. "She must be blinded," he says at last.

"Blinded?! But that seems to me a punishment, Raj. I have no need to punish this girl, who after all was so good as to worry about my chair."

"She is disturbed by the possibility that she will never see anything beyond the mix of what she has already seen. Take from her her seeing, and she will have no more cause to worry."

"Raj, surely there is another solution."

Silence.

Compassionate conservatism prevents the prince from following his counselor's advice, and instead he tells the girl, as she approaches the throne again, "You have wondered whether there are any new colors, or if in fact the ones we see are the only ones we have. A very good question, and one which understandibly perturbed you. The answer, which I give to you as your prince, is that there is only one visible spectrum, and beyond what we see now no new colors can be found, unless our own anatomy should alter drastically. Get used to these colors. Many of them are beautiful, many sad. Now you may go home."

The little girl, bloodlessly blinded, stumbles out from the throne room and into the gray world.
posted by Adam at 8:43 PM [edit]