Volta (& Effect)

for Monika

Effect

A sapling grows from a blank in the pavement at

The end of my street.

I watch it when I go down to the stoop to smoke in the

Night. Sometimes there is wind and it moves, but not tonight.

A carpenter has erected a wooden box about

The slender trunk and the young

Tree uncurled soft leaves because it is spring.

A stoplight blinks to red behind the crown and the leaves

Are crimson,

Like fall. Red. Red. All through. A wonder.

I stand and smoke and watch them change:

Green then yellow,

And back to red.

If I wait here long enough,

If I am only patient,

It will be spring again.

— T. Mazzara

Brooklyn, New York. 21 April 2020, Pandemic

I wrote this essay some months ago but did not post it. The antecedent poem is something I put together last spring and think is relevant to the work. The patches in the pictures are part of a stencil project I completed early in the pandemic and make me think of the year I spent inside a small Brooklyn apartment with my wife. The arm with the hammer and the sequence below the race bearings are stencils after the work of Clifford Harper. It all seems somehow appropriate now that spring is following hard upon all these dragging and dreary months.

She’s embarrassed by our poverty. The Polak. I had a whole other essay planned. It was short. Poetical. It referenced Aretha Franklin and insurrection and it was poignant and emotive. But the Polak told me, “No.” So, I deleted it in its entirety. Having been edited before, critiqued with some frequency, I’m used to it. But she wanted to gut the emotional heart out of it and I wouldn’t have it. So, I deleted it. Yeah, she’s embarrassed by our poverty, but our poverty is not her fault. And it is not mine.

Her mother reads these posts. She loads them into a translation application, for what that’s worth, and reads them in Polish. And she becomes worried because some of the nuance is lost in idiom. Irena, if you are reading this, your daughter is fine. She is sometimes happy, as happy as I can make her. But she is healthy. She loves you more than she’ll ever admit to you or Adam. I know this is a fact because I know her better than you will ever know her, which is a weird thing to boast about to somebody’s mother. Let me explain. She knows me better than anyone has or will ever know me, all my faults and failings, my means and meanings, my absurdities, the rules I follow and those I do not, stuff my mother will never know. Again, she is as healthy as she can be and as happy as we both can make her. But she is embarrassed by our poverty. Please, know that it is not her fault. Please, know that it is not mine.

We have done our best. Our lives are a work in progress.

A few weeks ago, while I was smoking, an older woman walked up to our stoop. Her pocketbook dog trailed behind her and she stopped. Strange. It is a rarity that someone unknown to me will stop and say hello, but she did. I don’t know what it was about me that made her stop. I’m not the most approachable person: tattoos, scruff, shaved head. Perhaps she just needed someone to talk to.

“This is a scary street,” she said.

“Why?”

“Well, the lights are off over there. And down there,” she pointed.

I explained that the house she indicated was being remodeled and that house over there has lights on the side; they just never use that front room. Although skeptical, she seemed to accept this explanation. Nodded, at least. She also seemed broken to me, but I find that attractive in people.

“It’s still scary.”

“It’s a neighborhood, a pretty good one, I think. I like it.” I insisted, “I been here a while. Everybody says hello. I mean, when they need to. We all sort of know each other. I’ll tell you what. If you’re ever scared, if you ever get really afraid, come to this door.” I knocked on my front door, maybe a little too loudly. “Bang on this door. Someone will come. It’s all Polaks and me in there. And if Polaks are good for anything, it’s for taking care of their neighbors, whether they like them or not. Trust me on that one. Bang on this door. Somebody will come.”

She said okay and walked on into the night with her dog.

I’ve never written anything perfect. As much as I’d like to be, I can’t consider myself a writer anymore (if I ever was to begin with), at least not in the sense that I imagine what a writer might or should be, or in the sense of how I imagine what you might imagine writers to be. Damn. That was an awkward fucking sentence. And my point is somehow made. Genius. I suppose I'm a hobbyist. That seems more appropriate. And I’m okay with that. Too many real writers have passed through my travels for me to count myself among them, journalists, poets, fiction writers. This may seem odd, but I know what they look like and sound like and write like. Hell, I can smell a writer from across the bar. I know who they congregate with, and how their different communities work. And all that shit’s just not for me. I still have a place in my heart for writers. I suggest you take most of them as I do, with a grain of salt: a healthy dose of skepticism mixed with a dash of fraternal affection.

The reason that I’m bringing up writers and writing is the title of this piece. Volta. Years ago now (wow), I learned the word “volta” from a poet named Maurice Decaul, a better writer than I’ll ever be. Before Maurice, I always knew a “volta” as a “turn” or sometimes even as the climax of a work. Whatever your definition, it is a shift, a deep breath and a restart, something dynamic in the narrative or movement of a work. A change. And this change is seemingly necessary in all literature. Even the lack of one is a statement about that lack, and therefore also a turn. It gets confusing. My relationship with the turn or the volta or the climax is most certainly love/hate. Sometimes finding it is like trying to squeeze blood from a stone.

Volta’s appear in prose, narratives, jokes, and stories, but the word is mostly associated with poetry. There is so much about prose that we miss. I’m certain of that fact because there is so much that I miss, and I’m really paying attention to the mechanics, probably more than most. There is so much that goes into it. Whether to end a sentence or a paragraph with a hard, consonant stop, or whether the ellipses represented by a vowel will prepare a reader for the hard or soft drama of the introductory sentence of the next. Is the first word of this sentence the same as first word of the last sentence? How many times have I repeated this structure, this phrase, this word? Should one employ the Anglo Saxon here, or the Latinate? Does the Anglo-Saxon word punctuate the prose in a manner it should be punctuated? How’s the metre of this or that line? Is this an allusion? Is this a pun? Is it intentional? Is this an anaphora or simply bad grammar? These are initial concerns. There are so many others.

Does that comma compliment the rhythm of the sentence or does it cause too much of a pause? Does it grammatically correct the sentence? How many beats must it admit when it is read aloud? And how many beats when it is simply read? Will my attempt at synecdoche here be understood and appreciated, or will it be read through and missed outright? Do I want it appreciated or read through? Shit, do I even fucking need it here? Am I drawing attention to the writing? To myself. You dick. Don't be a self-centered dick. Wait. Is that a sentence fragment? I mean, I meant it to be one, but damn. Will they know? Am I skilled enough to get away with a comma splice? Is this a zeugma? Holy shit, is that deliberate? Is this an accidental rhyme? Argh.

Don’t get me started on clichés.

The careful crafting of prose has always held my fascination. I used to try to end all my paragraphs with a consonant or some short, Anglo-Saxon word. I thought it would provide a sort of additional punctuation. If you closely examine my stories, and I know you will not, you will find this to be true far more often than not.

But we’re in the weeds here, lost in the woods. I know you read my posts, and I know why you read my posts. Okay, I suspect I am correct in my assumptions of why you read my posts. Better? They are

accessible. And although you might be, these words are not all that sophisticated. Neither am I. Let’s be honest. Yes, the prose is entirely accessible, or I hope it is. I admire that aspect in good journalism. What does that say about me? And what does it say about you? I don’t know how to apologize to my journalist friends here. Nothing of what I’ve written should offend anyway. It’s not even in the slightest bit edgy. (Sentence fragments on the other hand, totally edgy.)

By the way, this is actually me breaking the fourth wall. And I hate that. Fuckin pomo bullshit, but you signed on for this essay. My apologies for the betrayal. As a rule, never employ the second person in any of your writing, unless it is a note to self or a loved one, which (if employed) in a prose (narrative) is arguably still the third person, and tends to make the writing epistolary. In general, the second person is demanding and presumptuous; it is affectation and self-importance. But I guess this whole post is way too self-aware and has broken that fourth wall from the beginning. Another two things about writing: it’s what you can get away with and rules are meant to be broken. If you break rules without knowing what the rules are, you are a buffoon. If you break them with a clear understanding of their function and efficacy, and you’re not doing it to appear writerly but because it works best for the writing, you are on the right side of writing. That is my simple-minded understanding of the process.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeriG6XCRGw

You’ve made it through a few paragraphs about writing and you’re still hanging in there. You’re a better person than me. This paragraph is the volta. It is short and meant to punctuate with its shortness. It is indicating a change in the conversation. Sometimes it’s got itself an edge. Sometimes a lot of love. Sometimes not.

This is the conclusion. I won’t bore you with commentary on falling action or denouement. You made it through this sludge to here and may or may not have noted the exposition early on. Doesn’t matter. There are so many other devices you missed. It’s okay, I miss them in other people’s writing. We don’t have to know everything about a work. The conclusion of a piece tends to act as sort of a bookend, should deliver at least some degree of clarification, and should call back to earlier portions of the work. I saw that old woman with her dog again tonight. I was deep in thought and into listening to the music that is attached to this post, and I didn’t initially recognize her when she waved. She was wearing a mask, and that didn’t help. But she saw me, and she felt safe and waved profusely, like it was important to her as she passed by. In the moment, it became important to me that she waved. I waved back. Although she might not know our poverty, she was unembarrassed. And I was unembarrassed in the moment, but only because she felt safe. She felt neighborly. It was some sort of solace that she felt, provided by a superficial connection, and it spilled out of her. And ain't that a kindness? After I waved back, I felt something as well, and the something I felt was good.