Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

Recently, I had that uncanny experience of bumping into someone whom I’ve not seen in, oh, I don’t know, a decade? We chopped it up a bit in an airport terminal after spotting each other passing through security: Romie graduated from high school; is your stepson still in flight school? I see you’ve been traveling a lot. Where are you headed? You got a new book coming out, right?

I noticed much of their conversation issued from what they gleaned from social media — as if I were my own streaming station, with my own news show, with my own searchable library of life events and random dinners to access at the ready. Years ago, I had joked that in the future, along with birth certificates, we would simultaneously create social media accounts in hospitals to track each person’s journey from cradle to grave. I know. I know. How dystopian?

Today’s poem guides us to the revelation that we become the machines we dream, especially when what drives us is to be seen. We find ourselves contending with the mechanization of human behavior that divorces us from our power, which is the very real bodies we live in, and not the projected images of ourselves on screens.

A State of Permanent Visibility
by Steve Healey

            The seeing machine…has become a transparent building in which
            the exercise of power may be supervised by society as a whole. 
            –Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish

Each street led to another street.
If we wanted, we could just keep going.
Some of us drove cars. Some walked.
It was amazing. Blood flowed under our skin.
Our eyelids blinked every few seconds.

Everyone was doing something with their bodies.
Some prayed. Some played cards.
The King of Hearts was showing,
but only the upper half of his body.
Our history was full of bodies that were so beautiful,
we wanted to be them or hurt them.

Our history was full of beautiful clothing
that hurt our bodies. We could buy this clothing
in stores. We could see mannequins in windows
wearing this clothing as if it didn’t hurt.

Those mannequins were so still and perfect,
it was hard to believe. They all wanted to be 
Venus de Milo, who was so beautiful
her arms had been broken off and thrown away.
We all wanted to hold Venus de Milo
in our hands like an apple because 
she had held an apple back when she had hands.

We’d already eaten Marilyn Monroe like
a soft-serve ice cream cone until there was nothing
left of her. That’s what we knew how to do.

We knew how to extinguish a star
and wash our hands and put ourselves to bed
night after night, and some of us were able to sleep.

One morning we woke and found
that we’d survived. We were older,
and we were breathing. Blood flowed
through our vessels. Our eyelids blinked.

We were hungry—in fact, we were famished.
Our children brought us poison soup,
and we gulped it down. It was amazing.

“Permanent State of Visibility” by Steve Healey from SAFE HOUSES I HAVE KNOWN © 2019 Steve Healey. Used by permission of Coffee House Press.