The Quiet, Invisible Labor of Unlooming Reality

After a major life rupture, a schism in which all I’ve been working for for the past year has been pulled out from under me, I am given to wondering why notions of self-sufficiency seem to surround me like flies on a days-old sandwich. Why, suddenly, the notion of whether I’m capable of taking care of myself is called into question, drops front and center out of the sky, and lands at my feet like the stone of Sisyphus, as if my responsibility went beyond what I myself could control. 

On the flip side, it’s no wonder, that during these times, the poetry I am writing, coming from a deep place of hurt, complex in its intertwining themes of madness, love, loss, and rejection, seems to resonate with people who are going through similar things. 

Friends are made that way, rather, I might say ‘family,’ given that such a thing exists outside the bloodline. In these moments, it is clear to me, that the quiet labor in which I’m engaged, on an emotional and artistic level, but also on the level of community, serves a deep, necessary purpose. My life has meaning!

This quiet labor is unpaid, and often invisible to those around me whose lives are not in upheaval, for whom that labor serves no immediate need. If not invisible, this labor is sometimes seen as a distraction from the pressures of daily life: finding a job, making a plan, maintaining a home. These pressures are exacerbated by the worry of those around me, who hate to see me angry, upset, and frustrated at my situation. Another kind of pressure tamps down and weighs on my day-to-day, given my outsider status and location as neurodivergent and queer. I would say that it comes from the supposed inside, an external imposition of internal affairs, from the norm. The assumption is that I am broke because I cannot take care of myself, that I struggle due to some inadequacy, some inability to fulfill my own basic needs; that my needs have not been met due to a lack of effort on my part. 

Needless to say, after a rupture like the one I’ve been experiencing of late, and actively struggling to recover from, my financial situation, precarious to begin with, in that I am a poet and improvising musician by trade (neither pays very well), is up in the air. 

That people want my success and stability says much about their perception of reality as stable to begin with. Paul Celan once wrote, “Reality is not. It must be fought for and won.” With genocide in Gaza funded by the very government that promised to rid us of the fascist scourge of Donald Trump and his allies, and Europe on what looks like the brink of a wider war, not to mention the greater Middle East, where does one turn for that very stability that is promised from simply adhering to society’s status quo? 

If we can’t question what our basic reality is founded on, what happens when the much greater rug is pulled out from under us, I won’t say collectively, but as numerous components of a very human race? If there’s one thing I can learn from what could be considered a relatively insignificant upheaval in my own personal life, it’s how the unimaginable struggles others are undergoing, in parts of the world where reality resembles a waking nightmare, might have something to teach me about that slippery, ‘given’ nature of western reality, one that I might otherwise take for granted.

The cries for Palestinian liberation, including, and clearly not limited to those being heard now from students at Columbia, Bard, The University of Michigan, The New School, and other institutions around the U.S., resonate much more deeply with me, when the fabric of my own personal reality has unraveled to a certain degree.

“Do not compare,” warns the Russian-Jewish poet Osip Mandelstam, writing over fields of tilled black earth, in 1937, from his exile in Voronezh, after being ratted out for reciting an epigram denouncing Stalin at a private gathering. “What has held out against oxidation / and adulteration, burns like feminine silver, / and quiet labor silvers the iron plow, / and the poet’s voice” [Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam, transl. Clarence Brown, & W. S. Merwin, NYRB]. From where I stand, looking out over the St. Lawrence River, my interim home, I trust my honesty more deeply. Waves hurtle green upon the rocks. The sky changes rapidly here.

Eliot Cardinaux/Jeb Bishop: “Die Letzte Posaune”

Boston-based trombonist Jeb Bishop (formerly of Chicago – Vandermark 5, Brotzman tenet, Cutout) has been a very dear friend to me for the past 5 years since he moved into my former Boston neighborhood, Jamaica Plain, and invited me over for listening sessions. Recently we “got together” remotely, & recorded something I believe we are both really proud of. I shot & edited a short video to accompany the sounds we made.

As the story goes, there has to be a story. There was a line in the text I’m performing here, that refers to the trumpet, in biblical terms (as it appears in the hymn, “Steal Away” – check out Mat Maneri’s recent version with his mother Sonja. It’s on YouTube). I thought it might be more elusive to include trombone in the sounds I already had, rather than the obvious gesture of calling up a trumpet player & having them do “the thing,” & so I called up Jeb.

Jeb, who happens to be a German translator, in addition to playing the sh*t out of the trombone, informed me that the German “Posaune,” from the “last trumpet” passage in bible, translates literally as “trombone.” It only seemed fitting to recite the entire passage in the original German along with my prose poem, after which Jeb applied his unique musical & critical talents, not only on his horn, but in his advice on the mixing & sound-production end as well. The result is delightful to me, & I am really proud to share it with a little more context. I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed collaborating on it with him.

Eliot Cardinaux — text, spoken word, video & sound production

Jeb Bishop — trombones, textual & auditory advice

Written, recorded remotely, & shot, February 17-20, 2021

“…und dasselbe plötzlich, in einem Augenblick, zur Zeit der letzten Posaune. Denn es wird die Posaune schallen, und die Toten werden auferstehen unverweslich, und wir werden verwandelt werden.” —Lutherbibel 1912 The last trombone of judgment day”

—Lutherbibel 1912

Video shot on location in Northampton, MA in front of the “Women of Northampton” mural on Masonic St.

American Feelings

In January, 2024, I moved to Denmark for a love powerful enough to get me to leave behind my life in the United States. Less than two months later, my would-be partner abruptly ended things. By now, I’ve come to realize that she couldn’t accept me. She saw a truth in me. That I carry around a darkness. One of the signs, she said, is that I approach difficult subjects in my work. But when a friend reached out to me in crisis from back home, suicidal, wanting to end his life, she couldn’t respond to my need.

We were at a party. I kept stepping out to smoke, to get away, in panic about my friend. I couldn’t handle all the social interaction, loud music, and dancing, in the midst of his long-distance appeals for help. A familiar collision of dissonant realities. My wifi connection was spotty, making it worse. My friend’s eventual radio silence that night left me in the dark as to whether he might be alive the next day. 

She wanted to take my mind off things (“why don’t you dance with my friend?”). I tried my best to stay present. When we later got back to the house, she parked the car and said, quite earnestly, “we need to talk about your smoking.” 

I explained to her that it was a difficult time to be confronted about my admittedly problematic nicotine addiction. She retorted that my friend was “evil” for putting his suicidality on me. 

Her choice of words, I thought, must be lost in translation. Did she really view his suffering through such a radically moralistic lens? Writing this now, however, I am reminded of Søren Kierkegaard’s treatise, The Sickness Unto Death, in which he rationalizes ad absurdum about the immorality of despair. Perhaps she viewed my friend’s abjection through the present-day vestiges of a 19th-Century Danish lens. 

My own history with depression, anxiety, suicidality, and mental illness, has led me here, belonging to a community of likewise struggling individuals — most of them artists — both in the sense of my need for them, and my need to be there for them. That this reality was simply too much for her to handle, regardless of my integrity — which I did my best to uphold in our relationship — shows a certain preference on her part for comfort and ease of living, over the safety of others.

We can’t be simply reduced to symptoms of the societies from which we spring, nor can the functionality of entire societies be fully extrapolated from the behaviors of their individual components. However, with regard to my would-be partner’s rejection of the validity of my friend’s appeal, and my desire to address it, perhaps it is as simple as the fact that in her experience, there are no apparent, visible, and therefore adequate, or even conceivable reasons for wanting to end one’s life. Begging, for instance, is criminalized in Denmark, rendering virtually invisible the reality of absolute poverty in others. The system will take care of it. “The face of evil is always the face of total need,” writes William Burroughs. 

With regard to my own — yes, desperate, implacable, impossible (I very much hesitate to say American) — empathy and compassion in relation to my friend, however messy, perhaps I know the meaning of a certain pain because I’ve been there. To quote another, albeit fictional Dane alongside Kierkegaard, Hamlet’s fated quandary, “to be or not to be,” remains an essential question, one to be treated with the utmost care and respect. My former teacher, Ocean Vuong, relayed the same to me, when I once approached him in his office during a crisis of my own.

Many other Danes have since proven me wrong. It took a lot to untangle the feelings. As for my smoking, I’ve battled addiction all my life. In one week’s time, I will be three years sober from alcohol. If it’s not one thing it’s another. “You have many good qualities.” That was the last thing she ever said to me. Maybe it was her gift. To shirk all responsibility, and leave me stranded in a foreign country with no place to live but this feeling, this leaden substance that I now have to handle with care, and shape into something beautiful.

Eliot Cardinaux

April 1st, 2024

New Release: Sweet Beyond Witness

As some of you know, I have decided to pack my bags, and take leave of the city of Boston, where I have lived for the past four years. As I prepare to move out to the rural countryside of Western Massacusetts, again, I am finally gaining some much needed perspective on my life during my time here. There is evidence of that fact.

AMERICAN THICKET – OUT NOW on Loyal Label

Photo by Michelle Arcila Opsvik

RE-EMERGING PIANIST, POET AND COMPOSER ELIOT CARDINAUX OFFERS UP AMERICAN THICKET, HIS DEBUT ALBUM AS A LEADER ON LOYAL LABEL, A HAUNTING RIFLE THROUGH THE UNDERGROWTH OF AMERICAN RURAL CULTURE IN TENSILE IMPROVISATIONS AND VERSE

A week with Kresten Osgood and friends LIVE! in Boston…

Hello Friends,

I am very excited to be able to make this announcement…

Sacred Life, Sacred Living: On the Life and Poetry of Xu Lizhi

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Preface

 

Inspired by a recent event in China that received little attention, except for on social media, this essay addresses the life and death of a Chinese poet, Xu Lizhi, and the legacy he left behind in his work. He died by his own hand while employed at a factory run by Foxconn, the manufacturer of forty percent of the world’s electronics. His was one of many suicides, all by workers in their early twenties, related to the horrendous working conditions at Foxconn’s manufacturing facilities.