Standard Schaefer

Water & Power

Agincourt Press

2005

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Reviewed by Allyssa Wolf

hope each day the knuckles stiffen a little less

the mouth hardly open despite centipedes scorpions and Indians

the soft whip of deduction gone drowsily pragmatic

reaches the conclusion—anything with motion has to be wet

--North of Lone Pine, East of Independence (p.28)

Water & Power was the original title for the screenplay of Chinatown—a misdirection—intentionally or unintentionally changed to re-position the source of corruption in the American West away from the anonymous utility company buildings hidden in plain sight across Los Angeles to an exotic locus of close, dark flesh—an imagined evil.

Water & Power as Standard Schaefer means it is rather to look at the facts of the fictions of the West as they break apart into billions of loose molecules and settle into man-made holes or are siphoned into utilitarian white stucco buildings with huge bent tubes arching from them so that they look like fat octopus-spiders.

The book is a range of characters spoken through Schaefer’s mind that also exist in history and now-history. The power plant exists physically, it is driven by and walked by, reminding one of where one lives: a white, tubey octopus-spider.

Writing this from Daytona Beach, Florida now. Black Sabbath’s ‘Paranoid’ is on the radio, and I sit at a large drawing table on my sister’s porch in the wet heat from a recent hurricane. I’m reading Water & Power with worries about how we represent and inhabit others to speak things. I recall DH Lawrence saying something about Whitman to the effect that if he really cared about his ‘characters’ he wouldn’t try to ‘be’ them, he would just have compassion without becoming. In this book song strains and fragments overwhelm the dialect and dialectical flourishes to inform the reader what socio-political station we are reading through; in this way, we are away from an eye-thick sociological magnifying glass as well as wishful shared pain and deep and sometimes blind into the much more hairy jungles of musicked sentiment and preserved deserts of sediment, away from certain prisons of prose that build themselves up when we accept what we’ve heard before when being in music and not what we actually hear.

where today, remarkably, a bird is singing, just bearably, maybe virtue

is what is just bearable after the extreme tides of inertia, gold like ice caps

melting from our filling while the barbed wire with its long division

invokes the Medusa solution, for high tides and irredeemable desert—

nuclear winter though here even the English Department and The Gaming Commission

are ardently opposed

--Primrose of Los Alamos (p.35)

The range of existences portrayed is impressive, and you can sense that Schaefer is pushing out even further into an ‘old future’ that isn’t nostalgia but rather an inhuman or untouched nature within us that we recognize but cannot be.

The world of the book that he creates to be seen and heard, however, is an amalgamation of idea and thing and thing and thing and idea grafted onto idea after decades of relativity in stone—the sagging satin tit of a frontier prostitute sits on the grim, straight lips of a movie cowboy, as these two grow into one another they are photographed and then painted as a mural in the pool room of a clapboard medieval castle with Moroccan interior décor. One dream is built and grows into another until, despite our greatest efforts, these things become ‘real’. Schaefer gives the most mad and artificial the eye of science that looks not to exploit but to study towards the moral and ethical amid what is to be, to exist now and not as we would have it. The stones roll and speak again. As I mentioned, this way was not easy. For first to show the minds of the West one would speak in the ways we have heard foreign speech and not through the most foreign which is song in any language. To speak as one has heard before others mocking the foreign in prose may take one to a nowhere of reproducing a false reproduction that even the foreign themselves begin to reproduce as their identity. Instead, Schaefer begins the book with the poem ‘Prologue or Incantation’:

introducing the conclusion of compromise

The rest of the poem plays out as a man thinking through a man on a movie set (equally director and actor) spending an afternoon in Los Angeles with some academics.

I have to protect you from the banana stabbing your throat

Even with the “propaganda already in place” and the professors arguing over the “correct pronunciation of Goethe” the man on the movie set that Schaefer thinks through is “dazzled by the sound of the grass” and “startled by the sound of a pear sinking through water”. This is an attempt to move past the propaganda and into a space of sense and contemplation. It is also as if the first desert we pass through is the desert of academia, where intelligent people regard their own shipwreck on institutional islands—many of them in small, nowhere towns where words are the only flotation devices. And the odd thing about Los Angeles, the thing realized fast, is that it is not a big communal city—it is a collection of isolated small towns.

And so the bulk of the book leaves the English Department for The Gaming Commission (remember that they are “ardently opposed.”) Animals are everywhere at play in Water & Power, but Schaefer is careful not to dismiss human moral culpability with the romantic excuse that we’re all a bunch of dumb animals: “taking your clothes off isn’t a revolution”. Schaefer’s gaming and play is as serious here as his humor is dry.

rabbit hopped in hawk’s shadow, a rat took a tour of an owl

but I’m a practical man

--Plateau (p.30)

The description on the back of the book says “Schaefer playfully re-enacts Mingus’ stay in a mental hospital.” Note: playfully. Charles Mingus’ stay in a mental institution is not exactly a light subject. The kind of play that Schaefer engages in this poem, called ‘A Stint in Camarillo Or Episodes of The Man in the Window’ is a playfulness and playing read through a shield of tears—I have no idea how he got the piano underwater.

But in my mule orbits always thinking some days lollipops

some days coffin varnish,

always with a turning sunward of the head,

I slide off my face

(…)

Pigs in the counting room, goats upstairs.

But I don’t say nothing.

Because in my dolphin chamber, I make the substitutions

mules in the counting room, goats in the hall,

so why are you always revising me? why you unzip my window?

do you defile me slowly beside Dallas?

I just don’t want to dance for a living no more

The cake of my sadness

gallops in sequins

shamelessly sweet

Schaefer thinks through the minds of the West, from Walt Disney to frontier prostitutes, as a fly fisherman would: catch and release. He explores the potential for ethics within our artificial environment, the artificial stream we fish in, recognizing that our highest state is toward the artificial, and yet the artificial must be ethical and mindful of the animal, while not ‘being’ the animal. Perhaps we can finally give up the ghost of a ‘return to nature’, where we inevitably conclude that we own it--producing our false ‘freedom’, our inalienable right to act on our every instinct because we are highly private, individual creatures—like private dicks on Walden Pond.

Beveled light

Bored a hole in this attic

to remind me of the word “doe”

heading towards formaldehyde.

But as the director says, you gots to get there somehow.

Standard Schaefer is not fucking around. As they say about a movie that hits the tender and terrifying notes of the ‘old future’, that puts all time into a specific place, this book is an ‘instant classic’.

Not gonna play your goddamn games

I’m different and don’t care who knows it, our father in the station shouts

where’s my angry young man?

--Santa Clara Vs. Southern Pacific Or How I Came To Love Corporate Personhood (p.50)