Dashna,

Thank you for making so sure I would be in attendance at the speaking engagement of Mr. Pogosyan. Your activities and the people you encourage always makes me very proud of my school and glad to be here in this community. As you know I study the lessons of history and parse language looking for ways to inspire my peers in a world that has fallen to false credo and bumpersticker. Hours of thought can be lost on a small scrap of paper between classes, it’s quite a dilemma. Expansive ideas like the great chain of being cannot bring back lost housing, or kin, but you do like to think at least before the arrival of armed opposition who couldn’t care less, that there are points of departure that make sense. This occasion helped me see something more clearly than I did before. In Mr. Pogosyan’s telling of life, there is a gentle act of preservation and affirmation. In making a point of Hitler’s casual dismissal of his revolting acts by laughing off the Armenian genocide, Pogosyan resists the feeling that the issues left by the affairs have become familiar and stands against the feeling that future victims of atrocity have already been spoken for. I need such help in answering several split screens, one of them personal, when I am not being diagnosed, I’m being placated.

My hand isn’t always up because I have something to say, but my questions are important to me. I have long had a question about the meaning of the Armenian genocide, the origins of which lie in familiarity with my old teacher’s poems about it, excruciating passages about broken boys putting their knees in their pockets. It’s complicated, but even though they were second-class citizens during the length of the Ottoman Empire, they enjoyed some fine moments in those centuries and there is much to preserve, resurrect, understand, study and share. This is where I think importance makes itself felt in a satellite of UW with whom I am often at odds. Having grown up in a Jewish holocaust survivor community I have heard over the years a refrain that amounts, forgive my anger, to keep your holocaust to yourself I have my own. I realized when asking Mr. Pogosyan about Rohingya that maybe it is over-burdening someone who lives in exile, asking the wrong person doesn’t mean for the wrong reason of course, but there is over-burdening. I just don’t want to cater to it.

It’s endearing to my school having something like this because I know that exiles are terribly lonely. Even the Weimar Republic exiles who could speak English, which was hardly all of them, ended up in isolation, if they weren’t Thomas Mann, despite what became common cause in the worst war. We don’t have to burn books if they aren’t read or never written. In that fierce custody called isolation people forget that inside themselves is a whole world if only it could be shared. What has become of my letters, they must think in tears.

It makes me think of my hardest work. I was glad there was a witness with whom I’d talked over publication house indexing yesterday because the only two books on Armenia are by Richard and Ronald, sorted with one on Burma by another Richard about U Nu. When I was a child they sacrificed me and then criminalized what was done to me as though it was I who had done wrong so that I couldn’t fight when they attacked me again saying you should learn hardship so you will have insight as though flushing injury after injury into the toilet of idealism. I was a ruined tike and I’m not so well now. You can hardly deny the malice of the collegiates who go after me enjoying the sight, but the benefit to be gained from my experience is in really nailing down the dialectic between preservation ethic as something that can be shared between peoples at risk and this business of privileging one tragedy over another, which is what Richard and Ronald did of course during the AIDS attack.

There are things I could pick apart about American occult practices, the way the V.A. Lobby mobilize homeless Vets as a wedge against Immigration sensibilities, for example, the way that Hollywood uses multiculturalism as an Ark, a plot of tokens, where the tearful moment of re-uniting is viewed on the split screen of a blockbuster movie making tons of money for Nazis in media. Forgive me for jaywalking against the light on Godwin Street, I know you aren’t supposed to say the N-word that ways, but I’ve also learned that if America is in fact in danger the way Weimar fell it is in fact the same motion picture team responsible. That’s a fact I’m finding in the Kennedy assassination. I spent ten years in trauma care after a long ordeal of homelessness, just staring into space, until someone encouraged me to come back to school, maybe write about Syria.

The Learning Tree is so Warhol, blow by blow, the dismemberment. I don’t know why I keep trying sometimes. Being enfeebled weakens a voice in spite of having something to say. You get identified with defeat, but strangely enough I don’t feel humiliated. I’m just supposed to, and the fact that I don’t is so dangerous.

Anyway, thanks,

Mac