Richard Jeffrey Newman
On February 4, 2020, instead of watching Donald Trump deliver his State of the Union Address
I listened to the Iranian translator read her rendering of the mortar attack that cost the protagonist his arm in the novel no publisher in Iran would have dared to bring out about that country’s war with Iraq;
and I smiled as something in that translated carnage recalled for me the line I can’t now reconstruct, that we all laughed about in the open mic poet’s poem about ghosts with erections that pierced the clouds,
which, even before the translator began, had taken me back to a metaphor from the novel’s first page: bombed-out tanks with their guns like erect penises after ejaculation;
and I know those spent phalluses make the obvious next move the bringing into this already overdetermined phallic echo chamber the specter of Donald Trump standing in front of Congress, words pouring in spasms from his pursed lips, marking anyone who hears them as someone who can’t unhear them;
but I am tired of the obvious, so I will turn instead to a paper I wrote in the 1980s, “The President Is A Tribal Magician In Disguise,” in which I called Ronald Reagan’s 1985 state of the union address a spell he cast to get his audience to see the world the way he wanted them to see it, not as it actually was,
an argument I made using as its frame Bronislaw Malinowski’s notion that the beating heart of verbal magic is a community’s conviction that a statement will be made true, even one that contradicts reality, if it is delivered properly, under the right circumstances, by the appropriate person.
I think now, though, that instead of spell I prefer the old-fashioned term glamor, a word that shares with grammar its root in the Latin grammatica, which medieval writers used to mean scholarship or learning, including the kind you needed to cast a proper glamor,
which is what the authors of The Malleus Maleficarum accused witches of casting to convince men that their penises had disappeared; men who, if they didn’t exist in the flesh, lived at least in the imaginations of the Malleus’ two authors, as did the erections those imagined men couldn’t possibly have had,
making, ironically, just the thought of an erection an expression of optimism (which, at an institutional level, is what Malinowski said magic is); and so of course I want to say that erections-in-the flesh—which it is not an exaggeration to claim can sometimes feel like magic—express optimism as well,
but I am constrained by the fact that those erections are all too of-ten used like the guns on the tanks on the first page of that novel, though those of us who have erections obviously cannot order our bodies to fire and have them obey the way a commanding officer can expect a gunner to do,
which is also a form of optimism: that the shell will hit its target; that the people killed will be enemies who quote deserve it un-quote; that their deaths will be among the building blocks of our side’s victory.
So now I’m thinking maybe optimism is not what I want to talk about, except that optimism is what motivates the Iranian novelist’s protagonist, who believes that finding the arm he lost will somehow make him whole again, who spends the entire novel in a parallel but unsuccessful search for the woman he fell in love with before the war began, for whom he gave up being an inveterate womanizer, though I am glad to say the novelist did not make her the good woman who made him the better man that surviving the war ultimately transforms him into;
and as I sat their listening to the translator read, I marveled that the magic of literature and the sleight of hand translation is should turn this story about a country our government has for decades asked us to treat as our mortal enemy into a mirror in which it is possible to see an image of the state of our union that is far more accurate than anything Donald Trump could have said in the address I did not watch him deliver—because he is the manifestation of a body politic that knows only how to think with its dick, and I am, frankly, terrified of the trauma it will take to change that.
Richard Jeffrey Newman is the author of T’shuvah (Fernwood Press, 2023), Words for What Those Men Have Done (Guernica Editions, 2017) and The Silence of Men (CavanKerry Press, 2006), as well as three books of translation from classical Persian poetry, Selections from Saadi’s Gulistan; Selections from Saadi’s Bustan (Global Scholarly Publications, 2004 & 2006); and The Teller of Tales: Stories from Ferdowsi’s Shahameh (Junction Press, 2011). He curates the First Tuesdays reading series in Jackson Heights, and is a professor of English and creative Writing at SUNY’s Nassau Community College.
Indolent Books and editor Michael Broder are back with another poem-a-day series as a creative response to the threat posed to our democracy by the current presidential administration. The plan is to continue for all 1460 days of the 47th American presidency.
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