The Song of the Rat & Other Unconquerables

Portable Nature Field (detail), collaboration with Oliver Noble, 2021

Dear Friends,

These days I have little taste for opinion and analysis but I find I have a great thirst for poetry. I also have a powerful desire to gather with others in any room that I can—the zendo, the dinner, the poetry group, the poker table. While traveling between one space and another I have been writing in motion, speaking into my phone because I don’t want to stop.

I was reminded by Patti Smith recently of Camus’s words: “I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.” May we be together now and always.

— Sal

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I bring the reluctance of the animal past two o-rings lying in the street, one broken, one whole, past yellow leaves caught in an intake grating, past the rebuilding of the sidewalk. If you cannot find the book, you must write the book. If you cannot find the nation, you must write the nation. Somewhere, hidden in the tangle is the om, the mantra and the invocation. It turned out that all the mysterious objects that looked like lamps were actually lamps, as when the things in the world are representations of themselves. I walk the world as an uneasy representation—how much better to be represented by everything that is not me. I am thinking, also, of all that I lack. And what is lack, anyway, besides the hollow interior of a mould for the liquid metal of everything? Is the nation my body or am I the nation’s? If you are right here, when you look at the nation you see my face.

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I am damp from the evening rain, and I am on my way to a poker game. I’ve just left the poets and I feel sweet towards each of the faces and all the words ready to rise up from them. Rise up, o words! Rise up voices. Rise up hearts. Lately, I do much of my writing while walking. Remember that the darkness is a cave and refuge. Remember that a true sanctuary does not exclude the sorrowing and the rending. The gold curtains are lightly parted. The beloved’s face is still and sad, and yet we withstand it. I had decided not to prepare for this disaster. Now I’m going from room to room of gathering friends. After the national disaster, we hunt through the mud and collapse to find a photograph or two of the people we love. It is cold, but I can’t bring myself to wear a coat. Tonight, my walking is brisk and vigorous—one foot and then another is its own dance. The city is installing potted trees and rocks in the parking spots and I don't know why. The subway busker is singing a sad song from another country. On the train, the man next to me draws on the side of an empty coffee cup. His phone is in French. He wears a work jacket and pants in a heavy ochre-brown, sweetened by dirt and time. His beautiful hands have labored hard this day and he touches his own brow. He tugs in the corner of his coat so that a large woman can fit in between us. There is a circle and a star in his drawing. Without effort, Motown fills the air of the car and is right in its way, a kind of sunshine. The one in the vivid green coat maintains a secret smile. I think, for no reason that I can recall, of the words, fresh and new.

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Imagine this: I am riding backwards. Backwards I am being ridden. I am being rid of it, the wroth and wrath of reminders, I am rid wryly of the usual wandering because here I arrive. As you can see I arrive playful and sad, and the fear has been upon my brow. Verily! Verily I saw the rat in the road, and he was newly dead, and in the suddenness of his passing there was much life in him. His ears were translucent in the light, his whiskers were white, his eyes were open and they met mine blackly. His entrails had left his body, arrayed redly on the black tarmac among the yellow leaves. Thus we are fallen. The folds of his body were tender. His fur shone. Now, later, his rat-soul-ghost is on my shoulder and is satisfied to be writing. Rat of many lives, Rat of the New York School, Rat of 21ist Street at the corner of 9th. This rat was a great poet of his kind, or—may I correct myself a little too late—of her kind. Ratty and tattered, rattled, ratified. I fear what was voted and what will be certified, but the rat fears not even her own death. She was canny and then crushed, but she has already risen, almost instantly, into the new life. For she is the life in wrack and ruin, she is the unconquerable, the undefeated. She is the bite and the eating. She is the breeding and the excess. Imagine that I am rat-ridden, and that we are falling back, falling backwards through a darkness that the rat in me does not fear, for the rat is never just one body, the rat is a multitude and a swarm. For myself, I own not one word of the language I speak—my language is a swarm of ghosts, squeaking and howling. The rat speaks and in her diction can be no dictator and forsooth I will learn to take down her words and keep them close. Her words that she will not take back.

The song of the Rat

Blessing of the paw
Blessing of the tail
Blessing of the many and the breeding
Blessing of death
Blessing of the trap
Blessing of knowing the ways and the way

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Tell me how you are doing.

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Further adventures and new ways of seeing can be found in my book, The Uses of Art.

Artist Sal Randolph’s THE USES OF ART is a memoir of transformative encounters with works of art, inviting readers into new methods of looking that are both liberating and emboldening.

Dazzlingly original, ferociously intelligent.
— Michael Cunningham

A joyful, dazzling treasure-box of a book.
— Bonnie Friedman

Here’s a guide, to waking up, over and over again.
— Roshi Pat Enkyo O’Hara

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