In Endeavor’s Angle
When something moves is how you know it’s alive. I cannot see time move, but I try to save it, like the downy woodpecker who hit the window and whom I took to the bird clinic, trying to save it. Like wind, time is only visible by watching the things it touches. (I see the wind when it caresses the tree.) We see time when it touches the human face.
While some plants pull themselves up from the seemingly dead ground and bring forth fruit, humans don’t resurrect themselves. This, my great grandfather learned when he tried to revive a dead postman on his way to Mt. Athos by reading poems to the lifeless body. Still, some human time is outside the flow of historic time.
We carry the past with us in our feelings, our brains. Our cells carry traces of the first chemical kisses, when clouds of atoms began to gather, before this planet’s first dust clumps. We trust these reactions to carry oxygen through the blood, to digest our food, and in this simple way we carry ancient time in our own bodies. Some humans can’t stop thinking about the future and they panic. Others get stuck in time.
“Time isn’t really relevant to the unconscious,” says the Therapist, whom I have just now invited to enter.
And yet we are bodies bound in time.
Unbound by it too.
In a day, a week, a century.
That is part of Persephone’s, or really, anyone’s story. You walk through the sequence of say 22 years and you learn how to be in reality. Your night-dreaming continues but somehow you are robbed of your daydreaming.
Eva had been practicing her living performance of the ancient dead. She held her daydreaming intact, humming alongside.
War and time, she soon learned, are enemies. Sequence shatters. You are walking to the store to get bread and suddenly shrapnel is flying through the air like scared and deadly sparrows. In the moments after you can’t remember what you saw, but what you heard: a cackling of kettle drums with no rhythm, a black hole of sound. A pile of rubble where the bakery was. Then time is like a wound whose sides won’t seal.
While some plants pull themselves up from the seemingly dead ground and bring forth fruit, humans don’t resurrect themselves. This, my great grandfather learned when he tried to revive a dead postman on his way to Mt. Athos by reading poems to the lifeless body. Still, some human time is outside the flow of historic time.
We carry the past with us in our feelings, our brains. Our cells carry traces of the first chemical kisses, when clouds of atoms began to gather, before this planet’s first dust clumps. We trust these reactions to carry oxygen through the blood, to digest our food, and in this simple way we carry ancient time in our own bodies. Some humans can’t stop thinking about the future and they panic. Others get stuck in time.
“Time isn’t really relevant to the unconscious,” says the Therapist, whom I have just now invited to enter.
And yet we are bodies bound in time.
Unbound by it too.
In a day, a week, a century.
That is part of Persephone’s, or really, anyone’s story. You walk through the sequence of say 22 years and you learn how to be in reality. Your night-dreaming continues but somehow you are robbed of your daydreaming.
Eva had been practicing her living performance of the ancient dead. She held her daydreaming intact, humming alongside.
War and time, she soon learned, are enemies. Sequence shatters. You are walking to the store to get bread and suddenly shrapnel is flying through the air like scared and deadly sparrows. In the moments after you can’t remember what you saw, but what you heard: a cackling of kettle drums with no rhythm, a black hole of sound. A pile of rubble where the bakery was. Then time is like a wound whose sides won’t seal.
Methods of Transmission
Συντίμμα / Syntrimma (rubble) again: “[T]he shattering aftermath that follows the advance of human wickedness. It pictures life broken beyond self-repair, the debris … scattered along a person’s path and [...] society at large. The image is not a momentary stumble but a sustained condition of devastation in which healing cannot be found apart from [Third Party/divine (deus ex machina)] intervention.”
But will the gods come to our aid? Not clear. In the meantime we have to inspect each piece of rubble ourselves.
But will the gods come to our aid? Not clear. In the meantime we have to inspect each piece of rubble ourselves.
• • •
And “[o]n that day they will not advance with the deafening din of drums and fifes, cunningly contrived to stupefy all man’s faculties of reason. But their Rhythm will be their own heart’s beating, and the beat of their hearts will not be the excitement of the coming slaughter of enemies, their faith will not be in their bombs and bayonets and bullets. They will have cast away these hideous toys impeding the noble movement of men [and women] and with the mighty breath of their whole life… they will advance in a very wind of beauty, singing to their enemies that they cannot kill the [humans] they love.”
— Eva, Upward Panic
• • •
“And, as lovely Sappho says, ‘Come, Cypris, pouring gracefully into golden cups nectar that is mingled with our festivities’ for these my friends and yours”
— Athenaeus, quoting Sappho
Memory Rehearsal is out from City Lights on May 19, 2026.
Text reproduced by kind permission of the publisher.
Text reproduced by kind permission of the publisher.
© Penelope Massouri
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Born into a family of tree workers, bohemians, poets, ne'er-do-wells, visionaries, and smalltime sort-of hustlers, Eleni Sikelianos is a poet, writer, collaborator, and "master of mixing genres." As a student of the poets of Naropa, she is a lineage-holder in the Outrider poetics family tree. Deeply engaged with ecopoetics, her work takes up urgent concerns of environmental precarity and ancestral work. She has published ten books of poetry (most recently, Your Kingdom, 2023) and two unclassifiable hybrid works, sometimes called nonfiction, sometimes memoirs, sometimes fiction: The Book of Jon and You Animal Machine. Among other honors, she has been awarded two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a Fulbright Artists fellowship, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Award in nonfiction. She grew up in Goleta, California, and now lives in Providence, Rhode Island.
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