Nurse Ratched

By Stephen Mark Hoffman

With grateful acknowledgement to Ken Kesey and Louise Fletcher

Nurse Ratched. The resentful little girl who got revenge on the world by damaging and retarding–mentally, emotionally, physically–every human being she ever contaminated with her prolonged presence, including the large brood of experimental victims (i.e. children) she bore specifically for that purpose. Who honed her terrifying skills of spiritual amputation first in Canadian psychiatric hospitals during her stint as a nurse there, in the days when lobotomy was still practiced and shock therapy was induced by insulin (and where Little Shadow Nelly with the Button on her Belly resided, an little elderly “shadow” woman who picked “shadow” flowers off her bedcovers, and whose natural aversion to bath water was easily countered by enlisting the help of her own mania: “It isn’t real water, Nelly, it’s shadow water!”) then during her long “saintly” life as the Old Woman Who Lived In the Shoe. A practical, down-to-earth woman, the farmer’s wife with a carving knife.

Her father (James Charles Brady, born Dublin, 1876–four years before James Joyce) was a professor of Classics–Latin and ancient Greek, the language of poets, thinkers and statesmen–the persisting and sustaining soil of every live word that still speaks or sings in our throttled, affrighted, darkening, lackluster world. Educated at Trinity College, Dublin University, a majestic institution, Bishop Berkeley’s alma mater, founded in 1517 by the Anglo-Irish, Roman Catholics–like my grandfather–excluded until the late eighteenth century. The equal of Oxford and Cambridge. Elected to Canadian Parliament. Afterwards served until his retirement as director of the National Bureau of Records and Statistics. “He modernized record keeping in Canadian hospitals and prisons” says his obituary.  Heraclitus, Sophocles, Pindar...Michel Foucault?

She read indistinguishable pulp murder-mystery fiction checked out from the public library–strictly on the pot–to ease her digestion, because there was no TV in the bathroom. At least those miserable books were more challenging than Newsweek magazine, which she also devoured on the pot, along with a clear-cut mountainside’s-worth of glossy women’s magazines–Redbook, Lady’s Home Journal, Woman’s Wear Daily–always a slippery sheaf of them as thick as your arm propped on the laundry hamper. Life, Time, Look–the whole spectrum of human experience.

The preponderance of her large brood of children struggle today with Newsweek magazine. Our household contained exactly two sets of hardcover books: the Time-Life picture-book series of glossy nature-“science” photos–cloth-bound magazines really–and my father’s worthy contribution to the family library, the twenty-four volume Encyclopedia Britannica, with its 200-page treatise on the cultivation, production and distribution of cotton and cotton textiles, and its one-inch half-column biographical thumbnail sketch of the poet Charles Cotton, 1630-1687, a contemporary of Andrew Marvell: “Her pitch-black hair, her raven eyes/And a black beauty twixt her thighs....” Here is a strophe from “Epitaph upon M.H.,” a Restoration prostitute:

                                          Pretty she was, and young, and wise,
                                          And in her Calling so precise,
                                          That Industry had made her prove
                                          The sucking School-Mistress  of Love.

Amply larded with pithy apothegms–queer, fussy old grandfather saws. Rare apothegms of pith and airy delicacy: “A glass of curaçao sec is an excellent digestive after a substantial repast.” (See the article “Curaçao,” Encyclopedia Britannica,  Vol. VII–“Constantine Pavlovich” to “Demidov.”)

Who perfected the art of passive-aggressorship and self-lobotomy (inculcated in her children to splendid effect) to nightmare proportions. Who once told me (as I stood, appalled, on the threshold of adulthood and surveyed the ruins, past and future, of all my dreams) with a look of triumphant accomplishment, and yet sincerely and in all friendliness, as if dispensing with a touching gesture of maternal tenderness the most potent remedy in her secret herb chest: “Your problem is that you think too much, Mark. You should get a job where you work so hard you don’t have time to think.” Like nursing, her own prescription for good mental hygiene, or any of the other menial, service-sector jobs to which I and my other siblings were pre-ordained and condemned by her sweet foresight and thoughtfulness, and by her “healthy,” humorous, carefree and dismissive attitude toward comical parents who obsess about “getting their children into the right kindergarten” (as reported by Newsweek). Confident in her absolute, cunningly submissive, sway over my storming, doting, constantly thwarted father, who eventually gave up and submitted to her Senior-Care nursing ministrations. Always ready with a band-aid or a warm bottle to minister to–and encourage–a person’s infantile needs, but stonily silent, and even ruthlessly, tyrannically obtuse and obstructive, to those in whom, tragically, the shy need awoke to gleen more from life than the rec-room amenities, complete with 24-hour TV, and cheap, fattening food she provided to tranquilize as Head Nurse and “meds” dispenser the infantile “patients” of her own little psychiatric ward, diabolically constructed and populated to preserve her own sanity at others expense.

Kathleen Marie Hoffman, née Brady: born October 26, 1919, Prince Rupert, British Columbia; died July 23, 2006, Chadron, NE.

MetArt (or: Did I Say Her Name Is George Washington?)

Defoliated MetArt nudes. Agent-oranged vaginas, pits. (Pits, slits. No zits.) Irradiated in a nuclear holocaust. Mutant. Polished. White smooth buttocks bellies beaked like squid. White with the fat of kidneys of wheat. Naked Heva. Orient and immortal. Pointed pubes, tonsured, razored, honed. Effective. Lethal-looking. Jules Verne’s Vingt Milles Lieues Sous les Mers. Beak, claw. Cheeked, cleft. Gill slit? Doe hoof? Gazelle toe. Impala. Chubby toe. Cloven-footed hind, sorel, tickles still the sore. Wounded hart. Doe-y, dewy. Slavic, sloe-eyed, Ukrainian, cornflower-blue, amber honey chestnut hazel umber rose. Periwinkles daisies. Russet downy temples cheekbones (not armpits). Dimples. Lots of dimples. Tender tips.

No “Zemblan mousepits” though. No tinder to light the fuse. Shredded tobacco falling from the snuffbox: none. Sneeze-proof. Hypo-allergenic. “Lush carpet of moss” strangled in the utterance. Fur defeated.

Or I could watch Tomboy-Chan shove ice-cubes up her ass. To divide my cyber-choices inventorially would dizzy the arithmatic of memory (and yet but yaw neither in respect of their quick sail). I feel so–connected.

Sweet innocent Russian girls with all their polymers buffed. Gangly-wristed adolescent devochkas. Dedicated, ready to be shot into space like teenage cosmonauts or hookers. (Verne’s aquanauts: beware.) 18 year-olds. 15 year-olds. 13? 12? Train ‘em young. Tin monkeys. Rumanian child-gymnasts. Eastern bloc. Hairless for smooth adhesion to control surfaces. Machine-body interface. Shiver-sensitive. Trembling technology. Space capsule Eros. Squeeze through the hatch. Grease the pig. Docking procedure. Wince and sing! Squeeling sex pilots for the twenty-first century. Guide you to your nut. (Release, quietus, satisfaction.) Emission control speaking. 10 seconds to jag-off. Shoot the moon.

Then grocery shopping. Counter girl. Puce nails. Cockroach-colored nails, painted. Glazed beetle-brick nails, dark-roasted honey-chocolate skin, dusty, lavender caked, livid wrists, palms. Smoky lips. Hands running my produce over the scanner. Ruby laser lines dissecting kale, plums. Over a glass darkly, floating fruit. Glass-paneled scale, inky pool filled with dark device. Weighed on the abyss. Found wanting.

Filled with dark device. You no like my Engrish? Your base are belong to us. English as she is spoke. Please would paper chuck in wastebin thank you! Passengers will please refrain from flushing toilets while the train is standing in the station I love you.

I paid their ransom, redeemed them from retail hell, ascended with them to glory on the far side of glass-shuttered gates.

Halleluia.

Safe home, I set off on my thrice-weekly cycling adventure in New Jersey. Returned by nightfall, vaulting the bridge on swift-footed Michelins, jaguar paws. (I am Jaguar Paw. This is my forest.) Suspension bridge over the abyss. Hudson River. Inky pool filled with. She was wearing her jewels tonight. She’s a beauty even if her name is George Washington.

Lustrous blue pearls she wears on summer evenings. Lotus blue. Topazes and tourmalines when the sun is setting.

Recipe for a dry martini: steep bottle of vodka two hours in the light of a vermouth-colored moon.

A rare beauty! Did I say her name is George Washington?

Outlaw Probability

Two senses of the word “unusual” (ungewöhnlich; cf. “Wozu Dichter?,” Holzwege, 290): That for which there is a low degree of probability (small chance). That for which there was never any chance (zero probability). “I am,” for example. That for which there was--and is still not--any “chance.”

(There is hope, said Kafka, but not for us. There is hope for those we will be if, and when, we are–for which eventuality there is still, as yet, no chance. I.e., no probability. τύχη, “rainbow chance”--sunshine's olive branch.)

One is the law of probability. The other is the lawlessness of probability. Outlaw probability. I.e., hope.

The unusual: that for which there was never any chance--and for which there is still none. We, myself. “There is hope, but not for us.”

“I am--probably” says outlaw probability, probingly. Outlaw probability is like the full coat of fur without the panther–but not quite without its teeth. The panther hope.

                                          “If the sun and moon did doubt
                                           They’d immediately go out.”
                                                                            (Blake)

Goddess, give us hope. No. Give us hope with teeth.

Pitch a Stone into the Well

I heard the throbbing of search engines in the night, ingesting knowledge like alphabet soup and excreting it into the wastestream (blogosphere).

(The weather was beastly hot; it might have been air-conditioner compressors pumping stale air out of chilly bedrooms, CFC's. For your respiratory enjoyment, with our compliments.)

The blogosphere: where all literary ambition goes to die. (Je suis blogiste). Alphabet soup. Lettré, well-lettered. Out of the ether of knowledge into the wastestream funneled. Sewer effluvia. Transformation of ether into methane gas. Ether of the still-unsaid (can’t-be-said?) still-not-heard.

Everything you ever wondered at (like: can space see?): sum it up in a word (like: “sky”). Utter it. Would it make a sound in cyberspace? (Does cyberspace have a sky?) Or collapse the noisy auditorium in on itself, everyone crowding to listen? Implosion of all (cyber)space. Cybergeeks panting like beached whales in the open sun. Grinding metal of voice synthesizers and translation engines. Our world–that fool–(cybernetic but without κυβερνήτης, pilot, the poor fool) hearkening to the splash of a pebble but falling instead head over heels into the well? Pitch a stone into the liquid pupil of a well--O great blue iris of the sky!--and feel the water tug on your neck.

Listen through your eyes.

Pitch a stone into the well.

Moebius Poem

Sparse scattering of stars. Cerulean sky
Stained with rocket fire. Dark treetops
Register pale surprise at the blue zenith’s
Sparse scattering of stars.

The Ages of Man (or: Today's Forecast)

Beneath "Today's Forecast" on Weather.Com:


"Provided by NBC New York. Today's Top Picks:

Watch Cute Dog Herd Tigers.
Get Out and Play This Weekend
How to Control Indoor Humidity
Stay Safe on the Road This Summer
Drive the Beautiful Blue Ridge Parkway
Get Your Bug Spray Forecast
10 Ways to Enjoy the Summer Solstice
Hotel Travel Made Easy
Preventative Pet Care Tips"


The age of iron. The age of gold. The age of tigers herded by cute dogs.

Our age.

Cute dogs bonnes bouches for tigers. Per amusare la bocca. Preventative pet care tip: When in the vicinity of tigers....

Tigers of genius. Horses of instruction. Canines of nutrition. Cute dogs, both cuddlesome and edible. Mastication. Deglutition. Absorption. Amusing, tasty and clever. “My, but that tastes clever” prattles an English toff. We are the clever animals. Your brother, your sister, your mother. Ajax, Skipper and Tramp.

Frisky. Lovable. Consummate tiger-wranglers, all.

The next age: the age that devours its pets.

The Lost Spanner

Hurtling down into the ultimate darkness where things become what they are--the darkness under our beds--from the tall construction scaffolding of my sleep, a lost spanner.

You know the type: the word “Craftsman” or “Stanley” in fire-hammered letters on the drop-forged handle. Worm gear adjustment on the chrome-alloy cheek to ease or tighten the lower jaw of the tool around the nut of a resistant idea or irresolute thought. Like an opposable thumb, or a flexible earlobe to lock around and secure the meaning of a passing comment. "Tools were made, and born were hands." Every farmer understands.

I breathed lightly and turned onto my left side. My right hand and forearm dangled over the edge of the bed. Around the piers and pilings of my bed sheer nothing surged and foamed.

In the darkness where things become what they are a lost spanner, hurtling down onto helpless heads and eggshell fetus skulls of language still unborn, became a sidereal hand articulated by a celestial arm to a sleeping mountain–my shoulder. I haled this fresh-minted mountain arm out of the sea like dripping nets and folded it away, still dripping with starlight and holding something in its starfish palm, under my right side, returning to sleep.