Today’s episode is guest hosted by Leslie Sainz.

Transcript

I’m Leslie Sainz, and this is The Slowdown.

About two years ago, I stumbled upon the meta-theory of “intersubjectivity.” The term has slightly different definitions within philosophy, sociology, and anthropology. But I’m most interested in its psychological application. One of my favorite examples to pose is something we all have experience with, whether we’ve been the perpetrator or the dupe: lying. Lying is considered an intersubjective act because the liar is functioning with two conscious understandings of reality — what they know to be the truth, and the falsity they construct to bury or obfuscate that truth.

More recently, I’ve become fixated on identifying this intersubjective act in my new poetry. When is my speaker lying to themselves? When are they lying to me, the author, who they are both of and not?

As a kid, I was something of a pathological liar. Maybe all kids are, as lying is fundamentally a tactic of control, a defense mechanism. And so much of growing up is learning about control. Around third or fourth grade, I began hiding my progress reports in my closet, regardless of how good my grades were. I’d fold the thick printer paper into small triangles and stuff them into old ballet slippers or recital shoes. Sometimes, I’d keep them flat and tuck them underneath the mattress of my beloved American Girl doll’s avocado green sleigh bed. I’d put on what I thought was a convincing act and tell my parents that the school had yet to issue this quarter’s progress report, knowing full well that I’d have to give up the con eventually.

In what I assume was a retaliatory test, my parents made me sweat out the lie for a few days, despite asking after the progress reports the minute I’d shuffle into the backseat of our white Mercury Villager during after-school pick-up. On the fourth or fifth day, my father would call the front office to confirm the date the reports were distributed.

In my family’s lore, whenever I lie as an adult — which I do sparingly, and immediately cough up to — the running joke is that I do it to “stay in practice.” What they don’t realize is that I’m engaging in a sophisticated phenomenological exercise.

Today’s poem simultaneously inhabits the planes of presence and absence, conveying the suffering of avoidance from multiple perspectives. With restraint and disorienting beauty, we are at the mercy of the dying voice, the reviving voice, and the surviving voice.

Agony’s Rasp
by Garous Abdolmalekian
translated by Ahmad Nadalizadeh and Idra Novey

Then you arrived 
with bits of late hours
stuck to your slippers. 
You hung the night from the coat tree
and hid yourself in the bathroom.

Now the scraping off of incident,
the sound of washing the past few hours
into the sink.

My brother!
Humans cannot hide the hidden.
Not when bullets speak in the flesh.

Even if you polish all the doorknobs,
your fingertips will not be wiped from their spirits.

In the morning 
I woke to the polished walls,
the polished vases, curtains, windows.
No one was visible even in the pictures, 
yesterday indistinct from five days ago.
When I pulled the sheet aside,
my feet were gone. 

You 
had scrubbed everything till morning. 

“Agony’s Rasp” by Garous Abdolmalekian translated by Ahmad Nadalizadeh and Idra Novey from LEAN AGAINST THIS LATE HOUR © 2020 Ahmad Nadalizadeh and Idra Novey. Used by permission of Penguin Random House.