Albert Goldbarth

Does she love you?She says yes, but really how do you know unless you undress that easy assertion, undoing its petals and laminae, and going in below all trace of consciousness, into the neuroelectrical coffer where self-understanding is storaged away, and then lifting its uttermost molecule out, to study in its nakedness as it spins in a clinical light?—the way we all, in our various individual versions of this common human urge, go in, and in, and in, the physicist down to the string-vibration underlying matter, and the Appalachia fiddler getting so (as she puts it) “into my music,” sound becomes a flesh for her to intimately (“in”-timately) enter, “its thick and its sweetbreads.” Is he cheating on you?He says no, and feigns that he’s insulted, but for certainty you’ll need to delicately strip the bark away and drill, and tweeze, until you can smear a microscope slide of the pith and can augur the chitterlings —the way the philosopher can’t accept a surface assumption of truth, but needs to peel back the fatty sheen of the dermis, soak the cambium layer into a blow-away foam, and then with pick and lightbeam helmet, inch by inch begin spelunking through those splayed-out caverns under the crust, where gems of cogitation are buried —the way the diver descends for the pearl, the miner: in, the archaeologist: in, the therapist: down the snakier roots of us and in, and in, the way the lone, leg-pretzeled yogi makes a glowing bathysphere of worldliness and sends it in, and further in, tinier and heavier and ever in, the way the man in the opium den is floating forever, toward a horizon positioned in the center of the center of his head. . . . If we could stand beyond the border of our species and consider us objectively, it might seem that our purpose in existing is to be a living agency that balances, or maybe even slows, the universe’s irreversible expansion out, and out . . . and each of us, a contribution to that task. My friend John’s wife received the news: a “growth,” a “mass,” on her pituitary, marble-sized, mysterious. And the primary-care physician said: Yes, we must go in and in.That couldn’t be the final word! And the second-opinion physician said: Yes, my sweet-and-shivering-one, my fingerprint-and-irisprint-uniqueness, someone’s-dearest, you who said the prayers at Juliette’s grave, who drove all night from Switzerland with your daughter, you on this irreplaceable day in your irreplaceable skin in the scumbled light as it crosses the bay in Corpus Christi, yes in the shadows, yes in the radiance, yes we must go in and in.

The renewal project is doomed: because its funding board’s vice-president resigned: because the acids of divorce were eating day-long at her stomach, at her thoughts: because her husband was neglecting her, in favor of his daughter, who was dying: because her husband, bi and edgy, bore an AIDS sore that was ripe enough with fear and woe to throw this whole thick network of connections off its balance and down a hole of human misery. Haven’t we seen it happen? —when a crowded room at a party was tilted perilously askew by the weight of two wept tears that weren’t as large as a housefly’s wings, that couldn’t have filled a pistachio shell. _________ It’s like this: because because because, Sawyer was drunk when he delivered his opening remarks onstage at Stardome Planetarium. He stood below a slide show of “The Emptiness of Outer Space” —stars and planets, scattered like the scantest motes of dust in unimaginable void—and was about to make the leap to what percent of us, our dearly thumping bodies, is a corresponding emptiness . . . when one foot met a wire that had strayed outside the curtain, and a wild arc of hand undid the podium, which canted off its casters sidelong into the 3-D galaxy props, and you could say whatever thimble or pustule or hackle of grief was his, it had toppled the whole damn universe. _________ Was she a ghost? Sometimes she thought she was a ghost, transparent, stealing through the lives of people untouched and untouching. And so she carried a bucket of burning coals (we’ll call it that for now) against her breasts; and then she knew she was alive. And he. . . ?—was just the rusty foxing that an antique book exhales into dim air, wasn’t that what he was, oh it was, yes it was, and so one afternoon he strapped a meteorite to his back, and now he walks the streets like anybody else. An ageless tribal saying: If you aren’t given a burden, you must carve your own. An eye will do, if it’s ill. One word, if it’s cruel. And don’t be fooled by breath: the throat holds up some old-time blues the way a hod holds bricks. _________ But she didn’t die of full-blown AIDS —Sawyer’s daughter. Even so, her twisted legs and limp are enough to sometimes send him a little over the blotto line. Tonight, though, after show time, he’s just soused enough to wander through the mock-up stage-set milky ways agog with child-wonder: all those luminescent islands! all that vacuum! Look: a planet floats, there’s that much cosmos all around it. A planet! While we . . . we couldn’t squint and levitate a half inch, not the guru-most among us. Well, we could: if the laws of the universe changed. It’s only the Earth that makes us so heavy. It’s only our lives that keep our lives from floating off into the nothing.

My father’s been dead for thirty years but when he appears behind my shoulder offering advice, or condemnation, or a quiet pride in something I’ve done that isn’t even thistledown or tiny shavings of balsa wood in the eyes of the world —“Albie, grip in the middle and turn with a steady pressure”—it’s measurable, if not the way the wind is in a sock, or ohms, or net-and-gross, it registers the way an absence sometimes does, and I listen to him with a care I never exhibited when he was a presence, alive, in his undershirt, chewing his tiny licorice pellets and radiating a rough-hewn love. “Negative capability”—the phrase of course is Keats’s, from his letters, but we make it ours a hundred times a day. A hundred times we do our own pedestrian version of early maritime cartography: the known world stops, and over its edge the fuddled mapmaker writes Here There Be Monsters and then illustrates their non-existing coiled lengths and hell-breath with a color-splotched vivacity he wouldn’t waste on inhabited shores. Or: “Don’t think of a polar bear!”...the game one plays with a child. But I say with adult certainty that when Eddie’s wife Fiona went back to stripping he couldn’t stand to be at the club and see, and yet those empty hours in his mind were populated just as unbearably—and indeed, yes, there were monsters in that void, and the vigilant bears of insecurity and jealousy padded hungrily behind his eyes each night until her return. For Keats, however, the force that emptiness makes kinetic is a positive one, the way that the invisible, unknowable “dark energy” is seminal, a kind of funding agency or sugar daddy powering the universe in all its spangled beauty and veiled mystery from behind the scenes. Last night, a woozy few of us were mourning the demise of The Dusty Bookshelf. “Well I tried to support it,” I said, “by stopping in from time to time.” And B, the king of local kleptobibliomania, with his nimble touch and expando-capacious overalls, said “I tried to support it by not going in.”

Fire isn’t allowed, for the sake of the books. The lean monk-copyist who scribes the books is slate-blue at his fingertips this steely late-November day in the year 1000. Brother Ambrosio huffs some perfunctory warmth on his stiffening hands, then bends again to his goat’s-horn of ink. For every line, he believes, he’s forgiven a sin. And now he’s at his heavy uncial letters, and will be for nine hours more, until a slab of bread and a beet relieve his transcriptual ardor. What he copies?—psalter, missal, hagiography: the predetermined and sanctioned community passions of a religious culture. Nothing like the twentieth century’s prevalent kneejerk “self-expression.” Nothing like the priest, excuse me: former priest, and former nun, on daytime talk TV, who live, she tells us, in a “trinity of love” with the former creator-of-tourist-ashtrays-out-of-catfish-heads. This is, she insists, the final and jubilant stage of a lifelong “quest to feel belongingness” initiated thirty years before by parents skittering cross-country with the military: they were wholly rootless, and so she grew up “unable to commit.” The following day, a man confesses to pedophilia because of a lesbian aunt. A woman says she robbed the Sack-N-Save of $13.42 “because of what they’re dumping in the water supply, it makes me go all freaky.” Steve was bounced out from The Chicken Shack “because I’m Scandinavian.” The culture of blame is so completely exterior in its search for cause, some days I wake to think I’ll find most people laboring under the weight of sci-fi-style mind parasites, like fleshy turbans spewing in, and feeding off, their brain blood. This (by “this” I mean of course a recognition of the magic of objective correlative boppin’ about in the spotlight) is, to some length, understandable: you can’t beat the miniscule carry-along convenience of a silicon chip invisibly set in something, BUT for sheer persuasive visual power, that can’t touch a 1940s generating plant, its giant Alcatrazian shape against the sky, and the enormous wrestling electrical crackles snaking its rooftop pylon. In the scriptorium, even —such an isolated unit of human endeavor, its limited range of reactions surely is pure—when Brother Ambrosio nods off, sleepy in his long day’s long eighth hour of thickly nibbed and careful letters, he knows it’s imps in league with Satan that keep pulling down his eyelids. If in scratching his flea-measled thigh he spills a hand’s-expanse of ink across the vellum page, the fleas are tiny devils on a guerilla mission from Hell. And once a devilkin took lodging in his belly, and there created “rumbling noises like a toad, and which, for hours, spoiled the concentration of all of the other Brothers.” We find parchment scraps with appropriate exorcisms: “Away! you flaming sow, you poisoned udder, you arse of the arch-fiend, shit-fly, stinking he-goat, out out out, away, back into thine infernal kitchen, you bestial puke!” We also find those charming marginal doodles (sprigs in flower, unicorns, seemingly every songbird in Creation): such diminutive external bodies given to the longings of these cooped-up men. And when they came to drag my friend Jess screaming to the ward, because he was beating his head on the lawyer’s steps, it was clear to us all that the chemicals in his mind had turned against him. It was clear to Jess that he was being hunted like prey by hounds from the moon.

Fathers are invariably great nuisances on the stage, and always have to give the hero or heroine a long explanation of what was done before the curtain rose, usually commencing with “It is now nineteen years, my dear child, since ...” etc., etc. —Charles Dickens There might be a planet. Before that, though, there would have been a gas that coalesced into a planet . . . as, before that, there were dots of flux and energy that hadn’t yet declared themselves in concert. There’s always “before”: there's more each minute, more each person, yes and every one of its smallest, irreducible subparticles—which I name the “beforeon”—is exerting force on us that’s surely time’s own version of gravity: its purpose is to tug, and to remind us. In the house of second marriages, it causes the man to do what he and the woman had promised they never would: one night while she’s asleep, he snoops her bureau for telltale relics of the mysterious Mr. Number One. And why, or even what he hopes to find, he couldn’t clearly say: a letter? photo? sex toy?—something, some objectified gossip, a fossil of bygone love. Essentially, we make of our own psyches a bureau and pay a shrink to snoop; as for the moment when our neural linkage first began to form, as for the flavor of the fluids in the womb. . . we’re all amnesiacs: and our earliest self, just like the universe’s earliest being, is a “phantom limb” with the faintest mnemonic of starbursts in an otherwise chill void. I have a friend D____ L____ (this poem is hers) who, orphaned as a newborn, is devoted to learning her origin as doggedly as any cosmologist tracks light to its source, although her search (when not pure Internet) is more a matter of tape-recording the beer-sour stories in sailor bars, of sifting ashy memories in nursing homes, one backwards inch of plotline at a time. And yet somebody else is waking up this morning with the need to be detached from any history, to stand here like a person in a play who enters onstage from a pool of perfect blankness. Then, of course, he can start over, minute-zero-of-year-zero, unbesmirched. We could have told him that he’d be this anguished—sneaking in her drawer, below those folded pastel lozenges of lingerie, uncovering the one thing that could ruin them. Now he wants only to float (who doesn't, sometimes?) in an anti-world: appealing, but illusory. We can’t unmoor ourselves from linearity, no more than any one of us can be a human being unconnected to a genome—and in fact, no more than Mama-All-of-Time-and-Space-Herself (I mean the cosmos) can unwrap her vasty body from its own twelve million years of Big Bang “background radiation” so it wafts—a tossed off, filmy scarf—far elsewhere. No; there isn’t any“elsewhere.” When we sleep or simply deepen into quietude enough, the voices come—the rhythmic, grave, ancestral murmur, a woman bearing a ritual clamshell bowl . . . a man with a done-deal sales contract . . . whispers, knuckle-rap, cleared throats. . . . Her great-grandfather, D____ L____ has uncovered, was a lector—a reader they used to relieve the tedium of the leaf rollers’ shifts in cigar manufactories. Shakespeare, Dickens, union tracts, love letters, family diaries . . . . He’s walking through the tobacco aroma; he’s setting his text on his easel; and the story—the only story we know, the story of Before—is recited.

Chile, 1834 A month before his dinner with the visiting Spanish lawyer, he had “set out for the purpose of geologizing,” and rode back over the ridge of the Chilecauquen with a huge jute bag of living shells from the sandy flats at the coast, and with another, as full, of dead barnacles scraped from the rock. A few months forward from that dinner —on the island of San Pedro, where the Beagle was anchored awaiting him—he would be sneaking up on a fox “of a kind very rare” and donking it stoutly “on the head with my geological hammer.” (The fox, he’ll write, “is now in the Zoological Society.”) So what does he think, when the Spanish lawyer expresses a disbelief that the King of England would be so loco as to bother to ship to this sensible, orderly country a man “to pick up beetles and lizards, and to break stones”? No, the whiff of something “off ”—like suspect meat—attends eccentric stunts like these. “I do not like it: if one of us were to go and do such things in England, do not you think the King of England would very shortly command us to leave his shores?” Renous, another student of bugs and rocks, from Germany, is also there at dinner, and he mentions then that once, in a house in San Fernando, he’d been discovered contemplating the transformation of caterpillars to butterflies. He couldn’t deny it: there they were, the writhing green proof, in an open box! “The Padres and the Governor consulted, and agreed it must be some heresy”—and so Renous was arrested. Darwin can only shake his head in a quiet bemusement as his guests converse. Those inchling creatures crawling over their chopped-up foliage, heads as blunt as thimbled thumbs . . .heretical? How could anybody believe that the innocent jumble in the baskets and flasks of a naturalist is dangerous? * And Lillian Colton—the woman in Owatonna, Minnesota who for forty years has avidly collected the seeds of that state and, with them (“poking them into place with toothpicks and gluing them down”), has portraitured “American presidents, movie stars, country musicians, rock and roll legends, scientific and religious leaders (including Mother Teresa)” —what suspiciousness might seize the Spanish lawyer if he saw her on her rounds? What edgy wariness would grip him if he chanced on Nellie Staves, “at 87 perhaps the most famous Adirondack trapper,” out in the summer to harvest shell-shaped fungus off the dead trees of those shaded, spinous hills? —she’ll work for twenty hours straight on one, with the point of an old school compass, stippling it into the scene of a great alert-eyed ram or a sunrise, watching as the fungus’s own interior, brown juices dye the image into permanence. Who would these represent, for the Spanish lawyer, what forbidden Other?—a girl in the corner, walling her attention away from her sisters’ strident hip-hop, by reading a fanciful tale of witches? a girl on a dancer pole at Sturgis, strobing her tits for the boys in a quick 1-2-1 semaphore of fuck-the-work-week revelry? Surely not. Surely these are no threat to his world. And yet for nothing more than positing a newly ordered sky map, Giordano Bruno was led in chains from his cell in the Roman prison of Castel San’Angelo, there where he’d spent eight years as the Inquisition hammered at his ideas and his calm resolve. It was February 19th, 1600; he was tied to an iron stake; a wedge was stuffed in his mouth, to prevent any final utterance of blasphemy; and he was burned alive. The leg skin bubbled off of his body like a Christmas pig’s. It turns out that a redone sky implies a redone God—and a God is intolerant of this, a God is jealous of any counter claim to the pedigree of His cosmos. Yes, but . . . surely not this mushroom picker? not this boy who simply speaks to invisible friends as he wanders around the alleys? Oh but that would depend on the given Spanish lawyer of that given day and circumstance. In Ghent, a cock was put on trial and sentenced to death for repeatedly disturbing the peace of the Lord’s day, Sunday. It had been warned; so now it was just, to lead this beast to a chopping block —restoring the sanctified order. * Kansas, 2004 Ah, for a witty transition from “cock” to my neighbors Suzette and Edie!—lesbians, now in love with each other for over a decade and wanting only to declare their love in a marriage vow, “like anyone,” as Edie says. Not that my schoolboy humor would find favor in their reading life . . . although we get along; some shared affinity enables The Church of the Gay Girls and The Orthodox Congregation of Guy to coexist with an amiability. Still, I’ve witnessed other people pass them by with the slitted, ophidian stare of xenophobia. Suzette and Edie —are they the new apostasy? are they our own Anne Hutchinson? In 1638 she was found guilty, after a two-day trial, of heresy—of being “a woman not fitt for our Society.” With will, she had embraced doctrinal misinterpretations, “some of them blasphemus, others erroneus and all Unsafe, and of the Devill of Hell,” and she was excommunicated from Massachusetts Bay Colony “evermore.” Her actual crime?—a claim “the Holy Spirit illumines the heart of every true believer” without the need of a minister intervening. For this, she was harried into the wilds —it was called a “hiving-out”—and set at the mercy of wolf and of winter, “and it were Death to return.” Her other actual crime?—that after a pregnancy, she had been delivered “of thirtie monstrus Births or therabowts at once, some of them Bigger, some Lessr, some of one shape, some of An other, few of any Perfect shape, None at all of them of Human shape”—which perhaps is what you’d expect from a woman of “nimble Witt and active Spirit and verie Voluble Tonggue.” At the Republican convention, it was, indeed, the voluble tongue that Edie always flapped so saucily (and too, I’d guess, her rainbow-hue WE’RE ALREADY BEDDED . . . WHY NOT WEDDED? T-shirt) that (on her side) led inevitably to the violence. A surly officer suggested that she move. She pointed out how she was already in the caged-off square allowed for free-speech protest, and had no intention of leaving. There were “gestures they exchanged”. . . and then a stun gun’s 50,000 volts were suddenly alive inside her, just enough to crumple her into helplessness so that, when the panic began, she was trampled by friends and police alike. A lung was crushed, and when I visited three weeks later, her skin was still a nightmare Turkish rug of bruise. (For a moment, I saw in the air around her the first disabling gust of snow in the woods at the border of Massachusetts Bay in 1638.) To be fair, I should add that the confrontational officer doing crowd control went home with his head little more than a pocket of blood and neural damage. Do not, I warn you, ever lightly cross a Wiccan bowler. * Terms I haven’t yet used, from my pile of notes: separatist, sedition, dogma. Finally, though, when those clouds of abstraction open up, it’s always one specific ordinary rainy day, in Chicago, in 1961. I’m thirteen, squeaky-voiced, and with an adam’s apple popping from my thin throat like a doorknob—while my father is large, he fought the neighbor’s crazy German shepherd to a standstill once, and behind him are generations of him, solemn and knowing. We’re standing there in front of the house, in a dim autumnal downpour, and it wouldn’t look to anyone else like an even match, my scrawny shouts, his thousands of years of righteousness; and yet, in emotional terms, I have the upper hand. I won’t believe in his God. I won’t believe in any God, in any synagogue, in any mumbo jumbo or rabbinical teetotum, and I’m screaming this and screaming this and screaming this, until I see the rain become his face, and for the only time except his mother’s funeral on a similar day of wet and chill in a shivering mix, my father cries in front of me. And God, if He’s there, must write my name down on a list that He’ll turn over to His deputies on Earth —His Spanish lawyers. There are many terms for this, but only one rain. Now it’s falling, grayish twill, on a hill along the coast of the Chonos Archipelago islands. 1835. A mound of seals in the distance, “huddled together, asleep: they appeared to be of a loving disposition; but even pigs would be ashamed of their dirt,” which is picked at by the turkey-buzzards. Terns, gulls, black-necked swans. A deposit of sandstone. “Four great snowy cones” of the local volcanoes. He couldn’t be happier. He has computed the number of eggs in a tenth-of-an-inch of a sea-slug’s potent slime, he has suggested how “a great volume might be written, describing one of these beds of sea-weed.” The otter. The spunky Chilean mouse. He has read “a most interesting discussion on the history of the common potato.” He couldn’t be more mesmerized in the grand salons of Paris than here, in the rain, with his sodden insect net. And who would complain? He isn’t any rooster. He isn’t going to rudely wake anyone from a long sound sleep.