PREDELLA
ERIC SHANFIELD
“We are funny creatures. We don’t see the stars as they are, so why do we love them?
They are not small gold objects but endless fire.”
—Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King
2
Story With A Bear
Chapter One
The boy came to his father and said,
There’s something in my bed.
His father went upstairs and found the boy’s bed-sheets all crumpled. Inside them was a
naked lady.
Who are you? his father said.
I’m his wife, she said. The boy clutched his father’s leg.
But I don’t want a wife, he said.
Well, his father said, you’ve got one.
Chapter Two
His father said he should be asleep already and kissed him and turned out the light. The boy tip-toed
over to his bed. He could hear her in there, so he ran into the closet and shut the door. She said,
Where have you gone? He could hear her coming closer. What are you doing in there?
She opened the door and switched on the hanging electric bulb. He hid behind the hamper
and clutched at his dirty clothes.
Come to bed, she said, and took him by the hand and turned out the light and dragged him
there.
He could feel her under the sheets next to him, moving, and lay awake in the moonlight.
Chapter Three
Eventually she fell asleep and her breath was like a clock. What he wanted was to clutch his bear
but his bear was gone. Instead there was just his wife.
Where have you gone, Mr Bear? he whispered.
I’m under the bed, Mr Bear whispered back. There’s someone in the bed, you know.
I know, the boy said. She scares me.
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She told me she’s your wife, and that you didn’t need me anymore. Is that true? Mr Bear
asked. Don’t you need me anymore?
I do, he said, I do, more than ever. Please come out.
Mr Bear slowly emerged from beneath the bed. As the boy wondered how Mr Bear could
have fit under there, the noise awoke his wife.
What? she said as Mr Bear stood up to his full height in the moonlight, paw outstretched,
muzzle frothing. As she was about to scream Mr Bear pounced, and ate her up.
Thank you, Mr Bear, said the boy, and curled up beside him and put his arms around him
and finally fell asleep.
Chapter Four
He was awakened after a while by strange sounds.
What? he said groggily. He could feel Mr Bear tossing and turning in the narrow bed and
hear him growling.
Go back to sleep, boy, said Mr Bear. But the boy could see a little of his wife moving in the
sheets beneath Mr Bear and said,
I thought you ate her up.
I did, said Mr Bear. You don’t have to worry about her anymore.
That’s good, the boy said, and went back to sleep.
Chapter Five
In the morning when his mother came to wake him for school there was no sign of his wife or Mr
Bear. His mother wondered,
I wonder where they went?
On his way to school the boy passed a shop window with a mannequin buried in a fur coat
and his reflection in the glass.
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The Woman Who Floated Down From The Sky
Chapter One
The woman floated down from the sky with a beatific smile on her face. Floated down right in front
of him, arms outstretched. Landing, she reached around and removed the cable from her back. It
ascended back into the sky above. He looked up but there was nothing it might have been
suspended from.
Hello, she said. Hello, he replied, a little taken aback.
Do you want to get some coffee? she asked, and he slowly said he would. They sat together
in a little cafe.
Where did you come from? he said. She raised her eyebrows as if to say, do you really want
to know? and he supposed he did not really want to know.
Chapter Two
Twenty years later they sat together in the park reading books. Although they hadn’t any children it
had been a good twenty years, not without its small shames and arguments, but twenty years is a
long time and for the most part it had been a good twenty years. As they sat, a cable descended
from the sky, landing in front of them in wide coils.
That’s for me, she said, and went to pick it up.
Wait, he said, putting his hand on her shoulder. She looked at him and looked at the cable
and looked at him. She did not pick up the cable and it lay there for a while before rising up again
into the empty blue sky.
5
The Chimney
Saul lived in a brownstone by the museum. It was his first time living alone. His studio apartment
was not very big and most of the space was taken up by the fireplace, which stood in the center of
the apartment very large and breathing. Sometimes he could see the bricks buckling as it breathed.
Living in an apartment filled with fireplace is not easy. Everything was crammed against the
walls, and he had to flatten himself against them to move around, scraping past the fire-breathing
flank of the exceedingly large fireplace. But he liked it because it was by the museum and the rent
was low.
One day he passed his neighbor on the stairs. Her name was Alice and he liked her green
eyes and lovely blonde hair, although the rest of her was not so memorable. He lived on the top
floor and she was heading up past him.
Where are you going? he asked.
I’m going to the roof, she said.
He hadn’t known they were allowed on the roof. We’re not, she said, and pushed the door
open. He waited for an alarm to sound but there was no alarm.
The roof was dominated by a gigantic chimney. This probably should not have surprised
him but it did. Somehow he had not imagined the fireplace extended out of his apartment. Do all
the apartments have fireplaces like mine? he wondered. Of course they do, Alice said. What did
you think?
He put his hand on the chimney. It was warm but unlit. Alice said, have you been inside?
Saul looked at her like she was crazy. Didn’t you ever think of going in there? she said. Saul
continued to look at her like she was crazy. Here, she said, taking his hand.
She held his hand. It was a cool, soft hand. Now put your other hand in the chimney, she
said. He put his other hand in the chimney.
They stood there like that for a minute and then she let go of his hand and went downstairs.
When he returned to his apartment it was filled with smoke.
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The Refugee Camp
Crept across the minefield, what earth was disturbed. Where the tanks went they went too,
treading on flat feet, recoiling, round and round. In the shelter of a baobab they stretched their
legs.
Saul said, are you out of water? Alice said she was. Are you? Saul said he was and sucked on
her finger. It was dry as a bone.
At night they raided the villages. There weren’t any lights except eyes in the darkness.
What they shone out of was fear. Sometimes something howled: a monkey, a hyena: something. It
set them on edge and their hair too. The villagers saw them coming and hid in their hovels.
Saul stole a pot with meal and jars of wine and knew what was watching. Alice said they
make that wine by chewing leaves and spitting them into the jar. They drank it anyway and saw
visions.
An apple tree. A minefield.
7
The Octopus
Saul put an octopus on his head as was the fashion. He carefully draped its gloopy tentacles to frame
his face and adjusted the bulbous crown where it surmounted his forehead. It’s not as purple as it
was, he sighed.
In the street everybody had animals on their heads. Sea-creatures melted in the heat, and
even the mounted mammals—deer-antlers, elephant tusks, lions’ manes—were matted and
drooping. Sweat poured down Saul’s face, sweat and octopus goo.
At work he fought terrorists from his desk. They built bombs in rocky caves and Saul
pressed a button until they did not.
Your octopus is looking a little toothsome, Alice said. Saul said he knew. Alice wore a
squid, its ten tentacles attractively woven into her plaited hair. Ink slowly leaked down the back of
her dress. Alice sat at her desk pinpointing the enemy on terrorist-speckled plateaus. I can see you,
she said, quietly singing to herself the songs of satellites.
Do you think there are whales wearing human heads in the oceans? he said.
What? she said. What are you talking about? Don’t be stupid, she said, and pressed a
button that killed a terrorist on the other side of the Earth, which is mostly covered with water.
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Wonderland
Chapter One
It was nighttime. Stepping off the plane onto the tarmac, Alice realized how much she had missed
walking across the tarmac to the terminal, now that all the bigger airports had those extensible
accordion gates. Inside exploded the air conditioner.
She rode the escalator to the baggage claim. They were jagged like skyscrapers. A bird flew
in circles above, confused by the great glass dome through which could be seen the stars.
Chapter Two
He leaned against the brick wall. His geometric body.
Alice’s laugh was like a shell. So was her body.
They crawled around each other. The moon peered through a crevice.
Look, she said, and pointed. Several small white wooden balls rolled along the dark river
to where the trees rose and rose up into a dense illuminated forest. Gradually they unraveled into
lines of thread.
Chapter Three
Early one morning he called. Let’s go to the beach, he said. Alice gathered up her things and drove
to the seashore.
She waited by the bungalows, and she waited by the pier.
Eventually she got bored and waded into the shallows where the crabs were. She could see
them scurrying in the tide-pools. Then a rip-tide came and bore her out to sea.
Hello, Mr Whale, she said, but he only nodded sadly and swam away.
She wrapped herself in seaweed and made of coral a throne. I’m not so unhappy here, she
thought. The dolphins felt sorry for her and sometimes brought her fish.
One day some time later Alice found a perfect pearl had formed beneath her tongue.
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Chapter Four
They had their picnic on a nest of ants.
Great crabs devoured the city in the distance, but the ants didn’t notice, and she spilled the
marmalade trying to get the lid off.
Chapter Five
Snow blew back and forth past the window like a galaxy. In the morning her window was a frosted
white asterism. Alice put her tongue against the pane. It tasted like a slice of wedding cake kept for
years in a freezer.
The snow blew all the buildings away, and when the snow was gone a jungle grew up in
their place. Instead of cars there were orchids. Instead of churches there were monkeys. Instead of
Alice there were still, brackish rivers where murky-eyed dolphins lived.
Chapter Six
Late one night, Alice boarded a subway train filled with homeless people.
We’re not homeless, they clarified. We live here in this subway train.
They went over a bridge and into an abandoned railyard somewhere in Brooklyn. Weeds
grew up between ties and loading docks rotted like gravestones.
Snow fell all night.
The world is melting, she thought.
Chapter Seven
It rained. In the zoo, stripes slid off the zebras and festered in the soot.
Taxis dripped by, and police cars, screaming, muffled.
She padlocked her rusting bicycle under a streetlight’s poisonous halo. Water ran from her
hands like the end of the world.
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There Still Is Hope In The Bottom Of The Box
Chapter One
Trees rise from concrete into the sky’s hand. Where Alice is everything begins to converge and
come apart. Into pieces, little fingers and pieces. Beneath the ground are boxes. Boxes and lathes.
Strip the land from itself that the dead may be shunted aside. Into the air. That we may no longer
step on them as we do without thinking. Alice was very concerned about everything that was past,
and would come to be: therefore the dead. Watching each body float through the sky, entwine in
trees, impale flagpoles, gaze into the abyss, Alice could not help but feel a sense of foreboding, as if
each corpse carried a hidden message. They did: YOU WILL DIE, but Alice did not know that, and as
long as she knew that she was alive, was alive. On the rooftops, sailors gathered with boat-hooks to
snare the supplicants for evening mass, but they only floated on, oblivious to the attentions of the
church. Ignore the body, they say. It is only flesh. Great columns rise up to an arched sky painted
with stars. In the apse, congregants have moved boxes that they may smear themselves with space.
Crouched inside, Alice does not think of coffins.
Chapter Two
Beneath the ground are boxes. Honeycomb earth plied with steel. These are the foundations for
our morality, that the churches may live upon them and skyscrapers pray to the sky. But they are
the kneeling hand. Each building is a prayer that we may rise up. Alice rose up and found the
scrabbling insects making paper of the foundations. When the buildings toppled over into the sea a
great roaring and frothing of steel, the waves the color of broken concrete because that’s what they
were, broken concrete, Alice looked up and there were the bodies from which tourists hung on
strings to watch the end of the city. Whereupon she made of her body a balloon, and was taken up.
Chapter Three
She was very disappointed with the religious content of heaven.
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Chapter Four
The dreaming head is restless in its cave of sleep. Likewise the dead, who travel without moving,
see without seeing. In this way they are like the living. But curtains hang over every distance, blades
of sunlight through the blinds slice at the sleeper until he awakens, or is pierced in his dream.
Where there are skies, there is hope, or so Alice thought, and from above dropped another dead
body down onto the earth, where it landed without a sound and was sucked into the soil’s mouth.
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Earrings
Chapter One
He lay awake and listened to his tinnitus and to the wind. The dog loose in the living room,
pouncing on cushions. What is the wind but the air’s idea of the ear? he wondered. And how can it
be a ringing bell when it’s continuous and solid, a stone dropped in sound?
Outside, the avenue buzzed, peopled with neon. He pulled on his pants and went out in
bare feet. There was one shop still open but nobody inside. Heavy carpets hung from the walls. He
wrapped himself in a blood-red carpet and fell asleep. The next day he was carted to a movie
premiere and unrolled between hard concrete and movie stars’ feet. They poked little holes in him
with their high heels, but he did not awaken, and dreamed of being fucked in all his little holes by
beautiful women wearing earrings hung with tiny tinkling bells.
Movie stars saw the movie they’d been in: now they were much larger than themselves.
I’m not sure what this is all about, he thought, still half-asleep, but surely there is a reason,
and everything in its right place.
Chapter Two
There is no reason. There is no right place.
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Birds
Chapter One
He touched her underneath her thigh where the knee ran open. She twitched a little and rolled
over. She was asleep. Her pursed lips in silhouette looked like beaks, black birds with black beaks.
Chapter Two
He would not say her hair was raven-black. Her eyes, though, at night.
Chapter Three
I love you, he said. She was asleep. The curtains nodded and rolled over. In sleep she climbed
deeper into sleep. Her dream turned over. Now it was of nests, birds in nests. A mother bird
brought baby bird a worm. It wriggled and climbed down her throat. She awoke, choking. What,
he said. My throat feels sore, she said. He brought her a lozenge from the medicine cabinet. Her
throat put on a winter coat and the seasons changed in her mouth.
Chapter Four
When she died of throat cancer, it was winter. He stood over her grave in the hard ground and
shuffled his feet in the ice, shivering. All around the trees crackled and snapped. Over her
gravestone circled blackbirds, round and round, and the bright crackling sun did not warm him. At
night he slept poorly in his bed of sticks.
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Snakes
She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been in his apartment. It had probably been years.
When did you get the snakes? she asked. The room was filled with snakes. Creeping out of
cabinets, sunning themselves under light-bulbs. None of them were in cages, there weren’t any
cages. I’ve always had the snakes, he said, puzzled. He said, surely you remember my snakes. No,
she said. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been in his apartment. I think you’re him, she
said. Aren’t you him?
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The Tourist Couple
So he went out with a girl wearing knee-high boots and a dress even higher. If you can even call it a
dress: is it still a dress if it’s just a suspension bridge for her ass? Either way, he thought, this will be
a nice change of pace.
He’d met her through a friend of a friend. She was rich. Rich enough to eat at the classiest,
most overpriced restaurants in town, buy him dinner and movie stars. Just ridiculously,
inappropriately rich.
She took him to the Olive Garden.
Already high on pills, she nearly missed sitting down. He could see the jitter in her eyes.
She said, I’ll have the appetizer. The waitress said, which one? She said, all of them.
They covered the table, her fingers jumping at one or another. Eyes the color of pigeons,
blinking erratically. She said, I’m going to steal this fork, and put it in her bag. The waitress called
the manager and said, we saw you take that fork. The manager said, we’re going to call the police.
She made a little scene. Some diners ignored her, but mostly they were tourists and said, what did
you expect, in this city? He couldn’t believe the Olive Garden cared if she stole one of their forks,
but there you go.
Outside, they ran into a tourist couple who asked them directions to the Olive Garden. He
said, you’ve come all the way here to see the sights and you’re going to eat at the Olive Garden? I
can recommend a great Italian restaurant right around the corner, he said, two or three of them.
The tourist couple said, we just wanted to know where the Olive Garden was. The tourist couple
said, we didn’t want a damn lecture.
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Luna Park
Chapter One
I am here to report a murder, he said.
Whose murder? she asked.
Mine, he said, and fell dead to the floor.
Chapter Two
The Maharajah spread his hands in a position of appeasement.
Now, we are aware of the continuous motion of atoms in every substance, he said, be it
solid or liquid, hard or soft, wet or dry, and we are further aware that all atoms are made of three
basic constituents: the nucleus, the electron shell, and the vast space between them. This
machine—he pointed to a system of Tesla coils and dials strung up on a set of vacuum tubes and
phials filled with odious gases—this machine (a machine of my own design, I shall note with some
modesty), which I have named the Transedimentroductionometer, aligns all atoms in a given
substance such that the great space between nuclei and electrons is phased together into an
interlocking lattice, allowing all matter to slip past around it. It is not that you have traveled to the
center of the Earth, but rather that the universe moved around you on frictionless feet!
They gasped in horror and amazement.
Chapter Three
I will explain myself, said the Vicar.
This ought to be good, muttered Alice.
In the times before writing, he began, people used sticks to denote property. All you had
to do was find a stick the length of what you owned, and that stick represented the property. Now,
there were certain difficulties with this system. For one, what of different kinds of wood? Could a
stick made of oak be substituted for a stick made of, say, elm, and as such, what were their relative
values? It might seem that the larger a stick is, the more it is worth, but this was not necessarily
17
true: consider the eel. An eel might be as long as one’s leg, but is not a leg worth more than an eel?
So a general council was called to solve the problem of sticks.
First it was proposed that conflicts be solved by burning the stick in question to see what
color and quantity of smoke it produced: but did not burning of the stick also symbolize divestiture
of said property? Then it was suggested that a replica of a dwelling-place might be made from the
sticks, and whoever’s dwelling-place most resembled the model would be their rightful owner. But
this proved impracticable in context because everybody lived in caves, which all look more or less
alike, and anyway being of negative space rather than positive cannot really be represented too well
by a model. An additional problem was that it was very dark in the caves, and to see the sticks they
would have to be lit on fire, which not only destroyed the sticks and said symbolic property, but a
stick on fire is a different shape than a stick not on fire.
Finally the correct solution was hit upon: the marriage of sticks. By splicing one stick to
another in a symbolic matrimonial ceremony, one stick became subservient to the other, bigger
stick, and so the men were able to use the married sticks to beat one another into submission, thus
solving the question of property.
The Vicar took this as a parable of his treatment of the Voluptuous Blonde. By entering her
body with my symbolic stick, he concluded, I thus make her equal in value to my wooden leg.
Chapter Four
It is equally important to consider the question of burning animals, Alice reminded them. Shall we
bring sanctions against them, or institute an allowance? And what about forest fires?
I have developed a machine to combat burning animals, she announced. It consists of a
wheel-shaft, a flange, a lever, gears, and several other components which shall not now be
enumerated.
By attaching the lever to the burning animal, we can control its angle of yaw. When it flaps
its wings, wags its tail, or tries to run, these actions activate the wheel-shaft, which turns the gears
to the rear of the contraption. By making electricity, the machine equalizes the magnetic fields
created by the burning animal, thereby eliminating any risk of contagion to us from that which
burns, we who hopefully are not burning. If we do begin to burn, then we may utilize the device
ourselves to divest our bodies of flamicular particles.
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Because fire, you see, is made up of very small particles which do not themselves burn, but
when placed in close proximity to other, similar particles, become agitated by their neighbors’
presence and send out long flails which interact, creating the web of flare we perceive as fire. The
red and yellow color—blue and white when especially perturbed—derives from a photospectrum
of smaller bacteria which live their brief, tiny lives amidst the flaring particles’ webs. However, the
particles themselves are not alive; most resembling viruses, they possess only the ability to
reproduce, doing so by forcing half of their body to reverse polarity in the electromagnetic forcefield created by the flailing web, which causes them to separate, becoming independent entities,
spreading and growing the fire. The application of water or a blanket rids them of the oxygen they
need to breathe.
Why, you ask, should a non-living particle need to breathe? The answer is simple, but I
will not give it to you just now, addled as you are by opium.
And it was this very device, spoken into existence by Alice, that put out the fire and saved
them all from a fiery doom.
19
Selvedge
Chapter One
She looked up and fingers tapped gently against her muslin dress. Her dress was grey and when she
moved it rustled like moths.
Seth said, my name is Seth. That’s a funny name, Alice said. You don’t look like a Seth.
What’s a Seth look like? said Alice, answering her own question.
Seth was a giraffe, and seemed smaller than before. Alice picked him up. How is it that you
fit in the palm of my hand? she said, monkey-puzzled. A system of bonsai trees wreathed them
green and sharpening. Alice pricked her hand on one motley bit and fell to sleep.
Seth said, those thorns are larger than my horns. My horns are in the shape of t’s, and
therefore the same. Indeed they are, said Alice, awoken from three centuries of sleep. All of you
now are dust, she said, and Seth’s coat, crowned by a rust, slipped from him to reveal skeletons
beneath.
Chapter Two
Come out of the bath, said Alice. Seth watched his toes creep over the rim until they stepped out of
the tub and tile pressed against his hard feet. The rug was gone, the good green rug. He went
downstairs and water clung to him. His legs, his arms, the clothes where wetness blossomed and
stuck, the crotch in its tangled hide.
They took their daughter to the ocean and she washed her feet in the waves. There was
sand and she dug her toes into the sand. Little crabs marched over her little toenails. Delighted, she
picked them up and her fingers and their pincers waved at the far horizon. Illuminated from behind,
glowing. Attended by sailboats, or triangles.
Chapter Three
Alice awoke with a start. Where did the darkness go? Did it climb into an alley? Did it speak the
street? She looked under the table. A little darkness still huddled there. She scooped it up in her
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palm and watched it crumble into shadow.
Lisa sat in shadow and out of shadow and into shadow again. She said, no moon tonight!
Eluned had one of those old phones, the kind with a little black sun into which you spoke
and a little black crab you held in your hand. It stood upright with all the authority of a statue on
the one wooden table in the very center of the room where her hat, unused for forty years, also lay.
Alice had her hair, which was blonde, and Lisa’s was brown, and Eluned’s was also brown,
but lighter. They’d heard of people with red hair, but never seen one in person. They lay in bed
together and slept one night at a time. On one end of the bed was their heads; on the other, their
feet. And who can say what went on in between?
Chapter Four
She smelled of sleep. The room too. The curtains, like ash. The bedspread, like Alice. The morning
crept in, but gradually, tiptoeing crickets across the carpet.
She went to fetch a watering can and its elephant-trunk rained. Dirt swallowed and choked
and spit up moldy water, roots and stick.
Between the cobblestones in the yard flowers grew and receded like strange coral animals.
The flowers grew beards and bees came to suck. But the beards were fungus and the bees fell dead
to the ground, twitching. She propped her knitting in the window and the sun shone through it
tiny, tiny dots. The needle glinted, as needles so often do, sharp as a bee-sting. But there were no
bees: all the bees were dead. Alice made them a monument of honey. In the end it came to grief, as
all monuments do.
She picked up the phone and said, come home. All the bees are dead. I miss the buzzing. I
miss the stings. Now how can I know if I am awake or if I am dreaming? The answering machine on
the other end hissed back at her.
In dreams she stepped in eerie silence across a sunken courtyard over and over again.
Startled, Alice awoke and went to look at herself in the mirrors. She had two, one to look at herself
in and one in which to be looked at.
Late that night she crouched over her spinning wheel, thread wound round her hand a
spool, a shroud. Silhouetted against the grey curtains, she could be seen reflected in her mirrors:
Alice, and Alice, and Alice. Spinning, counting, and cutting.
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In Bed
Chapter One
I am lying in bed with all the women I have ever slept with, Seth said. Their names are Alice, Lisa,
and Eluned. They are not a lot of women, the number of women I have slept with, but I loved
them all, and three times is a lot of times to have loved, it’s true. You would think this would be
awkward, and you would be right, at least at first, although I find it gets easier over time.
Sometimes they say unintelligible things to me; whether this is to annoy me is hard to say. This
could be some sort of punishment, I suppose, but if they bore me any ill will you would think they
would not be lying here in bed with me... The truth is, I’m surprisingly comfortable.
Chapter Two
I am lying in bed with the only man I have ever slept with, Lisa said. How I got here is hard to say.
Once I was with him and then we were apart, and now we are back together again, in a certain
sense. Whether or not we are actually back together is complicated by the fact that in bed with me,
and in bed with Seth, the only man I have ever slept with, are two women called Alice and Eluned,
with whom Seth has also slept. And when I say slept, I mean: has had sex with. I cannot verify
whether or not these other women have in fact slept with him, or just had sex. Nor do I know how
many times this has happened, the sex with other women, whether it came before or after me or
while we were still together. Sometimes I ask about the sex and the sleeping, but I find the answers
hard to understand. Maybe they are mumbling; I myself mumble sometimes. When they ask me
questions they also seem unable to understand my answers. Still, I am reasonably sure I was Seth’s
first lover. He seemed very tentative that first time, but it could have just been the awkwardness of
new lovers. Still, I am reasonably sure.
Chapter Three
There are two women in bed with me, Alice said, and a man with whom I once had sex, I think.
His face is familiar, but then I have had so many lovers sometimes their features blur together.
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Sometimes I ask the other women who they are, what their names are, and what about this guy, but
their answers are faint, and indistinct. They might be making fun of me, but on the other hand
seem as puzzled as I. There is a bed, that is certain, and four people, including myself, but what else
is hard to say, exactly. Normally there would be some kind of ceiling visible above us, but there is
none; normally there would be walls surrounding us, but there are none. I have not peered over
the edge to verify the existence of a floor, because I am afraid there may be no floor, only an
endless blackness in which we lie suspended.
Chapter Four
There is a man in bed beside me, Eluned said. Without touching me, it is true, but connected
nonetheless in an inconspicuous but obvious way to our person by a certain closeness which is hard
to explain in the absence of intimacy, of physical intimacy, an intimacy I am sure I have not shared
with him at any time. As to this man, I have no fixed ideas. The other women whisper about one
thing or another, but their answers are tiresome, and little heard. All I want to do is sleep. Yet this
man who lies here so quietly with an inscrutable but not unhappy expression on his face, this man
intrigues me. Who is he, I wonder, and what is he doing in my bed?
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The Defenestration
Snow came down and so did he, seventeen stories from a high white building perforated with
windows like a spine. He did not die.
Everything was white. He did not believe himself in heaven but in a snowdrift and thought,
how about that, how about that.
She found him splayed in the snow at the base of the building, moving awkwardly back and
forth like a newborn child just emerged from the womb, testing himself out, too surprised to cry.
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The Drum Major
The marching band played at halftime and shivered in the bleachers. The game did not end until late
and the drum major was hungry so he marched the band into the street and traffic slowed to let
them past. He marched them to a drive-through window and as each rank passed a man gave them
burritos.
They ate as they marched. It was easier for some than others because not all instruments
are easy to hold with one hand; some of them are heavy and awkward, as all things are.
Cars honked and crawled behind them on the freeway. Everywhere they went people
stopped and watched and let them pass.
The drum major led them up a mountain and down again. They marched past cities and
towns, through jungles and lakes and deserts and into the night.
When dawn rose they were still marching round and round. As searchlights swept the sky
clean of stars they raised their instruments and played the sun up in a blaze of brass before following
the drum major into the clouds to Glory.
25
Arlene
He slept on her couch. The next morning they had breakfast at the diner. It was snowy and the
walk longer than he expected. An old movie flickered on the whitewashed wall behind them as they
ate. Around the corner there were fire engines. Flashing lights slumbered on the buildings,
migratory in miniature. It was silent and there were no firefighters, just fire engines in the snow
and large white plates in the diner where her fingers tapped, traveling without moving. Tap. The
fire engines drew closer. Tap. He waited for her to say something, but she was quiet except for her
beautiful hands. Tap. Tap.
26
The Little Sister
He found her at the end of a street called a movie star. There were stubby little cacti called
ocotillos and dry swimming pools in the shape of kidneys.
Hey, he said. Hey, she said. She was smoking a cigarette on the deck. Come on up, she
said, gesturing with the cigarette at him or the deck, either way. He climbed up. This is my
boyfriend, she said, and introduced them. He shook her boyfriend’s hand and had a cigarette. It was
already dark and cold. I didn’t realize it would get so cold, he said, it’s the desert after all. She
laughed. You idiot, she said, and laughed, but not in a mean way. Shivering, he clutched the
cigarette between his fingers a tiny reddish afterbirth.
They went inside for a while and the three of them sat together on the dingy couch and
smoked cigarettes in front of a fire. She rubbed one out onto the arm of the couch a charcoal
epithet. Embers in the fireplace chattered to one another. He poked at the logs with a stick, then
threw the stick in too.
27
Atlantis
Eight pigeons swarmed around his feet and sucked at sidewalk stones. He felt at his cheeks with his
fingers and felt at his brow with his fingers. Slowly his skull was growing out of his face. He could
feel it pressing on his eyelids and hardening his jaw against the lights of upper Broadway. Sitting in
the little park creased into the street, the bench seemed to tip and slide into traffic. When the light
changed he did not. Now that his apartment was bare and only light lived there, some birds
snapped shut their beaks and dust eddied about their plate-flat eyes. Once there had been a wife and
children but never had they been so far away and closed. And another thing was the indifference of
the street that left no trace when he shut his eyes. The mirror turned invisible then. Nothing glared
back. He tied his tie tightly and grimaced quite clearly. Sinners paced the sidewalks and shunned
the fruit stands. Shabby clothes stuck to sweaty backs and grainy skins bled sugary sap. Armpits
smelled like melons. He had left to lose. Now the pigeons circled his grave.
28
Two Pharaohs
Chapter One
He doesn’t know what it is but kills it anyway. This is not his first mistake. Clouds wait for him to
finish, hovering. What they bite hardly notices. He strings it up on a pole and mounts it in the
earth. The earth swallows and the pole catches in its throat. Choking, the earth spits small seas.
From that spring he draws water and waits for what’s next. Is this what’s next or is it another
thing? he wonders. How can we separate what’s next from what’s next? The King-Lists know,
strung up on temple walls. There he saw a fish in an empty cartouche and went to the river for a
sign. Birds picked pieces from the backs of hippos. A model boat floated down the river. He
thought perhaps the tomb-models were not models but the boats themselves. That people had been
much smaller in the old days. He measured himself and drew no conclusions. There on the bank of
the river is where he killed it. The river flowed but brackish. This spring cool and clear, drinkable.
Cupping his hands to his mouth to drink, he sees his hands beneath the water, as if he had not
drawn water from the river but immersed his hands in it. Nearby, mountains melt to baldness.
What succor the plants have comes from this new spring only, and walk toward it on insincere
roots. As if afraid to leave the ground to come and drink. They have grown down out of the dark,
burrowing into the land in roots to surround the oasis where palm trees grow. And there were
many dragons, but he soothed them, saying it had always been thus, and always shall be, as the
eternal King-Lists show. The dragons backed away and palm trees knelt at the water. That was
before the weather changed. The sky became hard against him, and because the pole was wooden
did not draw away the lightning which struck and smoothed him against the earth. When
everything abated he saw he was blind. All the spring turned to steam, and now everything
complains of summer. He mats his hair against his head and smoothes his skin until it comes
unpeeled. Hanging from himself in strips, he curses against the river, staggering forward clutching
the pole. When he trips and falls into the mouth of a hippo the birds do not remove him. Instead
the hippo closes its mouth and inserts its tusks into his eye-sockets. The hippo is female, but bears
him no children, and he drowns after a while under the water.
29
Chapter Two
In arid lands is where he puts temples, for you cannot farm a temple. Once he tried an experiment,
laying arable soil inside a great system of pillars open to the sky, but the crops turned out sickly and
it was a failed experiment. Anyway, if it succeeds it is no experiment but a harbinger. The prodigal.
The past never attains the heights of the present, he thought. His predecessors all thought the
present never attains the heights of the past, but they were wrong, or so he said. He said that all the
temples should be erased and new ones built in another place. From above the sun came down and
spoke to him. The sun said sunlight and so he said the sun was sunlight. Without sunlight there are
no crops, he said; without crops there are no men, he said; without men there are no temples, he
said; without temples there are no gods, he said; without gods there is no sun, he said; therefore
the sun: is god. It was unimpeachable logic. He placed a bar of gold in his mouth and spoke a
stuttering sunlight. Pressed shining foil into his mouth and with silvered tongue ordered invasions
of his own lands. Nevertheless, his generals were not impressed. They said an ibis, or a crocodile.
Sometimes they said ladies had lion’s heads. It all depended on where they came from. In any case
their heads were bulbous now, swelling from intricate flower collars like new bulbs emerging from
the ground. And such long fingers! Fingers that strangled ducks, that emerged from the hand like
smiles. Every eye, too, seemed to smile. Along the river he built a fantastic city where there was no
city to build. In the river they fished stalks, peeling them open and beating them together at right
angles, squeezing out the paste to dry in day’s oven. Then it became possible to spit words onto
them, that they may curl up as the beetles do in the desert, pushing their dung sun toward a
desiccated tree. We have worshipped the scarab that buries the sun, he said, but they are the night.
He held his head in his hands and the throne legs beneath his actual legs moved less than his actual
legs. His neck clutched a system of beads. Such intricate metalwork! Gold like a thousand bees
buzzing about his neck. He wishes he possessed their industry. After commanding a thousand
statues buried back into a thousand rocks he sat on his throne and wondered himself better than the
man who would eventually break what now is his. Who destroys is vilified, yet is he not more
powerful than those who came before him to build? Not the bees but the honey we steal from their
hives. How we break them open and they sting, but stings heal, and bees die having stung. Do you
hear me? he cried out. Are you deafened by my brilliant golden headdress? Does the snake on my
chin snatch your words away? We can escape history, he said. Then his generals killed him.
30
Armstrong
Armstrong looked at the moon rocks and saw himself looking back.
All around weighed the great weight of meteorites. He stood another minute before the
exhibit, then left the glassed-in museum where fountains stumbled. Grass poured down toocarefully held slopes. Sky already fading, the color of freeways, the greyness that comes when
afternoons last too long.
On the way home he stopped for a drink and called but Alice didn’t answer. In the mirror
he looked like anyone.
You divorced your first wife, Alice said. It was not a question. One sofa rose up from the
carpet to clench her. She clenched back.
Armstrong stood in their living room and mixed a drink. Plate glass, flat roof, swimming
pool pierced by a diving board. Astroturf.
Alice’s hair drooled down her head. She looked older than before because she was. So was
he.
It was quiet. A feeling half in darkness. Armstrong ran his hands up his forehead into the
skull rill. He was getting older. These things happen. She was always older than him, but exactly the
same amount older. He felt as he grew older she should remain the same, like the stars.
That’s Sirius, he said, looking through his telescope, and Cassiopeia.
Was she the one who could tell the future? Alice asked.
I think that was Cassandra, he said. And nobody believed her. I guess it wasn’t really the
future after all.
I can see the future, she said. It’s going to rain. Look.
At that distance it was only an arrogance. Dark against dark, lightning hanging comma from
storms’ sentences, the air electric like television. He hated going on tv, hair painting itself down
against those hideous lights, makeup chalk-caked against his face. It made him feel like a fossil.
An umbrella stood against the door its own gathering space. Armstrong thought it looked:
skeletal.
He thought of Titan with its frozen ocean. The red spots on Jupiter are centuries-old
hurricanes.
31
That night they made love, and when he cried out she assumed it must be in pleasure. He
passed a stone. She gave birth to rocks.
32
The Beginning of the Beginning of the End
Chapter One
They married at a church sinking slowly into the highway. It was white and they picked it because it
was white.
The door was a little crooked and so was the minister, but in a nice way. He had a gold
tooth and white boots and introduced himself as Father Christmas. Of course, she said: of course.
The altar looked like a living room in some Hugh Hefner miracle. There was a fake rock
wall and white shaggy rugs to stand on. We do Jewish weddings here too sometimes, Father
Christmas explained, and tapped the corinthian columns astride them.
Acanthus leafs, she thought.
She said her name was Alice and he said his name was Seth and they did and they were
married. He put a plastic vending-machine ring on her finger and signed the papers with a flourish.
Well, she said, we’re married now. You don’t have to impress me anymore, she said.
Chapter Two
The concierge winked and got them the heart-shaped bed. But when they tried to sleep their legs
had nowhere to go except around each other, which seemed sweet and entangling at first and then
just pins and needles. They tried the other way around, feet where the aorta would have been if
they were sleeping on an actual whale-sized heart and not a heart-shaped bed, but that wasn’t much
better, and in the middle of the night her head came unstuck from his cheek and pulled her down
into the sheet-slough. She woke with a start.
Where am I? she wondered, not for the first time. Then, careful not to wake her
husband—how weird is that, she thought, my husband—she rose, put a slinky thing on, and slipped
out the door. Seth slept on in the heart-shaped bed and did not fall off it for a while.
Alice wandered down the Strip. She passed the Luxor and above the Luxor a man was
floating at the pyramid’s very tip in a beam of light.
In a man-made lake she saw ships sinking over and over again. Air-conditioning blew from
every doorway like the breath of arctic giants, rustling the palm trees.
33
Farther down the Strip there was a roller-coaster wound around the top of a building, and
Alice found Seth there.
I couldn’t sleep, he said.
Me neither, she said.
Stupid bed, they said.
Later they went back to the hotel and she tied him to the bed and left him there after they
were done.
When she came back up he was still tied to the bed. You know, those weren’t really knots,
she said. You could have pulled yourself free anytime, she said. He said he knew that.
He hadn’t known that.
Chapter Three
In the morning they met a couple called the Robinsons. Here’s to you, Mrs Robinson, Seth said.
Yes, she cried, delighted, although they must have heard that joke a million times. No, no! she
squeaked. We were just married. I’ve been waiting for that joke ever since we got engaged.
Congratulations!
You’re the ones who just got married, Seth said. We should be congratulating you.
On the joke, I mean, said Mrs Robinson. Ah, said Seth.
They introduced themselves. I am Lisa and this is my husband Saul. Mr and Mrs Robinson.
Mrs Saul Robinson, she said, trying it on.
We were just married too, said Seth. Oh my! squealed Mrs Robinson. How wonderful!
Did you have an Elvis?
They had not had an Elvis.
Mrs Robinson seemed disappointed to hear this. Well, we had an Elvis, Mrs Robinson said.
He even sort of looked like Elvis. The real Elvis. Can you imagine being married by the real Elvis?
He could do that, you know, she said. Alice said she didn’t think he could. Of course he could, said
Mrs Robinson. He was The King.
That’s true, Alice said, although she did not say that Kings are often not particularly
powerful. Once she had read an article about the King of an African tribe who lived in Queens and
34
drove a cab in Manhattan where the criminal law courts are called The Tombs because they look like
Egyptian tombs.
They used to burn mummies for firewood, she said.
What? said Mrs Robinson, a little confused. Alice didn’t reply, so she smiled and suggested
they go to the pool.
They went to the pool. Alice wore a single-piece that opened in all the right places and
almost gave Mrs Robinson cause to regret the two-piece bikini she had chosen. Hers was not the
most striking figure but it would have to do, or so she had to believe because it was hers, and we
always believe in what is ours.
Seth wore swim-trunks and a shirt that said Okkervil River, which is a band, although it is
probably also a river. Mr Robinson thought it said Overkill River and it reminded him of that one
time in Vietnam.
They swam listlessly for a while until Alice said, let’s go to Egypt. So they took the
Robinsons and went to Egypt.
Chapter Four
In Egypt there were pyramids and tombs and sand and the Nile and what they did was go shopping.
In the hovel-shops Mr Robinson asked if he could buy a crocodile mummy.
The shops were collapsible tents and it was Mrs Robinson’s considered opinion that shops
should never be portable. Things ought to be where they are and not where they’re not, said Mrs
Robinson.
Mr Robinson squinted in reply. The sere desert light reminded him of the club where he’d
met his wife. It was so bright he couldn’t see himself blink and it was like blindness. It was so loud
he couldn’t hear himself walk and it was like floating. The women were dark and soundless in the
light and loudness. All he could do was feel them and smell them. They smelled like dead flowers.
They moved slowly past him, bumping like tugboats and freighters in a crowded harbor.
There was something about those clubs that made Mr Robinson feel: nautical.
Once Mr Robinson saw the corpse of a beached whale. It was enormous, darkly colored
but slowly bleaching to a viscid yellow. The whale’s mouth hung limply open like a wound, as if
those teeth did not belong to the whale but what had bitten into it.
35
Seagulls were tearing the whale to strips. Greyish shreds littered the beach, blubber raining
down from above, the slatternly shapes of seagulls biting and dropping.
Birds don’t chew.
Later flatbed trucks arrived, and men with axes and pitchforks struggled to dissect the
whale into chunks small enough to cart away.
The whole beach stank.
The club smelled of expensive alcohol and perfume. Mr Robinson had trouble deciding if it
was a desperate smell or a hopeful smell. Surely people would not subject themselves to this
without hope. Surely there is hope in any action man undertakes, he thought: when a man washes
himself or climbs a ladder or makes a painting or courts a woman, he does so out of hope. He does
so that time may supersede itself and actions suggest reactions and the world push forward into
tomorrow.
What do they do with washed-up whale carcasses, anyway? he wondered.
Lisa laughed. She liked that her husband rarely said anything. Eventually she maybe even
loved him. Mrs Robinson loved people as much as she could make them herself, and his silence
allowed her to imagine him completely, so she loved him. The Robinsons would go so far as to say
every person is to you whatever you are to them when you’re with them. In this way they made a
perfect couple, although she exasperated him sometimes.
Chapter Five
They were tired of Egypt and Egypt was tired of them. They had been married just long enough.
Seth and Alice and Saul and Lisa were starting to get short with one another, as happens
when people take trips with each other and when they don’t, but they weren’t entirely tired of
each other just yet so they rented some ostriches and saddled them and rode out into the desert.
It doesn’t matter which direction, Alice said. The desert doesn’t have a direction.
This was proved untrue when at an oasis the ostriches suddenly stuck their heads into the
sand in fear. They had unknowingly ridden all the way into Iraq, and insurgents appeared in a
rickety flatbed truck and kidnapped the women and shot the men.
36
The men did not die. Saul had been shot before: I was in Vietnam, he reminded Seth, and
saved their lives so quickly and so well that within hours they were able to follow the flatbed’s tiretracks to the insurgents’ hideout.
The hideout was a small shack surrounded by an endless duneless desert and the ruins of
war. There were bombed-out bunkers and smashed tanks like the carapaces of giant insects and the
blasted skeletons of enormous antennas.
There in the middle of nowhere were sunken deep wells and small oceans, shallow
concrete pits filled with artificially dyed water. From afar it might have been attractive, blue and
green and black arranged in neat lines amidst endless beige wastes like the Gap during khaki season,
but from close-up all the standing pools were slicked with scum and oil and every attendant
building long gone to rust and desolation.
The insurgents took the women inside one of the buildings and handcuffed them to a table.
The most annoying thing about being kidnapped is not being able to keep the sand out of your hair
and your hair out of your face as a flatbed truck whips you around the desert, thought Mrs
Robinson, and was happier cuffed to the table.
As they prepared to make a ransom video the insurgents tried to make themselves look as
scary as possible, but mostly they looked ridiculous. To a man they were short scruffy people,
hardly resembling any kind of real terrorist.
Mr Robinson emerged silently from the sink and snapped their necks.
It was over in seconds. They weren’t real insurgents, Mr Robinson explained. Real
insurgents would have taken you to some kind of headquarters. These guys just took you into the
desert.
Of course they took us into the desert, Lisa said. This is Iraq. Where else would they have
taken us?
We should try and find a phone or a computer, something with internet, Mr Robinson
said. I doubt we’ll find anything like that here, Seth said, but I’ll show you what I did find, he said,
and lead them outside to some of a building.
Some of the building had been destroyed when a Tomahawk missile landed in it, but the
missile hadn’t exploded and remained there, stuck half in and half out of the crumpled-up building.
Smart bomb, Seth said, although it didn’t look particularly smart. It was huge and blunt
and not very scientific-looking. We could try to use the targeting-computer inside, Mr Robinson
37
said, somewhat dubiously. They gathered round and together lifted him up to where he thought the
computer was. As he fussed with some wires the bomb began to hiss.
Mr Robinson said: Uh-oh.
Suddenly rockets fired and in a plume of sparks and smoke the missile shook loose its
concrete cradle and began to rise stertorously into the sky. They tried to pull Mr Robinson free,
but he was caught in the wires and they were all four of them together lifted into the air, dangling
behind the Tomahawk like a kite-tail, holding on for dear life as they climbed higher and higher into
outer space.
Chapter Six
Everything was dark.
I am dead, Alice thought. But she was not dead.
The space station took them in. How did you survive? the terrified astronaut who had
rescued them wanted to know. They didn’t know. All they could tell him was an impossible story
about Iraq and ostriches and unexploded ordnance.
It’s impossible, he said.
It is, they agreed. And yet here we are, they said.
I’ve been through worse, Saul said. I was in Vietnam.
That must have been rough, the astronaut said, but Mr Robinson disagreed. Not really, he
said. I didn’t mind Vietnam. Iraq though, I don’t like Iraq, he said, shaking his head. I don’t like the
desert. The thing about the desert is it has no morals. The sea, the sea has morals. When you
drown you fill with water and become part of the ocean. The forest digests you too. The air flings
you out of itself so you’re killed not by the air but by the ground. But the desert, the desert just
dries you out and leaves you there. It leaves: a husk.
I don’t want to be a husk, Saul said.
But husks can be nice, Alice said. This space station’s a shell, she said, like a husk. Isn’t this
husk sustaining you, protecting you from the darkness of deep and infinite space?
Mrs Robinson pointed out that where a husk is a seed once was. By fighting the enemy
abroad instead of fighting the enemy at home, you’ve planted a seed, she said, a seed of peace. Alice
rolled her eyes.
38
Mrs Robinson didn’t like outer space much more than she had liked Iraq. Too much of too
much, she thought. Too much sand, too much outer space: too much nothing. And something is
always better than nothing. She liked America’s too much, even Egypt’s too much. But kidnapping
doesn’t count as tourism, she didn’t think.
How do we get out of here? Alice wanted to know. I feel as if we have come to the end of
something. Seth agreed. As if something that was supposed to happen has not happened, and now
it’s time to move on.
What a weird honeymoon, he said. There’s barely even been any sex.
Life isn’t like sex, Alice said: it never comes to a climax and although it has a shape it can
only be appreciated in retrospect.
Too bad, Mrs Robinson said. I like climaxes. Her husband agreed and they smiled at each
other.
Unfortunately the space station was too crowded to try zero-gravity sex, so they decided it
was time to return home. The astronaut loaded them into one of the extra Soviet space-capsules he
had lying around. It was a cramped and crammed Soviet space-capsule, but all in all it was the only
way to travel.
We’re not going to land in some godforsaken Kazakhstan, are we? Seth said.
I guess you don’t have to, the astronaut said.
How about somewhere nice? Seth said. We’re on our honeymoon, after all.
I hear Mexico is nice this time of year, the astronaut said, and pointed out the window at
the whole world.
Mexico is nice every time of year, Mrs Robinson said, except for the Mexicans.
Alice slapped her. She said: enough.
Chapter Seven
After landing on the pristine sand of a pristine Mexican beach, they hailed a passing cruise ship and
were taken aboard into endless parties.
There was food at midnight and noon and every minute in between. There were Lido
decks and Sky decks and decks gleaming white in the devastating sun. There were decks with
39
swimming pools carved into them a little piece of elevated ocean and real quaint portholes in every
cabin and bars and casinos and a chapel. It was just like Las Vegas, except all of it was sinking.
In the chapel Alice and Seth found Father Christmas. They glanced in and there he was,
magnificent and tilted in his gleaming white vestments as if he was wearing the cruise ship itself.
Alice! he cried. Seth! he cried. You remembered us, they said. Of course I remember you!
he cried. I remember every couple I marry! What a small world, he said. We know, they said.
Still together after all this time? he asked. But it’s only been a few days, Alice said, although
that hardly seemed possible.
How time flies! Father Christmas chuckled. How are you? Are you getting along? I heard
about some recent unpleasantness? I saw it on the news. I recognized you. I said, that’s Seth and
Alice. I married them. Hell of a place for a honeymoon, Father Christmas said, Iraq.
Well, it was supposed to be Las Vegas, but we got bored, Alice said.
Of course you did! he cried, of course! Vegas is nothing but hot air and neon. I should
know! That’s why I took this gig. Can’t stand knowing practically every marriage I solemnize will
end in drunken despair by the end of the weekend.
Well, we’re still together, Alice and Seth said, as if reminding themselves.
Chapter Eight
That night the cruise ship dropped anchor off a fantastic coastline. They went out on the deck in the
moonlight. It didn’t really look like Mexico anymore. There where the cliffs met the shore was a
headland shaped like a half-buried giant, head in hands, enormous arms sloping to the sea.
Nothing has happened of which we were not a part, Alice said.
Not yet, Seth said. Not yet.
Alice did not reply. It was very awkward between them, like new lovers.
Our marriage is failing, she said.
We must not let it fail, he said.
Later, they died.
40
“Now the fields flew by, the hedges and the ditches, ghastly in the train’s light, or appeared to do so, for in
reality it was the train that moved, across a land for ever still.”
—Samuel Beckett, Watt
41
Autumn Rhythms
It is interesting how so many critics see abstract expressionism as violent, as painful. Is this to do
with the violent, painful lives many of the artists lead, the violent, painful gestures which
supposedly comprise their work, or the violent, painful times in which they lived? Because the
curious reality of the greatest abstract expressionist works lies in their stillness. That Pollock used
the brush as a kind of stick, as a mere disseminator of paint—brush as process—is ultimately
irrelevant to the finished work on view. Autumn Rhythm, for instance, is a meditative, quiet work, as
its title might make clear, a quality it shares with many works by Rothko, Guston, even De
Kooning.
What we are seeing in their works is the expression of the static nature of gesture. A
gesture lives in a moment; a gesture is a photograph, a state of being-as. But the work itself is not
the gesture, nor even simply the remnants of a gesture. It is instead pure structure. In this way
abstract expressionism is cubist, in Berger’s sense. This artistic movement more than most is about
surface, regardless of its dimension. It is about the fixity of gesture in art, about the static nature of
the work itself. Knowing nothing of the action lying behind the creation of Pollock’s work, when
we look at his paintings we see not gesture but remains.
Abstract expressionism is an antiquity of transience. It can be compared to a Japanese
garden, where each element exists both on its own and as part of the whole, perfectly composed
and perfectly still. No matter that in such a garden each element was carefully planned and placed
whereas Pollock created in a moment; its aesthetic content is the same: the subsumation of desire
to consolation, of movement to stillness.
This leads us to ask how the aestheticized gesture, form without content, can be
meaningful with no object to refer to. Some might argue for the significance and palpability of
process with regard to the work, as in minimalism, but ultimately the experience of any artwork
must be aesthetic, not functional with regard to process, as its power is not didactic. Meaning must
therefore be exoteric, yet still we seek meaning in action.
In fact meaning is found only in two places: art, and love, the only two means one may
truly ameliorate the fundamental horror of existence. Loneliness is assuaged by compassion.
Religion attempts to create this empathy, but its reliance on an illusory godhead whose
unwillingness or inability to preside within this world as it is experienced must eventually fail to
42
provide the very empathy it promises; though religion often temporarily manages to produce this
effect by sustaining a communal love which stands in for the godhead’s absence, it cannot ultimately
succeed in its efforts until some long-awaited god arrives.
We know love when we feel it, but how can we know art when we see it? What is art?
Art begins with mystery—the unseen made visible—and must possess two attributes: it
must show us something new, and it must be identified as art; magic must be framed, it must be
limited, or it is simply wonder at the natural world, not artifice. What we call beauty refers to
what remains exceptional in our minds after the initial magic of novelty wears off.
Therefore, art is the contemplation of magic. The revelation of mystery and the sense of
wonder which remains, wrapped up and presented to the considered perceptant, defines art. As it
always has. Some things remain harmonious through time because we share with earlier peoples a
similar sense of the experience of life, for, as Agnes Martin wrote, when a beautiful rose dies
beauty does not die because it is not really in the rose. Beauty is an awareness in the mind.
43
Fashion Is Not Art
Chapter One
Sculpture: the consultation of edges.
Texture, attendant on sculpture, considered as the addition of shadow, or its occultation,
what delimits edges. All sculpture is furthermore about the description of the human form;
whether representing a dog, an automobile, or simply abstract, sculpture always has as its subject
the comparison of its form to the human form. This is because when we look at something, we class
it by comparison, whose first model is the self’s form, the human body.
Sculpture is differentiated from visual art (drawing and painting, photography and film) by
precedent to the sense of touch, and touch always has as its object itself, its own form, as opposed
to the eyes, which take as their model the forms around them, offering as it does the concretion of
edge by (virtual) fingers. Thus, sculpture: a critique of the human form, by means of the
consultation of edges.
Fashion is the antithesis of sculpture because while sculpture is about likeness to the body,
fashion is about difference from the body. Fashion says: I am not the body. Its edges and shadows
analytically diverge from the human form, where sculptures’ converge.
Consider a dress I have imagined. It is a pure white color, except along its elongated trail,
where is lit a fringe of flame, eventually put out and its ash rubbed into the dress’s edge, which is
then wrapped around the body. Here we can see an illustration of my points: how whiteness serves
to emphasize edges by activating the negative space around them (as marbles do in the opposite
direction); how texture and shadow (made real by its analogue, ash) transform our perception of
edges by providing the appearance of depth and darkness (read: night, sin); how the flickering edge,
whose analogue is fire, is necessarily suspect (compare: film); and, more generally, how the dress
emphasizes the body beneath it by departing from it.
Fashion is always negation, a negative theology, a dialectical force opposing the ur-reality
of the self/body confirmed and detained beneath. Because fashion diverges from the human, fashion
is not art. It is instead a kind of refusal to see the body as sculpture. Fashion says, the nude is not
enough.
The perfect dress is wings, the perfect body birds’. Angels are incomplete: there is too
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much human left in them, too much soul. Perfection has no soul, not only because it is death, but
because it has freed itself from all meaning. Perfect beauty means nothing. Yet it is transformative.
It is not that the perfect dress flies away, or that the perfect dress is nudity, the lack of
dress. Or that the perfect dress frees the body to be nude underneath. The perfect dress frees itself
from the body entirely. Perfect beauty: the body is gone. Disappeared. The perfect dress erases the
body.
Nothing underneath. This is why beauty is often mistaken for shallowness, lack of depth.
Beauty frees us from meaning. Perfection kills the body.
Chapter Two
The difficulties of sex are often mistaken for the difficulties of sin.
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I Would Like To Begin With Robert Irwin And End With Me
Chapter One
I would like to begin with Robert Irwin, who designed DIA Beacon. One Monday a month or so
ago, having meanwhile almost completely destroyed my life, I awoke early in the morning with the
firm conviction I had to visit DIA Beacon that day. So I went to Grand Central with its green starry
ceiling and took the train upstate past the ruins of an island castle that used to be a pleasure garden
and past a nuclear power plant. I had it in my head that things were going to get better for me; I
had a fantasy that finally I would figure out how to meet a girl in a museum and that there would be
a girl in the museum I would want to meet.
Now, this is a museum which is mostly empty space. It is good, therefore, that it used to
be a Nabisco cracker factory. My favorite thing at DIA are the paintings they have by Agnes Martin,
particularly her Innocent Love series. It is hard for me to say what is good about Agnes Martin but
everything is good about Agnes Martin. Her paintings are square and have straight lines. They are
calm and they are beautiful. They are as much about the idea of beauty as being beautiful
themselves, which is not always the same thing. Near her paintings are John Chamberlain’s colorful
sculptures made from auto parts, and near them are Robert Ryman’s paintings, and that is where I
met the girl.
Chapter Two
Robert Ryman’s paintings are white. They are all white. They are white on white. Supposedly they
are about the brushstroke and the process of painting and somehow the white is supposed to make
this evident but they just look white to me. But there is one white painting so extraordinary I stood
before it dumbfounded. Having passed it without thinking many times because it was yet another
boring white painting, if larger than usual, this time I stopped before his tribute to Edgar Varese
and stared.
Imagine an expanse of whiteness so white you cannot tell where it begins or ends. Imagine
a whiteness so pure that although you know it has been painted there are no brushstrokes, and it is
as if this room-length white wall is itself one giant perfect brushstroke. Imagine a white painting
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taller than you and longer than several you so white it has to be propped up on little styrofoam
things and set forward from the wall so you don’t bump into it.
Later, I bumped into it.
Staring at this extraordinary panel was an extraordinary girl and as together we stared
somehow we started talking. She had a sexy accent and the sort of blue eyes poets get misty with
metaphors over. I thought: maybe the world isn’t just a bunch of random stuff after all. I was giddy.
She was perfect: smart, majoring in art history, beautiful.
And, as it turns out, from the Netherlands. And in town for only a few days. I thought: of
course. Of course. This was when I remembered that the world is just a bunch of random shit, and
I was so frustrated that after she went off someplace I left without even learning her name.
Chapter Three
At the train station I listened to Stravinsky’s Agon, which is named after the combat of the gods. It is
a ballet without plot or story. It is pure music, moving in twenty minutes from rhythmic tonal
fanfares to arrhythmic atonal goo, with a happy tacked-on ending that says, this is not where I am
anymore, but there you go. It seemed appropriate at the time.
Like Yasujiro Ozu I have always liked trains. The telephone-wire world out the window
looks like one of David Hockney’s photo-montages, where he assembles polaroids into cubist
portraits of persons and places. To me they always seemed retrogressive, obvious, but on the other
hand they look really cool, and though I’ve always found cubism boring to look at (though
important and stimulating to think about) I like looking at Hockney’s photo-montages.
I like looking at art in general. But the specific thing that drives me batty about art is this
modern idea that thinking comes before looking. That we have to decide the context before we
approach the work. When Hockney says of his figureless landscapes that we the viewer are the
figure I just roll my eyes. Of course we’re the figure: we’ve always been the figure. But we’ve
forgotten the picture looks back at us, too. Painted perspective acts as if it were human for it takes
into account the mechanism of human perception. But now we have even taken away perspective.
Cubism said that painting isn’t about human perception but about how we think about
human perception; after Picasso and Braque the art world devolved into one big Kantian
clusterfuck. Now, this was ultimately a good thing, because how many saint-paintings do we really
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need? But simultaneously, photography’s profligacy was changing the way everybody apprehends
things, and because the world isn’t really two-dimensional, photography falsifies whatever it
imprisons: and it imprisons everything.
When you spend so much time looking at two-dimensional things, you start thinking twodimensionally, as this ridiculous sentence reveals. I want things to be what they are and not other
things. I want to look now and think later. I want the looking to suggest the thinking. Maybe
cubism did this in the beginning, but so much of the art produced these days has first to be
explained, or at least it can’t be immediately understood without a serious immersion in the art
scene and what’s going on right this second in this one place.
Maybe I’m just not smart enough, but most of the Guggenheim’s recent anyspacewhatever
installation, for instance, while sort of fascinating, made absolutely no sense until someone snobbier
than me told me via pamphlet what I was supposed to understand is going on. (Pinocchio floating
face-down in the pool was pretty great, though.) Which is why I like to go to DIA Beacon where the
art is gorgeous and quiet and lovely and can just be looked at and enjoyed.
Chapter Four
And this is why I’m such a failure with women. I look at them and think: that’s what they are. I
think: how smart she is, how blue her eyes are. But that’s not her. That’s not anything. Thinking
does come before looking, thinking has always come before looking, and afterwards too, whatever I
want to believe. I want the world to be manageable and minimalist but the world is mannerist and
insane. Art tells us about people, art tells us about what it is to be human, but art itself is inhuman.
Its beauty is not what it is. Like Robert Ryman’s wall, art is just a white space in which we see
whatever we want to see in it. No; women, women are not art.
And that is why I’m such a failure. And that is why I’m so unhappy.
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A Bicycle, A Stool, A Bird, A Hanging Stone
Marginalia on Robert Rauschenberg in Brandon Joseph’s Random Order
Of course, Shattuck, the Frankfurt School and Bürger are wrong: Dada and Duchamp were not
about shock, but reconstruction. A bicycle wheel. A stool. It is not that the consumer is shocked by
their juxtaposition—the consumer knows perfectly well what this is: a bicycle wheel installed atop
a stool—but that Duchamp forces you to see these two things anew, not only in relation to one
another but singularly. Then hybrid; and how simply beautiful their marriage is. The shock of being
able to see these two things anew is at most transient, and probably irrelevant. That it is art, when
art is precisely what Duchamp was trying to destroy, is not a failure of the work, but a failure of
theory to apprehend the distance between newness and meaning. Too often we bind these things
together, for the acquisition of an object is the act that confers meaning to the consumer, that is, the
consumer associates the meaning they invest in the object with their experience of that object,
bounded by its acquisition, defined by its mental initiation. But meaning is not immanent in the
object, meaning is immanent in the mind, the experience, the life of that person activating the
object, activated by the object. Art always moves from the inside to the outside and back again,
rendering contemporary theory obsessed with the movement of the object outside of society
problematic.
Robert Rauschenberg’s white paintings are not about absence, but presence, like Cage’s 4’33”. This
is well known. But what makes the white paintings beautiful in the way 4’33” almost never is? First
of all, they resemble altarpieces. All paintings are devotional, in a way, made as they are of panels
to be contemplated in the hope of finding transcendence; Rauschenberg simply actualizes the
contemplation of panels by, well, making the consumer contemplate panels. And their whiteness,
as opposed to Richter’s greyness, but related to his own later black paintings, is the revelation of
light. By trapping light on panels, Rauschenberg reminds us that beauty is the necessary natural
consequence of looking, that looking is itself part of nature: the white paintings allow us to look, in
the primary sense. Light makes looking possible; the white paintings make looking light.
The truly modern art of our age is the private, small, intimate, hermetic work. The age of
globalization and Empire, the repetitions of neo-capitalism do not need to be reflected or
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refuted—they need to be ignored. Fuck biomorphics, neo-pop, post-modernism, the ipod culture.
Our silence is neither a provocation nor a threat. There are so many people in the world doing so
many things that they all begin to resemble one another, resemble one another in their difference.
What I call the “international style” in contemporary classical music—hard to describe, but you
know it when you hear it: a little bit of this, a little bit of that, all put together as if every option
was available, every option equally relevant—renders every gesture functionally equivalent, thus
devaluing the gestures. Choice is the modern drug. Over-saturation leads to the perception of the
equality of elements—that is, when you can make any decision, no decision has any more or less
value than any other. I am not saying that decisions have any intrinsic value, only that in making
them you must invest them with more or less value, and the modern technological consumerist
society degrades these perceptions of value, making them irrelevant on an individual level in a way
that collapses the ultimate meaning of the work.
Perhaps this accounts for the seething moral decay so many critics find in the world—
rather than the symptom common to all ages where morality is supposedly transgressed when it
merely changes, it is that morality, like art, suffers from an egalitarian surfeit. We need to limit our
options. Process, instead of focusing the consumer on his apprehension of the object thus created,
the situation and presentation of the object, becomes a tool toward breaking the hegemony of the
tyranny of equality. This is not to say democracy is bad; democracy is necessary in order that these
choices be made available, and is thus a necessary good. But some—much—limitation of options is
a necessary step toward creating a relevant modern art. This art must also be hermetic, bound up in
the individual’s experience.
I am neither advocating solipsism nor egoism, simply suggesting that only by finding in
yourself what is most meaningful and presenting it in a circumscribed, intricate manner, can that
meaning be meaningfully transferred to—made to appear in—another. The consumer of art is
constantly bombarded with every kind of stimulation—not that more is bad, but that modesty of
accommodation makes the work easier to understand. Now, modesty can be large, and intricacy
can be straightforward, but I am speaking not of size, or shape, but of readability, that meaning be
given only a little at a time, inviting contemplation of the object. It should not make its point
immediately, but should contain within itself the information and strategies necessary for its
comprehension and consumption, as computer programs usually contain their own set-up program.
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“The inexpressivity of the single monochrome panel.” No! They are expressive, in their tactical
presence, their blinding color, their arrangement on the wall—all these are the essence of
expression, not inexpressivity!
“The historical avant-garde’s optimistic, even utopian (although already outmoded) vision of
industrialization as an emancipatory force.” I don’t want art to do any of this. Why should it be
forced to participate in that with which it has no truck? It is not that art exists outside history, but
that history exists outside art. History must come into art, not art into history.
Ellsworth Kelly’s is a logical atomism of art.
“Eschewing the easel painting’s subsumption to commodity exchange, [Kelly] ultimately proved
unable to find any means of more thoroughgoing and pervasive mediation and commodification.”
Society is seen as so dirty by theorists, but the romantic cult of the individual which preaches
overthrow of the classical order leads to fascism. New theorists are fascists, dictators of
interpretation, who see society as a scourge. Society is not a scourge, it simply is. If you’re not
happy with it, you can try to change it, but it will change with you: you are society. Those cellphones you use to organize protests are the very globalization you abhor—you are globalization’s
whores, you are the damning evidence of its victory.
Abstract Expressionism is a retrieval of the self through the stillness that follows action. A painting
is not a photograph of the process of its production, but a photograph of the death of that process,
and the consumer takes that death into himself: for us consumers, abstract expressionism is a
resurrection of the image. It is no longer abstract—it is the thing itself, motionless; it hovers, it is
an utopia of perseverance, the sign against its own iteration. Yes, things may repeat, but we do not,
and as such the iterated sign may be multiple—because as we apprehend it we change—the sign
changes as it itself stays the same.
“Rauschenberg’s combines are ruins. They have been disembedded from their existence in a
particular historical place and time, and as reproductions, the images, even those of old master
paintings, have been emptied of the integrity of their contents.” Have they? I don’t know if I buy
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Benjamin’s aura, which is maybe just an artifact of the times in which I live: my generation has little
experience of the necessarily singular. But this frees us to create the past out of the past, out of its
fragments, without worrying about their integrity. The new fictions will be constructions and
autobiographies, but need not be. (This is perhaps why Borges is more popular now than ever.) We
are living in a new age of myth. Myth, that mutable, recombinable, inexhaustible source of stories,
of meaning, whose transmission is now instantaneous...
On Rauschenberg’s Canyon vs. Bendiner’s ‘Ganymede’ interpretation: So, is Canyon related to the
myth of ‘Ganymede’? Does it matter? Has anyone bothered to ask Rauschenberg or would they
consider that irrelevant, even dangerous? It seems to me they’re asking not what we see in the
combine but what Rauschenberg sees—they’re saying, what is the value in this if we make the
meaning ourselves?
To what extent, then, is the artist complicit in making his work mean? We are asking also,
not only how much, but should it matter. How much are we willing to concede an artwork’s
ostensible subject to its interpretation? If we see an old master painting of a biblical scene, to what
extent is that a painting of a biblical scene and not of our reaction to seeing that scene, the meanings
we bring to it? What if we did not recognize the biblical source of the scene at all, perhaps even
mistaking it for something secular and completely unrelated to the bible? What would this mean for
the picture? Any choices of material, no matter how aleatorically based, is a choice. Why this 4’33”
and not the next 4’33”? The two “silences” are qualitatively different. Likewise, picking for your
artwork a bird, a hanging stone—these choices, however arbitrary, in the end associate bird with
hanging stone, and if they suggest the myth of Ganymede... Art is always a search for limits. The
bounding of pictorial space.
Any reading of Canyon, any reading of any artwork, is dependent on its elements, but only
within a fixed perimeter defined by the actual contents of the artwork. Truth is not singular, even if
based on observed facts, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. We may not agree on what truth is,
but it must be there a little, something must spring from common observed experience, else we
could not understand the language, rendering any conclusion functionally meaningless to others.
(There is no private language.) Words have their referents, as paintings have their paints, even if
we do not see them the same way from person to person.
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Watching tv is not an “indifferent exchange”; if it were, why would we continue watching? We are
not so brainwashed as the French theorists seem to think—or if we are, we allow ourselves to be,
which is more or less the same and in any case irrelevant. What matters is not truth, but what we
consider truth to be—thus the success of Rauschenberg’s combines.
Automatic art is always a simulacrum of automatic art, the reproduction of the subconscious by the
waking mind, and is as such neither objective (in terms of chance) nor subjective (for the
consumer); it is instead narration.
“Fried’s metaphysic of artistic presence was as dependent on the exclusionary, institutional confines
of the museum as it was on a certain discourse of formalist art history. Fried therefore understood
that the art he was defending was ‘at war’ with those currents that were developing within
minimalism.” Well, but the art Fried defended was not truly at war with minimalism or dependent
upon the museum. Museums are possible space. Why are museums bad? Because they lead to
exclusivity, canonization? Why should we be disturbed by the formation of art historical narratives
when we know that no single narrative is truth, only a facet thereof? The minimalists led the
consumer to recognize the institutional and disciplinary constraints museums impose on their
contents, but if the museum leads us to recognize these very facts about the artworks they contain,
is it not essential too, complicit in its own destruction? And for this destruction to continue, and
continue to mean, must not museums operate simultaneously alongside this process? Art, antiart—all define themselves in relation to one another, unable to exist without one another (Zizek’s
parallax at work, perhaps?); indeed, the development of art, art history is also the development of
the means of and reasons for looking, the museum developing alongside as a possible solution, if
not the only solution as it appeared for so long to be. Museums make contemplation easier, more
possible, the trade-off being an institutionalization of those works selected for display, but as
museums are not intrinsic to art (although they may be to art history, art histories), to consider the
two as necessarily adjunct is a mistake on which too many ideas are predicated already. And since
every thought is a museum of the mind...
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The Postmodern Phantom and the Specter of the Avant-Garde
John Zorn suggests the tradition of an avant-garde is a genre of its own. In a word, that’s
ridiculous. The avant-garde has no meaning of itself; it’s merely a term that refers to new and
surprising developments in an art form. Neither a genre nor type, the avant-garde has no relevance
beyond its function—“What is hip today might become passé,” says the Tower of Power. And it
will become passé, just like the Tower of Power.
Like postmodernism, the avant-garde is a symptom of a process rather than a genre of its
own. For postmodernism itself does not exist. As a term referring to a specific response to
modernist techniques it has limited providence, but must be seen primarily as a function of the
modernist movement itself, rather than an independent movement in response to modernism. Selfreference, irony and a larger symbolic universe and frame of reference are not sufficient in
themselves to constitute a true independent artistic response—postmodernism can only exist as a
result of modernism, which is itself just another set of artistic responses to the general motion of
artistic expression through the particular history in which one finds oneself.
In a way postmodernism represents a decadent evolutionary senescence; when the original
symptoms of an artistic sea-change have begun to stagnate and bear no new fruit, then an appropriation of the
gestures characteristic of the original are freighted with knowledge of the perceived meaning and function of
those gestures, thus rendering ideas which once were revolutionary acceptable as aesthetic choices rather than
acceptable as ideological choices.
Although in this case the modernist movement is itself partially self-referential in
acknowledging and co-opting primitivist roots, and thus perhaps fundamentally atavistic in nature,
what makes it avant-garde is how new meaning is bestowed on previously rejected gestures. In
about the late eighteenth century the meaning of art was shifted from an appreciation of the
aesthetic content of a work to the ideological content of a work; we consider the artwork as object,
rather than subject. With romanticism it was no longer the landscape itself that was important but
rather how the landscape made the viewer feel, just as with impressionism it was no longer the
starry night that mattered but how the starry night was portrayed, how it was abstracted into the
idea of a starry night as imagined by a subjective mind. Thus pure abstraction in art was not in fact
the great rift that divided art in the twentieth century from that which came before, being only a
logical development of the subjective viewpoint toward non-narrative forms.
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There have been, in my estimation, three major periods in art history, with two major
shifts in ideology dividing them. At first, art functioned primarily totemically; eventually, however,
an object became valuable in itself rather than for what it represented. This happened over a long
period of time in different places, and led to the second period, which lasted for several thousand
years and ended only in the eighteenth- or nineteenth-century AD, when it ceased to matter what
an object depicted, and the object again became valuable for what it meant, rather than for what it
was. The first major artistic period could thus be called the Totemic, the second the Mimetic, and
the third the Conceptual. (Although it may seem that the third period is analogous to the Totemic,
what separates them is the function of the object.)
Originally an object functioned symbolically, that is, one thing stood for another. This
could take different forms: a cave painting of a cow could simply represent a cow, or even be a
cow, to primitive man. Stylization is not a factor because the actual form of artistic expression has
no bearing on the function of artistic expression. A cave painting of a cow could also represent a
cow-idea; not a cow per se but the idea of a cow, no less than an actual cow. A cow on a cave wall
could also perhaps represent a god, or the idea of a cow as a generic domestic animal, or the idea of
a cow as a domestic animal representing work. What all of these representations have in common is
a one-to-one transformation of object into symbol.
In the Mimetic period, art became more rarefied—artists sought to close the gap between
being and representation. In a way, it could be said that in this period the most perfect work of art
would be a perfect recreation of the thing to be represented (or its ideal platonic image)—the most
perfect artistic cow would be an actual cow made from scratch. However, since this period in
western history was coincident with the flourishing of religious beliefs that discouraged
identification with the creator godhead, the logical extension of these ideas was seldom pursued.
Later, the emotional content of an artistic work came to the fore, ushering in the third
period some two centuries ago, although the transition between periods is ragged, and in some
ways still incomplete. The most obvious visual manifestation of the Conceptual period was artistic
abstraction; since outwardly the form of expression had little altered during the impressionist era,
the significant change was for a time obscured until the arrival of modernism and so-called
postmodernism. Although avant-garde in that it was new and surprising, modernism was primarily
primitive, a series of co-opted atavistic gestures, and the true importance of the Conceptual period
lay in the ability to imbue any artistic gesture with value, including especially gestures that had
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heretofore been rejected as artistic because they had no place in a Totemic or Mimetic
expressionistic vocabulary, so long as it was possible to contextualize them within the work itself.
This is why so-called conceptual art and purely aesthetic art are in fact the same, although
they have often been considered antithetical. In conceptual art, the physical manifestation of the
artistic object is subservient to the artist’s motives for creating the object, just as in aesthetic art the
physical manifestation of the artistic object is synonymous with the artist’s motives for creating the
object, but it is the artist’s motives that are the thing, not the art itself. In absorbing the object, the
consumer is making the object into a vessel, effecting a transmigration of form.
In the Conceptual period, it is the conception and perception of the object that gives it
value, whereas in the Totemic period the object itself has value, and in the Mimetic period the
object itself has value only insofar as it affects a representation and explanation. The Conceptual
period marks a post-structuralism of art, wherein the text gains value through its consumption.
Thus, the artist is not responsible for the structure of his work, the consumer is. Likewise, no work
is for the artist really a work of art by that artist, but rather at best a palimpsest of his idea of that work.
However, that is not to say that the artist is really irrelevant, because of course the object
must be made in the first place, and when something is made it inevitably takes on aspects of its
creator. Nevertheless, in an analytical sense the artist is irrelevant. Therefore one must speak of
artistic movements as processes, with intended goals, beginnings and endings. An artistic
movement is an algorithm containing instructions for its own use and perception.
For instance, with postmodernism one simply observes a later stage in the process of the
perception of modernism, when its constituent gestures and clichés have entered the general
lexicon and can be used as tools toward meaning rather than having meaning of themselves. An
object becomes part of an ecological web, different aspects of its existence coming together in the
ability of the consumer to imbue it with meaning based on their previous experiences.
So it becomes possible to speak of a politics of objects; the sum of these effects is a politics
of meaning wherein all consumers who have perceived the object share in an association of belief
with regard to that object. The commonality of perception with regard to the object comprises the
politics of discourse of that object, defines that object, creating a general understanding tempered
by the relative complexity of the political manifestation of the object; the larger the ecological web,
the more stuff the consumers have to deal with, the more difficult and obscure comprehension
becomes. The esotericism of modern art derives from the complexity of the politics of objects, a
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complexity most people prefer to ignore; they care less about meaning than function: how it looks
on their wall, not what it means in their mind.
The avant-garde provides an attention-grabbing shock which attempts to break potential
consumers out of their stupor, but to suggest that the avant-garde, and its current attendant form,
so-called postmodernism, has any use or meaning beyond that, is futile.
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Shark In A Box
A week or so ago the Metropolitan Museum of Art put Damien Hirst’s legendary artwork The
Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living on display. It is sitting in the second-floor
gallery where Matta’s Etre-la used to be and isn’t anymore because now there is a shark in a box.
It’s going to be there for a while, until 2010 according to the internet, and the internet is never
wrong, which of course it’s going to be there until 2010 because it is very heavy and probably not
the funnest thing to move. If you don’t know it’s heavy that’s because you haven’t seen it in
person, which you can now do at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but if you haven’t heard of it at
all until just now its label describes the work’s materials: glass, steel, 5% formaldehyde solution,
shark. Yes, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living consists entirely of a large
vitrine filled with blue goo and a shark. This is not the original shark but another shark, because the
original shark got sort of toothsome, so to speak. Hirst had little problem replacing the original
shark with another shark because a shark is a shark is a shark, and all sharks are scary. I was going to
say they are all large and scary but that is not entirely true. Some are small and cute. Also scary.
There is no small shark that is not scary, because it is a shark, and sharks eat people, or parts of
people. Usually sharks do not eat an entire person, even great white sharks. Normally all they do is
take a bite. If you have watched a minute of Shark Week you know by now that sharks usually bite
humans for the same reason that other animals look at things: to find out what they’re dealing with.
Unfortunately sharks do not look at things to find out what they’re dealing with but bite them,
because they have those tiny dead-eyes, which is part of what makes Damien Hirst’s sculpture so
unsettling. It is not unsettling because it is a shark. It is unsettling because it is a dead shark. Real
live sharks are sort of beautiful. Beautiful and scary. Dead sharks are just creepy. It is the creepiness
factor that makes The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living effective, insofar as
it’s effective. Whether it makes good art is more difficult to say. When I first encountered this
monstrosity at the Sensation show in Brooklyn some years ago I was more impressed, partly because
I’d never seen any Hirst before and in context it was spectacular. Of course, when your
competition in context is a boring painting of the Virgin plus elephant poo, it doesn’t take much to
impress. At the time though I thought, how interesting. What Hirst appears to be saying, what with
the title, and what the work is saying, what with the shark, appeared to be two separate things
converging in that third thing, the mind, to make a third thing that is neither of the two first things
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entirely. I thought that was neat. What Hirst appears to be saying is that: no one who is still
remembered is really, completely dead. What the work appears to be saying is: here is a shark in a
box. What the mind appears to be saying is: when confronted with the physical apparition of
something which has lived heretofore in the mind it creates what never actually existed heretofore,
something that is not the thing that existed in the mind and not something that actually existed but
some third thing. Actually that’s only a couple of the things it appears to be saying. Another thing it
appears to be saying is: this shark and this box suggest that the aforementioned physical
impossibility of death in the mind of someone living is an artifact, and evidence of the real thing
supersedes or demolishes such physical impossibility. It appears to be saying that memory and
reality, when they meet, meet only in a pale shadow of either. It appears to be saying that when we
meet death, come face to face with death or its apparition, we cannot believe in our own imminent
death. It says other things too, which would be tiresome to list, as much as I like lists; so in short, it
appears to say a lot of things that sort of contradict each other or aren’t really that interesting or
insightful. Of course, this is what art does. Art asks questions. Sometimes they are stupid questions.
Sometimes they are amazing, or lead to amazing things. Capital-A Art asks questions; propaganda
supplies answers. We know this. So we start to wonder, is Damien Hirst’s shark propaganda? Is it
anything more than a silly British answer to the great and silly questions of life and death already
answered in England alone by Wittgenstein and Monty Python? Is it just a million-dollar shark in a
box? Well, I don’t think so, or at least I don’t think it’s just that, if only because it seems like a
legitimate work of art. Why it seems like a legitimate work of art is a question I have some
difficulty answering. Maybe because it just seems to fit in a gallery in a museum. Maybe because it
is, in its way, beautiful, and that an artwork be beautiful, however it goes about being beautiful, is
more than we can ask of most things. And it goes about being weirdly, creepily, expensively,
heavily beautiful in the gallery where Matta hung, next door to the Clyfford Still, and it fits.
Although I should say here that as much as I sometimes like Still, when my friend’s parents came
they looked at the labels and saw all those paintings were given by the painter’s widow, his dad said
that of course they were, nobody would have bought all those paintings, and he’s right, they
probably wouldn’t have. A room of Still is not the same as a room of Rothko, or a room of Agnes
Martin. It’s not half as good. If you don’t believe me go to Houston or take the train up to Beacon.
But it’s still good, so to speak, and there is room for the good alongside the sublime, because so
much of what people condescend to call art is not good, and Damien’s shark, if only because it’s an
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interesting aesthetic object that asks questions about stuff, supposedly deep stuff, life and death
philosophical kind of stuff, certainly deserves its place in that pantheon to art which is the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, although honestly their contemporary collection doesn’t really
compare to MoMA, but then, what does. Actually, the Met’s Autumn Rhythm is by far my favorite
Pollock, far superior in its calm singularity to that congested scribbly Pollock room on 53rd St. It’s
so still, restrained, even gentle, once you get to know it. And it’s right there, one gallery past
Damien Hirst’s shark in a box. And it’s way better.
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Time’s Dissonance
Cinema is nothing other than the disruption of time. It accomplishes this in three ways. First,
physically. The broken reality of twenty-four frames a second is a reality with which virtually all
viewers are familiar; depicting the flicker of a movie in a theater immediately brings to mind the
physicality of this aspect of film. Second, editing. Scenes in film are basically conceptually unary,
and the succession of scenes that make up a movie fragment the film’s total effect.
A scene’s unity can be produced in two ways: montage, or what I will call phasing.
Montage is in effect a cubism, where individual aspects or portions of a whole (the intended
objective correlative of said montage) interact within a given perceived time-frame. Individual shots
in a scene function as a spectacular or gradual montage.
In phasing, a single shot contains within it multiple scenes. In music the term phasing
suggests a single theme moving in changing relation to itself, where the same elements remain, but
in different positions from when they started, and are thus perceived as new entities inside a single
space. This, while comparatively rare in cinema, can be seen in the work of such masters as
Tarkovsky, where by subtly altering values of light and shadow, shifting the frame, re-positioning
the actors or objects in relation to one another, a single shot can contain several clearly
differentiated zones of happenstance which are perceived by the viewer as existing in separate
compartments, as it were, separated not by the simple expedient of framing, but by a shift in the
scene’s values.
Finally, disruption is found in the cognitive dissonance between inside- and outside-time
structures, to use Xenakis’s (again originally musical) terms. By this I refer to the contents of the
film viewed separately (outside), as opposed to their appearance within the film’s time-factor
(inside). The trace appears in the friction between, say, a shot of a particular teacup in itself and the
appearance of that shot of a teacup in the film in a certain scene for a certain amount of time.
Film is the projection of motion. There is of course no actual motion in film. Any motion
occurs in ourselves, in our brains, not in the film itself. Each frame of film has a more or less
arbitrary relation to the frames that precede and follow it. In fact, they need not be related at all, as
in the films of some experimental filmmakers such as Peter Kubelka. That two adjacent frames may
show the same objects in basically the same—or exactly the same—configuration does not
presuppose an identity between them: there is no congruence in film. This has to do with the time-
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factor of film. An object now is the not the same object it was a moment ago; this sentence is not
the same sentence you have just finished reading. The differential is experiential. In other words,
the same object changes in aspect as it changes in relation to other objects, and itself.
In film, from an outside-time perspective there is object A, and there is object B. But in
cinema, from an inside-time perspective, seeing object B after seeing object A makes necessary
seeing object B from a perception which has already experienced object A (though not necessarily
in terms of object A). To see object B without having first seen object A does not so much change
object B itself as it changes the perception of object B—a perception lacking the ability to see object
B in terms of object A. Whether one actually ends up seeing object B in terms of object A is
irrelevant—that it is possible, or not possible, is the point. Therefore in film the placement of each
object, whether that object is the frame itself, the frame in relation to other frames, or the contents
of the frame, has a fundamental significance with regard to time, that is, its placement in the film’s
linear argument—and all films are by definition linear.
Film itself is constrained by time; the cinema disrupts time. Film is here defined as the
physical artifact which causes cinema, the film-strip, its contents as activated by projection. Cinema
thus exists entirely in the mind; film is the physical artifact which causes cinema to happen in the
perceptant. As film is to time, cinema is to memory, and memory is independent of time in that
memory is an artifact of the present, and time is an artifact of the past. Thus film is always presenttense, cinema past-tense.
When I say time is an artifact of the past, I mean our perception of time is rooted in the
idea this or that happened, and for that I reason I may conceive this or that may happen. To say
something may happen in the future is to say, it or something like it has happened already and I can
conceive of its repetition in whole or in part, and in this way the future is an artifact of the past. We
only imagine things may happen because once something was happening, and then something else
happened, and we assume this will continue (until we die, but even then we assume it will continue
for others, or at least that it may continue for others). Cinema disrupts this orderly procession,
siphoning the past into the present itself. The past is actualized in the present, but only within us.
Film does not know something has already happened; cinema does, which contributes to time’s
dissonance.
Cinema is a series of images associated with one another in a linear fashion, and a scene
consists of a sequence of images perceived as a unity. When images are projected in time, they are
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perceived as an object of themselves, both single and multiple simultaneously—an entirely new
phenomenon for which traditional ideas of time and memory are insufficient. Cinema resuscitates
the image, yet without rendering them alive in the mind in the same way as the original physical
being which the image depicts was enlivened, then captured by means of mechanical reproduction.
Benjamin’s aura, which applies to the original as opposed to the copy, is meaningless where the
original is the copy.
When we say, we know that cinema is not actually happening, we mean, the actions
depicted in the images are not happening, but of course something is happening: the images
themselves are happening. This brings us to the question, what is the difference between the image
and that which it depicts? If an object is congruent to its description, and images describe an object
to a greater or lesser extent, then when film collapses single and multiple it also collapses the
singularity of the physical object being depicted with its projected copies, which is weird.
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The Inexhaustible Surface Of Things
Chapter One
Let me tell you about Mike Slack, whose photographs we are now discussing. To date, he has
worked entirely in polaroids, although he is said to have recently begun experimenting with the
more conventional medium-format. The saturated color and square format of the polaroid is
intrinsic to his work, and the instantaneous nature of the process undoubtedly affects both his
method of working and the composition of his images. However the philosophical problems which
arise from polaroids should probably be ignored in his case. While it is true polaroids possess a
curious suddenness manifest in the irreversible blending of chemicals at the moment of composition
which transmits itself to the viewer with an immediacy other formats lack, even when depicting the
most sudden or violent events, when it comes to Slack this instaneity is subsumed in the immediacy
of the format itself, which defines and describes the image.
We are not so much interested in the fact of the picture as the shape of the picture, the
colors it inhabits. The famous frame edged with white confers a simultaneous gravity and
weightlessness, its thick bottom band anchoring the image in space, preventing it from floating
away. That rectangular whiteness, reproduced in Slack’s books against a matte-white page on which
it seems to hover, contains and defines the image’s edges like bones, bleached, slender and fluted, a
careful armature on which the photograph itself rests, tenderly suspended. And the square shape of
the image, played against the weighted imbalance of its frame, provides a basic compositional
structure that separates it from much, if not most of the usual photographic frames of reference.
A square format is always non-naturalistic; binocular vision resolves the world into a sort of
rectangle, the classic photographic medium-format, which is of course why paintings and movies
are generally contained in rectangles. Landscape, too, because it consists in sight and not nature, is
rectangular. The major exceptions to this rule are television and the early standard film format
(1.33:1 aspect ratio) which birthed its dimensions. Although this too is rectangular, it is much less
so, and does not resolve into sight the same way: we see what surrounds the television when we’re
watching, except we ignore it.
This format persisted in part because it is ideal for viewing the human face. A film like
Dreyer’s Joan or anything by Ozu demonstrates this, just as Sternberg’s fascination with
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interrupting and obstructing the frame, even while fetishizing Dietrich’s face, proves how artificial
this approach is. In a way the square format represents focus, while the rectangle represents the
universe. We approach the world as if it were spread out before us all at once, and not divided up
into a perforated sphere. Rectangles support this jaundiced view, while squares paradoxically
remind us of the singularity of looking; focusing our attention on a particular thing in our field of
vision forces us to remove the thing from the world and place it, as it were, in our heads. We then
see the thing hung up in a personal museum, the weird and cluttered galleries of our minds. As
opposed to the spacious and white-washed walls of today’s museums.
Chapter Two
When we visit a museum, most of the time the photographs are rectangular and large. Indeed, such
displays have suffered an uneasy gigantism of late, the works getting bigger and bigger until they
cover an entire wall; longer and longer until the image is a composite of fifty or a hundred separate
shutter-blinks. This trend, while often producing impressive results, ultimately has an effect in
inverse proportion to its size. The bigger the picture, the more it wants to say, the more it has to
say, until the perceived weight of all that expectation pulls the whole thing to the floor. In the
white-walled world of the museum, a vast expanse is not made more vast by a few extra feet.
Against this trend Mike Slack has mounted his small one-at-a-time works. It is
uncomfortable for more than one person to see them at once. They do not need a slab of wall or
some glassy frame to make their impact; they already have a frame, and the image on a polaroid
seems to exist underneath its plastic surface, raising up to press against the plastic like children with
their noses up against a window, if that is not too treacly a metaphor. This unpretentious
presentation removes his work from the weight of expectations. If one picture is a failure, that does
not indict his entire enterprise.
The very smallness of his approach also works in inverse proportion, but this time with
potentially greater rewards. Smallness can hardly be made to shrink, but can easily grow, the tiny
perfections in which his work consists gaining momentum as details acquire resonance beyond
themselves; perhaps only in small formats may details themselves become subjects. Likewise, the
very modesty of the format highlights the monumentality of that which is depicted, conferring upon
a simple stone or brick or balloon an enormous mass with regard to the image-space, separating
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one thing from another or gluing them together into a single entity, in either case divorcing the
shape from its surroundings.
One of the most interesting and characteristic qualities of this divorce is the reversal of the
traditional relation of figure to ground. In Mike Slack’s photographs, the object is not depicted
against a background, but the object and the background live simultaneously in an impossible
singular space, a two-dimensional practicality premised on the egalitarianism of shape. It is difficult
to overstate the significance of shape in these works. Not line: shape.
Where most photographs attempt to differentiate between the subject and everything else,
multiple subjects creating multiple viewpoints and perceptual confusion, Slack works entirely in
simple values of mass: a shape, a color. Shape itself is made to be a function of color. He collapses
the distinction between negative and positive space by eliminating the illusion of line. And line is an
illusion: we do not see the world as a web of interacting edges, but as a vibrant mess of weights and
counterweights, blocks and blobs moving here and there, coming to rest not in juxtaposition but in
balance or imbalance. An obvious observation, yet countermanded by the bulk of photographic
evidence.
Too often photographers default to the standard opposition of person or thing against a
backdrop. This instinct may be compared to a composer setting a melody on top of a harmonic bed.
Many pop songs are constructed in just this manner, a tune sung over strummed guitar-chords, and
there are thousands and thousands of fantastic songs consisting of a tune sung over strummed
guitar-chords, but they are interesting because they are good tunes and good chords; they are
neither original nor interesting in and of themselves. It is the difference between a songwriter and a
composer of concert music. It may well be true that the composer’s work is overly rarified,
intellectually elitist and constructed, rather than felt, just as it is often also true that it is the
composer’s work which will stand the test of time, comprising as it does a more profound
understanding of what it is to make music, of how music is made, and why we listen to music, what
we are listening for in music: it is a more profound experience because more deeply invested in
what it is to be moved by music, more committed to understanding what music is and how it is,
whereas today’s hummable tune will be replaced by tomorrow’s.
Similarly, no matter how deeply felt, every photograph of a person’s expression, haunted
or mirthful, will always only be a picture of a person, a record of the fact that once they felt this
way or that, a record of a moment now gone. But a great photograph will never just be a record of
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its subject; it will instead partake totally of its component parts and joyously or darkly fuse each
element into a unary whole, a single image which is not the sum of its parts because there are no
parts, only a singular grouping of shapes which suggest an aesthetic or emotional fact to their
observer, a fact only accessible through that one particular arrangement contrived into existence by
the photographer in cohort with his camera, and when Slack manages to achieves that rarefied
moment he does so by eliminating positive and negative space, allowing all elements of the finished
composition to live in full simultaneity, together forming a total space, perfectly balanced within
the equilateral zone in which they persist.
Now this argument may appear backwards. If we cannot separate the image from the
imaged, negative from positive, we are then dealing only with the interplay of values. It is a
question of layers. The difference between Andreas Gursky’s parking lots and Mike Slack’s parking
lots is that Gursky’s are built up, often quite literally, from different layers of photographic
evidence, while Slack’s persist in one layer only. Most contemporary photographers work in a kind
of instantaneous collage, what John Cage called simultaneous multiplicity, assuming the significance
of each portion of the image, relating the part to the whole, while Slack just images the whole. This
has the side-effect of making what might be interesting parts less interesting, more, forgive me,
slack, but since the picture gains both aesthetically and conceptually from this compromise, it can be
forgiven, or at least passed over; such satisfaction can be had from most every other photographer
out there, and there’s a lot of them.
Chapter Three
The conscientious viewer may read the preceding and think, wait a minute. Slack’s photographs are
often the very thing they are supposedly not: figure and ground! A balloon against a blue sky.
Chimney Rock against a matte sky. Scuffs against a blacktop. A shadow on a street. And this is true.
At first glance. What erases the concept of figure and ground is their unusual overall treatment. We
do not see a balloon against a sky, but rather a balloon in the sky. The sky and the balloon are given
equal weight. The subject is not the balloon, sky as background: the subject is a balloon in the sky.
Chimney Rock seems to sink into the sky behind, and the flatness of that rock/sky, ominous and
disconcerting, drastically alters the tenor of the work, so that it is not a picture of a rock formation
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but a picture of an emotional state, an anthropomorphization forced by the context Slack carefully
provides. So too the shadow and the street at once; the scuff and the blacktop.
It is an effect similar to that of, for instance, Siennese painters such as Giovanni di Paolo
who so assiduously avoided perspective; there too we see a confusion of color and line, a profusion
of shape in which it is sometimes difficult to disentangle the near from the far. A happy confusion
reigns, a tumult of colorful frames-within-frames that nevertheless add up to only one frame just as
all Western religion does, whose emotional import is thus magnified. The saints’ faces, the
tabernacles where they kneel, draperies geometrically piled across their bodies, seem to partake of
all the constructed world’s beauty, everything equal in the gaze of the Lord. So too in the late work
of Botticelli, influenced by the austere teachings of Savonarola, where events separated in time and
tenor mingle in one continuous frieze, do we see how the virtual elimination of figure and ground
enhances the resonance of the scene’s consequences and meaning, which is supposedly singular,
comprising as it does religion’s necessary objective correlative.
For me another close resonance can be found in the works of the so-called Color Field
painters and later minimalists such as Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Eva Hesse, and my personal
favorites, Agnes Martin and Sol LeWitt. Morris Louis’s poured paint and vast expanses of blank
canvas remind us that the canvas is in its austere way just as beautiful as the ostensible subject of the
work, the paint itself, or at least deserving of as much attention. The void some critics find at the
heart of his work is nothing less than the space in which the work dwells; that the “painting” is not
contained entirely in the figures but the ostensive ground is the work, too. Kenneth Noland’s nonfigure figures eliminate the figure in favor of a kind of painted ground, while many minimalists
were forced to define the serial nature of their compositions against a ground that took on aspects
of the work so defined. Without the space, there would be no multiplication; thus the space
became part of the work, originally as a ground against which the figures could be measured in the
early minimalism of Judd and Andre, but eventually, in Agnes Martin especially but also Hesse and
LeWitt, itself worked or defined organically enough to not only reward the attention of the viewer,
but be seen as an extension of the artwork of equal importance to the manually-worked areas.
In Mike Slack both the sky and the stone seem equally worked, equally significant. We are
reminded that each thing exists parallel to each thing, continuing on in their own way one and one,
nevertheless affecting one another, infecting proximity by means of a camera: Slack has made the
photograph a democracy, each thing given full significance in itself. But it is well to remember that
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tyranny may be enforced by democratic means, that his photographs eliminate everything else, and
what appears to be a photographic record of a moment, a system of objects in space, is in fact an
artifice, no less a construction than any other artwork, be it a painting or an essay like this one.
Chapter Four
For instance, the viewpoint here expressed is not necessarily the right one, and certainly not the
only one, but by eliminating conflicting viewpoints I am able to come to a means of artistic selfexpression within what is ostensibly a report on fact, an essay on the photographs of Mike Slack.
Many readers of this essay will either not know Slack’s work well or at all, or will go to it after
reading this (http:/www.mike-slack.com/); it will thus precondition them to a particular way to
see his work. Those who do will either find their opinions challenged, vindicated, or ignored.
However, I did not write this essay to do any of those things. I wrote this essay because his work
elides well with my own; I perceive his artistic approach to coincide with my own approach. By
examining certain aspects of his work I can gain a better understanding of my own; likewise, my
own work has conditioned me to come to Slack’s work in a particular way.
I am a composer and a writer. I write about figure and ground, but it is my compositions
which partake of my theories; most of my music is inspired by visual art and the ideas that give birth
to visual art. And the visual art that moves me most is based in patterns. I am fascinated by
patterns, from nature’s fractals to the delicate traceries of Islamic design. Reading a monograph on
Morris Louis, I came across a paragraph which attempted to argue for the significance of Louis’
work above “mere decoration.” As if patterns were not themselves significant enough to matter. As
if aesthetic design was not the wellspring of art, all meaning to be found therein deriving not from
the art but the art arriving into meaning.
Art is first of all aesthetics. Wherever beauty is found, be it in symmetry or asymmetry,
artistic balance or imbalance, it is found in the shapes and colors of the work. Everything else is
attendant. It was not always this way. Medieval art can hardly be understood except as a system of
allegories. Yet even then this was not as universal as some claim. At the Cloisters I came upon
several paintings which were said to have “no meaning,” being just interesting pictures of lions and
landscape. Somehow the caption made them seem less significant for that. Yet the legendary
Unicorn tapestries a few galleries away cannot be made to resolve into any kind of sequence either.
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Scholars still argue over just what they represent or allegorize. And the best of them, executed in
the elegantly cluttered millefleur style, gain infinitely in loveliness from those million flowers curling
in and about the captured beast. They must not therefore acquire value from symbolic
representation, but simple delight in aesthesis.
Every so often scholars get so caught up in meaning they forget about lines and shapes and
colors and someone like Mike Slack has to come along and remind everybody just how wonderful
they are in themselves. After all, in the Islamic world most art is “decoration,” and that decoration
is hardly “mere.” There must be something about patterned wallpaper or mosaics or mini-blinds or
freeway-overpasses that activate something intrinsic in our artistic awareness. And to image these
things such that they partake of an emotional resonance—even, yes, some modicum of meaning—
shouts ART to me much louder than, say, some guy shooting himself in the arm: whatever the value
of that gesture as art, in the history of art, as politics, as an aesthetic gush of gloop, in the end I just
don’t find it interesting in itself; it resolves into a simple political protest, propaganda, a guy
shooting himself in the arm.
Mike Slack’s photographs are interesting in themselves in the same way a landscape can be
interesting in itself: it may mean something to those who live in it, it may mean something to those
who must pass through it, but as an aesthetic object it simply is until people stop looking at it, until
they decide it isn’t worth looking at anymore. Looking, the simple act of looking, is devalued by
conceptual art. Conceptual art may gain value in other ways, and indeed there is a great deal of
conceptual art that ramifies beyond itself and must be called Art with a capital A, but to condemn
patterns, photographs, decoration to a lower rung in the Jacob’s Ladder that is art because it gains
value only in looking as opposed to thinking, is to condemn the very fundamental impulse that
drives us to make art in the first place.
Chapter Five
This is to compare Slack’s work with other pattern-makers, from Bridget Riley to Martin Ramirez,
from Shaker quilts to Chinese lattice windows. Seen from above, even landscape resolves itself into
jagged patterns, as Slack recognizes in his bird’s-eye shots of ancient cities carefully crumbling into
desert grids, or mountaintops stitching the near forest to the blue horizon beyond.
It was the composer Morton Feldman who most clearly understood the function of pattern
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in art, the relationship of figure to ground. Taking inspiration from Persian rugs and Coptic
textiles, in his later years he forged quiet masterpieces from tiny elements arranged into vast
symmetrical designs. He called his technique “crippled symmetry,” and even organized his musical
staves into Calder-mobiles slowly rotating around a central axis; each system usually consists of
nine measures, four on one side and four on the other revolving around a central measure, these
systems arranged into similarly constituted pages, those pages arranged into four-hour long musical
mesmerisms in which small harmonies emerge from silence and disappear again into it. Feldman
can be compared to Slack in the way they both find colorful, distinctive items and separate them
one from the other, yet carefully emphasizing the ground in which they lay so that it is of equal
value as the more conventionally figural shape.
In Feldman, silence is as important as sound, just as in Slack a sky is as important as the
balloon floating in it. For Wittgenstein this was a moral imperative. “Whereof one cannot speak,
thereof one must be silent.” The second half of the Tractatus could not be written, consisting
entirely of a profoundly ethical silence, yet this silence is just as important as the densely packed
pages preceding it. To eliminate figure and ground is not necessarily to move into Eastern
aesthetics, the Japanese notion of Ma—we are after all talking about Western art in a Western
tradition—but simply to revalue that which previously seemed of less important because it carried
no immanent meaning.
Denaturing sky into backdrop, for instance, derives from the Western insistence on
depicting only that which supports symbolic or allegorical understanding. To elevate sky to the
foreground, to depict only sky, is simply to suggest sky is worthy of such meaning, not to eliminate
the historical concept of meaning as it has been applied. To take what appears traditional, figure on
ground, and annihilate that heretofore fundamental dialectic, is to reimagine and recreate the basic
human artistic instinct of looking. By eliminating utilitarian distinctions, by forcing us to forget
about use and concentrate only on appearance, by emphasizing what is on the surface Feldman
makes us hear anew, just as Slack makes us look anew, as Calvino pointed out in one of my all-time
favorite quotes, from Mr. Palomar: “It is only after you have come to know the surface of things that
you can venture to seek what is underneath. But the surface of things is inexhaustible.”
However there is a conceptual danger in this kind of interpretation, and that is to question
the utility of such a unary response to an apparently multivalent form. Barthes points out in Camera
Lucida that “the unary photograph has every reason to be banal.” In the photographer Lisa Fox’s
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workroom in Huntington there stood above her desk a photograph of a Victorian house, the home’s
corner from a low view, thrusting upward into the picture-frame. When I expressed interest in this
picture Lisa laughed and said it came with the frame, not worth contemplation, strongly implying it
was bad art and beneath serious appreciation. Although I understand this point of view, I cannot
agree with it, because it is perhaps the very banality of the image that gives it its interest—why this
subject, why this angle, why this approach? The simplicity of framing has a power derived from its
repeatability, its essentially serial nature: anybody with a slight knowledge of craft might have taken
this photo; it does not seem to bear the individual stamp of the artist.
Yet any image betrays a significant trace of its maker. The choice of this photograph to
come with the frame suggests that it is thought to appeal to a wide demographic—as it did to me—
and the commercial photographer who took the photo did so presumably in the hope that it would
have wide appeal, tapping into an objective correlative screaming America! Us! You!, and this is
significant because images today live primarily in a world of surface fact. Barthes has noted that
photography is subversive only “when it is pensive, when it thinks,” but must subversion lie at the
heart of art? Why must irony invade everything? Cannot, as Rilke desired, an image be itself and
itself only, not the objective correlative of Eliot or Medieval religion where an image produces a
given, predictable response, but that the image may unquestionably result in a response, any
response, whatever it is?
The success of the framed Victorian house is not that it is particularly artistic, but that it
succeeds in being what it is; and there is a beauty in an image expressing only what it is, in light
delimiting an object as opposed to thought delimiting it, because thought is an absence, a projection
of self onto something exterior to the self, and photography has nothing to do with the self in that
like all art it makes a space onto which the self may project, but is not inhabited by the self, and
thus its banality is a purity, and simple prettiness makes for itself a place which cannot be usurped
by art, because art is in a way irrelevant to it, as art is irrelevant to us, but we are not irrelevant to
it. And maybe this is the point, that aesthesis has no truck with photography’s dissection; but
photography is never mere anatomy, nor mere love.
Photography has that power of aesthetic transmission inherent in all depictions based in the
natural world, including those not necessarily immediately identifiable as depictions of natural
phenomena (although with photography we must assume that any photographic image is at bottom
a reproduction of something which once existed), and to that extent how can we ever know if a
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photograph represents what it appears to represent? We believe in what we want to believe; we
may accept Barthes’ point that photography is proof—but proof of what?
Chapter Six
There is, finally, no truth to light, as there is no truth to color, which changes in fact, not just
perceptively, as light moves over an object; so too there is no truth to photography. We see in a
photograph what we want to see, what we expect to see, as conditioned by individual experience,
and in this way it does not differ from any other method of representation or abstraction.
Barthes again: “Photography has something to do with resurrection”—yes, because we can
resurrect something that is not dead, or which has never lived, making apparitions of appearances,
as time does. The moment has died, but its subject lives on: what relation has this moment to its
depiction?
There is an unusual kind of timelessness to these images. All photographs appear to possess
a real timelessness, although this is an illusion, as photos more often suggest the passing of time
than its stoppage. Not for Mike Slack the usual sense of a long-gone slice of life made to exist for
eternity, suspended in some moldy ether while the reality changes and dilapidates elsewhere. And
that is what makes him good, or at least that’s part of it. In his work, as in the work of all great
photographers, time itself is made fugitive, linked only to its perception, and in this way
photographs persist as something separate from their object. They may be corpses, but what is
death for someone who is not dead but a prediction? Photographs are predictions of our own
destruction, as birth is a prediction of death.
Photographs multiply death. And anything that is multiplied loses its effective capacity to
emotionally move its observer, which is why photographs are not often considered art by the
general public: they are too common, like movies, to mean anything more than the things they
show over and over again. Time moves differently for photographs than for what surrounds them,
but it does move, and in a way we are thus photographs ourselves.
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The Island Of Catalina Is On Fire
The island of Catalina is on fire. Where have all the buffalo gone? Are they stampeding across the
bleak beige land through smoke, thick brown coats burning, streaking flames behind like carried
candles in the dark?
In Avalon the homes are washed-out blues and greens and pinks and overlook the harbor
where everybody has gathered for the boats. Homes on hillsides are supported by sticks; it’s
impossible not to imagine them sliding down into the sea on broken legs. Chimneys wreathed with
fire, hillsides haloed in smoke.
On the ferry to Long Beach flying fish sparkle up and land on the deck. Every scale glints in
every direction as they flop and it is difficult to tell in what direction they are pointing. The deck is
gritty and wide and thrums noisily, a subterranean sound. The sea beneath parts to let the ferry
through, dirty and blue and stripped with dolphins and wads of seaweed.
From Long Beach, Catalina appears a low long purple murmur in the distance.
Disembarking, the evacuees can see suspended above the island another island floating in the sky,
insubstantial and raw, that is the fire’s crown. It is not a mirage and it is like creation, light against
dark, form emerging from chaos where form and chaos both remain, uneasily rubbing against one
another, leaving a margin of emptiness between where some sky shows through, dirty and
unnamed.
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Instructions For Writing The Story It Seems Like Everybody’s Writing These Days
Something surprising happens. Characters respond to it as they would any slightly surprising thing,
when in fact the thing is extremely surprising, or even impossible. These characters may be
sympathetic or not; we may not know anything about them; they may not even have names, or be
animals, or robots. Ironic deadpan humor occurs. Sometimes the story is aware of itself, its
characters ungainly literary appendages; other times it aspires to be a slice of life. Either way, it is
told in clear, economical prose, or less often in highly metaphorical, overripe experimental
language, depending on who the author studied with at that one university or writers’ program.
Events that take a long time are telescoped, and events that occur in an instant are magnified.
Nevertheless, the story is usually short.
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On Forgetting
Any communally experienced event worth remembering passes almost immediately into myth.
Where memory is concupiscent, myth is archetypal. In other words, with memory you remember
what you want or are able to remember; myth tells you what to remember.
Forgetting in Paradise—Benjamin’s das Unversessliche—is related to the forgetting of apocalypse,
that the universe dies over and over again not only with the death of each person, but the death of
each object—and since it is impossible to say when something truly dies, the world is in effect
dying at a continuous rate, neither dead nor alive, in a period of continuous transition, the past a
prediction and the future a remembrance of what has been forgotten.
There is something incomplete about writing. Writing is supposedly a form of communication, with
the self or others, but this is a misconception. In fact writing is absence. It consists of the things we
know, or think we know, pushed out of ourselves. By writing, we absent ourselves from our own
thought.
Concerning Rilke’s sisters of rejoicing, longing, grief: Once you have rejoiced, you have learned
what it is to rejoice. Once you have longed for something or someone, you know what longing is.
But you must relearn grief in every instance of loss.
The aim of philosophy is its own destruction. If a proposition can be shown to be true, then it no
longer needs to be said, because it has become apparent. Thus philosophy is the process of
unmaking thought.
Paradoxically, minimalism isn’t about repetition; it’s about change.
Identification is always exclusion.
I cannot sleep, but sleep is poor practice for death.
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If I lost these words somehow, if these words disappeared, I couldn’t really reconstruct them. I
cannot recite all the words I have written: Writing is forgetting. Or, rather, writing allows us to
forget. Thus, we do not write to create, but to free ourselves from creation. Though compelled to
make, what are we making? The future, and the past. Writers destroy themselves that they may go
on. And books, the consolations of memory.
The task of any work of art is to make itself relevant.
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On Morality
It is a mistake to confuse morals and power. Morals are the means by which we consider
administrations of power.
For instance, murder is never a moral act—or an immoral act. It is instead an exercise of
power. Morality has to do with our human response to that exercise of power, a response that
differs given one context or another, one situation or another. This is setting aside questions of
whether morality is an objective reality or derived from social/evolutionary development—we are
discussing the function of power and its attendant proxy, morality. If morality represents real
values, it is nonetheless acted upon by agents of power who seek to reproduce its effects, which
cannot be differentiated from any real effects deriving from said acts.
Seen this way, morals are never absolute. Power is the only absolute, which is to say, death
is the only absolute, for power, in human terms, is always the exercise of will toward death. (Thus
power and morals can be thought of as actualizations of death; morals are simulations of death.) No
action is willed that does not carry behind it the force of mortality. It is a happy coincidence that
only one letter, the t on which Christ was crucified, separates the two concepts.
Morals are the conclusions we draw when actions are insufficient in themselves.
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Brief Lives
What John Quincy Adams Knew
This is the last of earth.
He said, at the end. He said, This is the last of earth—I am composed; as if his body was a
symphony reaching its finale; as if he was a nation, his organs states now seceding forever. He’d
seen it already, he had seen it coming with a rational keenness most men never possess. Years
before, before his election to anything, he’d understood it was coming. He dared not say that it is
not to be desired, the coming war, although it would be calamitous and desolating. For the
extirpation of slavery from the whole continent would be the result, and this he fervently desired at
the top of his lungs from his seat in Congress, now that he was no longer President of these United
States of America.
When John Quincy Adams was no longer President of the United States of America he
swallowed his pride and was elected to Congress, where he spent a generation at the top of his
lungs. When he died it was first purple at his desk, and then in a little room off the floor of the
House called a chamber, the Speaker’s chamber. His bald head shone and his eyelids dripped down
over his eyes like wax.
In the one daguerreotype his eyes are bleary with motion and shine. His hair is limp and
thin and scraggly, especially on his cheeks where there are sideburns apropos of nothing, resting
there limply against the stubble that surrounds them, climbing up under his nose and across his
furrowed chin. His chin and forehead are furrowed both, deep enough to plant things in, veins for
instance, veins growing out of his eggshell head into river valleys stretching across the wide round
expanses of his mottled skull. Beneath, his body reclines in a black abattoir of coat, so dark it nearly
blends into the studio background, broken only by a flash of white at his heart.
He wanted to build an observatory, the better to see into the past and thus into the future,
to see what lies beyond; but Congress would not let him. They were nothing but hostile to him
until he failed opposing them and reluctantly joined their ranks, when then they still opposed him.
He was a failure as president and strident as a congressman, yet Abraham Lincoln called John
Quincy Adams his hero, and that should be enough. It is not enough. Nothing is ever enough.
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He was the son of that most cantankerous patriot John Adams, and today this is all he is
remembered for, in a time where Presidents are weaned at the weak teats of Presidents. At least he
is remembered. His father is sometimes mistaken for beer.
Kafka Attends the Air Show at Brescia, 1909
Wilbur Wright does not attend. Instead the aeroplanes look mostly like bugs. Kafka watches Bleriot
try and fail and try again to start his engine. It is not the machine that first flew the English Channel,
but what’s the difference? It takes to the air with difficulty, like a paper bag. It does not seem to
want to stay there, aloft, and wobbles sometimes with incertitude.
There is a zeppelin Kafka does not see, all baggy and soft. People hang from trailing lines
and whisper through the air. When they let go it is into muddy fields where some of the first
automobile races had been held, whose tracks are covered over with dirt in the same way graves are
covered over with dirt.
Max Brod is there and another friend. This is Kafka’s first vacation in a long time. They
hate their lodgings and the cobblestone streets, which are not so different from the lodgings and
cobblestone streets in Prague, streets Kafka feels one way about and then another. Later he will
pose in a wooden cut-out of an aeroplane and in the photograph he will be the only one smiling.
Biographers will always comment on this, that Kafka is the only one smiling, because they cannot
imagine Kafka ever smiled.
One thing Kafka likes to do is attend the movies, but he does not in Brescia in part because
he is not staying in Brescia, where the air show is, and in part because he can see a movie anytime
and aeroplanes only rarely. It is still a novelty, man’s dominion over the air. And an incomplete
empire as yet. Half the planes carted to the air show in wooden packing crates do not make it into
the sky at all.
It rains and the aeroplanes do not stir from their hangars. Crowds wait under umbrellas in
the same way they wait under umbrellas in the summer under the sun, and the rain does not stop
and the aeroplanes do not stir from their hangars.
Kafka returns home before the air show is over and his account of the proceedings is his
first published work, so far as his biographers know. But what do they know? They cannot even
imagine him smiling, even as he looks up into the empty sky and thinks, those men in their stained
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overalls, those rickety contraptions stuck with greasy lines and cogs, they together will rise above
all this. Staring into an empty horizon all around, staring into the future, into war.
Retrospective Perspective
They specifically designed the floors to hold his work. They specifically designed the doors to fit his
work. He specifically designed his work to fit the space. Standing in the sculpture garden, however,
he concedes the most spectacular thing is not the enormous spiraling work itself sitting on the
floor, but the smaller sections flying over the wall. A photographer from the Times arrives to flash
a photo of that towering steel wall suspended from a crane, rust flickering off, shimmering flakes
fluttering down into the reflecting pool where a stone woman watches, contorted, terrified.
In the second-floor gallery Richard Serra is dwarfed by his work. He is not particularly tall
but gives an impression of wideness; it is too tempting to say he is as solid as a sculpture. He laughs
more than might be expected out of a stern mouth, hard eyes glittering, when Charlie Rose
interrupts him again and again, insisting the work must follow some kind of logical progression,
that the work must develop from year to year: he can see it, why can’t Serra? They keep calling it
the work. Charlie Rose does not realize work progresses only from work, that sometimes creation
proceeds from opposition, from destruction, that what appears to follow on from what has come
before appears that way only because it follows on from what has come before, while elsewhere,
simultaneously, something else follows on from what has come before and does not resemble
anything in the second-floor galleries or even the sixth-floor galleries.
On the sixth floor is a steel plate wedged into a corner. Secured by nothing, it topples
sideways in opposite directions at once, completely still, serenely struggling to burst the careful
geometry which defines and delineates the antiseptically white room.
Sometimes lead plates lean against walls; other times they are held there by pipes, by
masses of bulging rubber. Richard Serra draws with lead, not just with his pencil. He has drawn on
the wall with leather and with rubber and yes, with lead plates too, and the drawings are as twoand three-dimensional as drawings.
Charlie Rose interrupts Richard Serra, and Richard Serra cannot get a word in but if he
could might have said that his work, unlike sculpture in the past, does not fit into its surroundings;
it contains its surroundings. In a field, in a landscape, they would be shrunken by the skies, the
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plain. He does not define his surroundings. He does not control his surroundings. Instead he
transforms the space which surrounds him, he transforms the space which surrounds Charlie Rose.
This is not always a good idea, this transformation of space. Tilted Arc, the only work of art
ever destroyed by the government of the United States of America, lasered a corridor down a
black-and-white plaza in lower Manhattan, mottled and rusted through photographs from the
nineteen-eighties that look like photographs from the eighteen-nineties. Recalcitrance destroyed it;
Richard Serra, uncompromising, destroyed it. It might have funneled a bomb blast into the
government building. So they said. It annoyed the government bigwigs who had to look at it, who
had to think about it. It annoyed the government workers who had to walk around one hundred
and twenty feet of steel every day—yes, it might have been nice and even artistic the first few
times, but every day, every damn day?
Richard Serra walks the loops and curls of various torqued elipses and toruses. They change
through time, and even when he stands still they do not. The steel is preternaturally light and seems
molded, hand-kneaded as Rodin’s Balzac who faces haughtily away from the sculpture garden
behind, where the future rises reddish into the past.
John McCain, Tortured By the Vietcong, Imagines Himself President Of the United States
John McCain, future Senator from the state of Arizona, future candidate for President of the
United States of America, current prisoner-of-war and captive of the Vietcong, tries to dig himself
into the dirt away from his tormentors, but the dirt won’t let him in. It is hard and unyielding and
it is soft and muddy. It is not yet ready to open into a grave for John McCain.
He thinks, there are so many things to be said and none of them in particular are what he
has to say. It is hard to think anything while small shadowy men stick bamboo up underneath his
fingernails. The pain is excruciating. He thinks, if I were President of the United States, I would
have sent myself into this hellhole to fight communism and be tortured on behalf of communism
and on behalf of democracy because it is the right thing to do. If I ever become President of the
United States, he thinks, and I ever have to send men like myself into war, I will do so
unhesitatingly if I believe in that war, in that cause. I will send men to be tortured and to their
deaths. He thinks, you would not think a little piece of bamboo would hurt so much. It’s always the
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small things. Bamboo; bullets. Shrapnel. What is left after the explosion has cleared the explosion
away.
They bury him up to his neck in mud and until the insects come he thinks, this feels nice
and cool. Later on women will give an arm and a leg to get such treatment. Not as literally, of
course. The United States Armed Forces do not yet want women. Or gay people. John McCain is
opposed to letting gay people serve in the military. Let them get their mud-treatments in spas, he
thinks. He thinks the government shouldn’t be enabling gay people to get mud-treatments at the
hands of the Vietcong.
John McCain, standing on the Senate floor, fulminates against allowing the torture of
captured terror-suspects: does he realize he will shortly back down from this honorable, long-held
position? Does he want to be President so badly he is willing to compromise his beliefs, beliefs he
suffered for? Fuck them, he thinks. I was tortured for my country and nearly gave my life for my
country and I deserve the benefit of the doubt. What he does not realize is he is not a Senator. He is
not standing on the floor of the Senate in a grand building all of marble. He is a prisoner-of-war and
captive of the Vietcong in the wettest, dirtiest damn jungle on Earth and as he watches them behead
his friend he does not think at all. There is nothing to think about.
Maurice Ravel, Hit By A Car
Can no longer compose and thinks about his friends who can. When there was only one hotel room
and one bed Stravinsky slept beside him and ever afterwards had to endure the endless jokes about
what went on in that bed. Ravel, like Vuillard, like Cornell, lived with his mother all his life, or so
he’d heard. He was punctilious in dress, in manner, and in music, leading to the drawing of certain
conclusions. But late at night when his mother was asleep he snuck across the silent meadow
through the silent trees to the brothel. He was one of their best customers. Nobody found out for
almost ever, either, until long after his mother had died and he had died.
It was after a surgery. His head, wrapped in a white bandage, never quite worked since the
accident. They went in with their eerie metallic instruments and sung his death-song in the echoing
chambers of his skull, where his brain was in its cauliflower coils. There was nothing we could do,
they said. We thought we could, but we could not. We could not, well, unravel the damage. In the
nineteenth century, where Ravel had begun, it was believed ontology recapitulates phylogeny.
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However, this was untrue. It is true that embryos at first look the same, but then they don’t. For
many years it mattered to many people whether Debussy stole from Ravel or Ravel stole from
Debussy. Weight was on the latter side of the equation for the pundits and the public.
Nevertheless, they all died: Debussy of sonatas, Ravel of a taxi, the pundits of age, and the public of
indifference, and now even the most modernists can hear the difference between clocks and clouds.
Now he tries to compose and does not compose. It is a familiar malady. How many years
did it take to pass just one piece? So he waited and tried again. And again. It was only despair that
took him to surgery. Who has surgery without despair? Plastic people only. Ravel hated being one
of the plastic people. Gershwin came to him for lessons and Ravel had none for him, just as later on
when Xenakis came to Messiaen for lessons Messiaen told Xenakis not to be taught. Keep doing
what you’re doing, they said, whatever it is. Gershwin died young and Ravel died young. Messiaen
and Xenakis died old. At the end of his life, Xenakis could no longer compose either. He said he
was a desert, an endless desert where nothing can grow any longer, a desert with a powerful but
unbearable past. Messiaen died in glorious C(hristian) Major.
Ravel called for his brother and said he had much more music to write, but his head was
open and it was over. It is told at the end he attended a concert and did not understand the applause
was for him.
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La Machine animale
by Eric Shanfield
How A Dead French Person You Have Never Heard Of Saved You
From Cholera While Almost Inventing Movies And The Airplane
Discussed: Flying horses; Sphygmometry; Leonardo da Vinci; Overripe Jacket Blurbs; Parisian Epidemiology;
Unusual Woodcuts; The Plausibility of Artificial Insects; W.G. Sebald’s Encounter With Sylvester Stallone; The
Difference Between a Zootrope and a Kinetoscope; Samuel Langley and the Smithsonian’s Funding of WindTunnel Research That Resulted in Public Embarrassment Involving a Would-Be Airplane Falling Into the Water
(Not Discussed In This Article)
Chapter One
You have seen Eadweard Muybridge’s photographs, in which horses fly. In Étienne-Jules Marey’s
photographs, it is birds that fly and men that leap, which is less surprising, though he shot them
with his revolving photographic gun. In fact it was Marey, not Muybridge, who laid the foundations
for film, though he stopped one step short of inventing film because it was not motion he sought
but what happens inside motion. It is therefore ironic that this man who dedicated his life to the
study of motion should have been so obsessed with arresting it. Let me tell you about this man.
Chapter Two
Étienne-Jules Marey was many things. He was French. He was born in 1830 and died in 1904, and
thus extremely bearded. He was sometimes an inventor, more frequently a zoologist, occasionally
an epidemiologist, but what he was, specifically, was a physiologist. These are the titles of some of
his writings:
La Machine animale: Locomotion terrestre et aerienne.
Du mouvement dans les fonctions de la vie.
Le Vol des oiseaux.
Le Mouvement.
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He invented:
The Sphygmograph.
The Chronophotographic Gun. I will tell you what these are later. And:
Movies. Almost. And:
The Airplane. Not really. But he laid major foundations for these and a bewildering variety
of other things we cannot imagine modern life without, and a few we can, like microscopic
chronophotography. I will tell you about them in the order he came to them, but first I will tell you
about a book.
Chapter Three
I discovered Marey in a book called Étienne-Jules Marey: A Passion for the Trace by François Dagognet,
of which this article is in part a collapsible version, in part a review, and in part a jumping-off point.
This fine if somewhat fulsome tome I judged by its cover, a series of ghostly white silhouettes
depicting a man in knit-cap and stockings jumping off the right side of the book and landing on the
left in ten unequal increments. It made me think of Muybridge, whose nude ladies climbing out of
bathtubs and pacing tigers in their cages always make me happy in the way Atget makes me happy,
so I read the jacket flap, which claimed Marey’s achievement was “to show that the living machine
spawned by the forces of technological modernity must be thought of in terms of movement, which
is reflected in his influence on Bergson, Futurism, Duchamp, and the rise of Taylorist methods of
production.” Impressive, if true, I thought. This slightly overripe blurb then pointed out that “for
Marey it was not just a question of understanding animal and human locomotion: with his constant
fabrication of new recording devices he studied a world that could no longer be grasped by merely
looking and sought to trace the kinetics of flow, turbulence in the air and dynamics of water and
wave patterns.” In this we possess truth, although those words in that order make it sound as if
there’s some special pleading going on, where in fact Marey’s importance is widely recognized; it
was Marey’s studies of hippolocomotion that persuaded Leland Stanford, he of the university (and
at that time governor of California), to fund Muybridge’s famous photographic system. Dagognet
himself, though, has only this to say: “Was Marey, as I believe, the artisan of the modern world?”
He then compares Marey to Leonardo da Vinci. This seems a bit rich for my blood, but that’s okay,
because Étienne-Jules Marey started off studying blood.
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Chapter Four
Having admired that transition, we may now discuss Marey’s sphygmograph, which measures the
heartbeat, a more difficult operation than it seems, for taking a pulse by hand is incredibly inexact;
when the heart beats arterial walls contract and all sorts of other infinitesimal things happen which
are the actual things that require reading, and measuring them with your fingers is problematic at
best. More important than the sphygmograph per se, which was really a refinement of earlier
devices invented by others, was his addition of a pneumatic system that allowed the measurement
not only of the workings of the heart, but the lungs as well. Disturbingly, some of these
experiments involved horse vivisection, with Marey “looking at the line of the external beating of
the heart.” This is disgusting, but that’s how it was back then. The sum total of these investigations
was to show the relationships between mass and force working within and without a living
creature, and to do so strictly from measurements by instruments, rather than the traditional
methods of experiment and observation. He said: “I recognize only two kinds of manifestations of
life: those that are intelligible to us, which are all of a physical or chemical order, and those that are
not. In the latter case, it is better to admit our ignorance than to dress it up in pretended
explanations.”
Chapter Five
This method of direct measurement found one of its most useful outlets in epidemiology. In 1884
cholera was at its height, and no one really knew where it came from or what caused it to spread in
such unpredictable ways across the country. What Marey did was abandon the sick completely and
instead shut himself up inside civic buildings studying municipal files and records. Back in 1873 he
had heard from England there might be some connection between cholera and water, so he
undertook “to find out, in certain areas affected by cholera, what part this element might play.”
Although requiring considerable drudgery to uncover, the results themselves were easy to explain:
cholera followed drinking water. Even without identifying the microbe responsible for the illness,
it was obvious that a map of Paris’s water distribution system exactly matched the infection’s path.
In the days before indoor toilets, infected people, stricken with diarrhea, would literally shit where
they ate—and, more importantly, drank—spreading the disease. He reported these results to the
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authorities, and thus, thanks to Étienne-Jules Marey, was the municipal practice of preventive
medicine born.
Chapter Six
There is an excellent nineteenth-century woodcut depicting a bird attached by wires to several
batteries and recording arms drawing squiggly lines on a revolving drum. This was Marey’s
electromagnetic apparatus for transcribing the wing beats of a bird. I will explain how it worked in
a minute, but first I will tell you how he ended up wiring a bird to a machine, and why. What he
actually started with was a horse. This was not because he wanted to know if a horse, when
galloping, lifted all of its hooves into the air at once, although this was something of a burning
question in nineteenth-century zoology. He actually chose horses because they are large, docile
enough to attach things to without watching them get torn off immediately, and because the horse
was ubiquitous in the nineteenth century, making it of special interest in the way cars or airplanes
are today. But here he ran into his first problem. Horses don’t gallop at a constant speed. Or trot,
or walk. And they do not always go in a straight line. As we have seen, Marey distrusted the
evidence of his eyes: “The most careful inspection will never be enough to unravel the successive
and harmonic order of the limbs,” so he and a friend invented hodochronometry, in which they
studied hoof-prints. Actually this method and its attendant stenographic recording was old—
choreographers of dance had used it for centuries—but useful; apparently they were able to learn a
few new things from this revised traceology, primitive though it appears. Next they listened to hoof
beats and found that if, in clockwise order starting from the left front leg you call a horse’s legs A,
B, C, D, they walk BDAC, amble BCAD, trot BDAC, and gallop BACD. You will therefore notice
horses amble each side in alternation, and gallop from front to back. Another thing he did was put
little balls connected to recording cylinders under the horse’s hooves and composed the resulting
data into a kind of musical notation consisting entirely in drawn lines, which lines were Marey’s
preferred, virtually exclusive means of visually depicting his results.
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Chapter Seven
Now, most of this information was known already. What Marey did was explain the transformation
from one state into the next, which is really the interesting thing about motion: we already know
things move, and it’s not difficult to measure them moving, but how things get from one state to
another is where science arrives. As a side note, he noticed that when a horse gallops, it has all four
feet simultaneously off the ground, although he could not actually show this in photographs, only in
his beloved lines. That would have to wait for Muybridge’s line of twelve cameras set to go pop!
pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! in succession when a running horse
stepped on the cords stretched in its path, closing the circuits that triggered the shutters.
Chapter Eight
This brought Marey to the birds mentioned above, who take less readily to measurement than
horses. To birds; to flight, more precisely. Now, birds’ wings do not leave traces in the air, so
Marey found himself frustrated. Here is what he did. He did not work from the sound of the wings.
He did not work with birds. Instead, he held insects with tweezers against paper covered with black
powder and as their wings beat they brushed away the powder in just the shape of their wings’
motion. He shone lights on little gold discs he attached to wasp wings and watched the shapes it
projected. Wikipedia says he even constructed a tiny artificial insect to demonstrate how an insect
flies, but that sounds pretty incredible and you’ve got to wonder about their sourcing, about which
more later. But none of these devices could really measure anything. So: birds, and the woodcut I
mentioned an hour ago. What we see in the woodcut is actually fairly simple: The bird-wires open
and close a binary circuit with each flap, so counting the number, force, and length of wing beats
(actually wing revolutions) in a given period, but what Marey actually ended up doing was not so
simple, as birds are stupid and rarely cooperate. Geese, for instance, fly into airplane engines. They
know something’s coming; they can hear it; they just shrug their shoulders and get eaten by the
engines anyway. Do birds have shoulders?1 Anyway, as we can see in another, more elaborate
woodcut, Marey has fixed an entire recording contraption (complete with stylus and cylinder) to
one wing and tethered the bird at three points to an apparatus that Rube Goldberg would have
1
They do.
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found implausible. In such ways does science move forward. And believe it or not, in this way the
world moved inexorably towards film. Étienne-Jules Marey’s electrified bird made Sylvester
Stallone possible.
Chapter Nine
At one point in Campo Santo W.G. Sebald mentions Judge Dredd and it’s really weird.
Chapter Ten
These studies resulted in Marey almost inventing movies. What he actually invented was the
chronophotographic gun, whose name conveniently explains what it is. Basically, it combined a
camera with a revolver. Shaped like a pregnant rifle, the chronophotographic gun had in its swollen
belly photographic plates which spun at the rate of twelve photos per second, producing a series of
images evenly separated in time. (Incidentally, this was also the first portable camera. I leave it to
philosophers to discuss the meanings of this first portable camera being shaped like a gun, just as I
leave to them all discussion of Marey’s stated influence on Bergson, whose ideas I do not really
understand.2) By painting lines on animals and synchronizing his shutter-speed to the motion of,
say, a bird’s wings, Marey created an increasingly abstract series of plates forever persuading
nature’s complex motions into a stillness, making his own little contribution to the collapsing of
time and space that marks the modern era, those contractions which perhaps comprise the
twentieth century’s true hidden revolution.
Chapter Eleven
As to Marey’s role in the development of cinema: there is considerable disagreement about Marey’s
role in the development of cinema. The entry on Marey in Wikipedia reflects this3. Not only does
some of the information proffered sound suspect, like the artificial insect thing, but sentences like
“Marey also made movies. They were at a high speed (60 images per second) and of excellent image
2
Fun fact: Henri Cartier-Bresson was an avid hunter, and not only played a servant in Jean Renoir’s La Règle du jeu, but
was the (off-screen) gunman during the famous rabbit hunt sequence.
3
Clearly much research went into this article.
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quality: in slow-motion cinematography, he had come close to perfection,” are simply untrue.
Marey did not make movies. Period. Today they can be projected as such, but not back then, as we
shall see. What he actually made were more complex versions of the Millhauserian
phenakistascopes, zootropes, praxinoscopes, phasmatropes and phototachygraphs so popular in the
late nineteenth century, in which single images were spun, projected, hurled, or otherwise set in
motion to create that blurring our eyes perceive as motion—but he did not take the final step
towards cinema. The crucial technical difference between all those scopes and modern movies is
simple: before Edison, motion-making-machines lacked the stopping mechanism which allows for
fixed projection through a shutter. Every image on a film-strip has to come to a dead stop or it will
blur and fuck up the sensation of continuous motion.4 Marey never got that far. He didn’t need to;
he was interested in tracing the shape and line of flight, which his chronophotographic gun did just
fine, and the question of reversing this process and reproducing the motion thus captured
apparently struck him as largely irrelevant, although he had an assistant working on it for a while,
this assistant eventually patenting a precursor to Edison’s revolutionary solution, perforating the
edges of the film. (Edison solved other important problems as well, like making sure the film winds
and unwinds at a constant rate.)
Chapter Twelve
It is not surprising these intensive studies on the motion of birds in flight led to various theorizing
upon heavier-than-air manned flight; in Animal Mechanism Marey baldly states he “does not hesitate
to admit that what has sustained us in this laborious analysis of the different acts in the flight of the
bird, has been the steady hope of being able to imitate, less and less imperfectly, this admirable type
of aerial locomotion.” Nevertheless, I cannot agree with Dagognet’s assessment of Marey’s
significance in the development of flight; raw data, while important, cannot fly you to Phoenix. He
did not invent an airplane, or even design any kind of flying machine. However, he did invent the
wind tunnel5. Which is impressive enough, really, especially considering the uses wind tunnels are
put to today, from vehicle design—airplanes, cars, submarines—to the impact of wind on
buildings, gas dispersion models (shades of Marey the epidemiologist here), even the effects of the
4
Zootropes for instance do not have this problem as their printed images are not projected and fixed in relation to one
another.
5
Well, simultaneously and separately from several others—it was in the air, so to speak. Hah!
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patterns of snow drifts on pedestrians. Eventually these studies on the movement of air around
large objects led him to the chronophotography of smoke flowing around microscopic objects.
Finally, in his last book, simply titled Le Mouvement, he worked on the microchronophotography of
the crystallization of salt. Now measuring the inanimate instead of the animate, Marey concluded
his profligate career as he’d begun it, examining delicate systems of lines as they moved and traced
shapes before his eyes, having at his end attained near total abstraction, watching sea water turn
slowly to salt.
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Jury Duty Is Exactly How You Think It Will Be
There’s nothing lonelier than the sound of a payphone ringing and ringing in the empty halls of a
courthouse. Not today, anyway. The halls sound like seashells, humming. It’s hard to say where the
humming comes from; few of the jurors talk to one another. The judge has told them not to discuss
the case. Until minutes before they knew nothing of the case and had their lives to discuss; now the
case is their lives and they do not talk to one another. It is difficult to read a book in all that quiet.
And the payphone, ringing and ringing.
The courtroom looks nothing like the wooden courtrooms on tv, all high teak and
mahogany creaking out the inside of a ship. It is very high nonetheless, the judge’s risen plinth
surmounted by a stone monolith telling you to trust only in GOD, that you trust in GOD. It is hard
to tell if GOD is capitalized when everything is in capital letters. Everything in the courtroom is in
capital letters, from the sparse decor to the lawyers. The judge looks exactly the way you think a
judge would look, and sounds like it too. His grey hair is as flat and quiet and stern as his voice. The
clerk is dressed very neatly and the folded corner of a handkerchief, undoubtedly faintly scented,
emerges carefully from his breast pocket into an apse.
All the names on their perforated ballots are tipped into a metal octagonal contraption and
revolved by the clerk. The clerk calls the prospective jurors’ names and they respond as if it were
they who were the accused. Rising from the hard wooden seats recalls pews. It is hard to tell
whether the courtroom is reminiscent of a church or just that every church is a courtroom also.
The accused from the back is bald. All of the accused are bald, shorn and black or brown.
All of the judges and court officers are white. This is hardly worth noticing; you knew that already.
One thing you did not know is the magnetometers in the lobby provide colored x-rays of
the bags that pass through. Where the colors come from, what they represent is a mystery. While
waiting it is fun to watch the bags’ insides made visible in all the colors you would expect from just
that kind of anatomical diagram, each component a color-coded trigonometry. The colors inside
the bags are not the colors on the magnetometers’ screens, although they might be by coincidence.
The lobby where the magnetometers sit with their felt-tentacle mouths is two stories high
and glassed-in; the glassed-in lobby is surrounded by chain-link fencing and drooping trees, and
there is nothing sadder than a building surrounded by chain-link fencing, except maybe for the
sound of a payphone ringing and ringing and ringing in empty courthouse halls.
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Paul Virilio Pisses Me Off
If war is cinema, can there be a cinema that is war? Is this related to Artaud? Perhaps a cinema that
distorts the perceptions of the viewer—propaganda films are often spoken of as a weapon of war. Is
abstraction in art then a kind of conflict, a teratology of war?
“Art is the casualty of war.” Paul Virilio, in The Accident of Art, claims that all twentiethcentury art is a response to war. But what if war is the result of art? Perhaps society reaches a stage
where it needs to implode, to fragment, and modern technological war is a casualty of the same
human psychology that produces art. What if war is itself a kind of terrible art?
Possibly Virilio is to some extent right, but it is a traditional concept, limited, even
mundane. Abstraction as destruction. Yawn. What about abstraction as a new dawn? Picasso can be
joyous as well as horrified! If modern art is a consequence of technology—no. It is not that war and
art are casualties of one another, but that they coincide, being the organized products of humanity.
If art is only a response, it cannot precede. But it does, it does! Just because Artaud’s work
was not generally recognized until after WWII does not mean that it was not relevant beforehand,
or, conversely, that WWII made it relevant. Sontag, tongue in cheek, even suggests artists may be
influenced retroactively, and I must agree with her.
All abstraction is just disfiguration? Really? Can there be no pure form? Gesture? Color?
Shape? Light? Is not the world itself often abstract? Is photography not an abstract art?
That art thrives because it is entirely besides the point is what gives it its power. Art is elite
not because it needs elites to comprehend it, but because in comprehending it one becomes elite.
War is not art because war is the antithesis of art. Art creates; war destroys. Art may be the
simulacrum of destruction, may itself be destruction, but is never itself death, only the imagination
of death. To aestheticize war is to trivialize death, which is something art may never do.
Even when art pretends to trivialize death, this is always a rhetorical device. War by proxy
may be a simulacrum of war, but we must never forget that somewhere people are actually dying.
Baudrillard’s error is that war may have become for us its simulation, but we too are our own
simulations, in everyday life we simulate the person we think we are or want ourselves to be, and
the simulation of war acts only on this inherent simulation of ourselves. Real war really affects us,
because we are not televisions. We are not robots, or simulacra. The desert of the real is populated
by humanity.
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Virilio’s troubling reduction of 9/11 to an “accident” which reveals something new to us,
to an iconoclasm comparable to the Taliban’s destruction of the Buddhas of Bamyan, is deeply
irresponsible. If I were to murder Mr. Virilio, I might learn something new, and in dying he might
learn something, but of what value is this “accident”? The twin towers may have been a symbol,
their destruction, yes, a kind of iconoclasm, but there must be a difference between killing art and
killing people, eradicating ideas and murdering human beings.
The significance of 9/11, both for the terrorists and for us, lies in the great loss of life, not
the symbolism such loss of life entails. If the terrorists had wanted to destroy a symbol only
metonymy would have been sufficient; but burning flags is not enough for Al Qaeda. They could
even have dynamited the Washington Monument after-hours without loss of life, but toppling an
empty Washington Monument and toppling a packed World Trade Center are “accidents” of
completely different orders.
Terrorism is by definition rooted in murder, the murder of innocents, and though the
image presented us by the collapsing towers may have been unary, there is only one reasonable
response, one human response, and Virilio, who laments the lack of multiple perspective in this
case, seems to lack that humanity, undermining his own credibility. Intellectual analysis must be
based in human experience, or it is of no value, and to view 9/11 as anything other than the
tragedy it was is inhuman. Has technology made Paul Virilio a sociopath?
By equating art and war, aesthetics and war, and if there is, as he claims, good and evil,
beauty and ugliness, then Virilio does evil in The Accident of Art, even if only accidentally. “Whereof
one cannot speak, one must be silent”—Wittgenstein meant this as an ethical proclamation. Silence
may sometimes be consent, but it can also be justification.
Virilio’s problem is his nostalgia. All of his diatribes against globalization, the rise of the
vision machine: he has no alternative vision of the future. “Too much of too much”—maybe, but
there will be more and more people and we cannot murder them.
Virilio is afraid. He suckles futurity but shuns his mother’s breast. Accidents and disasters
are everywhere, art has become a capitalist landmark—but that doesn’t mean people don’t still
exist as they always have, pushing forward against themselves. Virilio is not a pessimist: he’s just
dried up. He has no ideas, only critiques of others’. Fond of making grand, extreme proclamations
without backing them up with any sort of logical calculus, his is the failure of European
intellectualism: self-loathing. In fact, though he cannot admit it, his solution is destruction, is death.
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He longs for what he cannot call for. A desiccated vision, the vision of a machine.
The intellectual is not death: the intellectual is a machine, no less than cinema, no less than
war, and the inhumanity of machines lies in their ability to do only what they are programmed to
do. Machines cannot see. There is a difference between sight and vision.
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Very Late At Night
Sometime after two in the morning he heard two loud thumps from upstairs and opened his eyes. It
was a big apartment building and sometimes that happened. He closed his eyes again. Then a
woman screamed Help me! Please help me! and there were another couple of noises and then they
stopped.
They were anguished screams, the screams of a woman in need of help. They were not sex
screams or joke screams. They did not sound like actresses sound on television screaming for help.
They were anguished screams, the screams of a woman in need of help.
He’d never heard anything like them. They were loud but not horror movie loud. He
could hear them through the floor from somewhere above. It was hard to hear his neighbors
through the concrete walls but sound came through the floors like water, although just where they
came from was hard to tell. Some years ago his downstairs neighbor had complained for months
about the loud noises coming from his apartment until he pointed out he’d been away for a month
while the neighbor complained.
It was near two-thirty. He got up and turned on the light and listened. He could hear
himself breathing and his heart beating. This was a good building, a doorman building. People who
didn’t belong didn’t usually get in. That very day the new doorman had buzzed the wrong
apartment when his friend arrived and his friend had had to call to let him up. Women did not
scream for help at two in the morning in this building.
After a few minutes he called emergency. He did not know why he waited a few minutes
but he did. The woman who answered seemed bored. He explained what had happened. For some
reason he omitted the noises and only reported the screams. She said, coming from the hallway? He
said, from somewhere upstairs. It’s hard to tell where sounds come from in this building. She said,
the seventh floor? He said, no, I’m on the seventh floor. The sounds must be coming from the
eighth floor at least.
Will you send police? he said. She said they were on their way. Should I tell them what I
heard? he said. She said they wouldn’t come to his apartment. Then she thanked him and hung up.
His phone stayed in emergency mode until he switched it off. Earlier that night the lamp in the
corner had burned out with a flash and it was half-dark in the half-light. The city was never dark,
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his mini-blinds long broken, and he stood there motionless in the light from the other lamp and the
light from outside and it was still dark in between.
This is a story, he thought; I’m in a story.
I was dreaming, he thought; only dreaming.
He had not been dreaming. It was too dark and late at night for dreams.
After hearing her scream at first he assumed the thumping sounds were of struggle. Now
he began to wonder if maybe she was alone up there and knocking things over in her anguish. A
heart-attack or a stroke. Should I go up there? he wondered. Why are all these bad things
happening to me all of a sudden? he wondered.
He had just returned from the coast where his father had had a heart-attack. Barely sixty
and in good shape, rarely sick, wide and strong, until the week after Thanksgiving his father was the
picture of health. Then some chest-pain while working out at the gym turned into an emergency
angioplasty which in turn shook loose some clots which turned into a heart-attack. Now this. It did
not at first occur to him that none of these things had happened to him.
I did the right thing, he told himself. He told himself this as he turned off the light and
climbed back into bed. Should I have gone upstairs and tried to help? What if she was being
attacked? What if the attacker had a weapon? I’m in my underwear, he reasoned. I don’t even have
a baseball bat (why don’t I have a baseball bat?). The police will be here soon enough; the precinct
is across the street. He got out of bed and lifted the mini-blinds and looked at the strangely
illuminated police station. During the blackout it was the only building for blocks with a generator
and even then as the city slept in darkness his window still glowed as always.
I did the right thing, he told himself, and went to bed. I did the right thing. As he lay there
a siren grew louder and louder and then stopped. In front of the building? he wondered, but did not
get up again to look.
It was three o’clock. It was four o’clock. He lay in bed and did not sleep. Every little noise
made him start. He turned his ear to the ceiling and his other ear into the pillow. Through the
pillow he could hear ambient thrumming sounds, and his straining upturned ear caught a few
footsteps that might have been from the hallway and some muffled voices from above, quietly, but
that was all he heard until he finally fell asleep near sunrise, exhausted.
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The Book Of Transience
Did not the World Trade Center always resemble two great gravestones? Black tombstones of
futurity, monumental predictions and precessional commemoration of their own demise. There
was always something sinister about those blank dark tablets, even when streaked with light at
sunset, less an enormous brooding presence than an absence on the edge of our island. We ceased
even then to see these buildings as buildings, but as symbols, objects of contemplation. As they
always were; only now their meaning has changed. They have become ciphers, meaning taking
vivid, double shape. In this way we see that the towers are figments of remembrance, the shape
memory takes. We see that an object is a circuit, closed by perception.
Thus, a monument is a system of remembrance. If every object is a circuit, first of all, a circuit
must be closed. Monuments only possess power so long as they possess memory. In other words,
memory is the monument. Monuments lose their ability to commemorate as humans lose memory
by death and by decay, becoming memorials of monument: Monuments are the event rather than
memorials of the event itself. The human aspect will inevitably, inescapably diminish over time,
becoming merely a list of names of the side of a sepulcher. Monuments are always monuments to
themselves—monuments to monument. Therefore the only true memorials exist as activated
memory, memory made solid by signs. A monument is a hieroglyph, a sign that must be understood
prior to reading.
Coming upon a structure with no idea as to its significance, such as the mounds of Britain
or the megaliths of the Mediterranean, we can only project onto them what we might use such a
thing for, or, using what knowledge we have of its builders, imagine what use they might have put it
to. Even if we recognize a structure as, for instance, the memorial of a great king, because we
know nothing of the king, really (even a whole history of his reign is irrelevant now because we
were not there), we cannot utilize it as a monument. To call it a memorial is not correct
terminology. It may have once been a memorial, but only so long as it lives in human memory.
Today it is only the memorial of a memorial. So the true monument is necessarily unbuildable, in
the sense Robert Harbison suggests. Consider my proposal for Two World Trade Center Memorials:
1. Bury a number of stones equal to the victims of the September 11th tragedy in an
undisclosed place. Do not mark or reveal its location. The stones should fit comfortably in the hand
and be found, not bought. They should all be buried at once. While laboring, no food or drink
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should be consumed, nor should any words be spoken.
2. The space that once contained the towers to be recognized as the memorial.
These September 11th memorial proposals, though undoubtedly inadequate, deal with these
questions. The first provides a ritual of remembrance, knowledge of which or participation in
provides the necessary activated memory. The second actualizes unbuildability, and gains a second
level of significance because efforts are already underway to fill the void made by the terrorists: a
“real” monument is insisted upon; memory is already fading. We make memorials not because we
need them to remember, but because we need for others to know we remember.
And all remembrance stops with death. W.G. Sebald knew this above all. In Austerlitz he
notes that darkness does not lift but becomes yet heavier as he thinks how little we can hold in
mind, how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the
world is, as it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and objects which
themselves have no power of memory is never heard, never described or passed on. It was Sebald’s
attempt to create such places and objects that possess this very elusive power which commends him
to us today, and to the future which was for him a place of the dead, like the past, filled with those
with whom we cannot speak, but speak to us, searching for what is not theirs, and not yet ours.
When we visit a cemetery or a memorial, the feeling we get is not general. Each
gravestone reminds us of a loved one’s grave, each monument reminds us of a tragedy we were too
close to get away from. This is why when we create monuments, erect gravestones, we are not
mourning the lost, but mourning ourselves. We are contemplating the rumor of our own death, for
which all other deaths are synecdoche. This is why the principal attribute of Sebald’s writing is:
compassion. The beauty of melancholy consists in empathy, and his detailed understanding of the
loss that surrounds us is part of what makes him incomparable.
Appropriately, then, his posthumous volume Campo Santo is named after a graveyard. This
book, assembled piecemeal from various uncollected sources, makes clear the shared provenance of
two apparently different approaches to prose. His essays might be excerpts from one of his novels,
and the novel fragments with which the work opens could just as easily be considered essays, if not
for the fact that they submit to the same creative reanimation of fact which colors all of his major
work. By modifying the presentation of real events and persons to accord with his personal
preoccupations, Sebald was able to create a reality more real and meaningful than any collection of
facts as they would be found in a book of history. In this he resembles perhaps the only other author
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of our time to which he can be compared, the late Bruce Chatwin.
Travelers both, Sebald and Chatwin, authors of five volumes of prose and two books of
essays apiece, coincidentally came to untimely, sudden deaths, denying the world any more
products of their singular genius. Taking loss as their subject, or rather, the search for what has
been lost, both writers sought to make for themselves an intricate lacework of connections between
events which lay, hitherto undisturbed, in places too distant or unremarkable to have fired the
imagination of lesser minds. Although Sebald’s first book is ostensibly a poem, and Chatwin’s two
initial efforts supposedly works of non-fiction, both writers endeavored in similar ways to create a
kind of hyper-real prose; not a magic realism, but a sort of surrealism, where objects loom larger
than themselves and people drift through places and meetings as if in a dream, as if already dead. A
particularly English sense of melancholy lies palpable over these works, but the rings of Saturn
bring, instead of sadness or depression, a sense of the wonder of existence, of the beauty of life in
all its strange splendor. We discover that melancholy is in fact a species of joy; that contemplating
the ruins of the past and the decay of the present remind us that things continue, slowly moving
toward dissolution, becoming beautiful in their own way as they return to dust and damp.
Beginning with a series of narratives chipped off an uncompleted work about the island of
Corsica, which Sebald began in 1996 after the completion of The Rings of Saturn, in Campo Santo we
find the author reaching a communion with his ideas and images suitable to a final, valedictory
work. Indeed, which of his works does not feel elegiac, redolent of endings, shadows passing? It is
so common in his novels to discover the narrator sick, uneasy in his surroundings, that in this work
the satisfaction with which Sebald writes of swimming out into the ocean and feeling one with the
world cannot be undercut by the vertigo which overcomes him on the return journey. That other
commentators have remarked on this incident, finding the vertigo of ultimate significance, seems to
me missing the point. Of course he is overcome; of course. That is how the narrative voice is in
Sebald’s works. But this sequence illuminates a key promise in his books, what appeals to us in
reading what might on the surface appear to be meandering, lachrymose works—in these moments
we realize that perhaps the proper word to describe a reader’s experience of Sebald is: repose.
One never feels hurried, invited instead to linger in darkening libraries, crumbling
underground stations, dark nocturamas with their death’s-head moths and eerily glowing eyes. But
simultaneously whatever unease the narrator feels is never shared by the reader; instead, a curious
sense of suspended time settles over all things, and the connections drawn by Sebald between
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eccentric people and grey, decaying palaces with their cracked glass arboretums and stuffy parlors
inhabited by drifting apparitions lulls one into a timeless place where past and present intermingle,
filled with the ghosts and phantoms with which Sebald populates his novels. Real persons and places
are transformed by a mysterious alchemy into memories, the accumulated weight of knowledge,
lost dreams and grandeur turned into small relics nestled under bell jars, remains which we are
invited to view and consider before they turn at last to ash.
In an essay first published barely a month before his death, Sebald tells us of a 1976 visit to
the artist Jan Peter Tripp in Stuttgart. He remembers that visit as a remarkable occasion, because
with the admiration he immediately felt for Tripp’s work it occurred to him that he too would like
to do something one day besides giving lectures and holding seminars. Sebald fell to examining
Tripp’s engraving of Daniel Paul Schreber, the mentally disturbed judge who became convinced he
was nightly transformed into a woman and subjected to hideous ordeals, and about whom Freud
drew some of his more specious conclusions. In Bruce Chatwin’s novel Utz the storytelling I, who
remains unnamed like the narrator of Sebald’s extended fictions, both the author and not the
author, is admitted with some reluctance into the collector Utz’s bathroom, where he discovers
hanging on the door a silk dressing gown embroidered in the most delicate and fantastic manner.
On the way out through the dark bedroom, he sees a wig and wonders if Utz, like Chatwin, might
not harbor some secret vice which would ultimately lead to his downfall.
Indeed, as Utz was being written, a dark and then almost unspeakable death was already
growing inside Chatwin, a death that may be imagined similar to Tripp’s engraving, which depicts
Schreber with a spider in his skull, leading Sebald to wonder what can be more terrible than the
ideas always scurrying around our minds. He tells us that much of what he has written derives from
this engraving, not only the will to create the brilliant works of art by which he will be
remembered, but even his method of procedure: in adhering to an exact historical perspective, in
patiently engraving and linking together apparently disparate things in the manner of a still life,
asking himself what the invisible connections that determine our lives are, and how the threads run.
It can be no coincidence, then, that in this selfsame collection of essays and prose, Sebald writes of
Chatwin himself, and Utz’s dressing gown, suggesting that, as in the work of poet Ernst Herbeck, it
is objects that attract us, for things, as Chatwin writes, are tougher than people. Things are the
changeless mirror in which we watch ourselves disintegrate.
But although it is difficult to compare Sebald to any other writer, for the singularity of his
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vision and means of relating it are so far from any traditional exercise of genre as to render them
impenetrable to the usual artifices of exegesis, there are certain points of similarity with other great
figures besides Chatwin, ancient and contemporary. For instance, though his beloved Sir Thomas
Browne wrote only of what he perceived to be revealed truth, there is the curious exception of the
Musæum Clausum, found in the posthumous Miscellany Tracts. This small work lists strange and
wonderful objects supposedly found in his collection, but which never existed, or at least were
never physically in his possession. It is indicative of Sebald’s method that in the final section of The
Rings of Saturn he would single out this seventeenth-century forbear to his own work, transforming
an already odd accumulation into an even more remarkable miscellany, rife with the sort of
fascinating and melancholy diversions which turn out not to lead outward into bizarre and
interesting byways, but into the very heart of his saturnine theme. In this way his novels are not
really fiction, his essays hardly straightforward examinations of their ostensive subjects—rather,
both are reports on the world as it is—as it actually is, not as it appears to be.
There are those, for instance, who have complained Sebald’s lengthy essay On the Natural
History of Destruction, which examines the supposed silence of post-war German writers on the
subject of the allied bombing and virtually total destruction of German cities during World War II,
exaggerates the scarcity of those reports. But even if people had written tomes on this matter—and
they did not, at least not very many—he would have said the same things, because it is the
impossibility of writing about such things, the inability of coping with such memories, that is Sebald’s
conclusion, which is for him morally necessary.
When Joel Agee notes in a footnote to the foreword of his translation of Hans Erich
Nossack’s book The End that an unstated motif throughout Sebald’s essay appears to be a polemical
claim for his own quasi-documentary aesthetic as the only responsible way to contemplate the
bitter truth of historical memory, he hits the nail on the head. Every artist must believe that his
approach is the only viable one, or is at least the most appropriate means by which he may do
justice to his project. That Sebald should take as his subject the destruction of German cities by the
allies in WWII reminds us that the loss he perceives everywhere is not an abstract notion, but
suddenly, ineluctably real. When he examines the notion of ruins, Sebald is not considering
destruction as an abstraction, but creating a utopia of actual ruins, unifying the past and the future
through the motionless dead, who reside in the living, as memories dwell in the very buildings we
inhabit and ignore. Santayana condemned the future to those who repeat the past, pointedly
103
repeating the words of Livy himself, but for Sebald the future lies in the past, and by repeating in
his work the tiny details and coincidences of lives now gone, activates the past, and in so doing,
perhaps rescues the future from the mistakes and misfortune which once befell us. Memory
requires desire; otherwise it is just reportage.
Consider Walter Benjamin apparently writing of the rise of commodities and the
industrialization of the cities in the nineteenth century, or Eugene Atget photographing storefronts
and empty streets and Versailles, luxuriating in the poetry of empty spaces and broken geometries.
Their shared subject was actually Haussmann; they elegized the destruction of old Paris. Like them,
like Nabokov and Browne, Sebald is not interested in the past per se, but the way the past manifests
itself in the present, the way the past means to him, and by extension, to us. Because it is his own
history, the European experience of World War II provides a sort of founding myth for Sebald’s
mythologies, but is not its subject.
My grandparents were in Auschwitz. Once when I was young we sat in the backyard of
their Denver home, and as my parents silently ran the video camera I interviewed them about their
experiences. There was a lemon tree, and shade, and cool concrete. The lemons were inedible. I
do not remember today a word of what they said, and have not since viewed the video, which still
exists. But although I can never forget the essence of what they told me, being told a thing is not
the same as knowing the thing itself. They could not forget what happened; but now they are
among the numberless dead, the tattooed numbers branded into them by their would-be
executioners devoured underground along with their quick and motionless flesh. For there is a
certain uselessness to remembrance. Memory of the atrocities they witnessed will fade, as they
always have, and fresh crimes will be visited on the heads of our children, as they always have. We
learn nothing from loss.
Sebald knew that loss cannot be heard, described, or passed on. His great attempt was to
try and hear, describe, and pass on that loss, and when he failed, settled for making a natural history
of that destruction, which is the most any of us can hope to do. Writers can show people ruins, but
the great tragedy of history is that we must make them for ourselves to understand.
104
Where The World Trade Center Was
The Winter Garden is that bulbous glassy building behind the World Trade Center Site. From the
top of the steps stretches a torqued rectangle of whitish wasteland where ramps mount one another
into a low retaining wall. There are holes where excavations were, the search for human remains,
most of which are no longer than a finger. They are called potential human remains because it is not
at all clear whether they are or are not human remains. They are burnt and stubby and grisly if they
are.
Inside the Winter Garden are rows of palm trees which may be fake or may be palm trees.
An interesting thing about palm trees is they are actually very difficult to fake. In Southern
California, where palm trees line every street and every highway, the cell-phone companies have
erected fake palm trees to hide their antennas and they may as well have just erected the antennas,
so ugly and fake-looking are these supposed palm trees. Reception is good along the streets and
highways though, where you are not supposed to use your cell-phone while driving.
There are many things not to do when driving and people do them all. Then they crash into
palm trees and the palm trees do not burn but the cars sometimes do, and the drivers. It is very
hard to set a palm tree on fire. It is easy to set a human on fire; all you need is a wick. Clothing, for
instance, or hair. There is a movie in which a palm tree burns continuously for about ten minutes
until it is consumed, like a wick, just like a wick. The filmmakers could not possibly have started
that fire by crashing a car into the palm tree.
Those palm trees that line the streets and highways are tall and straight and planted in
parallel, mostly, like the World Trade Center. In the high desert someone has created a sort of
artwork by teasing palm trees into rare and curious shapes, outlining bent toruses and elipses along
the road like living Serra sculptures. Whether the trees were grown and tended and coaxed into
taking such strange shapes in the manner of bonsai trees or whether chainsaws were once at work is
impossible to tell at ninety miles an hour. The desert shoots by very slowly, changeless and serene
and darkening. Dusk arrives so subtly night is a distinction, not a difference.
At night the World Trade Center used to be illuminated, windows in rows and rows of
parallel lines. The actual black buildings themselves disappeared and their mottled insides glowed,
so that they appeared to hover in midair, delicately suspended in the dark.
105
“All my days are farewells.”
—Chateaubriand, Memoirs d’Outre Tombe
106
from REMAINS (Work 001, 1996-2001)
Pride
Threaded through her mind’s eye,
a travail of phosphorescent hearts.
Snow White as the briar she lies
in the glass box of her component parts.
A lily-white invitational to comprise
every ditch between a sigh.
Lamentation
I saw through a glass darkly disfigured desire,
the spherical ember of Dido’s spent fire;
this burnt aureole of our celestial mother
is third son elliptic spun round one another.
107
from DEAD MUSEUMS (Work 022, 2003)
Ash
1
a small wooden box.
sky reliquary.
the long horizon line. littered with gold.
trackless animals. limp across the arroyo.
a clotted moon.
cellophane night. meteor crinkled.
2
broken bottles. empty cans. long lands.
where landscapes. breach the skies. or silos.
roadsides. cleave houses. where the porches are. are sprinklers. and summers.
broken bottles. on their lawns. shatter sunlight.
3
the planetarium’s roof. blew off in the war.
now the zoo. cages strewn with stars.
108
Gravestones
1
In pastures past her earthen grave
some branches lay too burnt to save,
but lest we marble tombs forget
some broken stone sharp fell to whet,
which gathered in her ribcage lay
marked passage long her earthly way.
As if the sea hardened into stone:
rough breakers passing unnamed, and alone.
2
Three evergreens press the skies with greying palms,
dissected by nightfall, they offer these alms:
A tincture of moonlight encrusted with stars,
pine needles aflicker, the chaste and the chars
are illumined by mouthsuns, brittle and burst,
nebulas flare over the righteous and cursed;
everything in equal light: spare, bare and bright.
But then when the dawn comes again (as it must)
everything is revealed as it is: just dust.
109
Fire
Crumple.
Oranges
seek edges.
110
October
A barbershop
abuts the road.
Buildings low
against the flattened sky.
There is grey
in the shops, and the buildings,
and the concrete.
Cracks have broken the sidewalk,
and suckle soft shoots, and scree.
Everything crunches.
Bare streets alight with stones.
Pebbles chatter, scatter winds.
Brief breezes, really.
In that slight, rapturous cold,
teeth bite each other,
flee the warmer tongue.
Long fingers leave the earth
where the garden is,
to change the brightening air.
Across the purple evening,
some stars sting the vast round sky,
and hang transfixed.
Then, softer than before,
are replaced as the planisphere revolves.
Autumn nights do not lengthen.
There is no winter, or summer.
I am the fading, always.
I am the wilting bloom,
the last chrysanthemum.
I am the darkness breath,
faint as all the visible.
111
Saturn
for W.G. Sebald
1
In my jar of autumn leaves
a leaf lay long suppressed,
an herbal couched in crouching smash
and shattered loneliness;
it curled in stride at agon’s door
and shivered now in jest,
for though it creeped upon a bough
it withered now as waves will crest,
as if to sigh one backwards gleam
and come at last to rest.
2
Who knows the fate of his bones?—I do:
they will be burnt by supernova slew
and deposited in an ashen space:
we go backwards and forwards, and there is no place.
How often shall they be buried?—I know:
what is not crushed or singed will go
into a vault or earthen womb,
to be forgotten where, or whom.
112
3
I am the cedars crushed to silk,
the drapes that cluster and drool like milk,
the rotting mirrors hung with gauze,
the manor where you briefly pause
to describe the garden huddled there,
a labyrinth of sky its weight to bear.
The pillars streaked with ruin and mist.
The luminous temple’s stony fist.
113
Moths
Forgetful moths
burn their tongues
on yesterday’s small death
114
Hieroglyphs
1
When I was young
I made the trip
to the corner grocery
with a girl my age.
Her eyes were the color of stone
and as round
and flat.
Like pebbles
on a long empty beach.
I have not forgotten her.
She was my sucking stone
my bezoar
my ballast
my gizzard stones
left in pyramids
for paleontologists.
2
When I was young
I scratched my name in the sand at the beach
with a stick.
Who has not done this?
Even before names
and persons
there were sticks
and sand
and beaches.
115
Rape
Her mouth approaches the bright eye of pleasure,
but her eyes are closed, and her fingernails are ragged,
and her porpoise-breath blurs the space between their faces.
On the night-table the light-bulb a button of brightness
sewn into the deepening night
sees the vain thrust, the stars about his eyelids, their cantilevered vertebrae.
Fingertips long and languid, attached by gnarls to their knees, flex, fleshbound.
Her body twists like a kite in a stiff wind.
His breath a hot comet on her lips.
116
Urns
1
edges dissolve the dusk
2
I am the urn. I am the canopic jar. I am the tongue’s rough coin.
3
Vessels lie empty in corners, in soil.
The wells of dirt flow unimpeded underground.
117
Daze
1
The day
pops.
Hot wicked ripe plums
swollen with rain
empurple the garden,
where the oaks are.
2
Nipplebright cherries
aloft
alight on
her body:
tremulous, dazed.
3
Bright blue days
an electric lightbulb
swollen with naked night.
A june bug.
118
4
Perforated damp
stamps
on the desk in the study.
Musty cool air
the color of apricots
and a lampshade
swimming in darkness.
119
from UNTITLED (MOTIONLESS JUNGLES) (Work 027, 2003)
Asyla
1. Richard Dadd
Lines are swirling swirling swirling from the background to the sky, we can see them flowing by
trembling burning up the air which streaks from place to place but has no space in clouds or
thought which haunt the spot where little fairies lay. Through the glens and ferns and flood the
wingèd stroke and quick crosshatch which flowing back from glass to glass lends comfort to the
property. No benches made of incurved root so painted down from top to toe, stroked neatly in
the fire-spot where little ashes go. When through with blaming paces for the streaks that crack the
bottom half, the painting on display in stairway deep beneath the window stark opens on mahogany
wood so deep and dank and dark. Meanwhile, in smallest glen, beneath the bones of tiny trees,
enormous boughs, the mouths of fairies drink the sap of stricken, bleeding stones upon which sit
Titania and Oberon on rounded jewelèd thrones.
120
2. Adolf Wölfli
Bodiless birds arch Brancusi space and totter in uncertain pace from one long swirl to longer cuts
which rut the paper flat with ruts made by errant pen in celestial stroke, the curling numbers of
musurgical ark. A pear has seen the witches’ lake, and stepped into the bramble-wood where
numbers danced through paper megaphones and stolen cash from imaginary homes, calculating
space-travel costs with lists made from wooden frosts that were the corners of a door; set deep into
the mantled floor some frescoed cabinets upon which stay the splay and spray of yet more wings.
Enameled things, absconded things, the houses in the corners from which stretch the eights of
infinity lost, and masks’ gain. Yet amidst these prayers the solid man, so short and tight in waist-lit
trousers bulky wrapped in burlap threads, he glares from walrus face to spread the mischief
fragment of salutary years spent reaching for another pencil, another mark, he pushes away the
crease and the thought of another time which will pass till his death; unremarked, unslit, the tapers
of imaginary dress. In balloons he rides from parliament place, and herds of birds make homage to
no trace which survives of carousel-colored pencil-unblurred lines, carried across the garden on
tiny, tiny tines. A line becomes a waterfall, a door becomes a tooth, and in the distance painted
words are clouds upon their roof.
121
3. Dr. William Minor
Word by word the truncheon spoke, put into the wheeled spoke each repetition of a meaning
known but never hence prepared for folk to know. He knew; others too knew but such a small fair
that subscribers had to be found to support the rounded paginations now we glare at with a glass,
and see diegetic, anodyne, ellipsis espouse. Now, his apartment was rather large, and overlooked
no ash tree, but in the meantime he had circled his sickle gaze upon the trunk that grew between
his legs. Luckily the surgeon know what would spout, as it has been determined by some that the
Loch Ness Monster is no more than a great species of fish, sturgeon swimming up from unusual
riparian climes, which would suggest most heartily that he thought his fish a monster to be split, as
trunks are severed bit by bit with chainsaws, or lacking that, a knife. Likewise minor scales had
called up from unspoken lakes to stream a thought that while we gasp at what we know’s not there,
while the surgeon saw hoaxes in his lens, we, we saw what we wanted to see: ripples of darker
thought, huge frightening anatomy.
122
Helle Nacht
Brooklyn bronchial night. Bridge’s bride. Brick red through the window, dark blue sky perfectly
blue, but dark. A silver ’47 coupe, fattened by ancient attentions. The lone guard in his lit kiosk
underneath the superstructure, trains blinking in the nightlight rattling the ceiling. Pale colors turn
darker during the day. A magical toy, the moon over Williamsburg. It’s easy to imagine streetcars
through the ruts in the cobblestone roads. It’s easy to stuff so many people into a car, blow past
stop-signs so early, though not yet dawn. Her birthday party breathes, the sting of cigarette smoke
swirling away. Whirling. The shapes it makes in the caught light from above. Incurling, organic
chemistry. Everybody writhing, jerking, sweating. Inscrutable metal things hang on bare walls.
Pretty girls, not so pretty girls. None of them interested in me. But who cares? Look at the night.
Such a bright night.
123
Journey’s End
Stellar by starlight. Belles by barlight. Each ice cube an iceberg shard. Each woman, breasts buoyant
in no bras, sea cows for sailors. When he stirs he thinks of the skies when they dug the grave for
their captain, and the antler mounds like spoons or spars emerging erumpent from the snow. He
thinks of whales beneath the hull when his barstool jostles, of shrieking birds in laughter. At home
waits his wife and his notebooks. Already he has begun to forget one, or another.
124
Question
Where will my bones be when my bones are gone? For they will not live on and on. True, flesh
shirks the shape quick, bacteria spilling slick over sickly soul-yearning lawn, and bones be
remaindered to the dirtiest lumber room—but these too will be spun on celestial loom until
nothing is left but the tomb and space in the room. No, no remnants will be my trace, only my face
in the mirror convinces me that once I was and once shall be: and the only true vestige of me, is
me. But I cannot reconcile myself to no fate. I cannot relate to that most forlorn state where the
nothingness creeps and no shroud is my home; I’d rather be corpsed in a mausoleum stark than my
molecules dispersed into space and the dark. Even the energy that sustains all my worldly affairs
will leak slowly, irrevocably into entropic airs, and all things shall stop, and earths cease to spin—
this the sad essence of man: though he can’t win, he cannot give in.
125
Winter
The trees are turning white. Not with snow. The birches know
which way the winter goes…
126
from HERMETICA (Work 030, 2003)
The Great Dome of Heaven
The creation of heaven and earth
is circles.
No one knows
which way the hand points,
or where the fingers are.
Trees
peel,
and bleed.
Nested inside themselves,
pricked by bone
and blur,
saints with sticks, and roads.
Purple hills rise in the background
surmounted by churches
or buildings,
flat and far and flat with paint
laid on with eggs.
Swollen with color, and stunned sky.
127
Forbidden pigments,
tincture laid bare by bones
rounded with ribs and sudden.
Out of the earth springs round.
He walks on water.
He forgets the world is flat, and laid with air.
This was the first mistake.
We saw our Eden that it was good, but had to know the garden.
How can we know what is good
if faith cannot serve what is evil?
128
On the Loneliness of Sympathy
We long for things we cannot have much more than those we can, of course,
And longing breeds contempt for that which lies beyond our reach:
Which is why marriage often ends custodian of hard divorce—
A lesson hard to learn indeed, but harder still to teach.
For no-one truly knows a thing until they’ve felt its noisome sting,
And even if you’ve seen it with your very own two eyes—
Can you be sure your phone will sing until you hear its lonesome ring?
And how can you be certain that you’ve not been hearing lies?
The eye, you see (a pun—how droll), is nothing but a poet’s tool
To make it seem as if the world comes easily to hand;
But worlds are made of nothing more than thoughts belonging to a fool:
(I speak of solipsism and to you alone remand
The custody of faults which, chastened, clutter up cerebral vaults
And leak into the common urn when most uncalled upon
To stain the course of our discourse and make of talk a limping waltz,
Each awkward silence we must cross a verbal Rubicon).
My point is simply made: In short, the last resort is sympathy
For those who live vicariously—in crowds alone they linger.
Those people who would rather see TV instead of poetry,
The sort of people who would give their hand to save a finger.
129
Underwater
It’s the day after yesterday,
The stars are in their rows.
Icebergs die of cold.
The hand knows; the mouth knows.
130
Drought
Not a bird,
not a sound.
Beach the horizon
on whales. Breath
unfocused by cold:
not yet. Autumn still
drying, planting tin
seeds, thin metal roots.
Selfseed,
valleys blossom out
rut cardboard
smooth ripples.
—Know water;
know its lack—
keep faith,
will flower.
The destination
on hold—
for next month
Elms begin again.
131
Exfoliate breath
with rustle,
the eczema
of sleep.
Leaves in her mouth.
shelter air.
Leaves in her mouth.
no aftertaste.
Roots desire;
giants rise
from hillsides
swept by wings
—not a flight—
In the basin,
shades drawn
over hills
devolve the sun,
dissolve the mother.
What once was stone
are not one,
but neither are they other.
132
Coda: The telescope
knows not of the microscope,
the moon knows
not of the sun—
Not a word,
not a sound begun.
Late respiration
calms the seas
and air
made hard by looking.
Long
the eyesilence of drouth:
the sound is in the mouth.
133
Fingertips
chase the hand.
In the steppes,
dreaming particles stir,
and the hand
beneath the fluttering face.
She reaches across you
to the sheet-dune.
The belly-weather is creased,
tectonic and rippling,
her eyes gloved by lids
as the trellis is gloved by roses.
Fingertips climb
the trellises of night;
wisteria blossoms on the windowsill
reminding you the stars are close,
and contain the resting, beating heart.
134
Brooklyn
for Arlene
Night has made everything more beautiful but you.
The bricks so red they bleed,
the sky so blue it bruises,
the bridge so long it breathes.
Night has made everything more beautiful but you.
135
Akeley’s Wildlife Preserves
Fever-dream of seasons I deny you.
Heat comes off of the trees,
the grass like water.
Still no motion in the sky
where the omnipotent clouds hesitate,
trembling mountaintops
covered in the fever-hair of rainforest
like the explorer’s shed body,
abandoned forever to the animals.
Step up, mistress,
I know what you want.
The cloud cover can’t arrive soon enough.
136
Jar
I am elated
by jars,
and edges.
Not what is in them,
but the strength of emptiness;
what is within and what can be seen
and grasped,
untouched.
The whole round world
is glass
and mouth,
eyesized.
What is most unseen
is closest.
I am elated
by jarring images,
that which startles bone
to breath,
speaks of enclosure
in whispers,
imprisoned in the invisible.
Walk, walk with me
through the great round space:
above,
hole stars.
137
Midwestern Images
1
My life wastes by.
Long trains along rotten tracks
brush grey leaves and speak.
2
Dark voices under a bridge.
Antelope water
leaps beside elongate roots
half in and out of the river.
3
Underneath the porch where the birds go to die.
Wings beat fitfully in the shadowed places.
4
Tilt your face against the sun:
Gravestones have shadows but mirrors have none.
138
Living Fossils
Outstretched fingers.
The bones beneath.
Living fossils.
139
The Coelacanth
The coelacanth is lonely,
its friends are in their graves.
Perhaps this is the reason
it lives upside-down in caves.
140
Aphorisms
1
If love is blind, and blindness sight’s aversion,
then God is love, and sight God’s conversion.
2
Our bodies consist of cells, skin, and bone,
but what we think is a mortgage is really a loan.
3
For the Christians, a lion made you a martyr;
for the lions, a Christian made you steak tartar.
141
Reclamation
I’ve seen the rusty battlements,
I’ve seen the rolling graves.
Beneath the grass and sediments
We make of earth our slaves.
Molecules are reimbursed
For service they have spent;
Each Neanderthal was cursed
By this stone’s sentiment.
We eat the bones of dinosaurs,
We drink the virgin’s blood;
The men that fell in ancient wars
Our veins’ deluge and flood.
Each thing we build with our own hands
Bears skeleton ancestral;
Each thing our greedy mouth demands
Was probably once menstrual.
A reminder born not of disgust
But some macabre bent;
Though we shall all end up as dust
And may be heaven-sent,
Evolution’s harsh decree
Revives its ladder’s rungs:
Some petrified anatomy
Breathes air into your lungs.
142
Palms
1
Trees grow from night’s ribcage,
unshaping the night.
Grow into shadow:
night’s slinking backbone.
2
Canyons:
petrified echoes.
3
Palms locust shaped poles
swarm past highways,
strung up blinking.
Electrical skylines
regurgitate the crucified star.
143
House and Land
1
meadows alight with sparrows—without seeing them—
you know—they are there—
2
night—punctuation—
to the grammar—of days —
3
we die—a thousand deaths—
the flower—barely begins—
4
the moon has risen—the day has gone—
the house has given—sleep its lawn—
5
yawn and turn like breath—sleep is not like death—
build houses but not land—build each day with your own hand—
144
Horizon
The world is hard and insincere.
Have no fear:
Clouds gather on the eastern horizon.
Those skies did not exist before the crow
passed by that open window:
The world no longer has my attention.
Virgin’s milk flows from the grave.
Christ did not his body save:
And we are weaker than the son.
What we have lost was never ours.
Beware the winter hours:
There is dark before the rising of the sun.
145
Bodies in Flight
1
Van Gogh:
the Morse code
of desire
2
My
indecent
mouth
3
Rain
smells
like rains past
4
Caress the sins
of solitude
they’re the most sincere
146
Bodies in Flight
1
Fevers
dream
of summer
2
Winter
dreams
of itself
3
The heart in winter
beats
more slowly
147
Sun, Mouthful
Sun, Mouthful, burns.
Spit rises like grass
From an ashen field.
Fires speak themselves out.
148
Odalisque
Phantoms so slender they cannot be seen.
She turns and her flat belly swoons me.
Her fingers are small, perfected by nails.
Her nose aquiline, better for having been broken.
Poets would long to kiss them both.
I am no poet.
I long to kiss them both, but not for poetry...
149
The Elysian Fields
Shred Elysium,
autumn shrivels every leaf, like slugs.
Laid upon the prurient earth,
homesteads of disaster already woven into stone.
The leaf knows desire because it rots.
Alphabets swoon and cover themselves with branches.
The northern wastes stretch the length of an eye.
150
Secret Cartographies
Enraptured by the deep
psalms and scree.
Wounds open inside arteries.
Bleed and do not notice.
Sharp spires have enhanced the dawn
where towers rise and fall.
Crenellations disturb the perpendicular.
Automata whir and disappear.
151
Desertongue
Coroner of bliss,
alight.
In the psalms,
great pillars
erupt from your face,
the desert.
Palms outstretched
to stroke the sun.
Fuck mouths,
splay.
Kneel.
152
In the Garden of Eden, Baby
Africa, my eye.
No one has been there.
Giraffes a fiction.
Savannas too.
All safaris are inward:
Serengeti scorches my desire,
Sahara mounds my breath;
Adam and Eve have been there,
and Abel, and Cain, and Seth.
How you took her head in your hands.
How you mounted her in her sleep.
153
Bunker Archaeology
Fortune has bit
the tongue from heaven’s mouth.
Ever-blackened roots
swallow,
suck horns embittered by sleep.
Forget faith,
and the razings of sin.
Eyeblessings ablaze,
rimfires
extinguish the afterglow.
Where windowsills ache
with daylight’s
cold castles.
We break what comes up
in the fields we have not planted.
No-one yet.
Sharpens the day on me.
154
Hush of Noon
Twin summers stray, buried. Hatchets and spades dull with
earth.
Scars appear on stiff metal. Rolling on and on. Haystacks glow and are overturned,
buried.
Eaves filled with rain. Hush of noon. Curled up into a ball, the boll-weevils imagine themselves
enormous.
Bliss is never enough. There must be its description, and sound. Against the barn lean
great mechanical wings.
155
First Chill
Cool crescents.
Metal implements in the shade.
Hard-packed earth slumps in rotten bags.
Across the clearing,
leaves are falling.
156
from ABANDONED SONGS (Work 037, 2004-2007)
Scintillant
In the winter-time
when frost is at its height
mountains bloom
scurry away on the sun.
Satellites
blur the spaces
between stars.
157
Harry Crosby
Parmenides drowning on the obverse of a golden coin. Sucks the tongue’s cold coin.
Smothered the sun: it was a round skull inside.
Ashes in a goblet.
The river was his bride.
158
Upon A Grave
1
We speak and do not put the lie
To places in the earth and sky
Which, broken, to the past resume
In memories that quick exhume
What’s hidden in the murky peat
All twisted in a graven seat
Where bodies lie and skin portends
The loosing of all earthly ends.
2
Beneath the widow’s bark and bower
A lonely and unclothèd tower
Reaches to her windowsill;
Inside its wooded gnarl and rill
No xylophone of chlorophyll
Stands in wait, just cloven pine
A stripped, denuded palatine
Of lust and fervor lost to sound
By birth into a queen uncrowned.
3
If there were but one minute more
We would not scream and pound the door
But enter of our own decree,
In gentle faith and mimicry
Of what our hands have always sought;
But never knowing when our lot
Shall slit the earthen door a crack,
We turn and fall in on our back.
159
from THE ARCHITECTURE OF ARRIVAL (Work 044, 2004)
Beginning
1
We are all beginning,
beginning to go to war.
Victims of the cold restraint
suffering, the lack of it,
fingers within us.
Suffering is necessary because violence is insufficient.
We live without living, die without death.
The world no longer knows which way it turns
because we no longer spin it,
balancing on our finger like an eye.
It is no longer enough to be only alive.
There are things beyond us:
not God, necessarily,
not clocks,
not dirt,
not stone,
nor the eye. All lie.
We have moved past those things.
Monoliths of words lie on pages in the past:
we may repudiate them, we were young then—
to no avail.
160
Words are not made of memory,
as the eye is not made of sight.
Everything is at war,
everything drifts into evil:
we cannot believe this.
The earth’s better than that.
Just because we shall all lie beneath it
does not mean that’s what it is for.
There are better things than we know
drowned in every stone,
buried in an ash.
There are no things we cannot know,
but we cannot know them all.
2
Poetry does not need to be defended:
it needs to be disguised.
Forgive the young poets
not because they are young
or because they are poets
but because they suffer.
Forgive them because they are human.
Forgive them because they will one day be dead.
And if this is not ecstasy,
and if this is not pain,
then we do not yet know if we are alive.
161
True, pain reminds us that we are still alive,
but it also reminds us that we are in pain.
There is nothing to be gained from suffering—
or, there should be nothing gained by suffering—
but truth,
and truth is not worth this.
Better there had been no Celan, no Cioran.
We cannot believe that. Why not?
There must be poetry after Auschwitz
because if there is no poetry there is no Auschwitz.
162
Palimpsest
Every work of art is necessarily a palimpsest;
every art destroys its ground.
What we make, we destroy.
Time is a perforation
invisible already in the work,
as erosion and stone
are one and the same.
Stones, rise up and walk.
Speak. Speak your mouth.
163
Autumn
1
Gardens grow near watertowers
green against grey.
Together, and apart.
Near the churches are roads.
2
Long white fences and
long white fences
shuttered against the breeze.
In the grass, long fingers wave
as if they were the wind.
They are not the wind.
What is attendant upon it,
what knows its name
slippers the words in a hushed mouth.
3
Ground,
and trees,
a smoldering fire.
Autumn trails its fingertips down my arm.
I can feel the long bone underneath.
164
4
Trees flee fire
and the sky full of rain.
Nothing burning. Nothing wet.
At least, not yet.
Arrival is an illusion.
165
from A SUMMONING OF SEA-CREATURES (Work 050, 2005)
Hearthread
1
Left dark,
and thrown.
The candle-mouth spreads
metal, tinfoil teeth
retract solace.
You cannot care
for you,
you neither into or from
the between-board space.
2
Places bend to will,
branches stand-cling in furnaces,
digging for ash.
Spend me, she says,
element in shadow
where thrust-up embers strike.
Veins stick the arm.
Walks through the urnfield
arterial, venal.
166
3
Let me scab the cycle,
bring the up into sea.
Cannot know,
cannot find,
but for
gotten.
4
Empties puncture the hearthread,
burning itself into beats.
Pulsing, fire climbs the flue
into the fevered, viral sinus.
5
Bed encrusted,
the license-flight wearies.
Her whitish face
lips the swimming pool
emptied of time.
Saturn turns unheard.
Cheap telescopes
red the imperiling stars.
The hole heart empties.
167
6
Blink, bleed,
what’s the difference.
A cylindrical aptitude extends
leaf into chatter.
7
Brimming eye.
Elegance, emergent,
strips the pool.
And a thousand things
rise out of oil,
shimmering.
Overflowing glance.
Rips tide: the arm,
the tabulating elbow.
Skies bend, towers bend, sand clenches and strips.
Leap
led
downward.
Hairs part
and echo.
Reaches and fails, shimmering.
168
As the eyebrow contains
the dampening
upward-clenching
eye-branch.
8
Spent skyward, the wreath encircles thorns.
Can’t tell,
can’t speak,
neverending birds.
Spent shrieks
cancel each other out.
9
In the valley strung with electrical wires
reddish balloons blare out round
on spindles for airplanes.
Threading breath, turning suns
away.
Flying too low again, the gall.
Blackbirds scatter over empty freeway.
10
Imtalent thrown north
the shape of moss
on a roundstone.
169
Twill and acre respond,
blinding the mayaction.
Pressed between glass,
the never-ware.
11
Threadbare, weak,
darning. The needle
speaks and punctures
the almost-wound,
the temporary heart.
12
Sprinklershards spark the asphalt,
layering mica over mica.
Leapt into armlengths, wavelengths.
Walls planted, sprout arms.
Weeds spy on empty lots.
13
Homes,
unopposed.
Heavy air
rolls up summer,
furnaces jet waver.
170
14
Rotless, beaten, pooling spaces beneath leafire
burn and burn.
Fire, rootless, explains.
The hanging eyeball
translucent, red:
corolla.
15
Emperils, empearls.
Diamonds are made in flesh.
World’s oyster snaps shut into sand.
16
Sunset is coming.
You do not need to explain the dark.
171
Strange Wastelands
1
Strange wastelands
black with sea-creatures
climb out of black ice.
Windmills creep over pack-ice,
throttling the falling moon.
An absence claims itself.
2
Justice, in its temerity,
slides down windows
as the glass does.
Thicker at the bottom
like the night.
Stairs climb themselves.
3
Escalators star and draw
nearness out of echo.
A bursting night
Claims fortune is missing.
But fortune is not missing.
She has opened up her hands into him.
172
4
Emily found fingers in the open palm.
Palm trees burn open.
Alight on a baked desert.
His bald head itches with stubble.
Scraping fingernails bite the face.
Climb up into the ear-horizon.
5
This thumb
blasted and incoherent
presses on a vivid pulse.
Upon the pallid table,
a floral tablecloth.
Ornamental and frayed.
6
Over the rapids
he strings a cobwebbed bridge.
Stuck with black steel thorns.
Incredibly, no one has thought to name
the arch.
Stainless steel swarming the sky.
7
173
Timid, or forewarned.
Tiny insects flee from rain.
Great puddles destroy homes.
Sliding off hills,
the unconcerned weight of earth.
Unconsoled, cars wait in lightless garages.
8
Giddy, she mounts those fingers.
Insides the color of wine
are not wine.
Slick engines muffled by blankets.
Sea-creatures emerge from dark holes.
You cannot escape.
174
North Dakota
Fills with dark ice.
It is difficult to see
what the eye covers up.
Wait for it.
Giraffe moon
caught on low telephone wires.
Into the shadows
a silo is tip-toeing.
There are gods in the earth.
Waiting for a sign to reappear.
Hay bales roll on and on
in one direction.
Grilles to the wind,
old Cadillacs
shed paint and grow.
Bulbous fins.
An air
sputters, and stops.
You can never really know
what direction
train tracks go.
175
Handseam
1
Backward-wind draws my path, uncertain.
A turn to what we have become
returns,
hollow.
Emptier even than the string
drawn out between two parting hands.
2
An inability,
a righteousness⎯
sea-birds circle over the slow-rolling whale carcass.
Clench tendons:
you will feel them pulled,
as if by inanimate force.
The word of will is not the breath of God,
nor conscience:
only telephone wires,
only electricity.
Who is on the other line?
3
Unlike globes,
reaching their terrible round into the eye-black spaces
ringing with what I have become.
176
Night cramps with chimneys,
sweeps emerge from soot.
On their tongues
gold coins mark no passage
into anything but down.
Pillows fight the headboard.
Sheets arrange themselves into the emptying body.
Evening brings down the shades
not like eyelids,
not like death.
Moons sing lullabies to their loosening planets.
177
from CINNABAR (Work 061, 2006-2007)
Swim
1
Deep sound
of desire.
Think how radiant it is,
the storm drain
after a storm.
2
Soundless
and vibrant
the beach
undresses waves.
The encircled ankle
leaks foam:
porous,
whitewashed,
abandoned.
Sand wrestles a crab out of its tracks.
178
3
There are no homes here,
at the edge.
Under the palm trees
stripped by that lathe, air,
bodies start and stop.
What are they making,
those turtles dug into the beach,
laying round white eggs
like suns in the sand?
179
Burn
1
Wanton wasteland of stricken pine
needles, deciduous, undecided.
Sticks, spires, a pointing jumble
toward the vast distance of aeroplanes.
Guidelines sway and respire
in towering wind.
Beneath,
mantle’s swimming cradle of flame
sings land’s lullaby.
2
Cable cars dangle,
roofs shingle. Everything,
even words,
precipitously.
Especially words,
unbuckling themselves flickering from the tongue
where spit is no longer enough
to put them out.
180
Step
Stone builds and unburdens itself,
a great weight lifted from those great shoulders,
dunes.
181
Burn
Moses in the bushes
couldn’t feel himself burning.
All that water, and the vast tongues of hippopotami.
The feverish bush, the sunken rushes, the stone he struck with his own two hands.
A cliff, a sight blows him out.
182
Walls
Stand up straight.
Lie down.
Not the wind,
but concrete’s compulsion,
the terrible spaces
we walked on air.
183
Hannah
The chair where she sat
the chair where she sat
beige
blue
and her hair
long
short
in which she fit so perfectly
there was room for no one else
especially me.
184
Untitled
Your tongue
tiny haiku
in my mouth.
185
Bone
1
Do they rattle around inside,
the dark?
Is the night so vociferous
it shakes the seas
and dark creatures fall out?
They float there, teeth upward
pointed toward what falls.
2
The bones are smooth
and nerves above them like a knife.
One knife crossing one knife.
There is only one knife.
3
She fit into her bones
like a comfortable suit.
Everything inside her skeleton:
her brain, her heart there already, waiting.
She got a job as a fashion model
and still wasn’t thin enough
so she broke herself over a train-track
and under a train
and rose up at both ends like a penny
into the shape of a manta-ray.
186
Shelter
1
Streetlights ravel darkness around themselves,
darker than darkness
when they flicker out.
Along the road and the gas stations
trees stand and swoop at cars
where they pass,
fingernails scraping paths across metal,
words on rooftops no one can read anything in;
lines scoured in now deeply,
now shallow, as the river does alongside.
You can barely hear it through the trees and the road and the gas stations
and the streetlights
raveling darkness around themselves
darker than darkness as they flicker out.
2
In attics where old chairs molder,
gently ghost-rocked to sleep
by rain’s sombrous lullaby,
her arms, fat as stoves, reach.
Her fingers plump smoke.
187
Sleep
Eyelashes flicker
like fire.
The pupil
a stone
dropped into the eye’s pool.
Those ripples are your eyelashes.
And the closing eyelid
sleep’s mortar and pestle.
188
Sleep
The death-word is a thousand syllables
and never ends. The dead speak
but cannot stutter past the first syllable.
Every word is a poem,
and every poem as many poems as contain it.
What translates them is impossible.
What’s impossible is all this.
189
from CAPTIONS (Work 085, 2007)
Heaven
Heaven
inoculates itself
against what
is already
Roads
Who can blame
lines
for
stuttering
The Dove
The
white dove
in its palace
of shit
steps over
guano glaciers
into
snow
190
from THE COMPASS, THE CLOCK (Work 096, 2007-2009)
The Compass, The Clock
ARPEGGIO
stars in a swimming pool
AT THE CONFERENCE OF THE BIRDS
a murder of crows
AT THE REGATTA
lovely scalene triangles
THE BOATS’ BRIGHT FLAGS
whispered to colorful shreds
DRIVING HOME
I remember the beautiful wooden table
EMILIA’S TONGUE, LIKE A GIRAFFE
delicately touches the tip of her nose
FINGERS RAKED TO THE BONE
trestles fall into knuckles’ whirlwind
GENERATIONS
they could not forgive us what they forgave
THE GREAT LAKES
hung with lampreys
191
HEAVY ROCKS
sink into the soil
VEINS
sink into my hand
HER FINGER ON HIS LIPS
slippers the words in a hushed mouth
I WILL GIVE UP THIS HOUSE
I will give up this place
I WILL GIVE UP THIS HEART
everything will be gone and you
IT’S THE SAME PICTURE OF SOME PERSON WALKING OUT OF SOME BUILDING WITH A VASE
and you think, my goodness, were there that many vases?
LONG GRASS
swims wind’s tide
LOVE SONG
if I’m an oyster, you’re my pearl
MATTHEA’S LONG SILVER EYELASHES
“like taking a snapshot every time I blink”
MOLES
stars underground
192
MY EYES WANT TO CLOSE
trapping sleep inside them
NIGHT SKY
desert’s brilliant colander
THE RADIATOR KNOCKS
heat wants to get out
ACCORDING TO SCIENCE NEWS
roundworms need protons to poop
THE SEA
pierced by islands and tides like needles and thread
THE SEA
breaking against islands, imagines itself climbing mountains
SETH IS SICK AGAIN
his throat, afraid of his voice
SUMMER
the picnic table crosses its legs
A SYSTEM OF CRABS
speaks against the beach
THE TABLE
spreads its legs like a whore
193
A TEACUP
contains the land of the dead
THERE IS A CERTAIN MADNESS
in the opening of a window
THE TRAIN
lays tracks before it as it travels
194
Imitation after Du Fu
Man red in tooth and claw
batters strange customs.
Ten years in these
skyscraper gorges
emptied out like
a lamp sucked by moths.
I live crushed between walls;
concrete’s etched valleys
wandering sidewalks
picked apart by weeds
scratched at by dogs
laying shit like fruit at their feet.
195
Elegy
In Africa, men are buried in the desert beneath round clay pots;
how cautious Death must be as it steps among them.
There is power in the body, and immensity.
We press ourselves into the ground like old gods,
like words,
seeds broken up for bread.
If only there were some human place we might remain.
But our hearts exceed us, and our crocodile bodies creep up onto the bank,
gazing with furrowed eyes into the land
where, measured more gently,
the work of human hands finds no greater repose.
196
In The Imperial Valley
Railroads’ dendrites
Creep open.
In the fields,
Shouting. It could be daylight
Or it could be the migrants’
Refrigerator-hum stoop.
Mountain climbing,
Sunspots rage and retire
Amidst trees’ telescopes.
Where purple horizons leak lead
And the soaked ground
Chews soil into rocks
Melons emerge like eyes.
Each grasping hand blinks.
Eyes open greenish.
The searing sun
Detonates birds
Into song.
197
The Passeistes
Canto I
In a garden thick with ribbony smoke
A child walked and then awoke.
He’d planted kaleidoscopes in the ground
And waited a night until he found
A morning bright with thrashing yellow
That was not sun and was not mellow.
“Robert!” his parents shouted from above
And when he looked up toward parental love
They saw his eyes were moving,
Stingers emerging and soothing
His mouth as it opened and closed:
A slowly unfolding, black-striped rose.
Canto II
What flowers there were (they were not flowers)
Rose out of the soil a system of towers
Encrusted with a jittering paste
That flew and entirely went to waste.
No honey was produced that day;
Only parents and children in dismay.
His parents filled the greenhouse with smoke
And pushed through visions until they awoke
To find their son Robert naked and rung
Red like a bell where he’d been stung.
Welts rose from under his skin like bells
And rung each one a thousand funeral knells
198
As Dad told 911 “He fails! He fails!”
In the end of course there were only some scales;
Churches can hold many bees, but just a few bells.
Canto III
As Robert’s soul ascended into heaven,
His body fell like the untimely leaven
Left by Jews in the desert to collapse;
If his body was the nave, his soul was the apse.
He passed a stable of unruly clouds
That wreathed him wet and sticky shrouds;
He passed through into stars like ticks
To the city of heavenly mathematicks.
Suns swarming around him a hydrogen blur
He counted until the end of number.
Only then did the galaxy open
And a vast blackness envelop him groping.
Canto IV
It was the mighty and lonely Black Hole.
It had no name, for it had no soul.
So it sucked up Robert’s, and spit him out;
He passed the event horizon without a doubt,
Too young to know it was impossible:
It is certain because it is impossible.
That was how he returned to Earth.
He landed somewhere east of Perth
In waters foggy with tired sharks.
And that is how Robert embarks on
199
Canto V
A wise old shark who’d never slept
Told how he swum in what he’d wept.
He said his name was Clyde and sighs
“I’ve never even closed my eyes.
My nictitating membrane slides up sometimes
Unto a breath of warmer climes
When I into bliss for a moment come;
But that’s only when I’m inhaling chum.
I turn upside and my mouth surfaces:
Am I to blame if I don’t see they’re surfers?
I cannot even count the times
Some meaty morsel has occluded lines,
And I’ve been dragged behind a chartered boat
Like knights pulled by dragons out of a moat
Then carried to a faraway cave
Where some princess awaits a save
As if I were her closing pitcher.
I wait until it’s dark, then ditch her.”
Canto VI
Robert listened to this story,
Even the bits that were overly gory
And the parts that didn’t make sense,
Until the tide brought him to a fence.
This fence was erected underwater
And provided plankton with easy fodder.
It surrounded a perfect manmade lagoon
On which any sailor would be pleased to maroon.
200
There were hotels and motels and Holiday Inns,
And if you hadn’t brought one, you could find a friend.
The operation was simply called “Paradise”,
And rented by bankers at a heaven-high price.
Canto VII
Robert, seeing this pricey abortion,
Decided to throw the sharks a portion:
After all, they hadn’t turned him into a bolus
(He thought they’d smelled his soulless
Self and decided against making Robert stew;
Do unto others as they do unto you.)
When the water turned curtains of flowing red
He pulled them about his shoulders and head
Until he’d made a bloody cape.
With this he transformed himself from soulless ape
To Emperor of Earth,
And set about turning plenty into dearth in
Canto VIII
To be Emperor, first he had to rule a world.
So he got a potter’s wheel and twirled
It into a sort of rounded shape;
This he populated with bald ape
And skinless grass that grew to the knee.
He called it Earth and Earth it shall be.
Then he baked it in a kiln until it hardened.
After that no one would be pardoned
For hardness of mind or hardness of body:
Really, for a world, it was pretty shoddy.
201
Canto IX
Cities rose up from flaking clay
Until he smoothed them all away
And only bands of hunters and gatherers beckoned.
A truly primitive place, he reckoned,
Would be impressed by mere technology.
He read them fascist poetry
Until some rebelled.
These he unblinking quickly felled.
All others fell then at his feet.
He quickly engineered a repeat.
When finally all to him unquestioning bowed
He bade them build at last a crowd.
Gathered thus, they elected a leader.
It was his mother, though they didn’t need her.
Elevated not out of filial devotion fine
But blackhearted lust for the ultimate crime.
When he crushed her down into the clay
They worshipped him on that kiln-baked day:
For all men who wish to lead
Must annihilate what they succeed.
Canto X
Triumphant, he turned what was his in his hands.
All these scarred, man-smoothed lands
Created by him, yet always there,
Like a bald man who has all of his hair:
A toupee. This earth a toupee,
Rocky quaffs floating on a magma quay.
202
He turned the continents beneath his grip,
Careful, lest the tectonic plates slip,
To hold what was where it was and ever shall be:
A man, a city, a country, a sea.
Canto XI
It reminded him of sculpture.
The earth an artwork and him a vulture.
All that culture meant no more to him
Than a quick dip or a bracing swim
As he’d seen the stars and he’d seen planets,
He’d seen the universe and all its tenants
In a childhood long gone into eternity:
He held the soil and he held the sea.
Art it was not, yet as perfect as art.
It then pierced his mind like a well-thrown dart:
He’d seen something like this before.
Huge steel sculptures on a flat white floor.
One work was long and high and curved,
Voluptuously falling until it swerved.
An enormous ribbon of eighty-foot steel:
If Giacometti made scraps, this was the meal.
Next to it stood two huge metal surgeons
Wounding massively gaping torqued torus inversions.
The first was called Sequence: a motion of hands;
But the toruses were nothing like those incurving bands.
Instead they held the space. A mesmerism
Of hands holding: frozen dynamism.
To hold something is essentially a cubist impulse,
Like the maps of that strange ornithologist Tulse.
203
To hold is to shape an object with one’s hands;
Holding wills an object into substance,
What we think once was but may not have been.
The past is therefore volume. Amen.
If a mass is the shape of a mass, being is shape.
So sayeth Robert, the ontological ape.
Canto XII
But there are indeed things that have no being:
They lurk and they lurk, see without seeing.
For example: Hidden deep in the galaxy’s center,
One such thing picks up a star and then dents her.
It is the Black Hole
That stole Robert’s soul.
Since what has no shape cannot easily manage fucking
It could not be. Thus: the soul-sucking.
But once it had his soul,
It still could not register for the heavenly dole
Because what you hold is not necessarily yours:
If you don’t have a key, what use are doors?
Frustrated, the Black Hole decided
To return what was Robert’s and elided
Galaxies until Earth was reached.
Then, of course, all reality breached
And was gobbled up.
The sound it made was a sort of blup
That echoed across space and aeons
And reduced all existence to one long seance.
204
Canto XIII
All could now communicate with all,
The Apocalypse concurrent with the Fall,
Every war fought under the same sun,
Every charge led by Napoleon.
Every politician gave every speech,
Every one sucking every leech;
Every painter sought Leonardo’s opinion,
Every King groveled to by every minion.
Dinosaurs traveled the interstate,
Crushing wills into intestate
As men visited their own graves and visited mistresses,
Who heaped them with flowers and with kisses:
One body another body sensually found;
That same body moldering too underground.
Great-grandfathers gathered huge family trees,
As long-dead bacteria conjured new disease
That fell them again and they watched themselves die.
Lizards took to trees and found they could fly.
Moses spoke to Mani, Jesus with Buddha:
They agreed not to try again, although they should have.
For in a world with Paradise and Hell on the same facing block,
Made out of dust that is also a rock,
There are no consequences, no past and no future,
Time no longer a line, but a suture,
Morality needed now more than ever:
An ethical line Robert determined to sever.
205
Canto XIV
Alternately joining forces with Lincoln and with Hitler,
Is nothing no decent man could admit, sir,
But he did. Taking council from every great man
He made him a multiform Walsingham.
With stealth he could play Alexander off Darius,
Take council from both Julius Caesar and Marius,
Have Shakespeare speak to Francis Bacon:
Well, he could try to get them to talk, but he couldn’t make ‘em.
Out came his cunning, and his claws,
He broke all the laws. Truly it was
A grand and terrible human feast:
Every man a passeiste.
Canto XV
“There is no crime that is not also an affront;
What we steal is not necessarily what we want.”
So said the Black Hole as he began his meal,
Slurping up first the empty and then the real,
Eating himself into being and what he was not
Filled with stuff and nonsense and utter rot.
“It’s not that I want to make a world inside me,”
He continued, “like an army be all I can be,
Nor make of myself a world.
Though that will happen, everything unfurled
Where everything was not and was crushed.
Down the gravid toilet of me all is flushed
And reassembled somehow,
Every man, every woman, every horse, every cow
206
Restored to its real and proper estate
(Just how I did this I will not relate:
Some things are impossible and should not be revealed;
Though only the possible is ever concealed).”
Canto XVI
“Some may ask, why did I move
From that central place from which I soothe
The galaxy, make solar systems rotate?
I will tell you: It’s Robert I hate.
He showed me what I am not, and fate
Reveals what we can’t be, we hate.
An awful state of affairs indeed,
And well-nigh impossible to concede.
Therefore I set about making right
What I was wrong to take a bite
Out of; in short, I propose
That what I did to Robert was something bad, I suppose,
And so it falls to me to untilt the windmill,
To plug up the dam once the land’s drunk its fill.
Undoing what’s done is never half the fun
Of doing it, which is why the Sun
Leaves night in its wake;
Darkness may be called the Sun’s mistake
And sticks be thrown at the sky when it falls
To burst those glowing pimples that litter its walls,
And starlight fall from its place in the skies
Like meteors whose streak enlivens what dies:
Wishes, and stone.
I have always been alone.”
207
Canto XVII
“I wish to take a bride,” concluded the Black Hole,
Who, though he must return his ill-gotten soul
Figured he might milk it a little
So long as he made neither jot nor tittle
Of immoral behavior be his wanton way:
He chose the Sun as his bride and Einstein gave her away.
As her general father, they were in a way related,
It was his special theory that they were fated
To dance together all night rolling round in furrows
Made in space by gravity like naked mole-rats in burrows
Till he stops them thence with his gravity-defying hair.
“You’re traveling at light-speed, so you’ve got time to spare:
You’re already there. You never left
This crazy-quilt of space, its warp and weft
Sagging under your conjoinèd weight:
And what of the terrible spate
Of terrible offspring you might engender?
I gave you away,” Einstein admitted, “on a bender
And did not think through my actions.
There are certain factions
That might not take too kindly to this merger:
The land, for instance, all clothed in verdure
Will be torn asunder
And all living creatures likewise plowed under
As you tear this from that and crush them into a singularity:
If every wedding’s a compromise, where is your parity?”
“You worry too much,” said the Black Hole;
“I’ll reconstitute you both well and whole
Once our combination’s complete.
208
Now stop your effete
Whining and give me and my wife
Some time alone to make new life.”
Canto XVIII
When the Black Hole and the Sun have sex
It’s earth-shaking. Literally. Every ibex
Falls from cliffs to be crushed on the rocks below
Into white stuff that’s everywhere and is not snow.
Were there children? Yes, there was one.
He was yellow in part but had no sun.
From his father he was black as sackcloth
And his mother gave him atomic froth
That lit up his back in rings.
She also gave him nuclear-powered stings.
He did not shine, but stung
And pricked the stars’ bubbles, one by one
With his celestial stinger.
He’d pop one and then fling her
Into streams of atoms threaded through eternity’s sea:
Stars, behold your new pollinator—and be!
209
“Where do we go when we die? he said.
I don’t know, the man said. Where are we now?”
—Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain
210