Beauty Is a Verb

by Jennifer Bartlett

  if there weren’t

  such a land

  as Moscow”

  and you can’t change that line, Mayakovsky said. It would not be the same if you were to write “Berlin” and “Warsaw,” for instance.

  Or Dixie. To live and die in Dixie.

  Roman Jakobson, the genius of structural linguistics, among whose great works are Verbal Art, Verbal Sign, Verbal Time, has written “...the speaker selects words and combines them into sentences according to the syntactic system of the language he is using; sentences in their turn are combined into utterances. But the speaker is by no means a completely free agent in his choice of words: his selection (except for the rare case of actual neology) must be made from the lexical storehouse which he and his addressee possess in common.” This is from his essay, “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances” (Language in Literature, p.97).

  Paris and Moscow, Berlin and Warsaw, both dyads would be available from the lexical storehouse, but, as we know, one expresses Mayakovsky’s idea, the other does not. “The ‘body’ of the poem is created from ‘sounds and meanings’,” (Jakobson) whether it is a translation or not. But it’s all translation anyhow. Crooked translation.

  Speech Production: Themes and Variations

  exhibit

  exhibition

  ribbons

  vandals

  the ribbons of vandals, the vandals

  of ribbon, scissors of ribbon,

  ribbons of scandal

  sculpture of

  ribbons or

  strips

  strippers

  strip clubs

  exhibitions: temporary inhibitions, my semblables: collective guilt: don’t leave your filthy shirt, your own fifty-yard line. What would be the motive in that “kind of temporary performance”? (Christo & Jeanne-Claude)

  quote

  quotation

  quit

  quoting

  quit it

  unscripted

  quoted unscripted

  quote script?

  script quote

  Why do I like it under the trees in autumn when everything is half dead? Why would I like the word moving like a cripple among the leaves and why would I like to repeat the words without meaning?

  physics

  physical

  physicist

  metaphysical physicist (string theorist)

  psychoactive physicists

  psychotic episode

  Sonata: a musical composition in contrasted movements

  constellation

  stardust

  nuclear glow train, Yucca, Nevada

  rotate the exhaust

  on second thought

  Did you make that: the sheep, yarn, afghan? birds, feathers, pillows, bookshelves, (trees, nails etc.) the books on them, the slides (yes), their glass mounts, tray, projector? lamps, record player, records (vinyl!), occasional tables, desk, chair, papers? their colors and weights, sizes, like that candy wrapper? notes (perhaps), postcards, newspapers, my cane, myself?

  C.S. Giscombe

  ON A LINE BY WILLIE MCTELL

  Start with railroad music, start with “Statesboro Blues” because it claims southeast Georgia as its stage, because specificity takes its listener to something else. Willie McTell sang, in 1928, “Big 80 left Savannah—Lord an’ did not stop—You oughta saw that colored fireman—When he got them boilers hot!”

  No narrative to the song—about traveling, about sexual possibility, about the colors of race, about the ambiguous hand-downs of parents. Probably the Midland Railway, the old line over the fifty miles from Savannah to Statesboro; probably a reference to the “massive” eighty-inch driving wheels on some powerful classes of steam locomotives.

  There’s beauty to the railroad, this is given; the railroad’s a received form—its “aspects and indications” regarding semaphores, its yard limits, its code of horn signals, the certain ways movement is permitted, and within that permission, restricted. In central Pennsylvania, in the first years of the new century, I trained as a brakeman using the NORAC rulebook and later became a petty railroad bureaucrat and worked with people in the industry and the regulatory agencies. Along with others I ran a tourist railroad, centered in Bellefonte, PA, and some of the fellows joked that we were playing train when we went out on the line, but the equipment was real and, because of that, “unforgiving”; and our operation was, like everyone’s, governed by rules. We traversed the superstructure, the General Railroad System of North America, the big map that shows the tracks to be in fact all connected, from Hay River to Savannah and Miami and, via Laredo, down to Lázaro Cárdenas and Veracruz and down east to Bangor and out west to Coos Bay and Prince Rupert; including the Bellefonte Branch and the sixty miles of ribbon rail we shared with freight traffic—coal trains—from Lock Haven to Tyrone.

  No firemen on our runs. As brakeman I would swing off to line switches, flag crossings, crank on (and release) the handbrake, set and remove the chocks, conduct the air test. The issue of railroad firemen is complex—the position survived the mid-century conversion of locomotive power from steam (with its fireboxes that, as we would say in Pennsylvania, “needed to stoked”) to diesel but by then the pool of firemen, through a series of labor agreements, had been limited to “promotable men.” A. Philip Randolph and others fought this in public, with mixed success. There were black brakemen but, as Time Magazine said, in a piece about Mr. Randolph’s fight in 1943, “Almost the oldest tradition in Southern railroading is the Negro fireman.” Post-war railroad hirings of black firemen and brakemen are documented in brief articles, often with pictures, in Jet. So wasn’t I the colored brakeman? Yes, but usage and familiarity are what define and govern—stake out—our positions; fireman was the storied job available in engine service, what Time described as “the best paid, most aristocratic job a Negro can aspire to in the South.” Promotable men were white men—one rose from brakeman or fireman to engineer or conductor—and my experience of engine crews is that they are still white, with obvious exceptions, and male (with obvious exceptions); I’ve seen exactly four black engineers since I began keeping score in 1962 or 1963 or 1964. Engineer’s on the right side of the cab, head-end brakeman on the left. As brakeman I would converse with the engineer about track conditions directly ahead—we’d agree that the automatic crossing protection (flashing lights) was working, that switches were lined correctly, etc. I’d watch for foot traffic, kids playing on the railroad, I’d watch for hunters, for people in cars. Much there involved in getting those boilers hot. Why should you have seen that colored fireman? Showed his color (but that usually means something else). The adjective “colored” is added for emphasis in the song but it was also a cultural reference, casually made, not an intensifier at all but a casual statement of the underpinning of the whole structure of everything in the United States. As a colored brakeman in 2003 I was so anomalous I may as well have been white. But I wasn’t.

  Later I applied to be an engineer and had my eyes and hearing checked and allowed the national inquiry into my forty-year driving record. My student engineer license came in the mail, signed by the superintendant of our operating partner. Months before, I’d made it through his rules class, an all-morning event, and passed the written exam. In my other life then—those years in that place—I was a member of the faculty at Penn State, one town over in State College. But this was Bellefonte, the county seat. One day, as we were taking a half-full train up to Pleasant Gap, PA, my engineer—Steve, the man with whom I’d been paired when I commenced my training—said, “You run it for a while,” and I did.

  The horn was a problem. It was a piece of rope that hung straight down next to the windshield. Signaling the intention to move forward (two short blasts) or to back up (three short blasts) was fine but the familiar signal for grade crossings was more complicated to execute—as every schoolchild knows, it’s two long blasts, a short and another long and “is to be prolonged or repeated until engine or trai
n is on the crossing, or, where multiple crossings are involved, until the last crossing is occupied.” The problem was that the engineer should take the equipment through such with his hand on the brake. Fair enough, but a childhood accident cost me my left arm some decades ago and it’s been a series of prosthetic devices ever since—they’ve worked well but the horn was a problem. There was the likelihood of slippage if I used my steel hook to grasp the brass brake lever; and if I kept my right hand on the brake, the dangling, dancing rope was hard to pluck, with the hook, from out of the air. So I went to Home Depot one morning before reporting for my shift and bought an S-clip and a length of new rope and—with the help of a young man, Timmy, who helped out in general—extended the cord. That is, Timmy and I added a loop, a long down-hanging U across the top quadrant of the windshield, an easier target for my hook—gross movement skills as opposed to fine movement skills, less difficult to pull on and make a joyous noise with, easier for me to pipe wildly down the valleys. Two dollars worth of parts. “Now we’re ADA compliant,” said Steve.

  Is this disability? My mechanical-man self ensconced in another machine moving across the surface of earth. My cyborg, my amputee, my centaur, my rolling man. Type of the modern! emblem of motion and power! pulse of the continent! Cyborg? The dictionary embedded in my MacBook Pro says: “fictional or hypothetical person whose physical abilities are extended beyond normal human limitations by mechanical elements built into the body.” My hypothetical self, typically irritable. In a review of a Stephen King novel, Duma Key, the reviewer says, “King neatly figures the tropes of dismemberment.” But it’s only irritation, my response to the tropes (and to neatness); only dismemberment. We on the railroad provided a service, transportation between Bellefonte and Tyrone (or Lemont or Port Matilda or Pleasant Gap), train service; we carried or hauled instances of the body, as ticket-holders might be described or configured from afar, while, over the same route, our operating partner carried limestone and I came to understand that what was in the back of the train being hauled made no difference to the vector of the train, which is what I endeavored to become or at least merge with. We sold our service, including my labor at the throttle or my labor on the ground at trackside. A rag-tag gang of white kids stared once at Milesburg as I waited for a coal train to clear the next block before throwing the switch so we could take a full load of paying customers to a restaurant thirty miles away in Tyrone, PA, and one of them said, finally and definitively and loud enough for me to hear and not irreverently, “Candyman.” Is this disability? Undying famous black monster of filmland Tony Todd with a hook for one hand—a monster’s something else. “Specifically, an animal or plant departing greatly from the usual type, as by having too many limbs.” How far is it from too many limbs to not enough? And what are “normal human limitations”? And what did he do to white co-star Virginia Madsen? Did he dismember her with his hook? (In the movie he asked her, “Do you fear the pain or what is beyond?” “Both,” she replies. “The pain, I can assure you, will be exquisite,” Candyman says.) The movie, based on familiar, intersecting urban legends and set in Chicago—in storied Cabrini-Green—came out in 1992. I lost the arm in 1961—normal human limitation would have me get by with the one, and people do, but I have always had decent insurance, a middle-class shield, so come equipped with high-end metal and plastic and fabric devices to let me cook and drive and get dressed and frame doorways, suspend my weight over a lover’s body, bicycle to work, and operate trains. The idea one comes across is that phantom pain is the body’s attempt to re-member itself and I find the idea precious and tedious both. On the railroad I extended myself beyond the normal into the fictional, the synthetic, without resolution. No Garden of Eden for me, baby; no circling back.

  The railroad’s centerless (as Alan Gilbert has suggested) which is how it gives off beauty. And it describes the geography it traverses. We’d leave Bellefonte and creep along Spring Creek to the junction with the main at Milesburg. There we’d radio the Altoona East dispatcher in Pittsburgh for Form D clearance to occupy the track; when that came, the brakeman would get off and throw the switch. I remember how it felt to move the train onto the main line and stop so the brakeman could re-line the switch and get back on. The main was continuously welded—ribbon rail—and we’d sail down the valley at thirty miles an hour, through Unionville, Julian, Port Matilda, through the country between those places, the horn blaring as I took us over the highway crossings.

  Willie McTell was known as Blind Willie McTell. From the New Georgia Encyclopedia: “As a person faced with a physical disability and social inequities, he expressed in his music a strong confidence in dealing with the everyday world.” (On the radio as I was writing this—on March 24th, 2011—the host of the Writer’s Almanac announced the birthday of John Wesley Powell and, not mentioning the man’s missing arm, that “he and his companions were the first white people to navigate the Grand Canyon Gorge”—Mr. Powell was a promotable man.) There’s an urban legend, apparently from Ohio, about a one-armed brakeman with a hook but it’s not one of the famous urban legends (in spite of or perhaps because of the heightened possibility of actual brakemen losing real limbs to unforgiving equipment) and is barely a ripple in the big legend-family of hook-handed bogeymen that mostly has to do with lovers’ lane jitters and “the natural dread of the handicapped”; the Candyman movie pushed the sex that was always there in the campfire stories and complicated it with “the instinctive dread of Negroes.” Willie McTell’s blindness complicates the situation of his song, his telling the listeners that they shoulda saw that colored fireman.

  My interest in the railroad goes back to childhood—the everyday world was full of trains and references to them as instruments of travel and as places of employment; trains covered distance, trains were sexual. My railroad career was short—2002 until I left Bellefonte for a faculty job at the University of California in 2007. I saw my first black engineer in 1984 or 1985 in upstate New York and saw the second two in Illinois in the 1990s. The fourth black engineer I saw was myself in the narrow cloudy mirror in the restroom of the Bellefonte train station where I’d change into my coveralls.

  No descriptive word or phrase for what I was on the train, no casual assignment. There’s no tradition, aristocratic or otherwise, of one-armed brakemen—aside from the bigger one the children in Milesburg understood—or colored engineers. Nor was I a singer no matter how much I love the song; on the railroad I was something else.

  from GISCOME ROAD (Northern Road, 2)

  In a dream I left camp to walk to town

  but the road stopped, was closed,

  & I stepped off into a line of trees

  coming out then into the open on a path alongside an uphill pasture

  where a girl was riding a horse bareback, she

  was very dark & big boned, riding barefoot w/ no stirrups through

  geese & Muscovy ducks,

  she rode uphill toward the crest, where the sky was deepest blue

  where it touched the crest.

  By the pasture’s bottom-most fence—alongside the path—

  some white men in suits were following a short black man, likely her father I thought,

  w/ white hair & a neat white goatee, courting him I thought:

  he had one leg, the other off way high up, & got around the site

  w/ a single cane, in shorts

  which showed the muscle of the one “good” leg,

  which flapped empty from the other,

  the white men trotting to keep up, their neckties flapping over their round shoulders.

  He spotted me & called “We have some things in common” & further, leaning

  across the fence to speak quietly, sd he’d been pleasuring 2 women,

  one black & one white, when it happened, the blood

  to the leg having “herniated” because of fucking them

  at the same time, he sd,

  making the motions of diving as though

  they’d bee
n water he was jumping down into, to go in & then to come back up in the current:

  it surfaced, he sd—meaning the blood did, meaning the blood did—, in the current.

  He’d lost an eye too, he sd, in a fight

  & now it was just this plastic one he had—

  it had been hanging out of the socket on its own threads focusing crazily

  when the doctors came he sd & they gave him something to drink that tasted like wild

  strawberry, bitter & sweet at once,

  & as he was asking them what it was they’d cut the cords

  “just like this” he sd, snapping his fingers to signify it all

  going blank.

  •

  Further on up the path I lost the direction but got back just at dark

  through some different paths, back to the barrier that had closed the road

  I’d left camp on:

  I knew now it was the countenance

  of the man’s woods that began at the line of trees there

  that attracted me

  (my narrator’s rarely-there speaking self, my traveling-on self)

  to the woods of that country,

  from where the road stopped, his fields too.

  I saw a big animal in the trees alongside & thought it a deer or moose

  but it was a horse leaping over fences in front of me & then