SEPTEMBER 3, 1752
By the time, in 1752, the English switched their calendar from the Justinian to the Gregorian, they lagged behind much of the rest of the world by eleven days. Their expedient resolution to this problem was simply to skip from September the third to September the fourteenth. Night fell on September second, the sun rose on September fifteenth.
This gave rise to various complaints about the unfairness—perceived as the loss of those days, that time—and also to abstract thoughts about what had indeed happened to that time, whether time as we perceive it means so little—the specific units of our time, as it feels to us, as we know it, according to the calendar we’ve created to make sense of it from our own point of view—that we can simply skip through it, change it, alter it, rename it. Sure, people understood the time (no matter how it was named) stayed the same: the amount of daylight, the hours of darkness. But it wasn’t that in some objective, inhuman way time remained unchanged that bothered people; it was that this underscored, or seemed to, the irrelevance and factitiousness of time as it seems to us. It reminded us of the great world’s uncaring existence and the mistaken comedy of our own within it, our imperfect point of view and our confusion that it means something, has truth, maps onto our existence, once more shown to be folly and farce and fiction. What good were all our hopes and fears and prayers if something as fundamental as how we experienced time was relative, changeable, our experience of passing through it (where September 3 gave way to September 4 and to September 5 and to September 6 and to September 7 and to September 8 and September 9 and September 10 and September 11, then 12, 13, 14, each day its own careful thread in the tapestry of our lives) as spectral as our dreams in the hours we were alone?
SEPTEMBER 15, 1965
The television show Lost in Space begins.
(Trivia: Though the robot is never officially given a name, an episode in the third season revealed the robot in its packing crate, which was labeled acrostically “General Utility Non-Theorizing Environmental ROBOT,” with the first letter of each word emboldened in red, suggesting the acronymic title “GUNTER.”)
That night, “Will Robinson”—who is not yet “Will Robinson”—falls asleep to the manic sounds of his parents fighting or making love in fierce whispers through the wall and dreams of space.
(Trivia: The first man-made object to touch the surface of the moon was the Soviet Luna 2, on September 13, 1959.)
He does not dream of the show, not exactly. He dreams of empty, silent space. It’s hard to say if there is a perspective in the dream, afloat in space. Certainly the sensation is not of a person aware of him- or herself and in space, weightless.
(Trivia: The Apollo 11 touchdown was just over a year after the end of Lost in Space, July 20, 1969.)
It is a great, profound openness, the sensation. This is what he feels, is filled with.
(Trivia: Two days after the show ended, Polish students’ protests brought about the Polish political crisis or “March Events.” Five days after the show ended, LBJ mandated all federal computers support ASCII character encoding. Ten days after the show ended, Bobby Kennedy announced he would seek the presidency.)
Though everything is silent, empty, void, he is filled with music, filled with incredible sensations of beauty and sadness and what can only be called divinity.
(Trivia: Within a month of the show’s ending, LBJ announced he wouldn’t seek reelection; 2001: A Space Odyssey premiered in Washington, DC; Andreas Baader was involved in the midnight bombings of two department stores; Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on his motel balcony in Memphis; Planet of the Apes was released in theaters; Apollo 6 was launched (the last unmanned flight of the Saturn V); and exactly one month later eighteen-year-old Black Panther Bobby Hutton was killed in a police shoot-out in Oakland; an explosion of natural gas beneath a sporting-goods store triggered a second explosion of gunpowder in Indiana that killed 41 and injured 150; and the song “La, La, La” won the Eurovision Song Contest, which some critics considered Eurovision at its worst and which made extensive use of the eponymous nonlexical vocable, the nonsense syllables “la la la.”)
When he wakes, it is to the sounds of his mother singing one of Violetta’s arias from La Traviata in the kitchen as she juices an orange. Daylight filters through his cotton curtains in visible motion, an effervescence of particulate dust. He has wet the bed.
OCTOBER 3, 1983
The sun’s new light is now visible, reaching in at an extreme angle through the basement windows. This is hour twenty-one of Civilization. The Twinkies and the Pepsi and the Kraft American cheese are all gone. The joint’s roachy remains have been shredded and smoked; little remains of anything anymore. The four still sit, visibly uncomfortable. G.P. chews an idle fingernail; perhaps this pica is the result of an excess of marijuana and a dearth of prepackaged snacks. Dimley is barely awake. He is, internally, suffering that deep-bowel empty feeling that comes after hours of sustained wakefulness riding on weed and high-fructose corn syrup. His eyes throb, as in visibly pulse in their sockets, swell, and subside. Hedga has been surreptitiously eyeing herself in a well-placed clock face, dragging her fingers across her face while watching the image’s fingers do the same, trying to feel what she sees and see what she feels all at once. Walf rolls the dice.
The number that comes up is eleven.
G.P., as he is sitting nearest, bypasses the game’s own metahistorical features and reaches for one of Dimley’s There-are-more-things-in-heaven-and-earth … decorated cards, flipping it over with an inflamed-looking red fingertip, raising and holding it very close to his face, eyeing it, not reading it out loud, yet.
An increasingly tense moment of silence passes.
“What does it say?” Walf finally asks, reaching a hand subconsciously up to grip his Adam’s apple.
G.P. clears his throat. Dimley begins blinking rapidly, his eyes a flipbook of expression. Hegda pulls her mouth down into a thoughtful frown with her right thumb and index finger.
“It says, ‘An unknown airborne virus strikes your country, killing off 98 percent of the population within a year. The suffering is terrible. The survivors wish they were dead. Plants and animals succumb. There is no more life left. Your country is utterly decimated.’”
G.P. looks at Walf, who looks only at the configuration of the board, the painterly representation of the Mediterranean, seat of civilization, looks at the tiles arranged there, the cards stacked around the board, the two dice lying side by side, a five and six showing.
Hegda seems to be trying to find the right expression for the moment, her face contorting in a shifting series of semblances, eyebrows raising and lowering, her lips pursing and retracting, her teeth appearing and receding. Dimley’s eyes are at this point literally agog, scarily protuberant, the right one twitching electrically, the left filled with swelling veins.
The silence this time is pregnant with rage and fear, power and helplessness. No sound seems to exist at all for several seconds.
And then, without looking up at any of them, without uttering a single complaint, Walf reaches forward quickly and with exacting motions and sweeps the gameboard—the carefully, painstakingly-laden gameboard—up and away from himself, an errant tile audibly snapping into Dimley’s extruded left eye, the flimsy Mediterranean folding in on itself as the cards spray loosely up and flutter down as if in slow motion.
SEPTEMBER 12, 2008
The bird’s wings shift up and down and stop and then it glides on invisible circuits of air. Its minuscule figure moving, moving as if without direction, without purpose
, without effort. For some reason the bird keeps flying. Its instinct, its essence, its nature. This is what the bird does. The sky around it is cloudless, the sun’s light above the distant earth below. The bird moves through the world, its world, solitary and singular, and yet so common as to be basically indistinguishable. It is just an ordinary bird. Below, the geometry of Pennsylvania is rigid and clear. It almost seems to suggest the world is structured, ordered; means something. Not to the bird. It is a bird’s eye view of a bird seeing nothing. Blank blocks of pasture, of fallow field, the veinous lines of roads and highways, stripes of skyscrapers, parti-colored parking lots. The world passes. The bird continues, as if without noticing, as if without reason, to fly above. It arcs through the sky like an object shot, tracing a trajectory meant to terminate, drawn back to the earth. But.
The bird’s glide is interrupted, the body stops as though suddenly stricken, perhaps paralyzed, and it begins immediately to fall—the magic of flight is overcome by the reality of weight, of everything succumbing eventually. It is a surprise and yet it is not. The bird’s flight was always defined by the necessary and inevitable fall. No one sees it coming, but there is no flight without some landing.
The body falls dully. It does not spiral, or turn, but drops. The wings are stretched out, frozen still and useless. The feathers are very subtly being ruffled by the wind, a suggestion there may still be some hope, a false sign of life. The bird falls.
If we look at the sky and see the bird, see its fall, we see that bird dropping constantly out of sight, streaking darkly across an otherwise unblemished blue. If we look at the sky, this is what we see. We see the quick drop of the bird across it; soon the bird will be gone altogether. But if we look at the bird, if we watch it as it falls, letting the sky fade into the background, then suddenly we see how still its falling is, its dead body hanging there, the world floating around it, nothing changing, no more motion, everything seemingly frozen, etched across the face of the sky, and if we focus like this, if we watch only the bird, the sky stays behind it, and it seems to fall forever.
* Clifford Geertz refers to Gilbert Ryle’s discussion of the imbedded and impacted layers of meaning to a gesture or expression as simple as a wink. Ryle’s example is two boys “rapidly contracting the eyelids of their right eyes”; for one of them, this is an encoded sign, a secret signifier; for the other, it is an involuntary twitch. The appearance of the two is identical, but the difference in the meaning is “vast.” Then, further, is introduced the character of a third boy, parodying the action of the wink, and but then—fearing his parody wink will be mistaken—there is the third boy when he is at home alone, practicing his parody of the wink in his mirror. This is Ryle’s definition of ethnography, “a stratified hierarchy of meaningful structures in terms of which twitches, winks, fake-winks, parodies, rehearsals of parodies are produced, perceived, and interpreted, and without which they would not … in fact exist, no matter what anyone did or didn’t do with his eyelids.” Geertz’s own definition of anthropology fits with this, viz., “that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretative one in search of meaning.”
From A Book of Spells
Andrew Mossin
THE PROPOSITIONS
Poetry itself may then be the Mother of those who have destroyed their mothers.
—Robert Duncan, The H.D. Book
We too are Greek—what else could we be?
—C. P. Cavafy
1.
A first sense of what was possible
milk-white curd on the glistening breast of the stream
like pure cut strips of balsa laid in place
memory’s optic silence around the rimmed
form of angel dust poured into the day’s becoming.
What passes notice—splendid sunsets and sights of evening—
mnemonic curse of the first-to-be-named
last-to-be-saved in water’s aftermath.
Black wood slipped over the wrist like a garland
fashioned from balsa strips laid over the woman’s hand
as she descends into the falling stream.
Birth stream of her blood oozing out into the wave.
Water is a wave of blood streaming out of the woman.
Namesake’s northern lights passing overhead in nights’ black skein.
Birth’s device, capitalized blood spoon in a wooden box.
Broken into, haunted, hunted inside the box wood.
So it was a dream of her death that sent us back inside?
Quarrel’s daylight, peach-green summer inside the hand of her fist.
Like a bargain we collected, passed inside the channel of her
right arm, ribbed release of her body inside the curtained room.
2.
Dream is less real than speech. Saw it was dormant
black bread thrown into a cave. Saw it go down
grooved ancestral fumes of its rising when it gave chase.
Nude form of it that saw us change saw us chained.
Was it black skin folded over sun’s optic?
Folds of black skin and black hair blessed by what was absent?
I said her name was wronged, her first name was wronged
next to mine. A said name is wrong.
Alert or was it inert? Speech pulled from the target tongue.
In howls of animal winter the ekphrastic speech she gave me.
Lore is cryptic, black signs on white. Saw the names
written over mine, emblematic breakers on white waves.
Saw name was a fashioned thing, gave it song.
Saw no name was a festooned thing, gave it blame.
Torn from her side was it a mountain ridge that was near?
Torn from her limbs was it a river we heard falling in the dark?
Heard it in a song, black books where the songs lived.
Heard she was Maia, black song of her body inside a thick-shaded cave.
Was it her name I heard, “Maia”? Blue-black angel tongued.
Saw she was passing over us like a blue-black crow in mourning.
A name inside the name she gave us. Her song drowned
out by what came before it. Courtyard’s black entryway
built on shells of thistle and straw grass. Heard her break
bread in the entryway, her arms and legs blackened by sun.
His body and hers at the threshold blackened by sun.
3.
Not kept not kin. Not years blackened by island sun.
Not Argos’s swift waters black-skinned habit drawn tight.
Not shepherd upright on mountainside. Not saying
it comes to these few things, items held inside the hand of a stranger.
Alert not white inside the frame a pale name kept inside the frame.
Not silent black-toned sepia-toned architecture.
Heard it was a stranger passing that gave it form. Heard it was like death
spreading wings inside the child’s lungs breathing for him.
Like water passing inside blood’s ovulate.
Like mineral light passed over the lips’ opening.
Bread clasped in one hand as if to offer is to please.
Floral principles of abandonment leading to a surface of ragged rock.
Heard it was rock that she laid down upon.
Heard it was a lyre playing inside her womb.
Heard it was Hermes inside the river’s current.
Black song of his passi
ng when he was born into the world.
And the tortoise he found by the river’s edge was made a singer.
And the tortoise bled inside black folds of his palm.
Held there inside black folds of the river man’s hand.
A shepherd brought into black rain to find its hands disclosed.
Hermetic light of the two sealed in one landscape.
Conjunctions 65: Sleights of Hand Page 31