One Fell Soup

by Roy Blount

  “There is, to be sure, a magazine-packaging boom,” I heard Hepworth saying. “But that is one boom that must not have its own magazine. Because there is something else, Doane—there may not be a boom in it, but it’s called professional responsibility.”

  Hepworth, of course, was right. There are stories that cannot be written. Confidences that cannot be shared. Bombs that cannot be dropped. Markets that cannot be zeroed in on. I would go through fire for that man.

  THE TEETH FESTIVAL

  SOMETIMES WE FAIL TO appreciate certain hard, basic factors enough, I told my lady friend Felice, as I brought her to the Teeth Festival. I doubted she shared my sense of teeth, though hers are glossy from regular brushing with a sweet, white paste she first heard of through a television ad, in which a young couple sang.

  As we entered, we saw display cases highlighting various kinds of teeth:

  BUCK

  CARIOUS

  GAT

  Teeth through the Ages was an eight-minute film. Early teeth, it is felt, were crudely designed, even soft. They could themselves have been chewed up by a set of modern home-fried potatoes. It was amazing, the progress across the years.

  CHIPPED

  GNASHING

  MISSING

  Over next to the refreshment booth, maintained throughout the festival by the floss industry, a shapely couple in flesh-colored body stockings took turns reciting.

  “Why must you always be uptight?”

  Said Eve to Adam. “Take a bite.”

  Fair as she was, however, fairer

  Is mouth-ease to a denture-wearer.

  The male was toothless in those days—

  “Scarce as men’s teeth” was the phrase.

  It may be Eve was made of those

  And not of rib, as most suppose.

  If Adam had ’em, they were false.

  Eve prepared some applesauce.

  “Still al dente,” did he mutter.

  Eve prepared some apple butter.

  And then they had some. “Oh wow, we’ve

  Been going naked,” fluted Eve.

  “I guess we are …,” said Adam, “nude.”

  You know, for all these weeks and months

  I only told the difference

  Between us by the way we chewed.”

  The Tooth Fairy passed among us, mincing, winking, in costume, leaving to each visitor a facsimile quarter. LOOK AT YOUR TEETH, said an old Army latrine notice, in the nostalgia section. EVERYBODY ELSE DOES.

  FALSE

  EYE

  CANINE

  We heard a song sung in country fashion, with guitar:

  When you

  Said you

  Were on my side,

  You lied.

  When you

  Said your

  Love would abide,

  You lied.

  When you

  Said I’d

  Be satisfied,

  You lied.

  But when you said

  You’d hit me and knock out my tooth,

  You told the truth.

  Musing, I held Felice. Nibbled mentally three, four, five of her vertebrae. Sweetflesh-muffled. Six.

  HORSE

  JAW

  DEAD

  Ruminant is how she seemed. I told her of a man I met in my travels, near Tigerdale, Florida, in a trash-and-treasures shop, who had had all his teeth removed, who said: “I keep ’um on the shelf in a little plastic dilly, and after supper in the ebenin’ or after breffust in the mawnin’ or after lunch in the affnoon or after cheese ’n crackers fore, bedtime, I get ’um down and take ’um out and count ’um and spread ’um out on the breffust-room table and arrange ’um like they was in my mouth. And then diffunt ways, the back ones front …”

  CROOKED

  WISDOM

  BABY

  I led Felice to where a dental-hygiene jingle was being sung, by the Cuspid Singers, in another part of the hall:

  Don’t call it incidenta—

  It may be sentimental

  But teeth are quite important in romance.

  Whether owned or rental,

  Teeth to some extent’ll

  Sway the course of love as much as pants.

  So keep your dentifrice

  Close by you, Bro or Sis,

  When going out to dinner or to dance.

  If bad teeth make you hiss

  While framing that first kiss,

  It may be you won’t have a second chance.

  Oh, whether owned or rental,

  Teeth to some extent’ll

  Sway the course of love as much as pants.

  “There should be a crockery/mockery rhyme in there,” I chuckled to Felice. “Listen,” I added—for we were not the only enthusiasts present, and the air was filled with snappy talk:

  “Molars are like nothing so much as the stumps of trees. What if the rest of the strange white trees were there: trunks, branches, leaves, burls, crotches, twigs, bark, moonlight through the branches, and acorns or whatever.”

  “We cherish teeth. Vide savage tribes. And chain saws.”

  “Teeth are the only bones we have that show. If we were arrows, they would be our heads.”

  PERMANENT

  GRINDING

  NICE

  We heard readings from that great symbolic naturalistic dental work McTeague, by Frank Norris—whose dentist hero, upon unwrapping the lustrous, four-rooted sign his betrothed has bought him, is beside himself: “It was the Tooth—the famous golden molar with its huge prongs—his sign, his ambition, the one unrealized dream of his life. … No danger of that tooth turning black with the weather …” Later, the dentist finally gains the upper hand over his wife, on the way toward utter ruin, when he develops the practice of biting the tips of her fingers till they turn black.

  Erich von Stroheim, I told Felice, made of that great story an epic lost movie, Greed, whose original version ran longer and far more compellingly than a working day; and the studio—MGM, the one with the growling lion—chopped and ground that gargantuan, unprotected film down to a venal two and a half hours, for shopgirls to enjoy.

  BAD

  LIED-THROUGH

  LOOSE

  “‘The fathers have eaten a sour grape,’” I quoted to Felice, “‘and the children’s teeth are set on edge.’” We were passing a breathtaking exhibit: long, long ranks of teeth set just so; so delicately balanced, one upon the other, that it seemed a breath of wind would send them pittering to the floor like sleet; set just perilously shy of meshing; not short of, but just finely higher than, meshing; we do not appreciate enough teeth’s flinty interaction.

  GRITTED

  JEWELED

  ACHING

  “Ah, but ‘the Lord who made thy teeth,’” I continued, “‘shall give thee bread.’ And you are toothsome, Sweet. And all of mine are sweet for you. But will you still esteem me,” I said to her lightly, “when my teeth are gone?”

  “No,” she said.

  She bared hers for me.

  Mine fell in my lap.

  All around was a sound like castanets, only harder, whiter.

  THINKING BLACK HOLES THROUGH

  Just by thinking on such a grand scale, humanity not only enlarges its universe but expands and ennobles itself. Perhaps the ideal metaphor is not Piglet’s Heffalump but Browning’s famous declamation: “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp / Or what’s a heaven for?” To the growing fraternity of black-hole theorists, that cosmic vision is the ultimate lodestar.

  —“Those Baffling Black Holes,” Time

  “YOU CAN CALL THEM Great Big Old Nothings all you want,” says Mrs. Vern Wike of Baruma, Michigan, “but when that thing came along and seized me up by the clavicles and turned me into a grain of dust five or six times and set me down fourteen miles from my home, it did me a world of good. I feel like a new old lady.”

  “Idea I got, it was trying to tell me something, trying to, you know, to communicate,�
� says Roster Toombs of Fillings, Maryland, who maintains that a black hole reached him in his garage apartment, transferred him to at least two other universes and left him with “kind of more perspective on life than I can use.”

  Ex-President Jimmy Carter is interested in black holes.

  Sings Benno Zane II in his black hole-inspired pop hit “So-uh Dark”:

  You-uh so profound,

  Grand Canyon like a levee.

  Billion tons-uh like a pound,

  You-uh so heavy.

  Yeah so-uh dark in there

  You got Noah’s ark in there?

  But the hole is greater than some of its poets. From Slippery Key, Florida, to Bosco, Washington, from England’s Cambridge University to cooperative observatories on mainland China, mankind is going further than it ever imagined possible with thoughts of black holes, those mysterious antiwombs of collapsed stars in which time and space are so warped that they gasp, enclose themselves and become nothing; the speed of light is just nothing, flat; and as for matter, it is spaghettied-out, shamed and compressed into a nothingness billions and billions of times smaller—and more potent—than it was when it was something.

  To some theorists, a black hole admits no escape. Under special circumstances, others argue, it may transpose things into another universe or back in time as far as, for instance, the Hoover administration, via passages dubbed “wormholes.” One school of thought posits phenomena dubbed “white holes” (which spew out nothing instead of ingesting it), but these—as anyone can understand who has watched both “American Bandstand” and “Soul Train”—have laid a lesser claim on the imagination. The possibility of a “yellow hole,” in which everything is sunny and visitors find themselves robed in buttercups, is generally dismissed as wishful thinking.

  So what kind of thinking is right? Even the savants wonder. When Sir Waring Tifit created the first mathemo-mechanical model of a black hole in 1964, famed Astrophysicist Vivien Soule took one look and exclaimed, “This is so dense that thought must become like Thousand Island dressing, or petroleum jelly or something, and time become u.s. news and world report.”

  The distinguished Pure Mathematician Seiji Kamara took one look and observed, “This is so dense that the birds must leave off their singing and crawl like little bugs upon the ground. It’s not the blackness so much, it’s the density.”

  Little Joey Fulks, the brilliant if ill-focused graduate student who later withdrew into market research, took one look and said, “This is so dense it makes me want to shriek.”

  The great Rabinrasha Charawansary took two looks and said, “I don’t think it is so dense.” But that was just Charawansary. He also didn’t think Kamara’s mathematics were so pure. Later that same evening, at a faculty cookout in his back yard, Charawansary reasoned aloud about black holes so deeply that his mind evidently passed into one. Because of relativistic effects, he appeared to observers to be forever nearly coming to a point but always more and more slowly and never quite. To Charawansary himself, he seemed to have summed up magnificently, in one great flash while burning a wiener, and everyone else was just sitting there like sacks of wheat. In fact, the phenomenon Charawansary presented was so extremely trying a thing to observe that all of his colleagues had murmured months ago that they had better be getting along, leaving him with Mrs. Charawansary, who was disconsolate until a troupe of quantum mechanics came through town and showed her some models of what goes on inside the atom that made her laugh and laugh.

  Can a person become a black hole? Not likely, believe most theorists. But just say someone were to. What if? His knees would in effect become his respiration … his past, future and sense of smell would be telescoped into an infinitesimal pelletlike item. … and he would literally be worn by his own shoes. In earthly geographical terms, an area the size of Maine, Asia and the city of Detroit and environs would be squeezed into a single copy of the New York Post.

  All airy speculation? Not so, insist some of today’s brightest young stars of physics and math. “Oh, the holes are there, for sure,” says Caltech’s Flip Kensil. “It ain’t no big thing. Could be there’s one of “infinitesimal magnitude coursing within a hair’s breadth of your face right now powerful enough to swallow human life and the federal bureaucracy. But hey, that’s the universe all over.”

  A “singularity” is what scientists tend to dub a black hole in the scientific papers that they read to each other. A “singularity.” These scientists! They don’t give much away, do they?

  The state of the art of black-hole thought is enough, in short, to tempt the layman to throw up his or her hands. But that would be defeatism—and in fact many laymen are doing anything but.

  Fulpus Wsky and Livianne Wills of the Yale-Rockefeller Institute for Astrophysics believe that public enthusiasm for black holes is such that the holes may well be in our own homes, in some form, before the turn of the century. “When we happen to mention at a cocktail party that at any moment we might receive in the pit of our stomach a golf ball the ‘size’ of a million suns,” note Wsky-Wills, “people’s heads turn our way instantly.”

  All very well, humanity’s ever practical side will counter, but what is in the hole for us? The answers to that question are by no means clear. A black hole, if harnessed, would be of undeniable value in trash removal and national defense. But so far the principal benefit derived is a sense of elation, of expansion, even of pride, gained by those hardy reflectives, in science and out, who make a level effort to comprehend the concept. Black Hole Clubs, NOTHING IS BEAUTIFUL buttons and “singularity bars” are springing up. In many parts of the country, black-hole mental-picturing sessions are replacing wet-T-shirt contests in popularity.

  Not all of these “holeys,” as the trendier enthusiasts dub themselves, rise to the gravity of the phenomenon. Misfits, many of them, acting out compulsions that are psychological at bottom and may have little or nothing to do with nothingness itself. These people, it may be, tend to cheapen the hole thing—but under our laws they have the right to think about what they please, as they please; and that includes the laws of nature.

  And in the end, who can readily say which response to black holes is authentic and which is not? Who can say that the Toombses and the Mrs. Wikes of this world are real zeros? Who can say—although we may know what a black hole is—what a black hole is like? Not the experts.

  “‘Like.’ Oh, it can’t be likened to anything,” says Rocky Top Observatory’s Bern Rogovin. “It’s … different from anything. It’s—I wouldn’t say opposite—it’s … Oh, what’s the word?”

  Antimatter?

  “No, not that. Yet definitely not matter. I would say, perhaps … amatter.”

  What’s amatter?

  “Oh, nothing.”

  WEEKLY NEWS QUIZ

  Questions are based on what you should have learned from the New York Times by the end of any given week in 1979, if you were paying that newspaper the attention it expects. Answers appear on pages 260–262.

  1. A member of Israel’s negotiating team raised new hopes for the Mideast peace talks in the face of growing tensions. What is his name, what names was he called in the Knesset, and what new tensions caused him to withdraw, the following day, his growing hopes?

  2. The mystery of plant life’s interaction with animal life has been deepened by researchers at Fordham University. What is the mystery? Name five plants and four animals.

  3. The man pictured on page 258 seems to have everybody in America (except, of course, anyone in a position of real authority at the Times) buffaloed. Who is he and what is his charm?

  4. The mood in Sri Lanka is more pensive now. Explain.

  5. “We have flatly denied that we plan to take over Holland and I can confirm that,” says a high-ranking official of a major nation. What kind of shoes do they wear in Holland?

  6. The State Comptroller’s office in Albany has revealed that the disbursing procedures of 71 departments of the New York City government are being plac
ed under tighter scrutiny. Who is the State Comptroller? Where is Albany? Is it up around Lake George somewhere? Up around Cornell? Where is Cornell?

  7. There is a worldwide shortage of (breath/gasoline/people/time).

  8. In a midyear economic review, the Carter administration forecast that over the next six months the price of gas could go as high as $4.97 a gallon, unemployment could rise to 38 million and inflation could climb to 42.3 percent without its being whose fault?

  9. The Pffowles-Sargeaunt system of orthography, according to which Iranian names have been converted to English spelling since 1934, is being replaced by a more accurate system, whereby “Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini” will be rendered as “I.O. Tolaruhola O. Maney,” Prime Minister “Mehdi Ba-zargan” as “Idhem Nagrazab,” and Brig. Gen. “Saif Amir Ra-himi” as “Bear Man Jackson.” Where did they ever dig up Pffowles and Sargeaunt?

  10. Among the various consultants in different fields summoned by President Carter to Camp David for his latest summit session on the energy problem was (Ralph Bellamy/Joseph Gargan/Bernard L. Barker/Norman Vincent Peale).

  11. According to (C. L. Sulzberger/William Safire/Arthur Daley/Mimi Sheraton), the inane hypocrisy of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare’s antismoking campaign is revealed by its peculiar refusal to follow the tangent of “the smoking Lancegate pistols packed by Puffabilly the Kid Brother and the Loan Arranger.” Can you spot and name all the rhetorical devices employed?