and even if you are, others might not be. Humans are different, and not.
Humans are animals that have not yet decided whether
they are predators or prey, and, undecided, have become the worst
of both, herd and ravager, a murderer that thinks only of the threat
posed to it and never of the threat it poses. Some wish
for a superior animal to tell us we are not predator, not prey,
we are in aggregate everything we ever dreamed of being,
we are altogether like a god. What it means to be like a god
but not a god is what the category of magic is for: divine power
without divine judgment. But all stories of magic are tragedies.
Let’s pretend every woman, child, and man on this planet receives
from this imaginary superior animal—this divinity—an elixir,
a potion, twenty jugs of which are a day of labor a thousand times
over, each person receiving twenty thousand jugs a day:
imagine the world, the wonder of it, the world enabled by magic,
the great asymmetrical castle of it, from few a radical exponent,
from a thin stem an impossible flowering. So much weight
sitting atop so little, so much breadth spun from so narrow a base.
No matter how unwieldy, any shape can be spun like a top,
can stand, but to stand it must spin or be spun forever.
To spin is to be in motion, and motion is labor, and to spin
is to work and make and make meaning of work.
Consider the lilies, how they grow; they toil not, they spin not,
and yet I say unto you that Solomon in all his glory was not so arrayed.
Solomon the king, Solomon the wise, Solomon the rich.
Every story of a people who have a story has a Solomon,
whether he or she is a mortal or an animal or a god.
When this Solomon asks God for wisdom he cites as his need
“the people,” whom he calls great, that they cannot be numbered
nor counted for their multitude, for who could judge so many?
Not that the people were great in virtue and not in wisdom
for were they the former they would do good because it was good
and if the latter they would know themselves how to distinguish
the evil from the good, which is what it means to be wise.
The most famous proof of Solomon’s wisdom is his solution
of a dispute between two women, each of whom insisted
she was the mother of the same baby, an argument Solomon
solves by offering to cut the child in half and apportion the remains
to each, at which prospect the real mother, horrified, recoils
and withdraws her claim, whereupon Solomon recognizes her
as the true mother and awards her the infant whole and intact.
The Bible is unclear about whether Solomon’s wisdom resolves
in knowing how to identify the child’s mother or in his original
solution to an insane problem: one more child in the people
who cannot be counted or numbered. Solomon the king:
700 wives, 300 concubines, of Egypt, of Moab, of Ammon
and Sidon and Hattusa. Everything in the known world when
the known world was not yet the whole world. Every living
creature danced at Solomon’s command, save one animal
and when questioned that animal said it was only seeking
some unknown place, and having found that place and found
it rich in gold and wonders, Solomon wanted that place too.
This is the king to whom God gave wisdom, this is what
the wise do. There is no animal in the world to take the place
of God but even if there were, God is not so wise as to see
what the wise do with the gift of wisdom. Human animals
altogether: these will be the god of their individual members.
Every single animal if faced with a great enough threat will revert
to some random, desperate action: a twisting, a spasming,
a madness. With all the ways to make an animal insane
one would think that madness is why animals were made.
An animal, starving, who is unable to find food, will simply
continue looking until it no longer can and starves and dies.
But an animal who can see food it cannot reach will go mad.
An animal given more food than it can eat might eat itself
to death. Do you think of yourself in terms of what you are good
at or what you are good for? Live long enough and someone
may ask of you terrible things, and you may promise them that if
they grow ill or deranged they can trust that you will help them die.
You do not know if you choose to believe this is because they find you
full of mercy or lacking mercy entirely. Someone has to sit
with the body and so you sit with the body. Someone has to dispose
of the body and so you dispose of the body. Some are always surprised
by horror or disaster or numbers. Some rehearse the death
of everyone they know because the world performs for them
those deaths time and time over, and it is not fair or just and still
it keeps happening, mostly to those to whom it has already happened.
There is only so much preparation one can do: you can manage some pain
but there is always a pain that deranges the mind, and it doesn’t matter
if you get to that pain by increment of amount or by unique kind,
for even if you know and remember the derangement
you can never tolerate it or master it or grow immune to pain.
You are brave until you are not. You endure until you cannot.
Some believe that the only relationship to pain is endurance
but these people have not yet known deranging pain,
because they do not know that a self capable
of endurance is an allowance of relief from pain, that pain
burns away the self that endures as if the self were a raindrop
in a fire, which at first may appear whole if variable, whole
if fragile, but will sooner or later be torn in half, its parts
rent apart, until nothing that is not fire can be in fire.
You don’t know which injustice will consume you.
When Solomon raises the baby by its feet before the women
and says, This is going to hurt, one woman imagines a pain
she can endure and one woman imagines a pain she imagines
she cannot, but neither knows, and neither is the pain
of the baby cut in half. This is going to hurt. Even the exceptional
is common. The mortal know they are not immortal
and the impoverished know that increase is not forthcoming.
Grand tragedies do not erase quotidian ones. You have had them
and you have made them with no one to remedy or adjudicate.
After my father died I slept in the apartment we had been forced to vacate
and all night I thought about how to imagine one of many.
In the morning I locked the door, slipped the key through the slot
and I thought This is bad but also This is nothing. Most have it worse.
But bad is a degree of worse. I thought This can get worse and it did.
But what would have been better for us that did not worsen others?
The only good view of the failure of civilization, one
that either could never have been kind and thus failed
from its very conception or could have been kind and was not
and thus failed in its own execution, is the imagination of pain,
an apocalypse one can watch but not live, a rehearsal
that can n
ever be the show. Everything is always falling, so
fall as slowly as you can. The dead are always from the future,
they are always sending reports of what can go wrong and will.
I am facing a man threatening to cleave a baby, I am holding a baby
no one will claim, I am reporting from the edge of the end
of the world I know, here’s what I see, do what you can.
We shouldn’t always do what we can. But sometimes we should.
I say this is going to hurt because this is going to hurt.
When my parents said it to me I thought they thought
it would make things hurt less, but it was just to remind me
that the value of my imagination was how limited it could be.
We imagined the wreck we’ve made and still we made it,
but maybe the wreck itself was the wrong thing to imagine.
Make less pain by imagining more pain, the pain that isn’t your own.
When we leave this place it will be empty of persons.
No one will miss us. No one would. Still: do what you can.
You can imagine an empty room but cannot live in one.
You can imagine an empty world but cannot live in one.
But while it persists you can only persist with it.
Do what you can to solve a problem that cannot be solved,
until there is no one left to miss what never should have been.
Where Else
A shelter.
A clipper ship, a frigate, sailing on an orbit around the sun, sure as an orrery on a copper wire.
A cabinet.
On the other side of inward-opening doors: cabins, a cloister.
On the spinning drum of a ship, between worlds.
A bowl carved out of a mountain.
A pocked caldera.
A hole bored into a cliff above a crescent-shaped bay.
In rushes, in reeds.
In gardens, in cemeteries, in glades.
On the layer below the layer of great tectonic upheaval, above the layer of lucid oceans.
The office behind the office behind the door with the closed blinds.
The folly, the gazebo, the hammock.
An estate, a quarters on the estate, the flat perfect grass of the estate.
An escarpment, a crevasse in the desert.
A reef, a sandbar, a skiff half submerged.
An enormous brass egg, a treasure room, a storehouse.
A blanket hung between branches.
A palace, a prison.
A shell, a shadow, a nautilus. A darkness.
A not here. A never here.
Tableau Vivant
I wanted to know the scene
not by knowing it
but by seeing it.
To know that you were there
does not place you there,
does not allow you
to recollect who was where,
who wore what,
to even recall who or what.
I wanted it back not to be back,
but to have again
all that information,
so thick I couldn’t tell
I was ignorant with it.
But how to ask.
She placed a hand to her head
and closed her eyes
and said, Now let me see.
Not like an old woman,
but like an old idea of an old woman.
Let me see.
How can I make out of these bodies
a machine to do what I cannot
when each body in the machine
suffers the same ignorance I do?
We are all of us alive now,
but each of us who once was
is wholly dead—
no more the thing we were
than the thing we will become.
I can see him as clearly I can see you
standing right here before me
this very instant.
Help me move the bodies into place,
where I know they must go
because I know where they have been.
Paint me a picture whereby
I do not know what
any of this looks like any longer.
I move into the setting.
And the bodies, too, move.
Spirit Measure
Please take this as a token of my affection. Or, think hard about this object, even though I’ve made its meaning plain. When the widow hands the watch to the spiritualist’s assistant, she wants to know that the object is, in fact, thinking about her. How cavalier the dead are, to have left so many items without impressing upon the living the importance of each. The face impresses itself upon the shroud, but when the dead man beneath it spoke he said, noli me tangere (touch me not). If you knew the provenance of an object just by touching it you would touch nothing, for anything you touched would declare the means of its making and how it found its way to you, and that would be terrible, like life in death, like life in things we need to be dead so that we can use them for living. The medium translates, but that is like using a handkerchief to grasp something sacred or vile: you still have to touch the handkerchief, you have to touch gloves to wear gloves. A medium makes for a bad translator. What does this object say to you? Touch me not, which means unhand me, which means let go.
Zato-no-Ichi
In New Tale of Zatoichi the blind swordsman—
played by the sublime Shintaro Katsu
who at its filming cannot know that he will always be Zatoichi—
is being hunted by Yasuhiko, the brother of a man he has killed
but Zatoichi wants no more killing.
So behind Zatoichi’s delight in life—
which we measure by his gambling
though his gambling is proof of his low station
and discern in his sensuality and his masseur’s hands
though this work too proves that of all
Zatoichi is the lowest and the least—
behind this capacity for joy is killing
and behind that killing another reservoir of joy
in killing which Zatoichi fears is his true calling
fearing also that his response to that call
is the act of orienting himself by his own voice
for it is of rage and powerlessness and resentment
at being blind without station subordinate to lesser men
and as such lessened himself that Zatoichi attended so well
to his swordmaster Banno and thus dug the pit
out of which he is forever crawling.
In New Tale of Zatoichi the swordmaster Banno speaks well
of his former pupil the man whose skill he admires
even as he beholds in him a drunkard a wanderer a gangster
who in abdicating his great gift for murder loses
the only coin that cannot be stolen from him but in murdering
loses even the hope of a respectability that he cannot achieve.
Yayoi the sister of Banno remembers the Zatoichi
that Zatoichi cannot allow himself to remember
who even as he strove to master that which would undo him
was a righter of wrongs
a decent man who knows enough of his own indecency
to be ashamed and appalled to be a drunkard and a gangster
apologetic for being a drunkard and a gangster
Yayoi sees in him what blind Zatoichi cannot see:
that his knowledge of his incapacity for virtue proves his virtue.
This is the paradox of the blind swordsman Zatoichi
who must know his position in the world
because he cannot see himself at home in it
unlike Banno who though accomplished and proud
is wicked and greedy
and would sell his own sister to warlords and unrepentant killers
both Banno and Yasuhiko unable to admit that their flaws are wounds
they insist on carving into themselves and from which issue fonts of blood
by which the innocent are swept away.
As we watch we can see on the face of Yayoi her refusal of her brother Banno
and the suitor her brother has found for her
The Cataracts Page 6