Or to Begin Again
Page 5
sound so much alike.
Not really, the Voice replied, at least not so as I can tell. It’s only that
middle syllable, the
men and the ven.
Bob Dylan makes those kinds of rhymes all the time.
Who?
He’s a singer.
Never heard of him.
You will, Alice said dryly.
I’d quote you some lines, but permissions are prohibitive. I suppose
I could sing to you
and then no one would know. She sang.
Bugs illumined in the setting sun, minute integers of life.
As she went along, Alice felt
the heavy gate of night close behind her. She
wondered if it were locked, and if
she would ever
find her way back through it to daylight. Ahead,
she could see very little.
She lay down on the damp ground and looked up.
Stars pulsed like tiny flares reflected in a sea, illuminating nothing.
Everything is suspended but changing, she thought.
She pulled at a damp blade of grass.
Nowhere-never droned around her
and blew on her skin.
A spray
of notes, or motes, issued into the air.
A nervous watery breath
lifted stray hairs
and set them out on the grass.
Perhaps, she thought, I am dissolving.
She began to hum. The Moon appeared,
exhaling a trail of thin cloud.
I am glad to have your company, Alice said.
And I am glad to have yours, answered the Moon.
You are entire, Alice said with a trace of envy.
It was ever thus, answered the Moon glumly.
But you wax and wane.
Yes, wax and wane and wax and wane ad infinitum. Nothing changes.
But everything changes, depending on whether you are only a thin curl in the sky or
a great luminous ball.
Changes for you, maybe, but I remain the same, a monocle staring down while the
sun comes and goes.
But the sun doesn’t move, you do.
Whatever, said the Moon. You go around the sun and I follow along like a dog on
a leash. Without you and the sun, I am a paltry gray rock.
It is a terrible case of codependence.
You have very low self-esteem, Alice said. Everyone here thinks the world of you;
you are always mentioned in poems and songs.
I know. It makes me cringe with shame. Moon this moon that, lovers and
moonlight, nocturnes and sonnets. It’s a total cliché. Stick an r in and you get
moron.
Alice stood up, casting a long black shadow.
Look how tall I am!
I will never be tall, answered the Moon, and disappeared behind a heavy cloud,
erasing Alice’s shadow and sending her back into the total dark.
An owl hoo hooed from a distant tree.
Alice felt afraid.
What’s it to you if I live in a pit?
What’s it to you if I cry?
What does it matter if I never get fatter?
What’s it to you if I die?
What’s it to you if I fall in a ditch?
What’s it to you if I’m sad?
What does it matter if I never get rich?
What do you care if I’m mad?
This ditty seemed to come from nowhere.
What do you care if I’m far off or near?
What’s it to you if I’m weary?
Does it matter at all if I’m caught in a trap?
If I’m a lunar moth or a fairy?
Alice spun around and fell down.
I do care! She cried, I do!
Is that true? You do?
Yes, tell me where you are.
I am here in your ear.
In my ear?
She touched her left ear.
Ow! Ow!
Sorry, Alice said. What are you?
What do you care if I’m a flea or a gnat?
Or a very small, excellent spider?
I am not a mouse or a rat
and I don’t know what rhymes with spider.
That is called an exact rhyme, Alice said.
Is it now? How?
Because you used the same word twice: spider and spider.
Just then a bluish light, no bigger than a drop of water, flitted in front of her.
You’re a firefly! Alice exclaimed.
Firefly! Firefly! burning bright
In the forests of the night
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame my fearful symmetry.
You’re stealing from Blake.
It’s not a mistake.
I’m a terrible fake.
I’m jealous of his Tyger
always burning brighter.
All I do is come and go—
I’m all illusion, not much show.
You and the Moon seem to be equally dissatisfied. You should be glad to be such a
magical luminous creature. I have no natural light.
You have turbines, and ignitions galore,
I’m only an intermittent spark of allure.
I come on for an instant, neither bulb nor orb,
a mere flitting mite with a poor dim light.
As it sang, the firefly moved off into the distance.
Good-bye, I must fly!
Want to come?
Alice and I
make a fabulous twosome!
Alice wondered what the firefly might mean; was she meant to race after it? Already
it was only a blinking spot in the dark. But then, in a rush, she found herself beside
it, hovering.
O my, am I flying?
Flying thou art
in a fit and a start.
Come, come away
before the break of day.
Alice wondered if she was still Alice. No one will recognize me now, she thought. I
am one among many and we are all the same. Everywhere she turned, she saw
mirror images, pulsing in the dark just as the stars pulsed above. She realized she
knew nothing about the life cycle of a firefly and wished she had paid better
attention in biology. She had always wanted to fly, ever since Peter Pan, but this
somehow was different; she was stuck in another story the ending to which was not
knowable. I’d rather be reading than being a story, she thought.
Reading and being do not rhyme.
You’ll have to do better if we are to be on time.
Where are we going?
I hate not knowing.
Just follow after.
Let’s head for that rafter.
Directions are scarce,
our map is my trace.
Let’s wake up the swallow,
he can sing us a tune.
I’ll lead, and you follow—
late and soon.
I’m breathless and scared
and your rhyming is forced.
Now it is Wordsworth’s
The world is too much with us.
Little we see in nature that is ours.
But now, you see, we are one with its prowess.
It’s powers, not prowess! What is your name?
My name is the same as the wishing game.
Make a wish double fast!
I wish I were Alice, cried Alice.
Alice rhymes with palace!
What fun!
Better a palace
than a barn!
Everything that happens is a word.
That’s absurd!
Not if you’re heard!
A Peacock appeared then with radiant plumage. It cried its terrible cry and Alice
remembered I remembered the cry of the peacock.
Why do yo
u cry?
Because I am so beautiful.
I ravish sight with my azure eyes.
And we all weep together, a hoard of captives.
I am the palace and the prince.
I am the enchanted and the enchanter.
I am the end and the beginning of each day.
Then the sun came up then.
Alice was not sure if her wish had been granted, and if it had, by whom. She could
not see clearly in the early light whether she was still a winged bug or a girl. She felt
lonely and cold in the damp dew. Beside her, she saw a strange netlike thing
hovering in the grass. It looked, she thought, like a handkerchief dropped by an
angel, immaterial yet visible. Well, she thought, I am still thinking, so I must still be
Alice. The sun began to make the world sparkle around her. The handkerchief
glistened. She reached for it, and as she did, it vanished.
That night, Alice dreamed of cheese, proper names, an elevator, a sad child, and
mistakes. She had lost her address and, since no one was expecting her, she felt a
kind of delirious freedom at the same time as she felt totally alone. She dreamed
that she saw a man she knew, and he stared at her blankly.
She dreamed she was in a tall building that swayed in the wind.
What are you reading?
A poem.
Does it rhyme?
No.
How can you tell it’s a poem if it doesn’t rhyme?
For someone who listens in to the world’s conversation, you are massively ignorant.
No need to be insulting. Enlighten me.
Alice was silent.
So?
I’m thinking.
I know that. So far your thoughts are inscrutable.
It’s like love.
What is?
You know a poem is a poem the way you know love is love.
But love is more likely than not an illusion.
The feeling of love is not an illusion.
This is not a good enough explanation.
Poems don’t need explanations, Alice said, and added in her sternest, most grown-up
voice,
and if I remember, you are the one who told me not to be empirical, and now you are
asking me to explain something that is not within the bounds of explanation. Poems
are examples of themselves.
As in, I know it when I see it? Without an objective criterion, you sink into mere
opinion.
It has to do with how words vibrate through more than one sense, more than one
moment. Alice wished the Voice would leave her be.
Read to me.
Alice read.
Do you have a name? Alice asked one day as she was walking toward the river.
Yes.
What is it?
I was christened Goggle, but most people call me Gog, I think because I seem to be
the same coming or going. I’m not really capable of making distinctions and I am
without a direction.
Then you aren’t human.
I thought I had made that clear. How many invisible humans do you know?
Many, but most of them are in books. Your name, for example, is in a book by
Samuel Beckett.
He took it from an earlier source, the Book of Revelation. Here it is direct from my
favorite source, which, by the way, I invented:
In the biblical Book of Revelation, a power ruled by Satan will manifest itself
immediately before the end of the world. In the biblical passage and in other
apocalyptic literature, Gog is joined by a second hostile force, Magog; but in the
books of Genesis and Ezekiel, Magog is apparently the place of Gog’s origin.
Are you evil? Alice asked. The question itself made her heart race.
Evil is as evil does. It is an interpretation, not a condition. It isn’t innate.
But what exactly are you?
I got caught in the crosshairs of brain and technology. It was a crisis, or crux.
So I am neither one nor the other. That’s the reason I wouldn’t know a poem if I fell
on one. Just then, the Voice stubbed its tongue on something.
Damn! said the Voice, it’s the Weather!
The wind picked up, blowing a few last leaves across the ground.
Alice wondered if, when she is old, she will be wise.
Is wisdom something that comes naturally, along with gray hair and wrinkles? Is
that old woman sitting on her porch wise? Wise rhymes with eyes, so perhaps
wisdom is a way of seeing especially clearly, like a clairvoyant. Madame Sosostris is
known to be the wisest woman in Europe. What a silly name for a wise person, Alice
thinks, not
like Athena, which sounds wise. Athens must be named for her, but a city cannot be
wise. Madame Sosostris is reading cards and she says:
I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.
This sends chills through Alice’s soul.
Who is the Hanged Man?
Alice saw in her mind’s eye a man, with dark eyes and hair, and another, in a mask,
placing a kind of scarf around the dark man’s neck. Then the masked man takes a
great thick rope and places it around the dark man’s neck. The rope turns into heavy
coils. The dark man looks complex: resigned, intelligent, amused, hidden, cruel.
The Moon was in eclipse. A shadow passed across its face. The Cat was looking out on the snow seeing something Alice could not see, even if the Moon came out from behind the shadow. Someone phoned and left a message. Alice thought about the idea of an answering machine. It seemed an odd idea. A machine would always say the same thing, no matter what question it was asked.
Are you there?
Are you there?
Are you there?
The you of the question was not the what of the machine.
The place of human action, Alice thought, has moved off and left behind only actors
wandering among broken, leftover sets. The Moon, in shadow, was part of a set.
The tracks in the snow, the greenish sky, the single star: sets. Someone
would come out before long to sing a song of longing. What, Alice wondered, is love
among machines?
Sappy, the Voice said, and dated. Get real.
There was a silence that filled with ambient sounds.
At last, Alice exclaimed,
I know what you are!
O?
Yes, you are a by-product.
A what?
By-product, a sort of leftover from other processes that left you, like ash after fire, or
slag after the copper has been removed.
I don’t think I like that idea, it sounds even less attractive than recycled.
It is. You have no further use. You’re an end in yourself.
Another silence.
Watch out, said the Voice, you are in danger of thinking us both out of existence.
When Alice woke up it was still snowing, a fine, salty snow that moved like a veil in
the wind. For some reason, she began to weep, and her tears turned first quickly to
icicles that then as quickly melted, leaving almost invisible tracks. It was impossible
to tell the time, since the light was almost uniformly a gauzy pale gray in which the
darker trunks and branches of trees seemed to be suspended. But for a cardinal that
tore a fresh wound through the air, and a few dark hairy hemlocks, color seemed
also to be almost gone. But none of these things had anything to do with Alice’s
tears, which seemed to have come from a far-off source, so remote and unknown that
they felt like those of a strange
r. Perhaps these are not tears at all, she thought, but
only the melting snow. But her eyes kept flooding from within, and the tears kept
breaking over their lids like spill over a dam. She wondered if she were crying
because of something in a dream. She could not remember her dream.
In the smudged air something stirred.
What ails?
I cannot say. It is as if before.
Yes, as often. Mine, also.
Before?
Aye, another time, when there were violets.
There are violets now.
These sang among rocks.
Singing violets?
They belonged to the winged.
Winged violets that sang?
Spoke also as they lay down along the path.
The path to where?
It was not to anywhere, it was from everywhere.
O.
Aye, a sort of O, an ambit.