by Joshua Cohen
Try the veal!
…
the fivethirty show’s exactly the same as the threethirty show—and thanks folks, I’ll be here all week…
Nu, that’s what he thinks.
As feedback echoes, feeds back on itself the sound cud, swells in the mouth to air raid proportions, but it’s maybe a drill, let’s hope, or a close relative screaming Name somewhere near—as the crowd alarmed, is made fidgety, restless…a buzz that is its own sting, inspiring of shock, the instinctive Amen that surprises: people whispering to each other, jawing that it’s finally, about time—unannounced, from the leftwing stageright, the cantor comes forward, arrayed in an illfitting white kittel.
Houselights of the world to dim, out; the candles guttering brighter.
They don’t know to sit or stand: there’s a great creaking, an opening of books, a mass cracking of covers, a slitting of page with the forefingernail, honey on the pagetips to encourage as the rabbi intones off the script, introduces himself, yet again; it’s a foreign language, yet another tongue’s trouble: it’s a responsorial without a response, or actually anything to respond to…how’s everybody doing tonight? we’d like to thank you all so much for coming.
Blessed Art.
A buzz at its height, as if a hive dangled down from the roof of the night: people whispering, shouting, screaming final warnings, advice; addresses overseas to be memorized, 36,000 12-Millionth Street, Apartment 3B and ring twice; times and dates…the corner of Broadway & Innocence, 1952, 6 pm; lashon hara…it seems here, the pages are different: some have books with oddnumbered pages, others just even; some of the books only have numbers: digits—and dashes; other books have photographs in them, are only photos, images black & white, and uncaptioned, or the pages, whatever they have or say or show, don’t correspond to whatever it is the rabbi or is he the cantor, the chazzan, I forget, he does, too, announces twotongued, in every translation known to this side of the ocean: page 296, two-nine-six, page number twohundred-and-ninetysix, in the white book, you can do your own conversion for the blue.
Old menschs up front flip through their books, shaking heads, muttering Substance at all the blank pages: what should be, what should’ve been, they fill it in with the lip’s drip, the tongue’s ink. Nearest the ark, the oldest menschs standing and swaying throughout as if letters themselves, though letters still in flux, still being developed, not yet bound to fixed form. O the aleph reach, the bet bend, the gimel footforward, as if symbols with bad joints, with stiff cuffs, one leg shorter than fractured heels down below; while up top, roofing: their necks twisted to cripple, though as beautiful then still ruled permissible, kosher. Their books held out as if their own ornaments, as if crowns, tags, and kotz, they’re just black covers, no pages at all. And as for how they’re pronounced, they’re stilted, not inept but unpracticed, hinged klutzy with rust, as if requiring miracle oil, rededication to the task of innermost knowledge…as if asking themselves, who knows their own name? how to say the self ’s secret, pronounceable only if known? Argumentative, they give way to grumbling, learned grumbling, studiously insistent nodding as if their very own lettered bodies in their movements and shapes would, too, give movement and shape to their sounds: arms flowing out into fingery vowels. In the back, where voices still carry, kinder play in the aisles, odd games of lots; the sacred idiot drools into the mouth of the drunk.
Late, they arrive, finally do us the honor of showing up, about time. Survivors, us all—you’re cordially invited to join together with the congregation in this staring at them down the aisle a murmur, through the mess of mismatched to their seats. Reserved. They arrive, can you blame them, as if they didn’t show up the show wouldn’t have started without them; we wait, as they fill in the last remaining seats, except one. Reserved still. One seat’s always left empty, always reserved, still remains: the empty seat and door open a draft are not quite contingencies, but gestures.
And so we might wait for an apology, but who’s listening, no one: everyone catching up, breath, asking after, brides, cousins, do you know whatever happened to her; ordnance outside, or is it just in my head; explosions, shaking the shul deeper into its foundations: every house is built upon its own grave, as if a pit for a brother, at home in a hole pitched seven years’ deep: at least it’s the earth, and as such, livable, knowable—as who can sleep in the sky, who can lie down in the air and be comfortable there? The clarinetist bends a note, and Heaven bends, brass, night’s rainbow of one widened band: darkness, the void, O the Covenant Who forgot.
Air’s typhus, from the Hellenist typhos, an impure word we’ve been infected with, fatal: meaning smoky, a blemishing haze. All around, puddles of lands-men wait to take their place, their places, ours, as brainfog, impenetrable cloud whose controlling deities are also charged with scalping and illegal recording. The first one inside and the last one inside sit next to each other, atop one another, share between them a book, but there aren’t enough books, never are. Ben Someone or Other’s summoned up to the almemar, the bima an island at middle he bridges across on the backs of his fathers; he throws up his tallis, is hugged, kissed, returned, hugged, kissed, then seated again, bound to his chair with tefillin. Outside faces press up against glass, crucified by the mullions, they’re stretched across shards, eventually shattering, each other, themselves; window glass that’s been silvered over, why not, the better to straighten yourself for what’s to come—and so, mirrors in which the waiting arrange hairs, under collars tuck ties, breathe against the panes to know they’re alive.
A sphere makes its way around a sphere, is made.
There’ll be no east one of these tomorrows, there’ll be no rising—an unleavened morning for the wrong New Year.
And the assembled, settle.
Night. Of what colors were left, half were bleached into the moon and stars, deloused into white, an assimilation to air, high and rare above smoke; the other half, though…the afternoon’s sky: only a sleeve salvaged of a coat of many colors come bleeding through the wash outside; hues ripped from rays of the sun, snapped harpstrings the strands of a rainbow—forgotten. Now dark, which nights everything passing through it, none left untainted: a black beyond black, benighting, not so much the color of death as already an aftermath, a survival, what survives dream; black, the last color: the hair of sleeping girls, sent away to work off their breasts and hips, indentured abroad only to exhaust their own fate; the effects of an infinite yellowing: passport pictures curling at corners from fires never extinguished, Never Forget!—a night of the ninth plague, not yet; a night like whole hunks of blackbread in the mouth, soon…a night by the night: its blackness bound by stars without number and nameless, a wall then the river around it of their drained radiations: greater dawn’s strain to make it through its own pricks and dings that, in truth, are the stars, dimmed.
As our rabbi, a firstborn though he doesn’t like to brag much, beadles the floorboards by the pulpit—the tenth plague readies, is kept readied in the wings: the ninth plague sets the stage for the tenth, the arch for its entrance; though the ninth plague’s also the tenth plague’s commandment, then the eleventh’s, the twelfth; how the ninth plague is, ultimately, no plague in itself but rather the condition of all plague: its blackness appropriate, the colluding, concealing dark without morning to bear witness, clear air. And, as this is the very beginning of this last night to plague and be plagued without end, this, too, is the beginning of the very last Sabbath of all time, if not just of their lives; tell me, though, how those aren’t the same, two-of-a-kind? A Shabbos eternal we’re welcoming eternally—as any sun that should ever set again would only ensure a day of rest whose holiness must blush in comparison with the sacrifice of this one, of ours, and so desecrating in retrospect, a defilement made all the graver thanks to its very posthumity. And so, a time for rest now, this day of rest now, such rationed rest that’ll last as long as light will be remembered. An idle worship, given to graven imaginings. Because, with regard to that memory, there’
s not much of it left—but still, there’s hope…to be hoped for.
Above the sill of the world, a pair of diamonds suspended. The moon and its stars, and the diamonds, too, are the impurities in the night, of the night, impurifying as those diamonds they’re only poetry, art; casements flecked with white paint, rubbled with plaster chips, remains of parget…these lights—no candles or candlesticks, which have been sacrificed to the rubble, melted down with their wicks wicked away, wisped into smoke with the upward ambition of flame—hover; what’s left is only their purpose: a question…does the light float in darkness? or the darkness around light?
No weather and the roof is maybe, hymn, missing, skullcaps blow off, blown around; there’s no refuge. Whether the roof was bombed through or, perhaps, has been landed on one too many times by messenger storks resting on which season’s way out…or, in another interpretation: there is, indeed, a roof, and from there’s where it’s raining, then snow.
Skypages blow from books that have pages, loose pages blown, wet paper mushed, pulped, wildly flung about and grasped at, stolen and promise to tell no one, they’re killed for; rain to snow, clumps of snow as if stillborn moons, this sleet and hail, this fiery hail, retributive fallings, a weather testamentary, Creation first testing its power: what can my sky do? is what God should be asking…though ignoring that voice, they jump out of their own voices and stoop to grab at skin now, piecing through the pages, this vellum taken in vain, binding themselves back together without a sense for order, with spit dripped from the seams of a beast remade, with weather into the shape of a cloud dispelled: to stoop and shirk from any mumble, that would avail a response to the mumbling of the rabbi who’d begun his own not in prayer but dismay—at their willingness to follow fate, but not his called command. From what illiterate womb is such disorder born? This reading of prayers they’ve read or should’ve read or had read to them lifetimes before, and yet prayers they’ve never, not even once, understood; the ignorance of a tongue redeemed…as they’ve never listened, heard, attended with still and silence. If reading for us is only memory—daily repetition as a guide to the pilpul perplexing, undertaken with any acronym’s help, enlisting all manner of mnemonic wonder and signs—then the following mysticism might preempt, be permitted: In the beginning was the Word, that word was all words, the book, any book, in which each letter falling into the arms of its mother is in itself the word whole—the Shibboleth, the Passwoyd, the Name of God, no one knows. The recitation of a spare set of teeth. While praying, no one knows what they’re saying not because no one knows the language of prayer, but because no one knows themselves, and so they pray: they dress themselves and shave and stoop and bow only in order to hope anew—only to ask for a tomorrow for which they might be dressed, be shorn, stooped and bowed, in which to pray again.
For an end to all this, to all time.
Tonight, though, they’ll be gone, with only their refuse, their lost and never to be found again articles to acknowledge existence, forgetting’s relics already enshrined, cataloged as just so much charity within a book glassed on display, not for use (a ledger, the list)—only to be replaced next week, same moon’s time, by a new shipment, a congregation bound in a box. The shul’s an enormous phylactery; the shul’s swollen like a stomach full and starved. No oneg shall follow, no Kiddush luncheon will save with its sponsor.
Slowly, with the pressures of privation, the weather, they remember, a response or else the responded to, same difference, especially if delivered in the hooked nosespeak of their father’s father’s father; respecting the variations, there are so many on so few—how many letters can an alphabet finally hold before it becomes a language unto itself, and so mysticism, tamei is the code, which is forbidden as bilbul, nonsense not proscribed but worthless, a waste save in how it preserves the minds and lives of those whom we’d otherwise lose to a God Who can be imaged as us—amid the shadow, embarrassment, failure; such intimacies, become parables and are foreseen to have become parables; everything’s known in advance, subsequently incorporated into the liturgy, written into the script in a fire that then destroys the script, ashes to ashes, prophecy received by the dead. All of this happened, and only then was cued—in this house, under the sky, this outstretched armband arching our world, as if a banner shaming the scroll unrolled in representation of the afterlife we’d once been promised, or so we claim in our beseeching of the only power who might grant us such succor: our kinder, who by now have all emigrated, or burnt. At the almemar, the gabbai oldtimers, the altes, the priests and the pillars, they’re still fingering what, cantillation, their arms flapping in approval disapproval all the same this way then that, the dim forms of the nusach for morning—then the roll sign, hands tumbling down a hill; business ensues; many blessings!
As the show ends, the service is what they say now, Ma’ariv it’s usually transliterated as, the rabbi exits stageright, the cantor the chazzan stageleft, Amen, they return along with the entire supporting cast to receive flowers under the proscenium arch, holding aside the petals and those of the ark’s curtain and gushing red, davening still duchening even and everything intensely meant and from the waist and kissing air then waving; the velveteen falls and rises, another round of applause, the velveteen falling, then rising again, a third and final round its applause scattered, Diasporated how they’re just standing around now they’re waving goodbye, then the velveteen falling again this time the last, the house lights go up for a finale as exit music swells from their mouths, zmirot: the players exit stage everywhere, wash, dress, and shave to shuckle through the stagedoor to the street, its grabbing hordes and their faithful hounds…down Prinz, sit.
The Rosenkrantzes and the Singer family rise and Misses Rosenkrantz searches around her seat if she’s dropped or left anything behind, and she hasn’t so she waddles out the row to the aisle to meet her husband who’s halfway already to the arch shining exit, quickly, her fat wobbles; as she reaches Rosenkrantz, there’s lightning, thunder, the house lights go out. A son, the ben Anybody to be made barmitzvah tomorrow if only, he emerges holding a long, thick, threewicked taper, thricebraided then those braids braided, its unified flame illuminating a knot that can only be undone through its melting; wax dribbles, scorches the hand. All stumble toward the arch out, step on each other, essentially trample one another, but politely, exceedingly viciously kind—a friendship’s tumult, unreal, as if faked; how the shul’s shrunk, it’s behind them now, and now the arch seems further, seems larger—as the shul backdrop’s withdrawn into the greater wings; an earthen set, perhaps, or a stage deserted, without fictive ornament or division, barren as if brokendown for the kindling—the deepest pit to be found through a hidden trapdoor…and the group, they find themselves in a field, empty—a nowhere. A sudden abandonment, but with the arch still ahead, and them standing facing.
A lone arch, standing free, with nothing on either side or above them; an arch, which enters and exits onto nothing, Niemandsland never fulfilled. Though it only appears to them far and large, huge from here, it’s a low arch, its opening’s small: to enter, they’ll have to suck and stoop, must become humbled, be made modest again; they usher themselves still in seating order, roughly, elbowing, pushing, it’s madness, keep forward. It’s suddenly hot (it’d been winter): hell if they believe in it should be this hot, that’s how, though they don’t believe, they’re living it here and now, shanking, shouldering, angrily pleasant—and not hot exactly but fevered, a delirium through which they’re wandering, exhausted, heads shvitzing, and pits…sucking under their tongues: a bottle’s cloth teat; a railway ticket used once but unpunched; an edge of ex libris marked with a temperature number.
An arch, pushed up, it stands atop a mound, a hill, a high mountain—the pressure of the arch, the pull and push the very source of its support, and how a force is pulling and pushing them, too: Singer struggling up against his attacking heart, what’s called a preexisting condition; the Feigenbaums, the Rosenkrantzs, Singers, and Tannenbaums, stepping
intrados to extrados and all that pagan parsing, the watchwords of idols: the archivolt with its inscription we’re too distant from, too far to read, the soffit, it’s unreadable, also…the vaulted above with its ogive, as sharp as a knife, murderous, then toward the middle of the arch, the hole, the drop, machicolation’s the term, from where the oil or boilingwater would be poured upon any enemy advancing, invading; progress in its deathmarch, slowed as their feet are made shoes themselves through procedures of callus, brass tacks, and metal—and how that wound opens: widens to the dip of the moon that’s only the sweep of a spotlight’s escape, and everything wanders: they grovel before the steps that lead toward it, up, the winding aisles and pillowed stones; stepping high over these hazards, as some are path slates, while others are as snares and barbs, bombs and mines, and how you never know which unless you step, or until. Know this, though: that upon passage through the arch, there’s no mezuzah to forget without kiss—if ever we arrive, and with our mouths survived.
An arch: stones go up then stones go down. Without mortar, it’s pressure alone that holds this thing up.
Once upon a morning, someone would’ve pulled up the sun: an old hand long unionized amid the rigging and tugging, would’ve risen it to shine through the arch with a frayed pole that’d serve as a rope—the sun to be framed in the arch, its face revealed, appearing as if only to receive the glory of the horizon’s siegheiling; then, risen under its own momentum and higher, up to the middle of the sky without middle, millions if not more of an archaic measurement above—it’d fix, be held, sun of Joshua, without shadow, day waiting…
An arch, skysized, though they still must stoop to pass through, to pass over unto—an arch, the entrance to and exit from, with nothingness on either side…