Witz

by Joshua Cohen

  The heifer, it’s a relation don’t ask me what or which to the heifer that’d led me back home to the cedars of Joysey—we’re two of kind, we are, me and her or it, beast and mensch, each of us becoming imbued’s what I’m saying with the soul of the other: with mine, it talks to itself, prays to be relieved of its burden, which is me, prays to be burdened with relief; and with its, what’s new, I’m humiliated, feeling such a bovine bloating inside, a new tonguing out from within, the snub of an animal silence; how in the beginning, we become exchanged, then merged, and eventually one, then ride on. On heiferback, and then with the heifer on my back and me hoofing us on with it horning me hard—I’m bucking, I’m buckling, getting tired, and so, changing again—we’re refugeeing deep into Polandland, toward the brute, campless edge and its Continentally, civilizationally middling fade into what once’d been Asia or so: to ride out the neglected quarters, unto fifths, the eighths, the eighteenths, and further into emptiness divided only by steps, a hoof-length, a cloveclop; to make our time to lose past huts woodthatched, past loose coops and cribs and pens and hutches, haybale bolus caravanical things left wheelrobbed by the roadside…mudward abandonments of corroded concrete lacking cement, and so falling all over themselves as if in clumsy apology for their very existence, alongside reactor collapses that irradiate green like, how to explain, leaky beehives of metal; through every forest and past every tree ever enchanting this Fleedom (like rooted corpses themselves—they’ll never leave, just lean and lave bare), we’re haunting the haunts, ghosting the geist, only keeping my self, and I mean my animalself, alive on the wet I might suck foul from the tail of my ride. As for it, why worry I think. Arrive at a village, a town, whatever its charter, its barren, sharding itself back together with any localized unguent recently prized: witchbrew of arsenic with honey, sap, and a pinch of spit, mortarsalves of bearfat, cowblood, gevalt, the blood of a blackcock and that of a strungcat, too, lime perfume/the linden bloom the spell, accompanied by a sprinkling of raw eggyolks and pulverized cloves…inspired, I claim I’m a rabbi, often a miracleworker, an itinerant preacher, sometimes, while at others I’m the heifer’s father, or sister, a heifer’s heifer myself—but all of these towns, these dorfs and khuters and shtetls of shtum they’re so over, so burnedup, clearedout, burnt and cleared in every direction depending on wind, that my claims the heifer hooves down into the snow in no language, in scarsymbols, piss sinks, and dungdrops, aren’t their lie for the effort, any favor obtained. Trampledover, then salted with rue to you, vulnerary vervain, and a drachm of oil of wormwood. A night in the poor-house, the almshome, a synagoguepew. I tie my ride up, or it ties up me—stay a while, won’t you; to exhaust its patience loopedround the end of my tether, then to take what I take, untie the ride or be untied by, to hitch its rein to my lower horn, which is my putz I mean and its manifold shed, I mount and we’re off again where, the heifer only allowing me to ride backward now, facing tush, wasteful past. If I try to face front I get thrown, my skin goes fored off, stripped away. And so when riding in hindsight, I pass—by enumerating the heifer’s droppings, for lengths untold, length, I’m telling you, long: three turds a day, hard little heads, eighteen turds, explosive shells they seem, six days’ the timers’ worth until, suddenly…we just stop.

  The Market of Spinoza Street

  At a river, a moat, which used to be, everything was, had been or did, I don’t know—and then, there’s a settlement further, a mere slip over the water, halffrozen.

  It’s the water, though, or the freeze of it, its icelife, its slushy rush as the two of them can never again become separated: the water flowing from the water stilled…no matter its state, the water’s it: the model, in that it’s everyone’s and yet it’s no one’s, too, and how the heifer—it refuses to ford. We stand at the edge of the slick, as it leans us over to lick, slaking its thirst, a quick lapping melt. O to have a tongue, even if leatherette. At its first lick, however, the burden of its bend, it drops, flattens, luxuriously redrugged, shagged…I should’ve kept it to sell or trade: its limbs splayed out in every direction north, east, flat, dead. I dismount by standing up on its carcass, walk around my moribund ride. And the river. How you cross is you have to wait for the sign—there’s nothing mystical about it, however: the sign’s petrified driftwood, or metal. It floats through the moat, floats around and around the moat, on a slow slog with the current. I wait and it comes. It comes fluming past icefloes, its edges shearing off hunks, here it is swirling and knocking and turning around. When it finally nears, is directly across, I step down, it’s only one step to the slab: not tempting to test but a plunge, then to spring up from my fare, passing quickly…thinking, it’s impossible to know depth without falling—how I won’t make that mistake ever again (falling and falling and).

  Interpretobold Symbolizetti Allegoriovitch Mystificinski, makes no sense…here’s strange! Estranging! By your leave, comrade citizen, with your consent:

  On the other side, this village, this town, if it’s even anything of only one street. What’s it called? What’s its name? I forget, didn’t have the time to notice while stepping down on what’s said. That sign, floating around and around the moat, over and under its weak skinflint freeze—if you’ll just wait by the banks, for a moment, you’ll glimpse it…it’ll come around again and again, have patience, have faith. Everything occurs twice, to begin with, to bore: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce; the third time as the third time, then the hundredth as the hundredth, unlessoned, unlearned. A sign in that many languages, related and not: Spinoza Straße, Spinoza Prospekt, Spinoza Ulice, Spinoza Gatve, Str. Spinoza, Vul. Spinoza, , Spinoza Street…streeting around the town let’s call it entire of only one street, and so it’s no town at all, and yet neither a village, only a poor lick of rubble rimming the hoar of the moat—and so it’s an island, if an island singly streeted with a street that both borders it and is it, too, you with me, a street that in turn islands the island; enough that it’s another refuge of sorts, if more forlorn than any before. And less an island, it seems once you’re on it and of it, than a pock of the earth, more like a pox, the scar of a wound from within, from without, bandaged by a moat so small in hindsight, and so shallow especially when frozen and holding or not, that I could’ve stepped across its surface, its depth, in only one step, singly strided. Forgetting the sign, the bobbing slat of its bridge. Onto this street narrowingly small in width if endless in length, in its loop, apparently infinite in its hellaciously circling circle. A street laden with the miscellaneously malevolent detritus that comes with the keeping of openair files: with papers of leave and conscription, with torn passports, the shred of visas to countries no longer bordered, receipts for burials, the crumple of death certificates, and crinkled, inksoaked m.a.n.i.f.e.s.t.o.s., sectarian statements of divergent platforms and parties, their transcripts of speeches and personnel report files, cadre profiles intermixed with assorted briefs on party discipline, calendar reform, and name standardization, stacks of cash worth nothing of late, bribes to (codename) Eurous the easterly wind; tarnished badges and medals, commendations, citations and trophies, epaulets, lapels missing pins, ribbons ripped, and tattered robes of the law, discarded after having been used as wrappers, too, for food, for milk and cheese and as swaddling clothes, blown along with the refuse of drinks, plastic and tinned, cans of pilsen beer, wineskins, vodka flasks and jugs drained of who’s selling; raffletickets irredeemable, and snowwhite, pupilless eyeballs numbered in an approximation of lotto—a squareless street lined with unmarked, drearily festooned stalls, one impossible to differentiate from another, a uniform gray-wood or other cheap synthetic substance as a matter of coarse, lined down the street more like around the street, and then around the street again around the rivering ice of the moat, its submerged then surfacing sign, then around again and again forever and ever, a fixedly infinite eternal return of the now, its street its mode and its trashy stalls its attributes (if only in the founding philosophical system—which no longer preva
ils), all one and the same of its Substance, which is indivisible and, also, monstrously gray. All the stalls are made of this vagary, of this allied alloy…I’m just passing it on: that the stalls have been created of coin, of planchet, of flan, are themselves—eventually, with the weather—total coin and as such, apparently, totally changeless: this dull gunmetal nondenominational mix, a circulation without breed as unsunderable, indivisble…impossible for its elements to be molten separate ever again; that weather judging down all through the day and night to mint the stalls’ rooftops and reeded sides in the image of rain, of snow, and the composite between them, to a resounding clinking and clatter of no tender issue, overpowering of every imaginable thought, so destructive.

  Strange, too, to notice that no matter the smallness of the street, by which I mean how narrow it is as such circle or cycles are as long as our lives, that I can never find the same stall on it twice, ever again and despite following such directions as I beg openmouthed, despite counting my fingers to numbers I’m deluded to mean: and maybe because there are no wares on display in the stalls (everything, and I do mean everything, is kept under the counter, and one should be hesitant to ask, I’ve been asked), how there’re no signs to the stalls, no numbers either except those imposed by memory in its imperfect ars mathematica…the higher geometry of borderless politics, the containment of illimitable will within mundane circumference, the daily and done—no coordinates save those supplied by the worst and, presently, only philosophy left us, which is that of hope…in that, I’m an expert. And then advice, too, which is the only thing in this market given for free, and in a quantity scarily excessive: actually advice, directions, counseling’s comfort, though all with the aim to a profit of any sort to be made down the line, the length of which is infinite, mortality depending. Along the way the long way around, only the forgotten are to be met—not as much met as to be unforgotten, in advice, in directions, in their comforting counsel: the windword, the snuff or guttering pass, offered to me as to all in hushes, shushes, incomprehensible whispers; such menschs or goys who knows who they are if and when they even don’t, who can care, they prole around, go ghostly a float down the street and so around the moated float of that one uninterpretable sign: Spinoza, who’s he, what’s he got to do with assimilation, with the secularism that’s only adaptation, an evolution toward any new reality, with our governance remade…the intersection of individual life with that of the State, the interstices of mensch and God, and the meaning of what that God is exactly, if not merely the subtotal of us: me, you, Refugee, A refugee, This refugee, viz. I recognize me-in-you, I recognize me-as-you, I recognize only us in proposition and lemma…starvedhollow in tears of scraprags, unshaven into these greatgut beards, this imperious hair atop, too, and those old philosopher eyes—empty, sockets: as if the wicks of candles blown out in their own industrygusts, only smoke; their mouths null islands themselves as they’re opened advising, they’re making their trades, their marking remarx…

  This is the Market of Spinoza Street, I’m only guessing…and every day’s Market Day in this sewerside moneyslough, this guttersniping remnant of any vanity’s fair. Upon closer inspection—a breakingaway, a crack in the systems—the street below’s paved with gold, which as it’s abundant is worthless, no good here, take it elsewhere. No new business, no today’s concern (only the wind and its witching flies by what passes for night, which is the same as the day if you’re hungry and thirsty and selling), this is a market of ancient standing, still held to only the most paradisiacal of principles: it’s operated & owned by everybody, which is the same as by nobody, really, if more comforting why, and everyone has the opportunity to purchase everything here, to exchange for everything’s what, trading even each other, even themselves—that’s right, step right up: just decide on a price, whether a trade in kith or in kind, a bargainy cutrated, cut your throat deal, whatever you think of as honest, whatever you think of yourself, whoever you are; all’s fair in vanity, every price has its thing. All these refugees forgotten crawled out of the craterous void, clawed straight out of the jaws of cavernous incoherence, theirs, history’s, no one’s—the island apprehended as if a mouth disembodied: these losers, their names at least, their words, flocking here in a great herding of regret left behind (among their losses, bashful sheep, too sheepish to cross; they wait for their shepherds at the sheer edge of the moat—not desperate enough to dare passage, to enter you have to lose everything), here with the idea of redeeming themselves…realizing I’ve heard, actualizing, too, whatever the term, I’ve been told: in new work, new identity, in new family and so, newer hopes, to sell their souls at the going rate gone, dark-marketed to the loss of supply, the malicious gain of demand; though some prefer renting their souls before buying them outright, others lease out only those names theirs and others’, their dates or occupations, on a plan requiring installments lowly a talent or so less than usurious: you might be interested yourself, only if. Isn’t it time for a change? A revolt? This Market’s open all day every day, weekends and holidays and even the Sabbath included. Actually, it itself is every day and all holidays and all Shabboses, Shabbos—all days indeed and their nights, too, you get the idea: the substantive world centrifugalized to its barest essentials, boileddown in the vat of a centripetal hell frozenover. Might as well abandon abandonment, in with the rest: you have to go through to get out to get in…

  Welcome, brother comrade, this I think a goy says as he shuffles toward me: thrush’s egg eyes, strawhair, straw coming also out from his shirtsleeves, bulging from the waist and legs of his pants—my name’s…today, I’m not sure; an escapee much like yourself.

  He frowns when I don’t say what.

  Here, give me a moment, and he goes to search through his pockets, their flax, to find finally a wipe of newsprint, a whimper of magazinestock.

  He holds it up to his eyes, reads aloud.

  Boris Borisovich Bourgeois, that’s the name…but you can call me Bobo if you have to.

  And me, what can I say?

  Or Bibi, B.B. or B., up to you…and then, silence, interrupted only by his perk at the wind: interesting that you should ask that question…if you’ll only follow me, and he leads on with confidence, that’s what he thinks I think but I follow—the conviction only to be found when dealing with the negligible, the middling, the though we’re all equal essentially unimportant…leads me as if to the one stall he knows how to find.

  This Kapo, he says as we go, he asked me was I dead yet, and so don’t doubt I answer him sure, whatever you want.

  I’m no, how do they say—putz.

  I fled for moons, you with me—until I come to this moat.

  I’d always known about this place, that’s how it feels…but myth’s what I thought, collusion or women’s gossip, impertinence, superstition, a nightmare in which I’m trying to dream. I know how it goes, it’s a merging like water, how all the systems or even, I dunno, dialectics opposed, they eventually flow themselves into one. And so I crossedover, no regrets. I’ve been here ever since, trying out this Bourgeois thing month to month. As far as identities go, it’s as good as any. Tells me how to live. What’s expected, what’s to expect. We pay with our lives for this life, so we’re told. I’m enlightened now, illuminated like you wouldn’t believe. I know what I’m worth. Exploitation of value as a generational thing, forget it. Inheritance has been gotten rid of, maybe for us, maybe by us; we’re remaking ourselves from the ground up, rib by rib, and all of them iron. I’ve lost my chains, my mind withered away with them—I’m crazy united.

  By the way, love your horns.

  Here’s what I’m thinking: get involved with the masses, go under—you’ll end up discovering yourself. Among others, as others, who not. You’ll be told who you are, who you want to be, all you need. If it doesn’t work out, refunds are refunds—they’re always for sale…as are sales. Call it a revolution, or not, call it whatever you want. We’re trying to figure out what works next. Think about it and get back to m
e. I’m changing my life, but I’m open.

  The explanations seem simple enough, though classless and Forbiddingly capitalized…Spinoza Street’s an infinite street, not that it stretches forever, no, I’m pacing it and myself with these thoughts, stretching afternoons long on metaphysical wander that still call for feet and cold toes: simply, it’s a ring, a street that serpentinely swallows itself, without crossstreet or throughway, and a moat that keeps it an island with its safeguarding freeze. And, as it’s said, if you end up staying here long enough, schnorring what’s necessary to afford your identity, maybe you sell some things of your own to afford yourself others’, the ring ends up seeming so wide, though its width’s strangely as if honestly narrow, that the street seems almost totally straight. Easy, should be. How straight does it seem? Give it up. And of course, the only presence of Spinoza Street is its infamous Market, fairied and storied as the convergence of all cyclical systems: legendarily, how there are no homes here, no schools, neither synagogues, hospitals, cemeteries, nor God forbid churches, just shops, only, stores, really stalls, unremarkable, with the effect that everyone sleeps out in the open, out on the street, in the Market, as the Market, though even then, at night, through its gusts emptying of pocket and heart, and suffused with trashflight, with whirlwinded discard—with a sky entirely dark except for the rise of a lovelost, in the red moon—the Market surely stays open. Forever. But as for the bell hollowly rung time and again, who knows how it’s kept: it signals nothing, is only a bell, merely tolling. Just as advice is the only thing that’s free in this Bourse, the bell’s the only thing that’s not, if that makes any sense…not for sale, not for rental, no money down—though Whose it is, no one knows, even guesses.