by Joshua Cohen
People says it’s lawless, without governance, says this Boris Borisovich if that’s still his name the goy he’s still suspectedly talking, and it helps, of course, that I can’t talk back…but I say no, that it’s the culmination of all governance, of all society’s laws, every one—unified at last in a compromise, if you’re free, if your freedom’s amenable. Watereddown, I’m saying. Smelt into One. Either way, the individual doesn’t exist, whether as class or consumer; whether as a true believer impoverished in ideology, or as a cynic whose purpose to keep sane is to keep spending large. Take me for instance. I began as an amateur, a hobbyist, a weekend dabbler in a new doublelife. Traded in to be a professional, then traded up again to become an expert, an expert what, I forget, an expert nonetheless; I was regarded, you know, vetted, peerreviewed and respected, a mind—you don’t believe me? and he produces from his pockets again a forge of documents to prove (relevance, utility) their straw, then asks me to sign for something or other, don’t ask my ask, beseeches then begs me, with the promise of utmost respect for any identity I might manage to organize for myself, to deliver this sheaf of Xs he’s waving in my face to a woman who she’d find me, don’t worry.
Forget it, he’s gone.
And so, nu: old, gutyellow wart draped with a flag repurposed to kerchief what must be a skull, do you think, peeking inflamed and plumped pussy from a gray dress trimmed in arachnoids of widowed lace also gray; she takes the papers from me and tosses them, filing them in the air, a wind’s document, the contract of clouds, mottled white slabs to flit amid the Market stalls then fall, to wet themselves into pave: apparently, I’m hers now, thanks to my signing or having failed to sign a brief counter, not sure, with Bobo getting his percent, if Bourgeois’s his middle name or last, if Boris and regardless of true patronym, hymn, he’ll identify himself as the agent involved upon the unlikelihood of any return, wherever he went and as what, even if. She leads me to a stall (at the Market, any stall’s as appropriate for any transaction as another, as long as everything’s kept official, which is approved only by ignorance, amid the tacit flux of the shade), walking me a step behind her, then two, on allfours with a leash cut of her hem cinched tight to pain at my neck. No deal, however, can be sealed for all of unutterable perpetuity—eventually, every resolution dissolves…like the paint from the prices, the dye from the uniform flags, the official kerchiefs and scarves in every color of blood. Soon she tires, loses interest, turns me loose, with the reminder, though, that she still owns me until someone, if ever, might own another ante up. Gets a better idea or its backing. Keep near. Stick around. It’s that I don’t have the resources with which to redeem myself. It’s not that I’m totally insolvent, no—I still have my youth…it’s that I never seem to have enough of such assets to better her bid, and if you can’t compete it’s a shanda of sorts but you’re over, you’re done with, you’ll be bought and sold at the whim of any interest with anymore of nothing to lose: how anyone can just stuff you down into the deepest stuff of their hind and so hiddenmost pocket, there to snout around for lint, dust, keys, or sweets, to hunt and gather for an offer ever greater. One day, though, or so goes the local lashon hara, gossip sold from mouth to ring in the ear as true as a shekel is true, as true as a shekel is said to be true: one day, is how it goes, and lo may it be soon though he tarries, a mensch will arrive here with a few new ideas, a handful of new dreams, and, profanely important, the wherewithal to holy them real…the mind, the will, what not—how we won’t miser away moneyed time anymore on this or that investment shortterm, the opportunity to make good on turnarounds in shortorder, thinksmall, no; this mensch He’ll go all out, forever, redeem not only everyone here, but also, in so doing, the Market itself, the entire street and its stalls, repave, revamp, remake its take, reimage the whole: out of pocket, He’ll bet out of the box, then shove it all down into a suitcase, take us with Him to ever newer, evermore innocent worlds.
Waiting I turn my eyes to the sky, its pouch turned again, For everything is in it…airing its lining of air, our last and faulty containment; imperfect in that its blackness is holed through with stars.
Here, where they fall, there…the setting for all revolution, perpetually revolting against even itself: party of the first part I haven’t met in a moon; party of the second part’s never invited. We turn. Everything here’s exclusive to how abject anyone’s able to get, privileged to the extent of how pitiful anyone’s willing to afford. Turn again. We’re drinking too much, smoking whatever will flare. Debates rebut into night, which is morning. Utopian ideals getting yelled down into insult, namecalling, and accusation: you stole my spoonbone, We Hereby Resolve you slept with my wife…keep your clause off her, be still; arguments sobering over what mud we call coffee, the ersatz thaw of the river steeped tea in our dirt. Place your dues in a bag, place the bag in a cup, by the time we’re done meeting it’s melted. Religions are founded, abandoned. Degenerate into governments imposed, then elected, forsaken. Constitutions cried in the sand. I’m keeping silent, how not to, but they think I’m withholding. It feels like we’re all in a search, but for what…even after what we’ve survived, especially after what we’ve survived—we want to keep faith, need belief…
On one hand—there’s serious worth going around, changing minds changing hands, circulations up & down, side-to-side.
On the other hand—everything seems foolish if you think about it enough, practically speaking, and even in thought, too, it’s hurtful, every proposal an impasse, any pronouncement’s tongue a deadend.
We’re all living too real, not really at all.
Two hands, I can count them on one—never mine.
I’m thinking: the nerve of those who’d confuse purpose for self, chutzpah I’m saying, mixing ideology with mensch—those who’d confound us with anything that isn’t an Eden elective. How it’s only a Market if you buy into it; it’s only capital if you’re able to capitalize, it’s only communal if you’re willing to share—and I’m not, either or both.
I’ll live without system or governance, without authority or Law—even our own, whose only purpose has ever been to destroy me, to drain us of blood and wringout the necks of our pockets, leaving our corpse for the auction-block, the prisonblock, for the flames of the oven…I’ll live. I leave on my own, as my own, quitting this veinvend, the frenzied flowed lode of this arterial art, wandering out from the Street: not past the moneyedhalls and hagglestalls, not following the swallowing around and again and engorging, but leaving it altogether, making a right or left, refuting the straightly narrowed, the giving take of moat’s icy margin to water, shattering under my step down and dispersing, feet smashing through into nothing deeper than a shallowness underlying, disappointment, wet heels—to earth if not perfect then mutual, or equal…I’m thinking, nothing but free.
I’m on one hand.
As far as hands go, it’s humungous, haired around the knuckles each the size of a house, its wrist and forearm ascending up to the heavens, to Heaven, piercing the bulge of the clouds—then out the stratosphere, unto what.
Mind the shvitz of the palm…to keep from falling, have to hold on with my own.
A day’s wander from the Market and I’m here at the edge of the known undecided: making my way up and over boulders and elbowy, shouldery cliffs, stepping steeply this road rising high between two valleys below that are hands. Twins on both sides, just over this dusksloppy raphe, descending from the sky, or ascending from the earth, God knows which with the weather, the smoke. All valleyed is marl, a bleached, bony whiteness washedout with gray at the edges, what I’m saying is, vain…how to remember, how it blurs with the clouds as if they’re the joints of lightning limbs, their snapping and pop with the thunder. It’s been told, in rumors, in gossipings heard as historical fact, as geography, too, let’s talk topos: all about the shoe mountain, say, or the hair-pike, I’ve been there, climbed that, horsts up from any ultima graben…the Hill of Glasses, and the Suitcase Peak, I’ve been around, made the grade
, scaled the heights—tectonic remnants, artifacts of destruction past, the war’s spoilings the heaped remains of sacrifices comprising the altared cliffs upon which a future has to be founded. A nest, an egg hatched, halfshelled…but this. I descend again a valley, go on to the other hand—it’s hard to believe, even now.
Questions, count them up by the fingers. Who knows where such hands have been? I don’t, just fall myself down into their cup.
This other hand’s huge itself, similarly haired around the knuckles each the heft of a house, its wrist flexed to forearm outstretching above.
I’m on this hand, then go from this hand to the other, that that’s previously this—what to do?
On one hand, I sit in the shade of a callus and think; on the other hand, I sleep tight among its fingers, between them.
On one hand, I lap at the wet of its palm; on the other hand, I gnaw its nails out of stress, and then mine.
On the one hand…I should turn myself in, and on the other, what good would that do?
Questions…I commute them a back and forth, crossing the fingers, fording my fortunes—Septentrio, Meridies, Oriens, and Occidens be their names, the orientations of their previous flows: lifelined, heartlined gullies and gulches, stonedry riverbeds, the graves of streams their own markers frozen to rock, their meandering wanders foretelling in script and in squiggle ways longer and harder than any would ever keep on. On one hand, what about my people! Questions, I’m asking the questions. On the other hand, what about my people? That’s what I want to know. How these fingers feel for each other, they feel one another…they’re elementally stiff, they’re ancient yet reminding themselves they’re still alive, maybe, how despite age, all their wear and the rheumatoid arthritic denial, they’re still living fingers and powerful, knuckled and full with flesh and toughened, so strong—perhaps those that’d made the world’s what I’m thinking, the original digits: they formed the head of the earth, poked the oceans, pressed into the softnessness of the depths, molding flesh…they’re giving a creaking, a cracking of wood or an earthquake, a skyshake this quivering shiver to fall—I’m knocked from my feet to the foot of the thenar, the Mound, that’s what it’s known as around here, the valley’s slow rise toward the thumb.
On one hand, the Garden took me in when no one else would.
To make itself into a fist, themselves into fists, with which to smash the tabling world.
On the other hand, they’re no longer in power, the Garden: Die—no thanks, I hardly knew him…this I’ve heard on one firsthand shaky, from a source as reliable and, too, as loud as the na zdorovyes I’d stood him, little flowery and watery vodkas flowing seaward from environs northeast: from a refugee he was who’d been saved by this mensch who he’d worked with a mensch, he’d said, tushdeep in the Solution, I’m talking two Tours’ worth of Unaffiliated Disposal (UND) behind him not that he’d liked to remember it much—but then again, on the other side of the other hand, its always unknowable face, that same mensch had also told me my parents were still alive, are, and happyhealthy, he’d said, Shanghai where, hic or sic, a slurred Shangri-La…that near the Mound as well, not sure, don’t know, up near which Zodiacal finger, got me, Pollex, Medicus, just past the Index girls keeping low in the line designated for love—you’re next, what’s your name, don’t be shy…Amularis orphans gathering ash and toxic particulate they’ll heat for a meal over the pulse of a wrist, since morning flush and flooded with life; keeping theirs from the Auricularis displaced, hiding their wretchedness amid pruning and hairs, the hump and hunch of the wrinkles—just point me in the right direction, I’m thinking, I’ll wrong myself from there, find me lost. None of these fellow wayfarers to give me the help of a hand, those or theirs: they ignore, though only after they’ve ascertained I’ve nothing left to steal, not even a pocket, a hole, the pocket of a hole—the depths of the valleys clawed out below us. None understand me’s what it is—all my palming myself off from thought to, indecision to, no one with whom to share my dissatisfaction, my unhappiness, this inability of mine to just nose my way out and pick, goddamnit, to fingerselect, to just settle down on one hand, or the other, and then just stay there, that’s that: stay deluded, and justifying your heart out; what everyone has to do, eventually, with the choices we’re handeddown from our birth. Pick a hand any hand then stick with it, shaken, choose your choice then die in the grip of its consequence, no.
I make night from one to the other—to live or die, to wander or stay with the sun, dawn to dusk, whichever at hand, its rising at one, its set at the other. Then, at fullest moon, a night seized with light, halfway between hand to hand to…mouthless, without speech: as both fists—they just clench, suddenly; their arms that had been other ridges and rims of other valleys, they outstretch the borders between…they lift themselves, become lifted, slowly, then up through the clouds, musclebound: how they weigh in the air, how they weigh the air, a moment amid the luminant sky, then eclipsing its moon…as if balances to weigh, too, the once sheltered now falling life they’d held tight with meaning, dim squalls and sobs tumbling through the mossy cracks between fingers opening, fingers spreading this widely, their crevices splayed—scaled high up as if in a benediction of fall, a blessing of crash, judiciously unto the Highest all then smacks, grubs grandly, and whipsup, is whippedup through the wisps into sky or Heaven, if that you prefer; these two hands disappearing, as if they’d never once been of our earth: without charity, without benevolence, grace or warning, their entire ascension in its cracked chap jointed point resembling nothing so much as a shrug…as if to say, sorry—I tried.
To find myself stranded with no thoughts, no needs nor wants, neither why, without hither, thither, or slither: snakey, how there’s no choice anymore, only chaos, a blood relation to night. I make my way up its mountain, a hill of mud, a hillock of bodied trash mounding bloodflecked—this mountain the middle ridge of the two valleys created whether by or as the cup of the hands, following their rise as unearthed height seeking between to clasp prayer for a peak. Tapering, wicked. A braiding of dirts by the weather. A limb’s wounded leg. An armway this straproad, this strop’s path, tabakfingered pointing the way between the marked lay of the hands and their arms outstretched, disappeared—and now, toward me comes this mensch, stooped as small as his bird is wings, is shabby and large.
I think, I can’t help it, is that who I think it is…come again.
Now, understanding that history means so much to us with its names and dates, and the way in which those things serve to make such history relatable, real—allow the Record a moment in which to record its ecstatic detachment, in which to renew its promise to serve the relations of future generations, future degenerations, with an unburdened account of the following…who could believe. Apparently, the rumors are true, that the gossip of the great has once again proved to be verity—the lashon for once having harangued the right mensch. Him, he’s the Pope, or once was, Pius Zeppelini da Foist, I’d recognize him anywhere, even like this: having exchanged almost everything of his save the yarmulke down to his now naked feet, robes for robes, his formerly supreme eccleisiatical power traded in for a powerlessness even greater, that of the nobody, the nothing ascetic, as if a king undercover, gone slumming, among: he has to live, goy’s got to eat, bird’s got to fly’s what they say, so I’ve heard—and so he’s converted, become as a schnorrer remade, Propheting Elijahstyled; I slacken my pace, hope my face won’t betray me. His riches ragged in three threats flat, he goes town-to-town, making the updated beatitudinal circuit urbi et orbi, his lapsed holiness bestowing blessings upon any head, in exchange for alms, psalms, straw, hay, mashke, noshke, and prutahs, anything else you might give how he’ll take; the once Holy Father and believe it, I can’t, behold it with your own allseeing thirdeye—he’s the nihilmensch secondcometh, thirdhanded bearing news of anything he can remember, invent on the wing, on the fly. Dethroned, how he couldn’t sit still anymore, began to walk, abandoning the pretense to any Dietrologia, it’s what you give
that’s what he gets, and so one Shalom to the Vatican and another Shalom to the road; how he’s become likable, almost too, understandable, makes you think, makes you feel, real salt of the earth this mensch just wandering the earthly See, globetrodding Messiahways, the humblest thing you’ll ever stumble across, I have, it’s slowing me down, tripping me up—not even rocks can compare, not even thorns can compete—for leagues, for parasangs of stones silenced in any way of ice, of mud, body, and bone. My son, I’a thank you…goes his spiel: works most of the time, so it’s been said by lesser—may you be blessed with’a many masculine kinder…
Into a village, a town, any of which, his accomplice the stork leads him by a leash rendered from pallia. Once out of town again (and it’s so hard to know when you’re out given all the ruination, these days), Pinchas, that’s what he wants you to call him, Phinehas if you must, he again leads the stork, holds a crosiered stick to help image his pace, just a wither splintered from the crook of a bishop found dead, in his other hand the ecclesiastical sash tied tightly around the gullet of the stork soaring above him—tugged this way, then yadda. As a schnorrer, nu, nothing’s too good for him: when he can, he’ll demand the best, and when he can’t, he’ll kvetch there’s no better; his dream: to merit upon the strength of his soulwork alone maintainence by charity unto the custom of his lifestyle former. Of course, without that naggy I’m here for you shtick—just got in the way, cramped his kneel.
Why shouldn’t I live like’a dat? he’s always asking the molting, weatherworn stork, who’ll never answer him if they want to keep up the act, the showy front that’s keeping them both fed and warm.
Da highlife, don’t I deserve it?
Hymn, a goy’s got to dream—have patience, have hope: the last two coins begged from the eyes of a cardinal beggar, asleep by the side of a road: he’s taken his wine, too, a shard flint.