I had to leave. I’m not sorry.
I’m sorry that you are too young to understand this letter. One day you will understand. One day I’ll teach you this song and then the song will be yours.
Love,
My father left and Grandma Clarel moved in, drinking instant coffee in the living room. She wouldn’t talk about him, save to refer in vague terms to “his trip.” Letters would arrive almost every week. A letter, Daniel, a letter, and in her exasperation she would fan herself with the envelope that she meant to give to me, looking aghast as I kept reaching up toward her face to grab it, saying stop it, stop it, and then seeing the letter in her own hand, give it to me, and, bright red, flustered, return to the kitchen. I’d go to my father’s study, sit under his desk, and read them over and over again. I didn’t understand them, but his handwriting was so distinctly his, the page in my hands seemed like a kind of embrace. I read them so often I memorized them—no, not memorized them. It was not memory. The letters imbued themselves in me. I couldn’t quote a single sentence from them; I saw the world through their pages. I would look up, once the letter had been read, at the bookshelf. There, in green with gilt lettering, sat Wonders and Tales. It was a book I never read from again, even as, in my child’s mind, it kept calling to me to retrieve it, calling me to it—
Dear Daniel,
I must tell you about the myth, but it is hard to do. To write it down too precisely betrays it. But you should know it, the parts of it you can know.
Beneath the sky another sky opened;
within the sea another sea.
In this sea one creature lived:
a white whale. It swam through the sea.
There was no land; there was only water. The whale was no god, but without the whale no god could exist. Time did not divide day and night; there was no day and night. The whale was like an island, but there was no land.
A flame inside the whale’s head spoke to it; the voice said “dive down.” The white whale dove to the sea’s bed, swam among the ragged rocks that cut the whale’s skin, carved into its skin words the flame inside its head chanted as it swam among the cutting rocks. The whale’s whole body was etched with words when the voice in the flame said “leave,” and then the whale left. It did not take a breath. The white whale swam to a desert place where the sea-bed’s soft sift lay deep and undisturbed by a single mark. The voice said “sleep” and the whale slept, and in its sleep it rolled in the sand, pressing into the seabed the words carved on its skin. It rolled in its sleep until every word carved into its skin was pressed into the sand it slept on. And in its sleep it dreamed.
The whale dreamed a dream of the sun over the land, a sun it had never seen; it dreamed the sun when it slept on the word sun pressed into the sand. The sun cast its warmth on the ground and from the ground a seed sprouted, and in the whale’s dream the seed became a tree full of white blossoms, and from the blossoms blew the seeds of other plants, of every plant, seeds the sun warmed until they sprouted, and then the land was green; the whale dreamed of this tree when it slept on the word apple pressed into the sand. There were no animals and no people in the dream. When the whale awoke the voice in the flame said “breathe” and the whale swam up to breathe, and there it saw the sun and the green land. The whale took a breath and the voice in the flame said “dive down” and the whale dove down, dove faster when the voice said “faster.” The white whale dove at great speed and when the voice in the flame said “die” the whale struck the seabed with its head, struck the seabed with such force its head cracked open and the sperm escaped into the ocean, each drop becoming an animal as it rose, every animal as it all rose, fish and turtles swimming in the water, birds springing into the air, deer and antelope, lions and elephants, stepping onto shore, and humans, crawling from the water and standing up walking toward the fruit hanging from the apple tree. The whale when it died opened a chasm at the bottom of the ocean, the bottom of the world. The whale’s broken body fell into the chasm.
There were two of every living thing. The man and the woman lived in the green world, eating from the tree, and another person lived inside the woman. She knew another person lived inside her, but could not tell the man; there were no words to speak, and nothing could be known. So the woman left the man and he watched her leave; she walked to the shore and walked into the sea and sunk down to the seabed where she read the words printed in the sand.
When the woman read the word “breathe” she tried to take a breath but could not; the air was far above her. She tried to swim up to the air but she could not, and when she could swim no more, she fell into the chasm where the white whale had fallen.
She fell into the whale’s open mouth; and the baby was inside her.
There is more, Daniel—but enough—this is the story you should know—
Love,
Father’s letters grew less frequent but more wild. He wrote to me as if he were telling himself secrets—
Dear Daniel,
You are another me and that makes everything harder and easier. The men here won’t talk to me. They go about their work, and it’s through their work they know the world. They each own a “sea eye.” They read the ocean’s surface and they read the clouds on the horizon. I eat at night with the captain, who smiles cordially as he pours me some wine but he eyes me suspiciously. I have no sea eye. A deckhand found me last night on the prow in a gale wind chanting into the storm, chanting the myth. He turned me around but I was as if in a trance and I didn’t see him but kept on in my song and so he left me there in the danger hoping I’d blow away. I know of it only because I hear the whispers. There are no secrets on a ship—everything will out.
There are words for the wind that can calm it, and there are words to force it to such violence it breaks a bird in flight in half—not words, one word said differently in the song.
It’s dangerous to speak.
Underneath the words on the scroll are a series of lines I’ve never understood. They don’t modify the words above them, nor is the line consistent—thicker in places, thinner in others, as is a calligraphic line. It is written in a different ink, I think by a different hand—as if, as if the old Jesuit’s helper had brought the scroll to someone, shaman or wise man or healer or singer, and that man added in these lines to correct or finish the scribe’s work. But last night in the gale I understood. Singing into the wind the gale spoke underneath my words, a drone against which the myth’s song could be heard. The song is double-voiced, can only be sung truly by two people. One must sing the unvarying drone, the ground against which the song itself with its words creates what it creates, opens what it opens. A song cannot be sung against absolute silence, a different kind of silence must be created, a silence that isn’t silence, a nothing that is instead of a nothing that is not.
I left, Daniel—and I’m sorry for it—but I left because I need help with some difficult points in the song, places where it seems a word must be sung twice in the same instant, sung in such a way where a word means itself and its opposite at once, as light in the song also means darkness, as the word for sun also includes the light of the moon.
So I am sailing to the island, the old island, center of the world.
There is one singer left, Daniel—only one person alive who can sing this song. He came to me in a dream and told me he was dying. Such people can do such things. In my dream he said he has heard me singing this song. He told me he must teach me what is unwritten in the words. He called to me in a dream, and because of this dream I left you. He told me he was dying. He told me time is short. He showed me a map. A tiny island in or near the Galapagos, those islands sailors for centuries would stop at to carry a tortoise away for dinner. Those islands where, when a sailor died while carrying a tortoise, died from heat or exhaustion or sickness, he was lucky enough to be buried on land so he still has a body to be mourned.
I also sound crazy to myself, when I am someone named Allan listening to myself—but I’m not Allan anymore.
Not only. I’m someone anonymous. A singer. A singer is no one and then being no one becomes a kind of everyone. I’m a better father anonymous than I am with a name—
Love,
Father never spoke to me when I was a child as he spoke to me in his letters. When I would stand in the doorway of the study while he worked he looked at me as if I were only a child—the child that I was—and too young to be initiated into his thoughts. He would look up at me with a kind of pity. In the letters his voice was different. He knew they wouldn’t only be read by the young boy I then was, but also by the adolescent I wasn’t yet, and the young man, and the adult, and sad middle-aged me sitting in the night sheen trying not to cry.
Grandma Clarel would read the letters, too. She knew where I kept them in my room. I didn’t hide them, nor did I mind. I wanted company inside their strangeness. She read them sitting on the edge of my bed; I would find her when I came home from school, dabbing a wadded-up tissue to her eye, sniffling loudly, and saying to herself oh no, oh my in rapid succession, and when she saw me, she would say Daniel, you’re home, you’re home, so early too! Coffee, coffee, it’s time for coffee and a snack, as if singing a song to a tune ever present in her head, and, stuffing the tissue up the end of her sleeve, would smile broadly as if to hide from me her worry, as if I hadn’t seen her crying, as if I couldn’t see her eyes, her slightly disheveled hair whose strands escaped the bun she kept it in, and seeing that I saw the letter in her hand, would look at me and say oh this, I was neatening up and it fell to the ground. Come, come with me—pausing briefly—Your father is having quite a trip, isn’t he?—
Dear Daniel,
The woman in the chasm in the whale’s broken mouth—she is not alive but she is not dead. She is waiting with her child inside her. There are other stories you’ll learn. Orpheus descended into the underworld to rescue his beloved Eurydice. He sang a song the darkness itself loved and it parted veillike in front of him. Eurydice followed him, would follow him as long as he sang, as long as his fingers struck the notes, as long as he didn’t look back to see if she was following. But he did look back and she was swallowed back into the night, the night that isn’t the opposite of day, the other night.
I’m scared I will look back too—when the time comes—Love,
The letters grew shorter. He stopped writing our last name on the envelopes; they simply said—
Son, my Son,
Do you know how much of the world is real? All of it is.
It is dangerous to speak and it is dangerous not to speak.
Beneath the song other songs exist;
beneath the myth other myths.
The chasm-world is open.
Songs are doors. Singers betray thresholds.
Death is a chasm under life. The song sings it open.
Dark ink on white page.
Opposites embrace when they collide.
The song is a form of life that does not deny death.
Dreams do not teach us to sing but show us there is a song.
The song is a form of death that does not deny life.
Every singer is also sung.
Love,
Father’s last letter regained a clarity I thought wholly abandoned—at least, it began so—
Dear Son,
The ship will leave me on the island tomorrow. It will sail away and leave me here. You might receive no letters from me for some time, and I want you not to worry. I will be with the old singer, learning. And when I’ve learned—
(and here his handwriting changed, lost the canny precision of his cursive hand, closed letters remaining open, a lower case e whose line never crossed fully into its semicircle, an o incomplete)
I will arrive in
your dream and tell you—and I won’t be alone—
Love,
CHAPTER 8
I PUT THE LETTERS AWAY AND WENT TO BED. OLD WATER in the water glass on the bedside table. I could taste time in the water when I drank it, stale metal in my mouth. I left the window open even though the spring night was cold. The house empty save for me, would the night breeze increase its absence? Lydia was a name I said to myself in the silence of my head. Stale metal in the head.
father sits in my bed reading
the book I am reading
is the book I am writing mysteriously bound
it’s about me he says
his eyes are pale he says come with me
father walks outside the house and out
across the lawn he peers in at the window
the study has a lamp lit on the desk
the moth thinks it is a moon
he says the study is mine it’s about me
he says follow me his feet remove the dew
from the grass from every blade of grass
the dew wets the cement under his feet as he walks
I walk behind him
he isn’t singing but there is a song
in the apple tree in blossom on the rise
my father points at himself he is sitting
in the midst of the blossoms singing all alone
and when he sees me my father
stops his song and says
both of them say my fathers both say
I looked back and I failed
I woke before the alarm and heard the alarm click before the radio’s voice began speaking. Investigators believe the poet fell off a cliff on the backside of the volcano. They cannot find his body. Investigators report they found the poet’s footprints near the crater of the volcano. They think he had injured his leg; that he had weakened. At the cliff’s edge the footprints disappear. No one could survive the fall. Further search has been canceled. I clicked the radio off and in the half darkness went to the study. I pulled out the novel and put it on the desk. I picked it up again. Its heft is some form of life that is also my own. The night’s dream indelible in my mind.
I looked back and I failed.
Page’s poor memory whose poverty is its perfection.
I stood up, novel in hand, and dropped it in the trash bin. It landed with a metallic thud, a single drumbeat, and then all was silent.
I walked out of the office. I walked out of the house. I walked through the dew-wet grass to the window. I stared in at the study, at the desk, where every morning for many years I sat and wrote. I stared into the room at my absence. I was the one who was missing.
CHAPTER 9
IT RANG YEARS AGO THE PHONE THAT WOKE ME. I’D gone to bed early, strangely exhausted. It was Lydia. “Did I wake you?” I tried to brighten my voice, but sleep was there, occupying it. Lydia’s voice in my ear, but her body far away. “I read your novel. I wanted to call and tell you.” Her voice spoke outside of time, articulate air.
“Thank you.”
“I did wake you. I’m sorry. I just wanted to thank you—”
I spoke thickly through sleep’s fog, a kind of amnesiac veil through which I could almost remember myself and almost remember Lydia, a fog wakefulness burned steadily but not quickly away, so that every word I spoke came from a person different than myself, more intimate because more strange, as if I hadn’t yet had time to fully assemble myself, and the words leaked out of the gaps as the rosebush peeks through the fog’s tatters as morning’s heat gathers. “No, I’m awake. I was just thinking about the night.”
“Thinking about the night?”
“Thinking in the night, I mean.”
Lydia laughed. “Well, I’m sorry to end your thoughts.”
“Don’t be. Thinking was getting me nowhere. I was thinking the moon was an eye that blinks. It takes twenty-eight days for the eye to blink. The full moon is when everything is seen. The stars are the shapes the moon thinks.”
“It sounds like something from your novel.”
“I know. Everything does—it’s a bit of a problem. The novel is just one long dream that doesn’t know it’s a dream. But that’s only the first part. I think it will be long, long and sprawling and disorderly, tying tim
e in a knot.”
“A Gordian knot?”
“A wedding knot.”
“The marriage of time? Whom does time marry?”
“Time marries Timelessness. It’s a marriage on the rocks.”
“I did wake you up, didn’t I?”
“Yes, I’m glad you did. Dreaming about the moon gives me headaches. Why don’t you come over?”
“Are you sure? It’s almost going to be late.”
“The warm milk cocktail has worn off, and my eight p.m. nap has rejuvenated me.”
“O.K. I will.” Lydia hung up the phone, decisive.
I kissed Lydia at the door, her slight blush in the porch-light. I had never kissed her before, not held her or her hand any of the times we had met for coffee or dinner after meeting at Olin’s. The crickets chirped. The firefly’s luminescent green flash in zigzag behind her and a heartbeat later a green flash in the lengthening grass. The moon squinted down, the only witness. Clouds, a cautious curtain, began to close. The night filled with a privacy that included us. The crickets sang a song that marked a boundary we were inside of; it was about us. I kissed her once more, on the cheek. “Please, come in.”
Lydia stepped into the hallway. “Is that your mother in this picture?”
“It is.”
Lydia reached into her purse and pulled out the manuscript I’d given her, thirty pages pinched together by a paperclip bent slightly out of shape. The first pages written on my father’s sheets for musical notation; in the dim light I could make out the title written in red. Lydia held the pages up so that they spread out like a bouquet, gently rolling her wrist back and forth as she looked longer at my mother’s photograph, so that the pages, like a peacock’s tail folding and unfolding, kept fanning from side to side, not the blue eyespots of the peacock’s feather when fully open, but her eyes, dark brown eyes, now looking at me as the pages’ thin lines crossed them. “It’s just as you describe,” she said, handing me the pages.
An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky Page 6