Synthesizing Gravity
Page 18
The great Borges respected forgetting and called it the dark side of the coin of memory. But I’m thinking now that he didn’t go far enough. If on one side of the coin is memory, and on the other is forgetting, the coin’s name can’t be memory any more than the nickel’s name is buffalo. Long ago there must have been a single name for this strange amalgam of memory and forgetting. It would have been silvery and velvety at once—quite impossible for modern tongues.
The Edges of Time
If a poem is going to be any good I have to write it before I feel I should, when I am still quite ignorant of its subject.
I undertook “The Edges of Time” with no more than a tiny vision of time as a physical substance, flattening out at the edges. But then things began to happen. Metaphors cropped up; rhymes wanted in. A kind of knowledge bred itself.
This is a very lucky thing for us. A poem can know more than we can know. It must. I suppose I should admit a secret about “The Edges of Time.” It had the most banal origin. What got me thinking about the subject of time was my habit, long noted by my partner Carol, of suddenly having to do all kinds of things just when it was time for us to walk out the door to go someplace. Carol would stand there, keys in hand; why did I have to put away the dishes now? Couldn’t I have done it earlier? No! I was stirred to action by not having time, by time’s diminishment or thinning. It makes me laugh to think that a poem that I can now easily read as a meditation on the approach of death—and which moves me because Carol did become ill and did die, and both of us did feel the “racket of claims” mentioned in the poem—was written to explain why I couldn’t get out the front door. If I tried to write the poem now it would be too grave; I would know too much; I could not.
The Edges of Time
It is at the edges
that time thins.
Time which had been
dense and viscous
as amber suspending
intentions like bees
unseizes them. A
humming begins,
apparently coming
from stacks of
put-off things or
just in back. A
racket of claims now,
as time flattens. A
glittering fan of things
competing to happen,
brilliant and urgent
as fish when seas
retreat.
The Poet Takes a Walk
This is actually an abstract walk, one I’m making up, a generalized walk based on what I like. I have usually done this on a bicycle, but I was asked to write about a walk, so I’ll walk.
I’m walking along a road, not a busy road, a country road, but one where people do occasionally have things blow out of the back of their truck or their car window or even where people conceivably have littered. In any case, there are scraps of things here and there along the roadside. Bits of things, fragments of color and print, broken shapes, fading pink receipts.
There are whole things too, but I don’t care about them. Except for a while I was very interested in the sheer phenomenon of the number of Styrofoam cooler lids I came across. In a way they were parts, in the sense that they were the top part of a cooler that wasn’t any good anymore, going on down the road in the back of the truck. But I have never been especially interested in any story element in the things that lodge in the grasses in the inevitable ditch by the side of the road. I don’t care if those people’s beer gets hot. Well, of course I never want anybody’s beer to get hot, but what I mean to say is that I’m not interested in the previous life of shards as they reveal things about people; I’m interested in the life in shards, among shards, between shards, shard-to-shard.
There are two related pleasures in studying roadside trash. One is identifying the whole from the part. A particular half-buried bit of orange cardboard can only be part of a Wheaties box. That greasy curve of flat black stuff has got to be from some kind of automotive gasket. I admire how good the mind is, what a small actual bit it needs to call up the whole, and how it attributes value to things simply because it recognizes them. I take the keenest pleasure in knowing that a small trapezoid of gold slashed with red is part of a Dos Equis label. I know it. I’m a weird expert in these identifications. I don’t know how I trained, certainly not consciously. Maybe it’s just that I’ve always enjoyed looking down. I don’t know how many other people really like to do this. Maybe a lot. My brother is even better at it than I am, but maybe it’s just my tiny family.
The second kind of pleasure has to do with pieces fitting together. Whereas the first pleasure was instantaneous, the mind effortlessly constructing the whole beer bottle around the little trapezoid, this pleasure is slightly more patient, involving some actual time and distance. In this second type, as I walk along I notice that some second scrap is the color of something I saw earlier, a ways back, and has a matching edge. The first scrap meant nothing to me, but my brain on its own seems to have believed that one thing may later connect to another thing, and this built-in autonomic faith apparently keeps all the bits animated. Which is to say, the brain anticipates significance; it doesn’t know which edge may in fifty yards knit to which other edge, so everything is held, charged with a subliminal glitter along its raw sides.
I like the retroactiveness—or retro-attractiveness—of this process, and I like what it reveals about the mind: that it is cheerfully storing so much all the time, generating infinite cubbies each with its single broken or torn fragment waiting for a match. The whole thing seems so optimistic, as if the mind on its own believes that things are going to fit together.
The pleasures of merely identifying (the piece to the whole) or of merely matching (the piece to a second piece) as one walks along the road can be had without their ever quite reaching the conscious level. Maybe it’s like the feeling one would get if she worked out the morning crossword, although I’ve never done those, just a little sense that it’s going to be a good day.
My House
Crispin was ticking like a little Geiger counter as she settled in on a pillow near my head this morning. I was her uranium. But of course with a real Geiger counter, the object isn’t just to register the find; somebody has greedy designs on the uranium; somebody wants to get it and sell it. Somebody is getting excited, and the ticking is getting faster and faster.
The marvelous thing about Crispin is that she is not getting excited. She settles down, turns off the tick, and shuts her eyes.
Not everything has to escalate.
I’ve tried to think about her purr. Why does it always happen at about the same nearness to my head? And why does she purr and then stop purring? What I think is it’s a perfect-proximity indicator; it turns on just as she crosses a certain border into perfect proximity, and its only function is to say, You’re there. That’s why it can quit.
What the cat wants isn’t contact but something close to it. Or I could go a little further and blur the border between proximity and contact and say that being almost there (proximity) is the best sort of being there (contact).
Close but no cigar, people say, as though anybody wanted a cigar. Close is much better than a cigar, says Crispin.
This feeling about proximity is related to the exquisite force fields in a house. In the same way that the cat is made perfectly easy (perfectly easy!) by a certain magical relationship between herself and the head of her person, a person is made easy by the magical relationship of various intersecting vectors generated by her chair and table in concert with her lamp, say.
That’s how we feel at home, ideally: we feel released to not pay any attention to where we are because we are suspended and weightless in a beautiful web made out of the sweet intersections of the familiar and thoroughly vetted.
A house is a big skull, or at least mine is for me—the container of my brain. Really, I move around in my house disembodied I’m sure.
Or I move around in parts of my house, that is. I wonder if other people are like this and only really
use an embarrassingly small amount of their space. If there was an infrared tracker of my movements it would be so irradiated in my bed area that it would burn through the back of Fairfax. There would be serious hatchings in the kitchen and bathroom, lighter arcs out to the mailbox and the driveway for the papers, but the other rooms would be ghostly.
I could apparently sublet much of this lavish thousand-square-foot house.
No: that was a joke. I need all the space I’m not using, just as Crispin needs everything all the way out to the distant perimeter of the fence. She knows if some bad cat has snuck in, and it is very polluting to her rest. We need it empty.
I actually mean empty both physically and mentally.
I have always felt kind of embarrassed that I have to have so much brain I don’t use, and even seem to have to aggressively defend the emptiness of. I’ve never quite come to terms with it because it’s so un-American, so inattentive-to-my-bootstraps sounding. It sounds like a character flaw. Dare I say I am in many, many ways not curious? That I do not care to add to my mental stores?
Or perhaps I could say, slightly less self-damningly, that though I am curious my curiosity is unserious, as if I am just pretending to be curious about, say, how tall hops plants can grow, because I know that hard little fact is going to drop through my mind just like pretty much everything else. In other words, it is a mind that cannot hold onto a lot but still it is a good mind in its way with long lines of sight unobscured by the heaps of stuff that build up in minds that can build them up.
What my kind of mind likes makes it tick like Crispin’s perfect-proximity indicator. My bedroom is full of books and as I pass my eye over them on a given morning, one or another of them is somehow just at the right distance from me, just perfect to open and allow that strange unmaking and remaking of the self, that weird interweaving of brains when things go permeable.
You have to have a lot of extra house around yourself to get this to happen and perhaps it is somehow happening in the extra-house part of the other mind that has become so attractive to me right then. Maybe we share some kind of room for entertaining.
Acknowledgments
Thanks are due to these copyright holders for permission to reprint:
“The Poet Hin,” “Dirge,” “Autumn,” “So to Fatness Come,” “Duty was His Lodestar,” from Collected Poems and Drawings by Stevie Smith reprinted with permission of Faber and Faber Ltd. “Duty was his Lodestar,” “So to fatness come,” from All The Poems by Stevie Smith, copyright © 1937, 1938, 1942, 1950, 1957, 1962, 1966, 1971, 1972 by Stevie Smith. Copyright © 2016 by the Estate of James MacGibbon. Copyright © 2015 by Will May. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. “Autumn,” “Dirge,” “The Poet Hin,” from Collected Poems of Stevie Smith by Stevie Smith, copyright ©1972 by Stevie Smith. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. “Between Walls,” “The Term,” from The Collected Poems: Volume I, 1909-1939 by William Carlos Williams, copyright ©1938 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. “Some Simple Measures in the American Idiom and the Varible Foot: Histology” from The Collected Poems: Volume Ii, 1939-1962, by William Carlos Williams, copyright ©1962 by William Carlos Williams. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. “The Paper Nautilus,” from The Collected Poems of Marianne Moore by Marianne Moore. Copyright © 1941 by Marianne Moore, copyright renewed 1969 by Marianne Moore. Reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved. “Dublinesque,” “Forget What Did,” “Reference Back,” “We Met at the End of the Party,” and “Whitsun Weddings” from The Complete Poems Of Philip Larkin by Philip Larkin edited by Archie Burnett and “Old Tiger,” “The Paper Nautilus,” and “The Student” from New Collected Poems by Marianne Moore, edited by Heather Cass White reprinted with permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. “We All Know It,” “Dear St. Nicklus,” and “Reprobate Silver” from The Poems of Marianne Moore by Marianne Moore, edited by Grace Schulman, copyright © 2003 by Marianne Craig Moore, Literary Executor of the Estate of Marianne Moore. Used by permission of Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. “The Effect of Cause Despaired,” Something Matters but We Don’t,” from Life Supports: New and Collected Poems by William Bronk reprinted with permission of The Butler Library, Columbia University.