Gap Gardening

by Rosmarie Waldrop

  The history of discoveries is his story of traps, mishaps, constant hurt. Of loaded dice. Outcome like reflection of clouds on ice. And once he set foot back on the continent of the past tense, the kingdom of certainty: what had Columbus found? For Ferdinand and Isabella who hoped to travel to the Indies? A packet of islands off China, vulgar pebbles a dog might worry in hot weather. Though pearls for eyes that see his steering wheel environ a round earth turning on its axis like a wheel of fortune on which more than limbs are broken. The rhythm of the midriff so closely linked to vapors of the mind. Diaphragm, frenzy, frantic, phrenology (discredited) and schizophrenia. And on the next page, my father says, a wall is still a wall, but rivers and crocodiles enlarge the landscape.

  Time Ravel

  1

  With the mind’s eye. We see against the light. The way we see the dead. My father reading at his desk. Read, road, door. Remains unclear how my brain chose to store this image rather than another. Or how it veers toward the surface. Ulysses fights his way back to an Ithaca with four-lane highways. Where serfdom has been replaced by alienation, anomie, anxiety. Returns, reverts, replies. A borrowed book, the sword to its scabbard, in recompense, response.

  2

  The assumption is that the sirens have drowned in the alphabet. And been replaced by warnings, war, warp. My father’s stopped reading to watch a magpie rising black and white against the sky. Memories are many. Glitter in the brain, ready to be pilfered. Does this fit my image of the real? Where the norms of social interaction have multiplied, and spontaneous acts come back as mistake? Or combustion? Natural feeling, temperament, disposition, impulse, energy all lashed fast to the mast. The rubrics of the dictionary meaning business.

  3

  The crew were afraid they would not come back, unable to close the loop time won’t permit, but sometimes a ghost or shifting winds. Or the memory of a big slab of ice that a man with leather mittens splits across the middle. To reveal the time hidden within where I might not find my body for the cold. And though my mother wraps the slab in a rag before putting it in the icebox, it would not warm me enough to have a self. Same, identical. Interest, confidence, esteeem, reliance, respect. Skin, though it takes pains to remember caresses, is marked by the roads that pain takes.

  4

  Color of fables, the Indies, scarves, curves. Every island Columbus found was a vow kept toward a map with no elsewhere. High spirits and cloud theory reflect in the sea and stitch coordinates toward a flight of gulls, of stairs. America becomes a continent while numbers pass through the air, soar out of bounds. Or run from danger, flicker of fear. How can I remember

  my parents if I need to run my hands over my body to make sure it is there. Or lean forward to brace against our element, deflect its head-on force into a more general time. Where God for love of us wears clothes.

  5

  I can’t hear my father’s voice, moored as if among antipodes, articulation hindered by head hanging down and a spill of oceans. Spell, sperm, spatter, splash. If the mechanisms of subjectivity are disturbed it requires total restructuring of the world. As when I first learned that the earth turns on its axis, that spleen, n., is a highly vascular ductless gland which serves to produce certain changes in the blood. Merriment (obs.), caprice, spite, anger, malice, moroseness, melancholy. Most marked in complex civilizations where the pace of events and cordless voices exceeds all the running one can do just to stay in one place. Though silver, on clear days, is the light.

  6

  In haste we now blast ourselves beyond the clouds, and get lost in skies behind the sky. It’s hard to rescue time from such a sight. And though they cast a shadow, perspective has no power over clouds. “Bodies without surface,” they vanish the moment before the move into abstraction. The way my mother’s large body evaporates before I can ask her to show me the breast I did not take. Columbus, though, Magellan, Vasco, in the name of Christ and King took firm hold of new markets. A mirror for a parrot, scissors for cinnamon, a playing card for a girl naked to the waist, a kingdom for a horse. And dust in everyone’s eyes for private purchase and sale. What does it mean to recall the past if I have little sense of the present?

  7

  Names multiplied in the wake of caravels, clippers, communicating vessels. The spelling capricious (see spleen) as the winds. Track itineraries, track vanished and erased, track how many pages between Circe’s island and Charybdis. It is not that our sensations need to match images in the brain, but that the brain needs a body for frame of reference. No matter if it be square or cant, short, squat, parts fitted together to enclose a window, door, picture or disposition of the mind. Just as emotion shows if we’re ready for the future hovering at the edge of our eye.

  8

  Great beginnings too can end up a small world. Whorl, old. Set sail on the power of imagination for hearsay geographies and real dangers. With greed as secret motor. It drove them back home to cities crazy for spices and gold. In between, waves and more waves. When I think of my mother I am heavy in the pelvis with the children she wanted, and begin to sing. A complex song of if and though I never had a voice. To introduce an exclamation, condition, stipulation, untenable argument, or wish. On condition, in the event that, allowing that these long-term memories are abstractions, a different mode of thought from short-term ones. And that their differences shape my sense of time. A violet’s blue as a sign of distance.

  from Driven to Abstraction

  The One Who Counts, Who Paints, Who Buys and Sells

  zero, the corrosive number

  Impossible. Without the idea of counting. To imagine numbers. Repeating an identical act, a particular mark. Over and over.

  Like languages that express a plural by repeating the singular. Or a man with a woman, and another, and a third, a fourth.

  “Etc.” prolongs its shadow, its mathematical imperative. The idea that ceaselessly. A string of beads. Of follies. Of particles. Elementary? as long as the momentum. Zero as trace of one-who-counts. Is-under-the-spell. Of women? Naked. Infinite progressions. Delirious possibility. Offspring.

  I dig a hole, he said, and then dig another and fill it with the soil I took out of the first hole.

  A system of numbers instead ties a knot around nothing. Of abbreviations, conventions of syntax and grammar. Conventions instead of. Notch, tally-mark, or pebble. Instead of. Thou shalt not make unto thee any image, no likeness of a thing. No catalogue of ships. No list of wars.

  Imagine counting emptiness. Fearless the mountain people cross the abyss on a flimsy bridge. Finger the empty space on the abacus. Has no value but colors what’s around it. Like a premonition. Nudges other numbers into place. Origin and starting point. Position without precedent, as if being in the world without being born.

  Once we have eaten of the fruit we cannot be. Like one who has not. Cannot vomit up the fruit and kill the ox that drank the water that put out the fire that burnt the stick that beat the dog that bit the cat that ate the serpent that crossed the coordinates.

  vanishing point

  You frame the roof as if through a window. Your eye is always the same lovely blue. In the same spot. If you connect the roof to the eye a cone of lines blossoms and intersects the flat screen you’ve put up. A minimum of ingenuity is required to make your marks. To represent, point for point, the surfaces of the visible world.

  Among cries of swallows your dead wife’s face. Recedes. And the lovely blue. Tints in front of your eyes the mist.

  Many painters place the vanishing point inside a frame. Door, window, mirror, even another painting. This doubles the pull. To emphasize.
High overhead. How other the dead.

  Leads a double life. The vanishing point. Like zero. You agree the point represents, within the physical scene, a definite location. Location, however, vanishing toward the infinite. Your reaction to this distance is wind blowing across frozen plains.

  What I am trying is to feel how this point in flight acts on the other points. Feel the creak I can’t hear of the weathercock high on the steeple.

  wFeel the space between your body and mine squeezed out till my nipple is hard against your chest.

  A flat mirror is held to the Baptistery in Florence. And the divers lines grope for agreement, illusion of truth. And stepping out the door, a figure detached and organized into a coherent image. Can I slip into the mirror? The painter’s point of view? This is how I see. Incarnate.

  And cannot lay my hand on your belly. For the eye is drawn out of the body. Through the centric ray. All the way to the horizon’s implicit promise. And blazes blue like a demonstrative pronoun.

  inventions of infinity

  If zero marks the place of one-who-counts, then perspective, of the one-who-sees. Who casts his shadow. Whose soul takes flight with the point. Of view, of anchor, of vanishing. More as in death than like a bird. And from the distance watches appearance shed its weight the way a flame leaps up to meet another flame. And an alarm goes off and his soul returns to his body with increase of temperature and a pinch of salt.

  And memory uncoils into fresco and secco. Like a bud into a leaf. Lest it, God forbid, be consumed in the fire. Yet even its charred residue can, by the method called spolvero, comfort the space your wife’s face had been. For being so deep and empty now.

  In Gothic painting, however, different places, different historical moments impinge without traffic jam. On one another because enfolded. In the eye of God. And out of these so very simple images, so very holy, shines a spaceless, noiseless sun. And you dare not stare too long because your vision thereafter might not refer. To objects in the world.

  The way Nicolas of Cusa thought a portrait could float a monk toward things divine if the eye in the portrait held him. And, though he walk from East to West, did not leave him. Then will he marvel how, motionless, the eye moves. And in like manner moves for one who walks a contrary direction. Then he won’t be able to contain. Such hallucinatory intensity. Any more than light in a bowl.

  “The icon of God” such a portrait was called. Because like unto “the gaze that never quitteth.” Just as the gold in the halo. Precious and immutable as He is. Could shelter His presence without annulling His transcendence. And if you understood you’d be delivered. From death congenital.

  But Alberti urged, in his treatise on painting, to reject gold. In favor of white. To show the structure of holiness. Being both color and absence of color, white. Performs for God’s presence. What the vanishing point does for His image, the artist. And your memory, for His image, your wife.

  But more than you want to see your dead wife’s face you yearn to touch. Her body. And try to find her touch in the hand that hands you a loaf of bread. But haunting is stopped by cold skin.

  bank-money

  Is there measure on earth? Gold was thought to be. The standard against which to gauge. Not a color that vanishes in the dark. Unchanged as it replaces the ox, the loaf of bread, the bean.

  No pricing system stays the light on a face, even remembered. Though the gold of the sun accelerates sap circulating in the leaf. And makes a wooden table smell of forest and recall broken weeping. And butter melts in the mouth.

  Gold was precious before some prince stamped his effigy upon it. And returns to what it was. So what does the act of signifying add? A level of abstraction? “Higher?” As the human soul is said to emerge into the world with, at bottom, the spirit of an animal. But reaches up through the majesty of the revealed word toward. High up. The sphere of Nothingness. From which all worlds emanate? It’s still our bottom that we sit on.

  Time moves through matter. And matter decomposes. The edge of the leaf curls and yellows. The skin sags. A gap arises between “good” money, the unsullied issue of the state, and the worn (or fraudulently diminished) coins in circulation. Between face value and the frayed contours of a face in memory. A little more dead.

  Because of this gap, a new form of money emerged in Renaissance states with international trade. Like Venice and Amsterdam. Not currency in the old sense. but a promise stretching time. “Imaginary” coin, a difference between is and means worthy of wars of religion. Its value globally a fixed weight of gold or silver and locally a variable amount of gold money exchangeable for it. “Bank-money,” exact to the standard of the mint, the mind.

  And with it a new type of transaction. Money bought and sold. Entering into relation with itself as if it too could insert the mirror. But without reflection. Or light gathered against it. Without the glow of an apple against the darker leaves. Without hold on feelings.

  Interlude: Cyclops Eye

  And what is the zero that marks the place of one-who-writes? A page like snow? White without seven dwarves? The invention of a bee see? Elbowing elemen(t)s toward o.p. cues? With increasing speed and frequency? The moment the Greeks added vowels to the alphabet so that we don’t have to draw on anything outside the word to construe it?

  Shapes not found in nature. To take us out of body.

  But I long for it. The body. Even if blue veins run from the knees to the ankles and the feet are swollen and bulge out of the shoes. And how can I long for something that is right here? A bit scattered my brain, perhaps. Not yet the bones I’ve carried around all my life. And by my own strength.

  So I embark. On writing. With a shout at the sea around me, the surface of language. The vessel’s not important, but the shout is. It brings the body. And with it the patterns I love, rhythmic, paratactic, the old oral forms, repetition, alliteration. And if I don’t use formulae and proverbs I at least play among their echoes in the inner ear.

  Words that sleep in the body all night and in the daytime come out and touch you like a warm hand.

  Yet all the while I sharpen my pencil to a fine point. My alphaknife to dissect the world. And remember the phoneme, an abstract value like that of zero, which makes possible the existence of language.

  Intricate lines, complex, across gaps and fissures. Toward the distance needed for full understanding. Where the void opens its one eye that never closes. In the middle of the mind. Not in the proportions of body. And I’m unsure, does it make me blind or seeing.

  Swallows, missiles, helicopters, wounded bodies, budding leaves, the sun rising out of the sea, streets glistening with rain, tin cans, plastic bags, armchairs, playing cards, a prisoner on a leash, chimneys, cigarette butts, colors shifting in the sky, rooftops, maples, humvees, tanks, fields of wildflowers and landmines in one big, blooming confusion.

  Or the other side of language. Where I am mute and the unsaid weighs heavy. On the tip of the tongue. A foretaste of death.

  from Snapshots from the History of Nothing

  nothing is round

  Nothing. Zero. Absence of things, of signs. Unnatural. Hover in the same space and look identical as twins. Point nowhere and like poems mean but what they say. And are but what is not. A source of horror for some, a commonplace in our speech that juggles degree zero, zero countdown, zero-sum-game and ground zero with zero option.

  But zero is not nothing, not absence, not simple exclusion. A signifier with a shape that could be traced in “learned dust,” on wax, on paper. A body unbound by words like nihil, niente, nada, nothing, nichts, and even zilch.

&n
bsp; Like the phoneme that makes possible language. Neither physical nor psychological reality, but a value with an abstract and fictive importance. That enables.

  The Babylonians mimicked empty space by empty space, absence by absence. So that “11” said eleven; “1 1”, one hundred and one. But this gap was an inside job, had to be framed by numerals just as a pause in music must be framed by sounds. Left on its own it floats off into emptiness.

  Zero knots its shape around a void. A hole a man may fall into if he can’t see straight. Ring, circle (vicious?), loop that separates in from out. And is also the egg, hence generation. All and nothing in one pregnant contradiction.

  As the young Elizabethan stuck his thing into her nothing he knew the serpent swallowed its tail inside Eve’s body. Even before Adam knew her. And her children, begotten of nothing, are thin of substance as the air. And more inconstant than the wind that blows us from ourselves.

  overtaken by nothingness

  The Christian church too had a horror of the void. But there was Gene­sis. It had to be admitted that nothing was something. Had a relation to God. Was at the origin of the million of stars and the grass and beasts and rays of light. This was hard to grasp. The mere thought made you hollow like a bird bone.

  St. Augustine was scared it was the devil turned night to naught. Aquinas clung to the idea that God had overcome. But St. Jerome strove to become nothing so that he could be filled with God. Huddled over the Bible, Jerome. The image of effort. Translator’s invisibility as a first step toward nothingness. Though difficult to navigate: you translate word by word, you sin. Add the smallest word, you blaspheme.