as part of its nature.
The overlord language resides
there, too: a stain, nerve knot,
with its incessant naming.
It comes into being, breathes,
then fades away again.
What was that? we ask.
Did you hear something?
It was nothing, says the cook.
A ghost, insists the chaplain.
It was dinner, says the hen,
so philosophical lately,
and always about one thing.
Three Found Books
Aimee Bender
ATTIC
She found the book in the attic of the house she’d bought with the money from her parents’ will. She was their only child, and they had saved mightily over many years and she paid for the house outright. It was blue, with a white door and a thatched roof. Inside, up a stepladder, one could hide in the attic, which was surprisingly clean and open, without boards sticking up or spiderwebs growing. She suspected the previous owners had used it for some purpose, but she could not imagine what, as most activities required furniture of some sort. She did find the book, though, on the second visit. Leaning against a sloped wall. It was an old hardback book, and on the cover it said Things People Say. The author’s name was not listed. The book had no ISBN number or publisher name but it seemed to predate the self-publishing industry so she did not know quite how it existed. It was blank inside, too. Almost like a joke: Things People Say and then the implication of nothing. Ah, she thought, turning the pages. I get it, she thought. Ha-ha. But she kept turning the pages, pulled on by some urge she could not name, and about a third of the way in, she found a filled-in page. “I say it’s over, John,” the page read, in ballpoint pen. “That’s what I say to you and your stupid gifts. I hate that shawl. I hate it, and the dinner, and the daisies. I am allergic. How can you not know that? Done. I am finally done.” Three pages later, in a new and looser handwriting: “OK, Jean. It’s over, then. I see this and I agree. I’m tired of apologizing and getting it all wrong. Just tell me how to go about it.” Three pages later: “John, you are so passive. I can’t tell you how to leave me.”
Three pages later: “Jean, you have not left. We are going about our business as usual. Is it over?”
Three pages later: “It is over, John. I am going about our business as an actor now. I like the house too much to leave. You are still here for your own reasons. But it is over.”
Nothing for about twenty pages. Then:
“You seem like yourself, like usual, lately, Jean. Have you been acting the whole time?”
Three pages later: “No.”
“I can’t seem to tell when you are acting and when you are not.” (Also three pages later, for this and every subsequent entry.)
“This is why it is over. You can’t tell? This is exactly like the daisies. This is exactly my point.”
“Can others tell?”
“To what others am I married?”
“Can you tell?”
And that was it for the rest of the book.
The new owner sat in the attic quietly. It was just so clean, the cleanest attic she’d ever seen, and the floorboards were a golden pine color. The walls leaned in to form a peak and someone had built a skylight into the northern slant leaving a stretched square of sunlight on the rug sample left behind that was the shape of Utah. It was, the woman thought, probably the most peaceful place she had ever been, despite what she’d just read. She leaned the book carefully against the wall again, went downstairs, and made herself a dinner in the kitchen using the old but functional appliances.
As she ate her dinner, she thought about the owners whom she’d met briefly when she bought the house. They were older, pleasant, chatted without tension; the woman wore a bun that made her resemble a woodcut. That’s what the buyer had thought: I’ve never met a woman so close to resembling a woodcut, she remembered thinking. Even the wrinkles on her cheeks seemed less like skin creases and more like someone with clear skin who had been roughly etched. The man looked like a regular man. It was the woman who seemed at once drawn and real. So she knew the book belonged to them because it was the same problem raised in the book itself. As far as she could tell, they were still together when she’d completed the house purchase and had moved as a team to another smaller house about thirty minutes away.
The light dimmed outside. She drank a glass of wine with her dinner. Brussels sprouts and a ham sandwich.
She, once, had lived briefly with a man who reminded her of a sculpture. At first it had been a compliment—that he was so burnished and beautiful, his skin and his musculature. But then she started to see him as inert when he would lie there with her in bed, his muscles frozen in some way, his tautness no longer attractive but seeming to indicate a person who could not relax. And come to think of it, there was her best friend in grade school who had the eyes of a watercolor, whose tears even seemed pale blue, whose features were unformed, washy, whose parents instructed her every move until her face itself began to lose specificity and when they were no longer friends the woman had trouble even locating her friend at school, even spying her in the hall. That friend had almost drowned in a neighbor’s swimming pool and people had wondered if it was deliberate. Drowned? She hadn’t ever put it together before. It was too perfect. Of course it had been a suicide attempt. She had nearly washed away already and was only taking one more step. For the first time in years she thought she ought to reach out to that girl, hoping she was still alive. I’ll do that, she thought to herself. I should’ve been a better friend. She returned to the kitchen and retrieved a brownie she’d bought for herself, cutting out a square so she could eat it over several days. She looked out the darkening window thinking of all the people she’d met who were made of art and not life. And here I am, she thought, a single woman eating a corner of brownie sipping wine in a house bought from grief, she thought. Be careful, lady, she told herself. Or you will become a Hopper or a lonesome black-and-white photograph from Beginning Photography Class in no time.
She got busy with cleaning and forgot to reach out to the grade-school friend.
It would be months before she ventured into the attic again, and then it was to put down another rug and a little stereo and a few pillows that broke the mood and changed the peacefulness but also made it bearable. She intended to have people over but never got around to it.
FRIDGE
I found your book next to the eggs. Did you put it there? You must’ve. It’s quite good, although I can never tell you that, because who knows where you are now, leaver. The note by the toothpaste, the egg book, the diary in my pillowcase, sewn shut, just like you. So easy to open with one big rip but you had to take the time, probably in the middle of the night, to sew the mouth of it with tiny threaded bites, so careful not to wake me, probably doing it while my head was on the pillow itself. Such intimacy, of which I took no part. Then those words on the wall: Bye-bye. Like getting slapped, to wake up and see that.
Remember the time I picked the Tylenol out of your mouth? You came running to me with a mouth full of pills. “Help!” you said. “I’m suicidal!” and you were cracking up at yourself but also all it took was a big gulp. It was like going fishing in your mouth, picking out all but two, at your garbled request, because you had a headache. I flushed the rest down the toilet though later you scolded me, saying all they needed was a little drying out and then they’d be fine. “Tylenol’s expensive,” you’d said, shaking your head. I think I broke a plate that day. Not while you were around. You and I, we seem to do all our big-scene moments in private. You had gone to the movies and I took a plate just like they do in the movies, when they throw it against a wall? but I did not throw it against a wall because I didn’t want to deal with the shards. I put it in a trash bag and I threw the trash bag on the ground. At first I heard nothing so
I did it again, harder. That time was satisfying in sound but of course I couldn’t see much so I just tossed it. Then I went to our bed and wept at my ridiculousness.
Your diary—you’d read it to me before, several times. I knew its worn red leather cover. I knew all the entries. The last one was new, though—about how you loved me so much but it was time to go and you would always remember me. The thing is, you’d written that before. If I flipped back about a year, which I did, I found an extremely similar entry, almost word for word. And that time, you stayed away for about two weeks but then came back all disheveled with your dreamy watery eyes and your hair sticking every which way like you’d refused to wash yourself in my absence. I cleaned you up in the bathtub at your request and you bit my hand like a little puppy. It was fun and tiresome at the same time. But this one feels different, even though the words are the same. This time I think you may not return, and I can’t be sure, but I bet it’s something about the book in the fridge that you wrote, your novel, because you must know it’s good and if it’s good and you return and I tell you it’s good what then my friend? No more hiding under the bed because it’s fun to slip under there. No more whimpering in the middle of the night about how you can do nothing, how you add up to nothing, your tears so hot and round. No more spitting on the computer because you say it is your enemy.
I read it while the pages were still cold. And crisp, even. But by the time I finished my hands had warmed it entirely.
When we met, it was snowing, and your skin was cold, and mine too, and we took each other upstairs and warmed each other up. Your mouth, bluish then red. Your cheeks, paper white, then pink. Your hands stiff and then soft, your eyes brightening and brightening.
RUBBLE
They found the document under the house after the house burned. For some reason, the document had not burned. It was made of paper, so this caused some confusion, then reverence, then fear. It, around the neighborhood, became a thing, a point of reference. The document, they called it. Our document, they called it later. Though it had very few words on it. It was a stack of papers tied with a string as if the owner had no stapler. And the pages were thick and warm, buttery paper of a kind no one had ever seen before. As if paper were sheets upon which kings slept, or as if paper were fresh cream in a jar for dessert. On each page was a word. The words were all nouns. They described the neighborhood. They first described items: house, tree. They grew more specific with types: Craftsman. Sycamore. They said street names. Each in the middle of each page, centered, these nouns. Then the names of neighbors. John Bowl. Sharon Adells. No comments. Just names. Then face parts and clothes. Long Nose. Blue Eyes. Red T-Shirt. Spotted Dress. It was Mr. Forsynth who found it—one of the leading firefighters of the local department. He had walked through the rubble of the burned structure, and spied it centered in the foundation’s base, and he lifted it out with a thickly gloved hand and brought it to the truck. He almost began to leaf through it but the quality of the paper and the flash of his own name (he lived two blocks away) stopped his hand, and he slid it into a plastic bag. He brought it to his boss at the station and the boss thumbed through with inside gloves on and Mr. Forsynth watched over his shoulder. Chin Mole. Toy Truck. Bobby Johnson. Small Hands. The owner had died in the fire. The artist. The writer. The explainer.
It was not a stretch to make it into an exhibit. They had to put each page up on the walls to get the full sense. It took seventeen rooms. It was the museum’s first local show. The museum had been criticized for only showing artists who lived elsewhere, in big cities, and although the owner of the house had died in the house, alone, with his dog, he had been born in this town and lived his whole life on that street. They had found his teeth. His body, too, but his teeth identified. They had found dog teeth. The fire was widely viewed as arson. Self-arson. The museum set up all the pages in their rows on the walls with acute lighting and the locals came to see the words that made up their world and a scientist tested the paper to see what had made it last and it seemed coated with a fire-resistant chemical no one had used before. It was not a known force in the world of fire resistance. “It made me uneasy,” said one woman after the show. “Seeing my name there.” Barbra Mintz. On Brand St. With Brown Eyes and a Full Mouth. The man who died had not included his own name in the mix. People called him a voyeur. Antisocial. “He was very social,” disagreed Matthew Stevens. “He knew everyone’s names.” Still, many who visited the exhibit left feeling a slight violation. All it was was words, all it was was seeing one’s name on a wall on a page, all it was was hearing your house had been seen by eyes that weren’t your own with intentions you did not understand to feel that something was wrong, to be relieved the man was dead, and to want the show to come down, which it did. The pages were saved in a vault. Not because of artistic value—because of the fire-resistant material he had apparently discovered or made. Why he died no one knew. No one knew him. A few had patted his dog. Frenchie, he’d named the dog. The dog got a page. Somehow that redeemed him to Janet Lasser. “The dog is there,” she said. “It’s OK. Don’t worry.” That the dog died with the man did not bother her. “He loved his dog,” she said. “He loved us all.”
The Book
Prelude, Andante Dolente, and Fantasia
Robert Kelly
PRELUDE
Bradford Morrow’s talk to a faculty seminar at Bard College in spring 2014 caught me. He explored the “broken set of Dickens” in the house where he grew up—not quite on the prairie but out there far enough to make the set untouchably artifactual, a mantelpiece ornament, not things in pages to be read, but off-limits. Brad’s frustration made me remember gratefully the twenty-volume World’s Greatest Classics my parents had gotten for subscribing to a New York daily tabloid back in the early thirties or late twenties. Those books, in skimpy buckram brown and gold and green, shared a little wall space with two other works: the New Testament, and an early paperback copy of Hilton’s Lost Horizon—a book I never actually read, finding my own way to “Tibet” later along. I think of those twenty volumes, some of them great indeed—Emerson, Moby-Dick—some of them more the consequences of late nineteenth-century taste when the judgment was formed in those who would publish books a generation later: Ben-Hur. A few of them I never read, too tenderhearted for Vanity Fair (though I’ve tried and failed over the years).
But I could read them. They were there and I could read them. No prohibitions of the physical books. But in another sense they were prohibited: They were books, and books are to be read. And I was not supposed to read. I was to save my eyesight for books I would need to study in college, in medical school, in all the intended disciplines to which children are fated—or condemn themselves by early inclination. Anyhow, I was not to read for pleasure. Books would vanish in the night, so reading became a furtive pleasure—a pleasure that condemned me to exalting love for literature and a low cunning in getting hold of it. To this day I start guiltily when anyone comes suddenly into the room where I’m reading.
ANDANTE DOLENTE
It may be that what we call a book is a mere way station in an epochal development, a temporary dwelling place of the text on its way from one tablet to another.
There is a natural development from the clay tablet on which cuneiform was pressed in, five thousand years ago, to the slim wax-coated wooden tablets on which the Romans took their notes and sent their letters, onward to the papyrus scroll that opened one pane or panel at a time, on then to the codex—that initial mechanism of the book—to the beginning of the mass-produced book of the last few centuries, and now at length on to the Android tablet I use to read Ovid or Shakespeare or Goethe, for reasons that will appear … Tablet of Sumer or tablet of Kindle, it seems that from the beginning we prefer the single page, the unitary visual event, so in that sense the “book” becomes a painting or a video screen. It reverses the living illustrations in those Hogwarts schoolbooks: The book reveals the marvel of a screen
where the words stand powerfully still. And only the mind moves.
Excursus:
EXHIBIT ONE
At last, said Homer, speaking for all unknown poets, at last the text itself becomes the commodity, not the thick object in which it is delivered.
EXHIBIT TWO
Poets sometimes think of books so printed and constructed that after each page has been read, the reader tears it out and nibbles on it, or chews it up, or lights it with a match like Papier d’Arménie, to enjoy its fragrance as it burns away.
EXHIBIT THREE
In 1855 Whitman took some leftover green paper covers from the first edition of Leaves of Grass, cut them small, and bound them into at least one pocket notepad. Once in the library of the generous Charles Feinman in Detroit, I held that notebook in my hand, opened it, and found that Whitman had written on only one page, and on it only one phrase: “the flanges of words.” That phrase has haunted me ever since, with its precise delineation of how words fit together in poetry, joining always firmly, but always at some angle.
That’s the real book, the thing you stuff in your pocket and write miracles in.
Return to Dolente theme:
But now reading the pages of a book is effortful and dubious. I have glaucoma, severe but stabilized. These days, oh these nights, I stand in my house and watch the shelves in office, library, living room, hallways, bedrooms, and I think wistfully of when I could just pick a book up and open and read it where I stood, tolle lege, as Ambrose told Augustine, or settle down on the steps or couch or porch. Now I can still take one down, not so easy to find it in the stacks, find it, open it, feel the texture of the pages (rough solidity of the old Bohn’s Libraries, that first generation of mass printing, or the sleek, lean pages of Loeb Classics, or the sensuous creamy paper in dark-blue-buckram’d Oxford scholarly texts of the glory postwar years—Raby’s Secular Latin Poetry, Vinaver’s beautiful three-volume Winchester manuscript of Malory), smell the distinctive glue and mites and dust and ink, the smell that ripens over years, making each book subtly different. But after that somatic flirtation is done, I have to hustle the book over to the halogen lamp, take off my glasses, bring the page close enough to read, three inches from my nose, word by word, half a line maybe in focus at a time. But I can still read with what they call my one good eye.
Speaking Volumes Page 9
