The “not knowing one language one knows all the possibility of sensation of instant relays” suggests a story. Tell me what it is. Tell me your tactics for this liftoff, this send-off as they wave their multiactivated tentacles. One for every day of the year although that calendar resists use when the frequency marginalizes all those old strategies. You were an octopus or saint of imagination. Take your pick. But not planning. That was a word that we dismissed long ago: strategy. It was male, it was war, it was not making progress, it was tied to scheming and a miserable plot of critical lingo takeover. A book of mere tactics. It was tied to male artists singing to themselves in a circle howling to have the moon take notice. Please cold dead moon take notice as we imitate your borrowed light. It was a drumming ritual, it was a plaintive wail for more nourishment of the woman who wasn’t coming to the ringside. Don’t get me wrong I love the men, the poet-men of linguistic enterprise. Put your weapons in the meltdown.
She was busy at the inexplicable, she was busy at the ready, she was still arguing but in a new psychic way: in silent screaming. And her story was not confusing. It was simple. Tell me what it is. Tell us what it is. It is a pedagogy in itself. You can carry it anywhere. The Reds were coming.
A bifurcation. A city. Parents with wings and a pantry. A fourth-floor walk-up window, a fenêtre on the stars, a defenestration often recorded by women although frequently performed by men. They would do this blindfolded so as to avoid their mothers. Throwing the girl a bone. A bone with a trigger. But the girls write the ritual down on animal skins. It will be studied later in a cave. Trying to distinguish between a cave down low and an independent window high on the fourth floor. That’s not enough to jump from, making a metaphorical leap is the magic. Masking a disillusionment with your culture, its city-living-transportation problems unsolved. But going up? Yes, up it is. Maybe it is like poetry, a long thighbone. It was incised with tiny runes that give meaning to perseverance, to walking with children slung on back. And a bone considers the other animals, your relatives, not strangers and the use the others’ bones have. Don’t get me started. So she is never tamed. She is swinging it over her head as a cheerleader with baton. She is trained as a cheerleader. Then she is taken under a desk to drive the demons down when the Reds might be coming. And sirens wail and tell of meltdowns. Let’s go offworld, she thinks, this is it. How will I travel, how will I be? I want to cheer. She was suddenly in the upside-down cup of her life. Held and safe and covered with cloth. A blue blue cloth. And it was a bowl she could see out of surrounded by glass it was. Other world looking in.
Then there’s a jaded relapse and shatter and another war. This is pedestrian. How can we ever return to the complex thighbone meditation? The tableau changes all over the planet as coasts give way, as empires tremble and fall or reconstitute even more implacably. And powers build towers to organize by. But that changes, you know that changes. And she dreams that there will be a waking up to everyone speaking in an unfamiliar tongue that even the trillionaires won’t recognize. When you no longer digitize the spoils.
A brilliant reprisal. But being young years the girl dreams in a way you never quite understand. How big is vocabulary? Did you know it all already? What creates the image of language in a dream? What is it you really hear? The sweet bruit of offworlds, the collective searing whispers of all you could ever hear in your spare time beyond ploy and seizure. You memorized this to say it down. Travel through this and be healed.
From The Book of a Thousand Deaths
With a Foreword by Salvatore Hobson
Brandon Hobson
NOTE. Three months following my son’s birth, I received the following short manuscript in the mail from my father’s unpublished book, The Book of a Thousand Deaths, which he had evidently written somewhere in Mexico when he was living with a young woman he’d met before he left the States and, eventually, disappeared. There was no return address. Even stranger is the foreword written by an uncle Salvatore I never knew I had, who addressed it to me and my four siblings.
My father went missing somewhere in Mexico in the summer of 1998. The case is no longer under investigation. I know nothing of the details, what he was involved in, what kind of people he dealt with—nothing. He was very private. Of my four siblings, my sister Veruca and I kept in contact with him the most, mainly due to our interest in his art. After receiving this manuscript in the mail, we have since tried to track down our mysterious Uncle Salvatore with no luck.
I have reproduced the manuscript I received here, brief as it is, in its entirety.
—BH, Tulsa, 2014
Dear V., Z., A., B., S.,
When I spoke to your father in the weeks prior to when he went missing, he mentioned he’d never told any of you about me. We laughed about it then, but in truth I don’t blame him: Your father was known for his certain eccentricities, among them his rage, isolation, and silence concerning personal issues. We reconnected a few months before he disappeared after years without speaking to one another for reasons too personal and unimportant for me to go into here. I should tell you I was hospitalized and treated for many years due to my bipolar disorder. I’m currently living alone with my two dogs in California. I’ve aged much in the same way as your father, as he’s several years older. Brandon, I’ve sent the only remaining pages from The Book of a Thousand Deaths to your address since your father gave it to me and mentioned your interest in his writing. Veruca, he mentioned your daughter might be interested in his drawings, so I will be sending these to your address soon. There are also numerous photos, postcards, and memorabilia he collected over the years that I will be sending to each of you.
I’m sure you’re aware that before his disappearance, your father took a lover, a young woman named Inez, whose art led him to begin sketching various nudes. I’m sad to report that Inez passed away recently at only thirty-nine. She spent time in a rehabilitative facility for addictions to prescription pain medications, and ultimately committed suicide by overdose on October 11, 2013. If the following text gives any sort of indication as to why your father detached himself, I would like to think, under the current unfortunate and odd circumstances, that he would want each of you to read it.
Yours,
Salvatore Hobson, January 2014, CA, USA
THE BOOK OF A THOUSAND DEATHS
His father raised pigeons in a chicken coop with an aviary attached to the front. White homing pigeons quick to fly and return. Though he’d lost several to hawks in the area, he was still able to breed the pigeons and use their eggs. When he was a boy, his father had told him to watch out for hawks. Once, they went into the woods and he saw a hawk dismantling some sort of rodent with a long tail.
“Demons,” his father told him.
The day fell dark. His father drank whiskey and moved slowly, wielding a butterfly net. There were strange noises all around them—the wind in the trees, voices of ancient mystics, the sky crying out.
“Demons,” his father kept saying.
Later, at home, they listened for mice in the walls.
In his childhood his mother developed a rare disease of the blood coagulation system, causing blood clots to form. Her kidneys and brain cells grew weak and she needed plasma to survive, so she spent a lot of time in hospitals. His father kept drinking and disappeared for days at a time.
“He’s with that whore,” his mother said weakly.
He put his hands in his hair and scratched. He kept scratching and scratching his head.
“Go to your room,” his mother said. He stayed up late into the night, searching his soul. After everyone was asleep, he went down into the basement, where a few pigeons cooed from the dark windows. He fed them angel cake from his hand. He sang a pirate song about ship rats. The entire room filled with rose-colored light.
His father drank in the middle of the night. He drank to forget about the woman he was in love with, but the more he drank the more
he longed for her.
He built tiny replicas of cities and small towns with colored construction paper. Nights after his mother was asleep he worked in the attic, by a dim lamp, sometimes all night. He built streetlights, trees, automobiles. “When I’m done I’m writing love letters,” he said to the dog at his feet.
He wrote notes on tiny slips of paper: “I will be in the bar downtown, where the beer is good.” Then he went downstairs and outside to the chicken coop and aviary. He tied the notes to the legs of pigeons and released the pigeons from their aviary, and they flew into the night sky.
A few days later, when the pigeons returned, their messages were gone.
They called him mentally deranged. Still, he wasn’t bothered by accusations or judgment.
He loved prostitutes. They were the only women who would sleep with him.
The first woman brought him photos of missing children. He couldn’t bear to look at them, so he sent her away. She returned with a glass of red wine that lit the entire room.
“To relax you,” she said.
She was really a bag lady with missing teeth. Helen of Troy, she said. Aphrodite! Venus, goddess of love! She put a finger to her lips and pointed at the wall, but there was nothing there.
The next woman brought a paper sack full of fruit and vegetables. She removed her dress and bit into a ripe tomato. The juice ran down her chin and onto her breasts. He started pulling off his shirt when he saw her lift her arms.
“You can shave my armpits,” she said.
He took her on the floor.
The next woman wore an Afro. She pulled off his shirt and blindfolded him. Then she led him by the hand downstairs to the basement, where there were loose pipes and exposed wires. She tied him to a chair. He stared at the wall while she lay on the floor, moaning and touching herself. This went on for six hours.
The last woman was young and very thin. She wore heavy makeup. She brought him a piece of paper and unfolded it. “It’s a map leading us to a place where we can find ourselves,” she told him.
“Where?” he asked.
She didn’t answer. She smelled like the chickens out in the barn. She broke down into tears. She told him her name was really Paolo and she was a Puerto Rican boy from the south side of the city.
He complained of a sore tooth all day. He didn’t do anything about it. In the afternoon he went to the flea market and bought a record player. He took it home and played his records, which consisted of Latin guitar music. While he listened, he unfurled a piece of paper that was wedged into the back of the record player. He read aloud: “She will be in the bar downtown, where the beer is good.”
He spent the rest of the night drinking old bourbon from a paper cup. Later, when he was very drunk, he used a bottle cap and a spoon to extract his own tooth.
“Water is afraid of dying, too,” his right hand told his left. “Look how quickly it freezes to ice.”
They fasted for thirty days. They saw fasting as a type of healing, like sleep. They believed fasting brought miraculous things for their health. Their neighbor quit having Tourette’s outbursts when she began fasting. Another neighbor developed a stronger sense of smell and taste. The boy with braces on his legs took a few steps without falling. His mother always talked about the spiritual benefits, claiming one could see the manifestations of spiritual beings.
On the day the fast ended, she told her husband, “I’m making a pot of stew. It’s full of rabbit and squirrel.” He took the plates and set them on the table, where everyone was waiting. They could hear mice in the walls. The dog was licking egg yolk off the floor.
“There are a thousand souls inside you,” she told him. “A thousand dying souls.”
For him, the world was transient and opaque. It brought a lethophobic panic the moment he watched his father, a victim of Alzheimer’s, sit on the edge of his bed, drooling and staring at something on the back of his hand. He never stopped worrying about losing his mind, his memory. He’d always wanted to be a scientist. Often he imagined himself leaning over a microscope, studying dendritic structures and dorsal root ganglia. Living an entirely different life than the one given to him. Yet things would turn out differently.
The world was indifferent to him, transient and opaque.
After she died, for weeks he sat alone in the room upstairs. One evening as the sun was going down, he looked out the window and noticed a leaf twirling in midair. The leaf fell from the tree outside the window, and it was as if time stopped and nothing else existed in that moment except the leaf twirling in midair under a branch. The sounds he heard coming from another bedroom upstairs sounded like something had gotten into the house, maybe a squirrel or a rat. But when he walked into the room he saw someone sitting on the bed. It was a woman, and she was looking down at the floor. She was small and very old. He waited for her to look up but she didn’t, so he spoke to her: “Who are you?” he asked.
“Who are you?” she said.
“Talk to me,” he said.
“Go home,” she said. “Go home to your children.”
He waited for her to move or look up but she never did. Then darkness spread across the room. Soon he fell asleep on the floor and dreamed his hair was three feet long. When he woke, the woman was gone, and the house was silent and dead again.
Outside, night had fallen and bled away. In the days that followed her death, he found himself grieving alone and in horrible ways. In the attic he sat at the desk by the window and began writing his autobiography in the form of fiction. This was only the beginning. This was not the end. Then he wrote a letter to his five children in the voice of a stranger.
The Watteau Poem
Donald Revell
Life in heaven not alto, but the freight
Trains’ higher register a shriek of couplings
In the February night air bedside
Table bedside telephone 1982
Resembles her, resembles the two of us.
We are an old married couple in Corinth,
Tennessee. How is any child’s
Eyesight a heaven? Any soprano
Stepping down out of the cars onto?
The color of periwinkles not yet
Came very soon afterwards, palette.
Be easy in your mind. Read yourself to sleep.
Into a train-yard cauldron one man,
Watteau until later on, looks again.
Corinth, Tennessee, is a township northeast of the city of Knoxville.
Symphony No. 4 of Gustav Mahler includes the song “Das himmlische Leben” for solo soprano.
Periwinkles, in French, pervenches, blue flowers of the dogbane family, Apocynaceae.
Jean-Antoine Watteau, October 10, 1684–July 18, 1721. Rococo.
A sudden river to the clown of roses,
S-curved presidency, the letters too
Are letters, and I mean to say Pierrot
Run among the roses suddenly red.
What’s to be said for understanding? Too
Late, too late. Those saints won’t hunt. These flowers
Understand nothing of the waking sleep
Makes poetry. How many red letters
In a country mile? We cross the river
Simply to rest in the shade of things, curved
In a flash and onrush I can feel,
Sleeping with you. Almost sleeping. I see
A garden scripted beneath our breath and noise.
See here, Johanna, Joachim, and Watteau!
Another will entice me on, and on
Through almond blossoms and rich cinnamon;
Till in the bosom of a leafy world
We rest in silence, like two gems upcurl’d
In the recesses of a pearly shell.
—John Keats, “Sleep and Poetry,” II. 117�
��121
Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees.
—Last words of Stonewall Jackson, May 10, 1863
Yes, I can hear it. Inside
The tiger lily bent double,
What I’d taken for a soft breeze:
Bee mouth, behemoth, sips. It is
For you to decide. The beauty
Bent to the breaking point, is she
Sad? Is she Cythera? Turn, turn,
To me, and I shall honestly.
What Watteau? If ever I once
Breathed the fine air, Dumbarton Oaks,
The world premiere of another
Country, June 1984,
The waitress is in love with us.
Are we the exact pilgrims? Yes.
The Embarkation for Cythera by Watteau, 1717, The beautiful pilgrims, have they only now departed? Have they only now arrived?
Another Country, a British film written by Julian Mitchell and adapted from his play of the same title. Part romance, part historical drama, it is loosely based upon events in the early life of Guy Burgess, spy and double agent. Betrayal is a sacrament of the last man, of the priest unto himself alone.
Dumbarton Oaks, Bliss family estate in Washington, DC. The house is now a museum and research library. The gardens, designed by Beatrix Farrand, are open to the public.
If the horse any longer … it was you.
Ride it. Restore the original word
Inside an only. And here it comes clattering,
Speaking Volumes Page 22
