Speaking Volumes

by Bradford Morrow

  How to describe their strange presence, their weight in the end? I watched the boxes that October accumulate in the hallway, until at last the set complete was ceremoniously opened one evening after Father returned from work. We placed each on the shelves made especially to hold them. These tomes I would become so devoted to. Hold one of those shiny, strangely thin but sturdy pages and a universe (foxglove, parallelogram, cupola, indigo bunting, Tunisian basket weavers) would open. The blue butterfly we sought. World Book. Before me the blossoming of all human knowledge.

  How quickly after that my classmates turned to shadow: their games, their edicts, their petty clubs taking on a kind of pallor and quiet until they receded altogether. Gone their whims, their exclusions. My vertiginous free fall into beauty had begun. The great continuous world ocean is commonly thought of as five separate oceans lying between the continents. (How could I have imagined, swaddled like that?) The Pacific is largest and almost round. One can be farthest from land on the Pacific than anywhere on earth.

  How to describe the mind’s immersion? I found myself submerged as if under that great vast, singular sea, lucid but helpless. I bobbed and wove toward the siren’s song deliriously (fish inflected, sea soaked). Few things could cause me to lift my dreaming head anymore, caught as I was in the sway, the fray of information and thought and dream. From the margins Post-Einsteinians, tipping their hats, bade me on. Hello, I call out, but who can hear from this darkly lit distance?

  I want to live. Let it be said as the world this afternoon teeters on the brink of ruin. I feel indescribable sadness when I juxtapose the children’s encyclopedia with the world we have made.

  The Hanging Gardens once flourished on the east bank of the Euphrates River, about fifty kilometers south of Baghdad. Fruits and flowers, waterfalls, hanging from the palace terraces. Engulfing, inviting, entranced, we move toward their splendor and darkness, for who has ever seen such a thing, rising into the air? Said to have been invented by Nebuchadnezzar to please his concubine homesick for her green land, even those historians who give detailed descriptions of the Hanging Gardens never saw them. Longed for by poets, embellished by all who heard of them. It is said that when Alexander’s soldiers reached the fertile land of Mesopotamia and saw Babylon they were mesmerized by the climbing gardens. In splendor high, high into the air. Look! It is quite possible, I have since learned, that those extraordinary pleasure gardens were only dreamt, invented, and that this wonder, not unlike other wonders, existed only in the mind.

  I try to navigate a path from the hanging gardens to the school and back, but school, with the occasional exception—Mlle. Trent, Mr. Sea Bream—was a horrible bore, which, after the arrival of the World Book, became entirely without purpose. It is said that in the 1670s, a French locksmith named Besnier flew by means of paddle-like cloth wings, which he attached to his shoulders and feet.

  Who’s there? A knock at my door. Oh, it’s my brother tapping out his code—an indication that there might be something of importance happening, and so, lifting myself from the charms of that world, those swells (more like music or shadow), I descend one of the interval of stairs that are scattered throughout our suburban split-level house.

  Yes, my brother is right. There she sits, Aunt Lorraine, strange and dangerous on the couch with my mother. She has come in from the country for the afternoon. Each of us vying for the position closest to her so as to best observe this, our ghostly relation (could she really be ours?), fashionable and thin, flawlessly performing her concise magic. First she would tap tap tap the little blue box, then slowly open it, first unfolding the foil, talking all the while, then, slipping out a slim, cylindrical treasure (a kind of mummy) and lighting a match (phosphorus), she would put a tiny flame to it. We sit rapt (five children on the couch) and watch her talking and laughing while breathing in, inhaling (that small brilliance at the tip), then exhaling. We were inside the stratosphere. We never got to see such a thing up close. That pyre of plant and paper, insinuating its way into our eyes and hair, and lungs; a dalliance of the highest order. We are mortal and immortal on that green couch in the New Jersey summer. The world on fire. As many times as we bear witness, we never tire of it. My mother and my aunt talking, oblivious, in this, their stolen time together, laughing and levitating in smoke up to the chandelier. Their lovely bits of conversation falling from the stratosphere—not Isabel really, who would have dreamt? They were buoyant and beautiful and we craved beauty, and we craned our necks to see.

  The grace of their exclamatory gestures seemed to me a kind of miming, part signal, part lamentation, missives to a heaven where their impossibly young mother already resided. A lilting figure presented itself in a high corner, a wound would float through any day they spent together, a feeling that would inevitably tinge the afternoon. We sat transfixed. A hand on the heart, a hand on the head, sisters joining hands. As the smoke accumulated and we breathed the illicit air more deeply. The baby’s head obscures the view for a minute. A baby’s hair on fire burns at desire’s wayward periphery. Get out of the way! The world is too dangerous to live in. Daddy does seem a bit under the weather, my aunt sighs, looking to her sister and exhaling. Never did they seem to notice our awe or admiration or alarm. It was, we assumed, just another of those chasms that exist between adults and children. (I stand on a great coral reef; it is composed of a billion organisms. Who can see me?) Only now that I am a mother myself do I understand how my daughter, Rose, must view me: shuffling around with stacks of papers, glasses of wine, worried, singing, telling nonsense stories, distracted, a consoling, benevolent, but fundamentally clueless figure in her universe.

  Many experimented with the idea of balloons, but the Montgolfier brothers of France made the first successful airship. The cigar-shaped craft carried a steam engine and had a speed of six miles an hour. In 1783 they built big balloons filled with hot air. Women (sisters) in baskets attached to these balloons floated freely through the air for the first time in history.

  I was as lost then as I am now. Father, can you let us in yet? we children would ask. The red light outside the door where we stood. We had found ourselves on the wrong side of the magic this time. My father, in the silver world. Father, can you let us in yet? My father in his darkroom pulling images from the chemical bath. Can we come in yet? The trays, the silence, the sensation of being at creation’s edge. My father’s shadow face in half-light, following a child down a dirt road near a lake, on gleaming paper. The sway of the trees …

  Intrigued by a world I felt too intense to live in, I immersed myself in those encyclopedias, a safer place, where I might stave off the green ray of the television, the Sunday procession of saints, the wine turned to blood, the floating sisters’ sorrow, my distracted father in darkness. No, I remained engrossed by those pages: the origin of stars, the migration of birds, the transit of Venus, peace in our time, ancient Egypt, electricity, the great inventions up to then, a century, at that time at its midpoint. I thought that I myself might become an inventor one day, but that dreamy child in the end has only invented a handful of figments: unstable, reluctant delineations—shadows on the page, characters in my novels. A novelist—how peculiar. In my life so far—a life well past its own midpoint, I have done little more than chase ghost figures, intimations, inklings, glimpses of what I once thought I might see in full. Charting voices both within and without. I bow my head to the passing entourage. My grasp on them so fleeting, so tenuous—it was always the case—I do not presume to hold. These figures of such haunting obscurity, simultaneously completely present and utterly absent, right before me and already gone. That drift, that flickering, that delirious procession—here and not here. I try to reach them through the flickering. What in me longs toward them, and their uneasy consolation, these apparitions, strangers risen from my psyche? An odd way to have spent one’s life.

  The three-lined paper, with the broken center line. The gray of the pencil mark, the smell of the eraser. A girl
is handed the key to the world—in a handful of letters. So be it. She’s lived a long time now with the secret.

  There, resplendent in the imagination’s dark light these characters gather again: Ava Klein, my dearest creation, mortally ill in her hospital bed, Francesco at her side; Anatole, perpetually stepping onto the small plane, taking flight. They come and go. Carlos: He’s cut himself on the punch bowl—he’s furious, angered by my whimsical summons, he wonders why he’s been called back again, after all this time … That drift of figments, that procession before me, having traveled unfathomable distances to get here. Handing us in the end their indecipherable messages. How strange to be alive.

  All those who have populated my solitude. A bleary chemist takes the center of the dark stage for a moment. It’s Ava’s father, Phillip, looking on. In the white corridor he holds the black coat for his wife and she slips her arm into the soft hollow. She’s back to make her grave donation. She holds her precious bone marrow in a silver cup. Mother, Ava says, I’m over here. Such sweet abandon—one scarcely knows how to bear the innocence of these creations. Gathering now for the year’s longest night under the winter sky. From what longing were they created? These configurations of language, arrangements on a page, stilled and in motion, this motion within my stillness, this world without end. Anatole, leaving the solstice party, heady with death, scrawls a note and heads for the airfield. These lovely accommodations to my sorrow and to my hope. Off you go. How are you feeling, Ava Klein? She stares into the distance. Guglielmo Marconi sits on a hill in Newfoundland waiting for a sound. Above him dangles a kite, with an antenna attached to its tail. Across the Atlantic in England sits Marconi’s assistant. At twelve o’clock on the twelfth day of the twelfth month of 1901 electromagnetic waves carry the first sound over water, a dit, dit, dit, Morse code for the letter S.

  How are you feeling? She points: It’s her aunt Sophie standing at the ditch she will be shot into—seven months pregnant and about to die again despite my best efforts. And here now Francesco perceived through this shaped feeling—I love you—this retreating figure about to leave once more. Out the door you go then. His serene and perfect indifference—like those two sisters, encapsulated in dream time, laughing right before me and utterly out of reach.

  My brother and I floating on a dock at my grandparents’ lake house those interminable summers—now locked in time. Two figures you could not get to again no matter how hard you tried. Why such melancholy tonight? The sky is on fire.

  What is this mission I find myself on now? Resuscitation, retrieval, resurrection, rescue of all kinds, my life’s work. To compensate for a loss I cannot even begin to fathom. Though certainly today there are intimations.

  I hear sound over water as when I was a child bent over that encyclopedia. My novels. Those characters. Have I said it—their consolation, their weight, and the eerie feeling that I do not exist at all except when I am with them? We create each other. Where are you? I do not close the manuscript too soon, fearing disappearance, but finally lifting my weary head from the page I say, Yes, yes, I shall come to bed. What was it I had wanted of them? One more minute. Who hears me? Perhaps, I conjecture (birds migrating make black patterns on my studio wall), I am one of the already dead. Are you there?

  Gilles Deleuze describes a principle, a point of indeterminability, of indiscernibility, when the distinction between subject and object loses its importance. We no longer know what is imaginary or real, physical or mental, not because we are confused, but because we do not have to know, and there is no longer even a place from which to ask. It is as if the real and the imaginary were running after each other.

  I am trying to reach you S, S, S on this terrible afternoon as clouds descend. A boy points to the sky. Ava calls for Sophie, Francesco, her parents, all.

  And what in the end will it have meant? A question ordinarily beyond asking yet at the cusp of this sorrow today, this strangeness all of a sudden … (The United States begins a preemptive war in Iraq.) I am scheduled to teach Chris Marker, and begin Godard this afternoon. One does ask what cannot be answered—expecting—expecting what?

  I write to you from a faraway land. I write to you from the end of the earth. I write to you from the end of childhood. I write to you from the land of obscurity. This flawed and mortal document I call a novel. And if no one else recognizes it as such—what will it have mattered? As bombs begin to fall.

  Voices emanate from the open page now. It shall be a record of our vanishing, one of the voices offers. A book of scraps, last messages left on answering machines, trace elements, an unfinished book of hope, a sort of reliquary, a dome, a memory of bread, a dormer, a basket, the rabbit path. It shall be a cradle that holds time. A prayer. More and more a prayer. It shall speak to what mattered most—as much as it was possible to do so. It shall be a pageant, a celebration, a mourning grove, a history of our suffering, both intimate and epic. At the limits of narrative—as we go (dit, dit, dit)—last ways of reaching each other. A confection, lighter than air, a wish, a hope, a dream, a pageant, a lark—the flurry of existence. My mother’s voice, the way the swing swung, the way he looked that night. And bells. Birds. Migration. Peace in our time. A philosophy of wings will emerge.

  It shall be our lives, eclipsing the darkness. Our lives passing brightly before the darkness, and obscuring it for a moment.

  This small offering that is song. On the horizon, the revelers. Weaving slightly, lifting a glass to another century as it passes. A book for all that is precious and passes—must pass.

  It shall be a catalog of all that has been lost. And of what survives. A record of what somehow, for now, still survives.

  Dear Grandfather,

  The day of the week is Tuesday. The season is autumn. You are living in the United States of America.

  “Has the Sea Given Up Its Bounty?” the melancholy headline read in today’s paper. “Most of the earth’s surface is covered by oceans, and their vastness and biological bounty were long thought to be immune to human influence.” “ … in the dim hint of the ocean’s former bounty …” swordfish once three thousand pounds. Cod, once six feet in length, have essentially vanished. The place we still call Cape Cod—for the fish that once flourished—like the Indian names for things we have decided to keep. Mattapoisett, Narragansett. Manhattan. Having decimated the tribes.

  Our great-grandchildren tell their great-grandchildren: shrimp. They laugh at the word. And when cooked they turned pink …

  “ … like a ring of fire burning on paper, as one ocean, then the next, and then—uses itself up.”

  “There’s been too much short-term vision. You look at all that water and think there’s no way you could overfish it.”

  Living things are among the most interesting wonders of nature. That is one reason why you enjoy going to the circus or the zoo or a farm. Almost everywhere you go you will find living things of one kind or another.

  Look! Someone points to a lighter-than-air creation passing over our head; it is shaped like a lozenge.

  The World Book reports that it was 1300 AD before anyone tried to solve the problem of flying scientifically. Roger Bacon, scientist and writer, studied the problem seriously. One of his ideas was that very light objects could float in air just as somewhat heavier objects could float in water. The idea of balloons filled with “liquid fire” that would be lighter than air. He also suggested a flying machine that would flap its wings like a bird.

  Such a machine is called an ornithopter, but no one has ever succeeded in making one that would fly.

  What did you think was beautiful there? At the edge of the abyss it feels more important to know. Simply to have some sort of record before separating into random strands of narrative and sound. Incoherence, bedlam. Scraps of voice left from cell phones all over the debris field. P, are you all right? I am trying to reach you. What in the end will I have been?

  I would often find
myself on Sullivan Street in Soho—after a day’s writing I liked to roam. There at one particular spot I could stop and see to the north the gorgeous Empire State Building and then without lifting a foot, turn the other way downtown to see the Twin Towers. It was astonishing—in one neat swivel I could see it all. I must have done it a thousand times.

  And then not again. And then not. And the expectations adjust to the given, as if we were made for that—or so it seems: One’s expectations shift with some illusion of ease: to first see the sky through those ruins. Those waffles of steel. The accommodation to survival. And even though those towers are still there in my mind’s eye I force myself to see only empty space.

  Nothing more. Your heart could break. The pivot now made silently in dust. A habit, I know.

  Of our ingenuity, and our resourcefulness, and our folly. That smoking ruin. And then nothing. That utter presence in absence. To see and forever what is not there.

  The French woman, suddenly back alive again before me who once whispered: I too would like to make the walnut wine but am never able to, for walnut trees are always too far from me on St. John’s Day. It is important for the success of the wine to have soft, milky walnuts picked fresh on that particular day in June, and to marinate them in red wine and sugar for long months so that the flavors and colors blend.

  What was precious, fleeting, most beautiful and ordinary—a woman on St. John’s Day contemplates the distance—and if not the real story, then what the story was for me.

  This transit that was our lives, these glimpses: a young wife doing an interpretive dance with rattle and rabbit head for husband and newborn, a sort of scamper. Another mother doing an asparagus dance for her daughter who has just eaten five tips. Her hands above her head in a point.