by Jesse Ball
seconds in the mind: they are the only
contributors to a song that sings like a vacuum
in your head, a rush of air followed by pain.
What we want is to be rescued, but when we
are ourselves we are ornate, far too heavy to
be carried. If you left the door open, then you
hoped for the uninvited guest, the one who
may give warmth as the fire does not. I have
seen him crossing the open spaces, simply
attired, moving with a sureness that was
staggering. I did not follow him; I could not
bear to see what that arrival would be like,
when he has spurned my door and scorned my
table, when he has walked through the wood
beside my house each day of his infinite life,
each day of my infinite life, and has never come
calling on me.
349 Served at table by men and women, each more
lovely than the last, served dishes and courses
that ebb on for hours, served liquors in
fashions that dim light and day, I retire for a
moment to the street, leaving the laughter of
company. I know then that I am a plain man.
Geometry is my science, the method of
arriving at a thing by staring it into sense. A
girl passes in the street, alone, and though there
are girls for me in the place from which I came,
I want this girl because she is alone. Surely she
knows what it is like to be on the street and see
me—surely she thinks that because I am alone
I too resist the quiet by singing beneath my
breath. It’s true, I want to say. You’re right
about everything. We are the thousand
variations. We project ourselves on every
wall. We don’t need shadow. We don’t need
light to manage it.
And so she passes, and I return to the meal,
which is grander with each moment. Night
ends in a bed. It begins with a stripping of
sheets. When I go down to the morning and
the morning street I am amazed again.
The fascination morning holds is that it is
always cleaner, more complete, than we
imagine.
376 When the dead leave paper, it is best used
without malice. Even the hint of a grin can
bring the tragic on wide wheels like a summer-day
parade. Everyone’s tending to flower
boxes. Everyone’s opening mail. The Dutch
door depends upon the farmyard; one day both
will be extinct. In a district of churches, I
sketch you with the ease of a master. The
drawing itself is less gifted. It will go in a trunk,
to be looked at on two occasions before I die.
386 And so, you see that what I told you on Tuesday,
when we lectured each other in the rain, when we
sprang upon the back of that great stone lion and
his twin, whispering apocryphal details, spouting
inconsistencies, now you see that I was lying. I
told you then that I would care to know, really,
which particle was the smallest, and how fast
it moves, and all the other sundry details that
go to explain everything save the need for
explanation itself. Believe me, I love the quest
for this particle. I love late hours in the
laboratory, when the atomic rain has fallen in
tiny happy chambers, duly recorded, noted in
a spidery hand on paper sheets produced
expressly for that and no other purpose. Gladly
I will creep about in such a place, exchanging
niceties with those researchers who labor, deep
inside the human cell. They love their mining,
and I love them for loving their mining. But I
am no miner.
IF the lion bucked, and his replica rose
sphinxlike in our esteem (speaking all
languages, knowing the wisdom of ancient
gods), then we were amazed, and that was
enough.
I have been a passenger on a yellow ship that
any doubt would founder. And so, I am
grateful to tell whatever occurs and the
manner of its occurrence. And here and now,
what occurs is this thought, this striking of
nerves. And so I tell it, speaking my mind as
though it were a map of the greatest of cities,
made long before your birth, a thing that your
life cannot question, because the questioning
and the rebuttal have gone their separate ways,
leaving you a simple yes, a simple movement
of the eye along the page.
423 There were men who named the crowds and
called to them at need. These men cared not
for who composed the crowds, cared only for
the energy with which these currents ebbed
and flowed. And though I am intimate with
this verse, though I know the feel of it beneath
my hands, I know it only as men have known
the crowd. For it is unfamiliar to me in ways,
and seems to each new observer as it will never
seem to me. A man shouts, points a finger. The
crowd ascends a wall, to stand upside down
upon the ceiling and chat of strangeness. A
man shouts, points a finger. The crowd
surrounds a child, steps into his heart, steps
into his limbs, inhabits well and long his head,
puts cloth across his eyes. I was afraid of these
things once—that there is no control for
speech, nor over speech, nor in speech itself.
And so I ready myself with contradictions, and
give you this view and that, and this idea
backwards compounded by rumors on the x
axis that the land to the west is populated only
by liars.
As though conclusions were the point of
anything … we shall all come to the same
conclusion. Let us live on cliffs among the
filthy seabirds, and scavenge eggs from hidden
nests. The only thing worth disguising has
already been disguised.
452 The palpable was a myth that we knew better
than to laugh at, for were our shapes not bent
beneath the weight of a thousand gravities that
would never relent? Count yourself among
those situated upon a high place. Let this
elevation speak to you and bring to your senses
details long lost even to the wise.
How shall I intermingle my blood and my
worth with the mass that crawls in the alleys
and lanes? I have heard that question, long
posed on your lips. And you will hear it posed
again and again, at each crossroads, each
waking from occupation. Only the very old,
on the eve of death, have played their hand so
thoroughly that they are left with no recourse.
Bend your mind to this better philosophy—
that everything that is is in the service of your
senses, and that your love is the equal to the
love of the world. Could you call it forth, you
would believe me. But you must believe first,
without counting scope or merit, without
thought of safety. There is no safety. Everything
is visible, and everything is harmed, and
everything is waiting to be harmed again.
476 At that the door is shut firmly from within, and
we are left in the hall with a sinking feeling.
Was there something more? There was not, I
say quietly. You nod, your stern young face
upturned, and we return to the stairs that lead
down to our many and varied destinations,
each taxing us a little more, until we too grow
old, until we too are visited in the unrecognizable
depths of our age, when such a door as
the one upon which we knocked today will
open and then close in evening. One of us will
be behind it, the bent one who turns in to the
room, unsteady feet upon a faded carpet, who
makes his way toward a row of gabled
windows to lock them shut, each one, against
the coming of night.
And if there are questions then, gathered in the
cotton of our bedsheets, draped among the
dusty remains of the piled things that we chose
one by one, then they are not pressing. For
how could they be? How could they be of any
importance? If they were, would we not have
asked them long before, in our youth or in our
prime, when our minds were agile, still capable
of understanding whatever answers might be
offered? No, these questions are not pressing.
They are merely old questions, long answered,
now risen again in confusion. Beg for the
answers if you must, but beg them only of
yourself. Beg them only to pass the time.
506 Oh, but do not take me at my word. For how
could I, who prize this life for what it is—a
single egregious question—ever speak of
failure, ever say there is a time when one who
wishes to think may not be able to think. Or
worse, that I should say such attempts are
worthless. No, no. I talk only of what I fear.
You know me, you know of me: a coward, a
gambler. For my skin will be no help to me in
this struggle with the opaque. And though I
have the marks of a proud family etched
variously on my frame, I fear even this. To
speak of my cowardice and thus make it real.
Well, it has always been real, with or without
my consent. Consent has had no part in this
life.
522 There was a time when I stood by the barber
amid a crowd of arguing men. I proclaimed
that the world has always been precisely the
way it is now. “Progress is an illusion for the
weak-minded,” I shouted, and others took up
the cry. But there was one, in the back of the
room, who quietly rebutted my every word.
He did this simply and without an audience, and
when I was done speaking, during the clapping
of backs and hands, he slipped out the rear. He
knows all the back ways and all the arguments,
and they are all, he will confide, in one tedious
vein. He is pleased not by relative merit, but
only by impetus. It is this study of moments—
of how a thing is caused—that is his greatest
love. “The universe has not yet been created,”
he is fond of saying. “Nor will it ever be.”
539 In the counting houses, the counting has
stopped. In the bell tower, the ropes have
frayed, the ropes have snapped. The bells are
falling through masonry, weight following
weight. With each moment, a new note is
struck. Never mistake the world’s inanimacy
for purpose. Purpose is a human trait, bred in
ice-age migrations, endless winters, feral
springs. The notation you see in scholarly
books, left open on a table, in a library’s
ancient wing, where the steps you take have
long been apprehended, commented upon,
discarded—it is no cause for worry. It must be
true: men have lived and died happily. Yet
these accounts are missing from the annals.
For now you see—the glad don’t trouble
themselves with certainty. This is how a
mirror becomes a door. This is how a letter
arrives, smuggled, at a crucial hour. The
urgency of hospitals, of necessary truth, is
inconceivable on this hot day, when the grass
is growing. Everywhere, ants well up out of
loose soil, intricate, manifold, working toward
an end. How can there be so many? How can
there be ten million ants to counter every
human mind? Ten million ants, carpeting the
ground, in a field to which you will never go.
566 Is there a distance more profound than the
distance of oneself from one’s own observations,
when separated by time? To know
something truly, completely, and to be the
genesis of insight, and then later, days, weeks,
years later, to look upon that thought as on a
foreign city, where populations have borne
lives without number to which you were never
party, though perhaps you knew their father’s
father, or his father’s father before him. The
blood has grown thin, and the streets are quite
unrecognizable. The myriad paths of our feet
and our body through life, drawn out on a map,
some small infinity of repeated passage, is as
nothing to the courses of the mind, which
moves as even Mercury cannot, bridging
impossibilities with assertions of the possible
born of misunderstandings that in time become
truth. Poetry may list, may render records in
this archive of my mind’s long tale. I was born
in a village by the sea, in a place of widow’s
walks and barbershops. A man in cold colors
stood with a beard at the shore and told me, this
dream, this one apart from all others, it is your
life, and though others may form and fail, this
thread has weight unlike that which will follow,
and unlike that which came before. You will
never know these things to be true, for your
movement between such states will be
indistinguishable. Say that the grass has passion.
Say that it once was born as you, to walk upon
the land, and that when the universe is cold, and
all matter distant from all other matter, then that
will be our longest sleep.
600 Artists mimic the objects of our lives with great
precision. Some contrive worlds where you
may live despite your separate, outer life. Still
others make a badge of their difference, and
disclude you from the products of their work.
I am not of these types. I am a machinist, and
I build theatres, and in those theatres I say the
most foolish things I can think of. I do not, of
course, think at the time that these things are
foolish. At the time I am in love with the
substance of my thought. It seems to me, in this
haze, that every inch of existence is carpeted
in a rich substance. To touch anything is
divine, et cetera, et cetera. And then I am
ashamed to have said so to a full house.
But this shame can be borne, and it is a bright
and pleasing existence, b
uilding chutes and
passages for thought. Acrobats enlist and sign
their paychecks with an X. I employ only the
illiterate, as I hate when what I write is read
from over my shoulder. Wait until I speak! I
shout. And my lovely legions wait, and talk of
things in the clear autumn light. It’s early
evening, and supper will be soon. Geese make
numbers in the sky, and the light doubles them
softly upon the ground. We are all ancient, and
no one has seen half so much as we have seen.
No one has left to see half so much as we have
left to see. And though I will die, it is of no
importance. For the air is temperate here
where I make my home, and the dusk is gentle,
and when morning comes I will go walking in
long fields while the earth sleeps fitfully,
beneath leaves as opaque, as delicate, as
crumbling as my own memories and the faces
around which they pulse and gather.
NOTES
The epigraph, “But now thou dost thyself immure and close/ in some small corner of a feeble heart” is from the poem, “Decay,” by George Herbert.
“#31, Conflict With a God” refers to the thirty-first of 36 possible dramatic situations.
“From a Clearing” was written initially on a bedroom wall in a house in Bedford Stuyvesant.
The writing that is visible in the lower left hand corner of the Brueghel drawing has been translated as “He who knows where the nest is, knows it; he who has the nest has it.” (An old Dutch proverb).
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book could not have made its ungainly appearance without the help of others. I’d like to thank Catherine Ball for her continued and indefatigable support. To Richard Howard and his eagle eye I owe a huge debt. Others who deserve thanks are: Glyn Maxwell, Lindsay Sagnette, Rob Reddy, Eamon Grennan, Todd Jones, Tim Kindseth, Liam Rector, Paul Russell, Stacie Cassarino, and Jana Zabinski.
As well, I am thankful for the munificence of the Red Barn in Michigan.
