March Book

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.