the fear of the devil is the memory of the shape of the mind
of a dead race moving human bodies to forms fit to house
the mind of that murderous race long after it had torn itself
apart in hatred and lust and war. This is an altogether roundabout
explanation of more common hatreds, but to justify Quatermass
the Explainer requires a mystery, the solution to which you can intuit.
Or whose origins you can see by looking out the window.
Some mysteries require an optic-encephalogram, a device that records
and broadcasts trace impressions from the brain
of upon whomever it is placed, which is how Quatermass
learns that some fraction of living Londoners contain
trace remnants of the mutant genes of long-dead aliens
and carry also the potential to enact a telepathic mass murder
against those Londoners who do not. Well, that’s one answer.
If in the present you see what you cannot believe,
you call what you see a vision, as if the means by which you would see
what cannot be there becomes synonymous with the thing
you cannot see. Pictures in the mind of one woman,
visions in the mind of the masses, a purge enabled
by a shared sense of seeing what should not be.
In Five Million Years to Earth Quatermass
and his allies save London and the human race
with an applied folktale, that an apparition abhors iron,
which is like saying a hard fact is the natural enemy of a vague idea.
Still, what a relief to have an explanation that is also an answer.
Ghost, ghast, demon, devil, plague, pestilence, threat, hate,
a version, a vision, a Martian, a memory, a mnemonic.
It’s a mess and a mystery, we shrug, but it all ends
when a man throws a chain down a well, and we all know
that a loose chain is better than one that binds you,
that all’s well that ends well, yes? No matter how it begins.
Here Comes the Flood
In Here Comes the Flood the painter makes the perfect village by making the perfect villagers, who know that in order to make the lake which, when still, will both reflect the village and be the surface on which the village sits, each must take up the same task, hoist to their shoulders the same tesserae, the same flat squares of sky. They look like sky because they reflect the sky, but they are lake, because they cannot stand on sky. From where you sit in the unfinished village, you cannot see the faces of the villagers who hold the lake aloft. But if the village is unfinished, how can you be sitting, where do you sit? Clearly this is not the first flood, nor the first village. Clearly, this is not the first you.
The Uncertain Value of Human Life
Behind the frozen falls:
green light through green ice.
Nothing made here,
nowhere to sleep.
Just the pale white light
ice-diffuse, indifferent.
And in the branching caves of karst:
blue light through blue water.
Transparent liquid settled flat
over heavy, blurry brine.
It looks like two rooms.
But in neither can you breathe.
Generation Mechanism
It is tedious only if you know it isn’t true.
A dream is a sort of tool or device, but
every time I have this dream
there is a moment when I think the thing of which I have dreamed
and am currently dreaming is finally true—
but then in the dream I recall all the other times
I have had this dream,
including the time
when the problem posed by tidal waves
was solved simply by scale and flight,
buildings that became colossal, gargantuan,
the principle of a sea wall magnified ten thousand times.
The ten thousands, the hours and amounts.
A wave-caller who crawls across
the massive face of the architecture—
he seems real.
And by the time I remember that he cannot be real:
here comes the whole ocean.
Harbor wave, first memory, is not a wave.
It is a tide.
Before it can return, it must go away.
Drawback, its generation mechanism,
whereby amplitude = height
and the height is the weight of breaking water,
of broken water.
Even the dream of the wave is a dream of light,
of the buildings and statutes that aren’t,
the legs of the colossi barrier islands,
the glassless windows of the rooms of their eyes.
The caller stands on the cliffs and shouts, wave, wave—
caught in the fluttering eye of the abyssal.
Like everyone, I could dream before I could see,
and now the dream and the sight are the same.
Wave after wave, zealous seams.
Downrushing, descent of water,
and the people in the village by the sea flee
as they have dreamed of fleeing, have fled before.
The descendants of the descent of water sound
like water as it flees and returns.
The clatter, the clamor.
Who could sleep through all this?
The dropping of hammers. The loosing of tools.
The Stoning of the Devil
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing—why?
Because you do not know how little you know?
But then how can you know when you know enough
to know more than a little, to have many pieces
of knowledge that in aggregate mean understanding,
so that you are no longer in danger or a danger to others
or a danger but differently. I thought I knew about an awful thing
that had happened during the hajj, that many people had died
in a crush of human bodies, but then I heard years later
than an awful thing had happened during the hajj,
that many people had died in a crush of human bodies,
and I knew I didn’t know whether it was the awful thing
I had remembered or another new and awful thing
that was also, awfully, the same thing. I now know that in 1994
270 pilgrims died and in 1998 118 pilgrims died
and in 2001 35 pilgrims died and in 2003
14 pilgrims died and in 2004 251 pilgrims died
and in 2006 346 pilgrims died and in 2015 2,411 pilgrims died
and I don’t know which of these I knew about first,
which means I don’t know anything about any of them.
I know one way to think about a crush of bodies is to blame
the people whose bodies these are, to think that everyone
acting selfishly inevitably results in people trampled
into bodies, but I also know that thought is cruel and wrong.
It is more accurate to note that at six persons
per square meter individual action becomes impossible
and people behave not volitionally but like water,
carrying shock waves, filling crevasses, seeking everywhere
to distribute equally the fluid weight of persons.
But this is also cruel and wrong, to explain what happens to persons
by admitting that enough persons deny the very possibility
of thinking of what happens to them as something persons did.
Most of these pilgrims have died during a ritual named
the ramī al-jamarāt, or the Stoning of the Devil, which begins
on Eid al-Adha and refers to the hajj of Ibrāhīm, wherein
three temptations occurred: representing that of Ibrāhīm t
o spare
the life of Ismāīl, of Hājar to beseech him to spare Ismāīl, of Ismāīl
to plead for his own life. At each of these Jibrayil tells Ibrāhīm
to pelt the devil with stones, and so each pilgrim must
do the same, striking one wall with seven pebbles, then on
the days following, each of the three walls with seven pebbles,
proceeding east to west. None of this knowledge is knowledge.
But each of those pilgrims is a person, unlike the drops that comprise
the fluid, the pebbles that comprise the mountain that collapses
to pebbles. What the devil wants of Ibrāhīm is for him to be selfish,
and that is what the angel exhorts Ibrāhīm to rebuke,
and what the pilgrims reject:
to think of others only in terms of the self. What the devil wants
is for us to look at the many and see none, to think of the many
but know no one.
Undercity
Unbearable above and unbearable alone: go below
to go within, make cavernous, dig and begin again.
The central alley of the undercity is where weddings occur,
where murders occur, where knife fights for the right
to lead the dwellers of the undercity occur, where the groom
lolls against the marital divan and the bride clutches
a bouquet of flowers grown in the artificial gardens
of the undercity by an old woman whose new name
suits her gifts, as does the name of every resident
of the undercity, or all those who found their way underground,
too ugly or too unloved or loved just enough to abandon,
who take their names from stories in books of old places,
beautiful places whose residents respected their monsters,
built palaces and mazes and castles for them, fed them
the best and the freshest and the bravest and the boldest,
built their whole civilizations around what gods compelled
them to acknowledge, around what they bred by breeding
with the residents of the mortal world, by bringing them
greater beauty and greater cruelty than a man can imagine.
All gods are built on whatever ruin remains of prior gods.
The cave is never closed, the season only changes.
The world is heaven’s undercity, the undercity makes
of the world above a heaven. The ugly, the dispossessed.
The stealers of children, the bearer of chains. Below,
where for each figure of the above lives a flawed analogue.
Here, too, a Magdalene, a Lazarus, a Nazarene. Yes.
Madness to Believe
that things happen
without being made to happen—
madness to believe there is no maker
the ocean’s agony and upset
is a giant risen from black marble
veined with white
like the tight but easily torn stitchery of waves
slipping against the giant
the jet of his fist
driven into the earth
the earth under the ocean is still the earth
cratered
and therefore creased
slow ocean
gelid black
viscous with cold
it only looks slow because it is enormous
and far away
but seems to quicken as it approaches
even though it slows
all you want from yourself
and from whomever you made a child with
is that as the wave advances
you will be strong enough
to fling that child to them—
that they will be strong enough
to catch that child
all you know
as the wave advances
is that even if it is only for moments more
you run
This Is Going to Hurt
No one who wants to see the world end wants to see it
from within the world’s ending. They end once upon a time,
but then they want to close the book in which they are bound.
That sounds like something people would want, but you
would have to know them to say, and even then speak
as if you weren’t one of them—just as I’m doing now.
Once, every living person needed, to a greater or lesser degree,
every other person. Now, every living person comes at the expense,
to a greater or lesser degree, of every other living person.
If you do not engage you afflict those who depend on your engagement,
and if you engage you afflict those who bear the cost
of your engagement. Do not worry, says the king, or if you wish
to put action to your worry, shop! And everyone laughs bitterly.
It’s a stupid example and common, but its stupidity and obviousness
are what mark it as stupidly, obviously, commonly true.
Faced with an intractable problem or an insoluble dilemma,
everyone asks Well, what can I do, not to know the answer
but to avoid the implication of the question. What you can do
is a problem all by itself, all the things I am doing by being,
the cascade of consequences of what I choose and refuse,
what I want you to do compressed to what I want you to want.
Every single item we declare ourselves wise by refusing
to buy drives someone deeper into debt, denies someone else
the dim profit gleaned by the manufacture of an object we wish
did not exist or the provision of a service we wish no one desired.
You cannot have your wish for nothing granted without crippling
whoever needs you to take what they have to give without wishing
them away as well. It isn’t that we believe anyone is innocent
of civilization; it is a question of how to behave once you know
everything you do or fail to do can only magnify your guilt.
I say you and them but I mean me and mine, joining to you
that to which you may not wish to be enjoined, and so
proving a fact by manufacturing one. That’s civilization.
Some moderate their response to the alleged hysteria of cries
that the world is coming to its end by saying that no, it isn’t
the world that is ending, it is civilization, but that is also false;
civilization will not end until people do, and even that misses
the point, which is that we are afraid what we find good about ourselves
will dwindle while what we find appalling will magnify,
and given that fear, the fact that a decline can take a very long time
means time is not something to treasure but rather something to dread,
a wickedness stretched over enough years to create greater wickedness,
a long enough spell for the people to make even more people,
every last one of whom will have the same claim on life, chief
of which is the production of more life, more living, more.
This happens to populations all the time, but that is no comfort
unless you are fine with thinking of yourself as a number of a number
The Cataracts Page 5
