We remember what’s been going on. Already remember what’s been here with us so long we had the time to see but now seem to have been waiting to remember. For who are we not to? Yet give ourselves permission also to forget.
Now, a thinker of the century in question, twentieth among many late centuries surrounding it that were on occasion repelled by the twentieth, said Meaning something is like going up to someone. If so, what is this that we mean to get over, and while we’ve got one another here, who is this someone we mean to share, we who were probably not here first yet who are no less natives at least of this motion. We deserve to know what approaches us.
Is there a break here? Or is it our breath together? It’s what’s between us, or we share. A relation, which we are all. And what a time for a breath or break. Before we’ve half begun. Which we are always doing, aren’t we? It’s the best time. A breather now.
For hear us falling. Toward the horizon albeit oblique, for we imagine it isn’t our natural state. We are some power to be here and to have changed toward life even to think distinct from these angels lately to be heard speculating in us as if they were learning to hope. We deserve to know what is in us.
Now, sent away by a mother who herself appeared to have been the one who left, those two remembered sons were secretly one as well as two. That is, we go on but we do not go on; go away but are still there. Mayn was the name, and of the two sons the one who eventually did go away was James.
And to go on: a personalized power vacuum a daughter found in place of father before she had ever even heard of a power vacuum out in the hinterlands stayed with her all along and into later life something of an inspiration. What would she have done with a more definite father? Call her Grace Kimball and she will hear.
Hear us all falling toward the horizon. It’s the wind the other side of an obstacle that draws us toward it. But the wind is our wind as was the obstacle we heard only as a prelude to whatever lay beyond. Hear what is in the wind. A song, says someone (grownup, to be sure). But, built into the song, hear the noise. The noise, it is a city in itself where not everybody knows everybody else. And each century is a person coming to that city. Like, for future reference, an ever-young, once-wed, once-divorced woman without children but with a following, by name Grace Kimball, who was bound to be heard from; and from another angle, for future reference (read residence), a family man and traveler, also once wed, once divorced, a man named Mayn, James Mayn, hear the noise. And should they never meet, we have been invited no less: like we are the news either way—meeting or not meeting—as we are the relations between them. And have we not felt we are more?
The angels to be heard at times in all this or in us were not here first. Sometimes we really don’t know what they are.
Once long ago a mother told one of her two sons he should go away and he was still very young, though a strong, manly boy. But then she left before he had the chance, and so he felt the leaving was hers, not his.
She never told stories, but his grandmother did, and his grandmother’s were made up out of an adventure she had really had in an earlier day, earlier century in fact. These old reports could sound sometimes a little like what was going on now in the grandson’s life, but he shrugged it off, trusting his grandmother’s little histories.
He belongs to all this which does not easily tell love and separation apart and is about both together. Unhappily he left his wife and his children. Yet did he not live, then, somewhat as he had always lived? It is a time of such changes. Life change is much the cry and we hear it and he probably more than gives it its true weight, which means he must take a longish view— maybe too dumb to be afraid, he jokes. Some brief, important people coming and going here more or less known to him—are they like parts of the work he does? are they news?—of birth, being in love, tenancy, privacy, children? To all this belongs also a woman he may never quite meet. Except through some of these same others. Unlike him she does think of these others as her work: aren’t they discovering body-selves? aren’t they designing their lives? exploring options? For all the world like traders coming and going around her. History passing through her helping hands and voice revealed to her twenty-four hours a day so that in the women’s groups she created and makes her living from in the mid-seventies of the century she runs things with a faith that comes from power more than the other way around. She can be fooled but not for long.
All of this speaks. In many bodies or, as our leaders have said, on an individual basis. Speaks also, we understand, in this "we" that we have heard. What is it? some community? Ours. Operating less than capacity then suddenly also beyond itself. So that in the zone between we have this voice of relations— is that it?—of possible relations too.
A truth here is that angels exist in thought. In great numbers as the case may be, and in small compass we understand. But as angels are summoned to be guardians or messengers, vascular go-betweens or light for its own sake, they seem granted more power than potential. Still, do not angels have rights or anyway abilities to be unprecedentedly other than themselves, or less, or more, since they are lodged in thought? What if they edge in, infiltrate, graft, find real being already present along the curve of the human said to be their arc of new evolution—though into us or into the angels they can be?
Are these merely our angels? They angle into and out of our speech like some advanced listening advice we recognize because we remember from somewhere. And what is this community—this large We we ourselves voice? It will be a community for one thing and capable of accommodating even angels real enough to grow by human means.
God the interference! Can’t hear the interference like we used to, what we once heard—the god relieving himself, blowing tubes, like our weather ship beneath her Coast Guard white paint.
Himself, did one hear? The god himself! Blowing rather his or her tubes; his or her nose; or noise—our noise. The news. But it was all news. Wind that we mouth into sounds of caves. Sounds on skin. We knew it, sound of bones living below the surface, visible like ankle and jaw, and then all that’s between connecting the neck bones to the thigh bones which masculine or feminine are the same old femora beneath the skin. May we not together likewise find, say, one question to comprehend two or more answers? Is there not breath enough for all of us to take one here?
Now if male is to female, then moral be to femoral, if we hadn’t instantly had our heads slung beyond these things to where, listening at the very thigh of the divine (flesh no obstacle) we pick up—the less hard we listen, the better we pick up—vibrations of a better way of doing things—costed, cost-risked—we pick up what else but the will of a slow worm in there. In the divine thigh (make it flesh).
We pick up only however the tapeworm’s track, but echo track of the headway it’s making elsewhere quite a ways from here. Vibes coming from up in the belly area actually where the worm is hooked in, yea up beyond the vaulted groin’s divide.
And this tapeworm in its steady state takes in along a multiplicity of small-scale units that are its nervous system’s segments a homogenized menu of the godly diet—read sacred—divine—read diva suddenly which is opera for goddess. But wait: what diet is this? We have to know. Oh it is food digested by her the tapeworm’s host then processed by the worm her guest plus helpings of a new para-placenta that lines the linings of this diva’s—read songbird’s—read opera singer’s—gut: so as the worm makes its way, and its way makes the worm, the diva gets hers, her way, which eats up her surplus and empowers her to shed really a lot of weight, sundry reported amounts upwards of a hundred foolish pounds. The better then, with her amazing range, to go on as the sinewy dramatic soprano that she is, as mother, lover, barmaid, princess, or herself, to music—if you call that music real noise.
The tapeworm thus did eat at length and having eat ate on unmindful of the noise of waters, running waters, running waters far away and near, of molecules hitting, hoping, sticking, and combining, for what could stick did, and the willful worm at work
upon its environmental meal never minds the noise overhead that’s gaps of power burnt, burnt into music, burnt to expel the song of this practicing singer content now to turn her windy will to work, having a month ago introduced this very special tapeworm into her system, her heaviness, her hunger, her desire, in the flesh of a predatory fish—a pike from the Mille Lacs region of Minnesota—a M’Lacs pike that had turned the wrong way at the wrong time, been caught, identified as a tapeworm host, and flown live one thousand miles direct to the supposedly overweight diva’s favorite Japanese restaurant by an Ojibway Indian medicine man with a diamond squint—a tapeworm (a fish tapeworm) prescribed by her fond but at this event secretly squeamish New York physician who knew he had to do something or give way to someone who could.
He thought he read her like a book. But what one?
"Confused," she once signed a little note hand-delivered to him one morning begging his advice: it meant "in love," and two months later she would confide in him that it had been just sex. When he said more than once to her, "I’m confused," it meant clearly "moral" and "angry," but also (undeclared as usual) "in love" (but with her, his patient, his dear friend), though she might refuse to read his moods. Is he important among these elementary elements? We know enough to ask. He knew he was important to her but not like her audiences in the darkened house, who mattered with a depth so great it verged on the invisible, and so mattered almost more than family (if she had had family in this foreign America—she had a father far away).
Sensational opera sheds little light on private life, but how weigh such light shed from her suns and windy heavens where she must have forgotten him for hours, her doctor, yet knew, like the most precious childhood awkwardness within this very lovely lovable body, that this loving friend was there. Nor did we mean to shed light upon the private life of grand opera. What happened, in good faith, was that we double-checked the god and took it from there; followed where the sounds led, through a divine thigh up to a tapeworm that later proved to be dual-sexed. In turn, this worm’s will to live by growing unknowingly obeyed the will of its host (nee hostess) to reduce. Yet she, too, gave way before a greater will or emptiness. Which some fresh power in us guesses isn’t the wind on the other side of the obstacle but an obstacle beyond the wind.
Inspired. Coming out of left field. Turning an eye that way as if we took place not just in the receivers of our waves of relations but as those receivers no less. Is that, then, true reincarnation? Grand, to be sure; maybe abominable, this vague incarnation intimated to us. Was it angel, animal, mineral, chemical, chemo-therapeutical? We will be asking again.
To go on, an obstacle. And inspired by trying to recover what we have chosen to forget. These words belong to a speaker for that century and the preceding, who maybe in what he refrained from saying knew the light that is thrown by forgetting itself. But how? we ask. And find one answer in ourselves: Light passion-bent past roadblocks it has itself devised: yes, in the fine void of our possible intelligence that announces owl-like one weighty day that we didn’t know what light was but we’d been promised a power and thought it might be to find that on good days we were light or got to be.
If it needs to be worked through, raise it in the workshop. Our void’s first lady, Grace Kimball, with reportedly Indian cheekbones, sees ahead to a better way of doing things, of doing us. Grace Kimball we already remember found history in women: in the women contained by men, and in men retaining secret fluid of women you don’t own up to, and this in all the people who passed through her helping hands making her sometimes in her dreams (for she and this history did each other full time) invisible as the raped call for help, and sometimes in her dreams non-important as a monstrously yawning future unplanned (and by others not oneself). Grace saw ahead into a future that looked back at her through the same eye with which she saw it, into a room without furniture. Her Body Room she would call it, as if other rooms in her apartment were not also body room, yet if in this day and age we become acquainted with long spaces by means of brief capsules, by, in turn, as we understood it equaling long spaces to short times and at other times simply, babe, letting (as in let it happen—as in life) letting (we already forget) letting a broom stick be equal to a base ball because if we can’t build our scale life in the lab mustn’t we look past what we already think we know and just say that this blindingly multiple curve equals those several lifelong brevities? Why did we even ask?
Her Body Room she would call it. Though other rooms in her apartment were that, too. Body Room. Renamed by the times through which we swing, celebrated by Grace, obscure like Mayn, and turned into her "Body Room" through being emptied by the wide load of her trip, her once violent motion away from an old home far away to a new. And as for the family furniture back there in that old home in the exact Middle West, forget it: for like that legendary legal Wide Load of our highways it held firm at that moment of launch yet with this difference: its inertia instantly forgot she’d blasted off when she’d moved that inner landscape of her life without furniture of her family from one of America’s middles to New York once upon a time.
But we already forget her marriage that came in between and filled if not New York her apartment there with modern furniture; she had tried to go the straightest route, do everything right, but this time far from home; later, in a dream she grasped her marriage as if, in the memory, it was the water or semi-precious stone the light came through, and had taken place not in the city of New York but in her hometown (read small city) where you could be owned and never know it till you were being carried to your grave reduced to a sign or an undeliverable message (read literally massage) and her father came home from work and was Dad and called her Gracie and never quite, it one day came to her, asked her anything about herself (except the nearly timeless "Where’d you go?"—just now? today? the last few years!). But this is only what we know she felt. Was he dull? This is but the beginning. She would find him in the living room annexed to the space near the dining-room door, fixed among her poor mother’s furniture like a passenger in a train and out the window the countryside is moving at pretty much same speed same direction you are.
Therefore, a later New York Body Room emptied itself of her dad’s powerful overstuffed low square armchair that if in the old days where she grew up you were coming from kitchen and dining room you have to pass to get into all the other furniture in that parlor, the Grand Rapids pair of lyre-backed straight chairs, and the green chair and the red chair, the gray davenport that didn’t open out and, facing it, the new blue that did, the tables you could rarely go under but had to go around, the magazine stand with its V-trough "hung" between small, narrow tabletop and same-size bottom shelf; a brass-buttoned brown leather armchair that felt cool on a summer afternoon when the heat from the miles—or as the Browning Club’s visiting lecturer from Chicago called them, the versts—of fields outside of town flattened the town and its colors and rose like a real, low flood around the houses until twenty years later when she was so long gone that she had returned from New York to pay her parents and then her mother several visits, the flood loaded all the circuits of the air conditioners and the electricity might go off in one whole block at four in the afternoon so suddenly you were aware of the still grass outside. Grace had emptied her prospective Body Room in her adopted New York also of—hadn’t she?—a gap that habited that old living space halfway across America where, with one thirty-second of Pawnee blood, she’d come from, where her father in the low armchair sat in almost any weather with a brown bottle of beer or with a tapered old-fashioned glass of blended whiskey held constant in his hand until one year a TV set materialized, or took its place blindly on the table at his elbow so it need never be looked at nor the local newspaper necessarily looked away from until the glass became the drinker’s magnified substitute nose upon being drained and this was Decision Time—just as Dad need never breathe ("breathe," she said to a man in argyles some years later whom she married); and yet her father sang, audibly in the bat
htub, irritably in the dark garage; sang an instant American favorite "Oh what a beautiful morning ... the corn is as high as an elephant’s eye," having driven the family through seventy-five miles of wheat fields to see a road show of the musical Oklahoma!, which was a neighboring state. But he didn’t sing in the living room, where there was a piano, in that power vacuum she only half named that was in the whole house, was it he or the room?, one name or another, for years, from memory plowing through all her mother’s parlor furniture to get to her father who wasn’t really there at the far end especially since to get into that tableau where you would not exactly cut a rug, you didn’t so much finish with him as start, start as you came out of the dining room by getting past Dad and his unforeseeable silences and the soft brown-and-red-diamond argyles she had completed for him one Christmas as, with her one marriage and except for her two pregnancies (depending on our point of view), she completed everything she started—one of two pairs of socks she ever knitted apart from craft experiments in the rapid seventies.
Largish town. "City Limits," signs said. Do things one by one, her mother said, this one and then the next; there’s time for everything. Her mother said all this, seated very straight at the kitchen table that had a metal top painted white. Her father changed the oil in the car. His beer can by the front tire, his backside in the air as he dragged the full drip pan out from under, he then on his knees took a drink of beer, got down on his back and worked his way under again to screw back the cap. It was this doing things one by one in their time, she couldn’t always think about it except to know she had to find a way to not do things in order but bypass as one day many hundreds of women knew of her through bits and multiples of her story like Eleanor Roosevelt or Helen Keller. Like Curie, for cures she always knew meant danger. (Always, Grace? even in high school, even at the sink with some boyfriend, even swimming at night in the Middle West before New York?) Like legendary Owl Woman whom a dynamite social-studies teacher named Ruby Foote in Grace’s old high school had said healed people of the southwestern desert with earth matter and a magic of understanding (that’s all magic is!) and with words of song that often went on in the absence of their singer and composer (Owl Woman) who would reduce herself to a tiny cactus owl as easily as expand the time you spent with her, according to Ruby Foote, herself some lone missionary type from the southeast coastal region, North Carolina way (where she’d been once married); now in the true Midwest a fast driver at age sixty of an aging Cadillac (she called it); a strong midnight swimmer, student of Indians (what Indians there were), and philosopher of rape as early as 1950—yes, like Owl Woman, whom Grace thought about and thought about until one day years later she thought Owl Woman into a promise protecting a future when Owl Woman would pop up like a reincarnate double.
Women and Men Page 2
