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What if you had gotten stuck there? my husband asked, watching one of the small-town episodes of The X-Files where the citizens are all in a blood-drinking cult.
In one version we had kind of made me a Juggalo; encountering a high school acquaintance at the First Watch, I had fist-bumped her and gone Whoop whoop. But no, stolen valor, that didn’t ring true. I belonged to a different child gang, stripped to the waist, scampering through brambles behind the Holy Grail.
Again and again I tried to pin down this nebulous period. When was she mad? When did she talk to herself so that you had to walk six feet ahead of her in the street, pretending not to know her as you pretended not to know our clouds? When, and how, did she go not mad? Was it something any person might be able to decide?
I dream of a life back in town. Not past, but a future, or parallel. The war that was coming would be between the Scrapers—who survived, who scratched their own existence out of the dirt—and the rest. In that war you will need more teeth, for your hunger, than the human mouth can hold.
Everyone else, over the last few years, had become obsessed with pottery, but I don’t give a fuck about a cup, I said. And I didn’t care about baking my own bread either. It’s like I was on strike against the Last Supper. I was with the silver, on the Judas side.
Once we saw green lightning on the way home, like the whole thing, as my teacher would tell me, were about to go. We cried out together, Oh! Then: Were we the only people in the world who saw that, though why should that be true, more than any other lightning. Do you think we were the only ones in the world.
In one corner of the classroom, the tumbler was always going, like the earth. It made things bright, little BBs in a wash of soap. Kim had to feed it things, like Pnin and the washing machine.
It was exhausting to be bound to your actual duty, what you were good at.
Kathy would glance up at you with a look of love, or else a look of not being able to hear you that well. She was out one week—not COVID, she had tested twice—and returned with bright red eyes and a wild, joyful personality.
I had chosen the little brain in the man suit, Krang, who was always crying in a horrible voice, MY BODY! I had an action figure of him that I kept on my desk. I didn’t want anyone to watch me do it. I just wanted to have him suddenly, in my hand.
Two of the child women had never even heard of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles so I had to do the voice for them over and over: TURTLES! MY BODY!
Each time you did it you would fail. Each time you would know a little more.
I saw myself in the mirror then, what I was. Everything broken in some small way or other; we spent the night, the three of us, putting it back together with glue. Joseph was the most grievously injured, his blue robe cracked from head to toe, but my husband bent over him, a surgeon, not breathing, and then held him up whole on the tip of one finger, sealed.
What I think now is: People are amazing. It was true, people were capable of the most unbelievable measurements. People made springs and closures and hinges. They multiplied by pi to find the diameter. They cut seats for sapphires smaller than glints. The terrifying aspect was not that it was impossible, it was that you started to see how they could do it. Was everything this way? Could I have learned Greek?
Well, I could do it this way, I said, trying the ocean vertically. The teacher said in her wonderful voice, Ugly. I know! I said. Why is it so ugly? Because it was not the way the soul sat in it—it went like that, it waved. I supposed these were basic principles of design, but why think about it that way when you could just say in the wonderful voice, Ugly. Looking at any wrong thing.
So use was what made something real. Warm skin was the surface we polished and polished toward. It was not like poetry at all, or else it was—it is like your words are washing me, a student once said after a reading. It was like it ended a dozen times before it did, said another.
I was cupping her face as I sometimes did, so that it shone out of its setting. You simply surround them, I said to her. You surround them and they are safe. I hardly know how it works either, but it does. Silver is so soft, every scar you put in you have to take out—but ours, in the beach light, faded to almost nothing.
And I was there because allegedly I had written a biography—of who or what, I had no idea. I was in a vulnerable state.
there was a deep desire in things to be told.
I had been freaking out quietly during the talk, squiveling in my seat, chafing against invisible restraints, as I always did when academics talked about poets—something about it seemed to make them dead.
A mad girlfriend of Ted’s had stolen it; you had to envy him the certainty of his type.
Biography was gossip; I could have been in the stream of it all along.
Why guns, and black crape, and cages, and why did she write fewer poems in 1866? Not because she was too overcome. Because she would not be that overcome again. As I had neglected to write, in any book about her.
In the lectures, coughs came scattered across the rows. Maria cleared her throat; the sickness had hit her hard—she had lost her scholar’s memory, been unable to read, and had the same trouble retrieving. The first two letters of a name would come, we agreed, but then the rest would be wrong.
They had emailed me about it, probably, but if you emailed me now it went into a place called Eternity.
This was the burden the biographer carried; there was always some encounter that could not make it into record, but was tucked with the handkerchief next to the heart. The heart? What was I saying?
I began the Iris Murdoch session wondering why everyone was in love with Iris Murdoch. At the end of it I was in love with Iris Murdoch. Her biography, full of slits and blacked-out pages, had been written by two women simultaneously, a kind of marriage; the whole crowd was intrigued.
They turned off the game after we were seated and Nuno became agitated. “WHERE IS MY GAME?” I shouted, to make clear that the passion was mine. “I need my game!” The waiters hurried over, relieved. Then all of us were happy, the waiters and Nuno watching, and Maria and I tormenting him with suggestions that the field should be smaller.
Every article of clothing I had packed was so ugly. I listened to music and wept, it was spring. I was lonely for everyone I had ever known.
I had sort of forgotten what happened in Breaking the Waves: a Skarsgård laid up from an oil rig incident, and his wife had to go out and fuck the world?
They searched the air around me for librettos; I loved it. There were other forms of insanity, besides mine.
Probably that man would live forever. This is the law I often thought of in conjunction with my father: A Bastard Lives Forever—whereas my husband was now expected to die just whenever.
I knew that cotton candy was Daddy’s beard. I knew a crazy word for pussy: crougnougnous. But where was grammar, where were pronouns, where the gender of a table?
Art must be a relay—I had taken over for him, all that time, now perhaps he would take over for me.
But writing new Beatles songs was easy; all it required was a proper name and a nonsense element. “Macready’s Marmalade Register,” “Mr. Tolstoy, You’re Driving Me Mad,” try it.
That was the artist’s hand, I told them, up at the podium, a teacher myself. It is the evidence that once you make something it stays made. Now someone was asking about the ending, how you knew—but the end was an oasis you never wanted to reach.
As usual I was there as a kind of traveling exhibit. I showed up to the student gathering and immediately screamed, Like a seagull, they’re lying to you! Which they were, whoever they were.
Why had I feared my contemporaries? Because they were alive and I was not.
No longer magnetized to the wind and weather. No longer wanted, for the moment, by death. In this place your hand could not be larger than your hand, your face could not detach and go floating, you could not be standing six inches to the side of yourself, your foot could not be “too far away.” Yet what a thing it had been, to observe from outside myself. What ink in the bloodstream had persisted? What part of me, throughout, had still tried to depict?
The line of poetic logic, I explained to the students, is as easy to disrupt as the narrative; is the narrative, where none appears to exist. The line, healed purple, went straight through the notebook, which no one had asked me to keep.
The morning I transcribed my notes about MANGRO my husband came upstairs as I was in the whirl of it, to keep me in that moment that was the making.
My husband took his shirt off, unmindful of the scar, which in this context of long weathering just looked like an event—as if a tree surgeon might indicate that particular ring and say: Something happened here.
Did a thing to be glimpsed—health, illness, sanity—maintain its solidity from moment to moment?
Pay attention to the first place you cut yourself, the teacher told us, for you will always cut yourself in the same place again. But now the light did nothing, the rain did not rain me, no souls rose in bright curves from the tops of people’s heads. Still, someone in the crowd must be able to see it: We had walked all the way out of the world. And come back.
