So when I want to read the way I used to, just grab the thing and read, I pick up my tablet, the noble Device, talisman of the e-book. High contrast, black print, font size whatever I choose. And there I sit, a child again, reading Buchan or Chesterton, or waking up my German with the lovely complete (?) Kafka. So cheap these “books” are, all the text and none of the object. I repeat: all text and no object. Or one object that embraces hundreds, thousands of texts. I hold a magic tablet that never gets heavier or lighter, no matter how many pages I load, read, store, ignore.
FANTASIA
The book is always waiting.
A lover you left unanswered
unsatisfied but who still might love you.
The book may still cry out to you.
Listen. Listen.
A book is speaking.
The book remembers better than you do.
It’s hard to forgive it for doing so.
The book sleeps beside you always ready to rouse.
They topple sometimes in the night,
the stack falls over, revolt in the harem.
These are things I remember about books.
The book though resists sexual implication.
The book is divisible, always in parts, always whole.
You can figuratively—or if you’re dexterous, actually—
tear the book into paragraphs, sentences, words
—mix and match?—letters, signs, like the old
American writer who put all the punctuation
on pages all by themselves at the end of his book.
You can do this too.
The book lets you.
A book lets you.
A book is a permission
always.
Even those sad books made
out of numbers and symbols and graphs—
even they will let you,
let you read them wrong.
Equations are rubbery things,
snaky thoughts that bite their tails,
you can bring nonsense back
the thing you need every afternoon,
build gypsy abscissas, matrices of emptiness,
things that go nowhere, bring chaos home.
A book will hold your hot coffee cup
keep it from leaving those pale
leprous rings on walnut tables.
The book is proud to bear the stains,
your sticky honey fingertips
your wine stains between the stanzas
or even on the sly lines of Rochester—
the book bears all for you,
the book is your suffering servant
keeps your loose sheets from flying away
(because every piece of paper ever
wants to fly, fly away, fuir!)—
a book is the enemy of paper,
holds the subject population in check,
otherwise the words would be everywhere,
o god let the words be everywhere.
And a book will gladly hold down
that check from your publisher
for a derisory sum
until it’s worth presenting it at the bank
ashamed at the teller’s all-too-knowing smile.
A book can be a weapon,
not all your rousing essays just
the heft of it, as once
in high-school algebra class
Mr. Breen hurled with accuracy
a thick hard red math text
at a dissident student not me.
The boy wept with pain,
no consequence but feeling.
I was very good at algebra
since it dealt exclusively with
imaginary or impalpable operators,
entities empty as a happy heart,
letters, letters, x’s and y’s,
letters in love!
My own third book
came out in Spanish, bound
in a shiny intense cobalt blue,
I gave it to a poet with long red hair,
laid the book in her lap. This
passed for sex in those days.
July–August 2014
On Walking On
Cole Swensen
NOTE. We readily recognize the centrality of walking to the definition of the human—our upright posture not only defined the species but also allowed it to expand all over the earth. (Poor Earth! But that’s another question.) Writing runs a direct parallel by allowing internal human experience (thought, sensation, imagination) the same extension that walking allows the external, the physical. And both forms of extension (walking and writing) are based in rhythm, which is to say, the incorporation of time as spatial, making repetition a body in its own right. It’s at precisely the intersection of these two forms (the walking writer writing on walking) that the internal and the external break down, freeing the self from itself, making it available to more fully participate in life beyond.
An amazing, a truly astonishing, number of writers have also been/ are obsessive walkers; the following texts examine this obsession, perhaps obsessively. De Quincey, a pacer, walked a thousand miles in ninety days across his back garden, constantly enacting the turn that is the verse of the ancient plow. Others prefer a fugue.
FROM W. G. SEBALD: THE RINGS OF SATURN
FROM SOMERLEYTON TO LOWESTOFT
Sebald’s work is a catalog of the lost, often in a labyrinth
in the grounds of a country house. It’s full of misplaced objects
mere traces, or larger things where others should be—snow
in fields in greater detail the farther away they are: They are sails
off the Suffolk Coast the entire length of the River Yare they are
the sails of windmills that catch the light that make it disappear.
It was a gray day in August 1992 that made it disappear.
What is striking in Sebald is the way in which he used walking
—or writing about walking—to release himself from the practice
of time. “The sentence is,” he says, “a funeral cortege,” and
wanders off. In the sleep of Lebanese cedars, in the sleep of
a vapor trail just above the trees, dream the incandescent
glass houses of Somerleyton lit by gas—huge conservatories
built of orchids, panes so thin they explode in the sun, and
every fragment of every one glints, hundreds of thousands,
creating as many tiny blind spots across a blinding afternoon.
SOUTH OF LOWESTOFT
The sails of the windmills make a clicking sound as they travel
their circle there is always one spot at which they trip. He stood
on a cliff and, looking down, saw the incongruous creature of
a couple making love. And at just that moment, the boat he’d
been tracking disappeared—most likely in a trick of light—a
sheet of glare wiping out the sea, but only for a second, he
thought; it will probably come back, though greatly changed.
JUST BEFORE SOUTHWOLD
The lighthouse, he tells us, was blindingly white
which made the sky, by contrast, tangibly dark.
He, mentally in Argentina for the labyrinth at the center
of which he could no longer remember
what he’d seen down there on the beach
nor why it had so frightened him.
From there I saw
the sea he said
was
random ships
that distance
spared
and at that distance, faces
in greater
detail.
And farther walk, in a thousand miles, in the counted nights,
he came then back to the thickening dusk, to he who
watched the storm hovering over Southwold briefly make
the world its own
Pass on. As does he, too, briefly, to the Vallüla Massif, which
is always waiting for him, which then comes back
to the sea lit like an ice field or an infinitely cold stretch of light.
SOUTHWOLD
For Sebald, writing about walking was itself a mode of travel.
From Gunhill he could see himself a year away
looking over at England from Holland
through a doorway
in which were framed
the small embellishments
that step beyond
a canal at times
or a field even farther, across which sheets have been spread
to bleach in the sun
or sheet lightning itself throwing a caravan
into sharp silhouette, a figure/ground relation that pulled him
back into the present: the green hillside of Gunhill
as evening fell just as it was falling somewhere else as it was
collecting in a doorway in which a woman leaned, smoking
a cigarette, trying to remember a name.
FROM VIRGINIA WOOLF: STREET HAUNTING
If shadows come in groves Virginia Woolf preferred
London in the dark of an afternoon whose pale islands
move from lamp to lamp anonymous beneath
and then a grove of sun slanting to the last as if
in walking on, a tribe of them was made. Virginia Woolf
liked the silence of the hurrying forms hurrying home
dressed in cold. As a city, all is surface or a succession
of surfaces that change texture and color, all its grays
upon gray filtered in shadow amber to a window
climbing as the gaze glanced above the trees
a window’s other lights and these as if we,
turning over or around a slower hour held the hour back.
LAMPS:
by which we are released. As by the dark, we sign away
a certain hold that held us toward or lease untied. We
catalog the many kinds of light: one surrounds, a warm
hand turns to a face as a face glides through its pool
and other streetlights white like those that cut across
Green Park, deepening the dusk. In Woolf’s day they
would have been lit by a lamplighter who rode up on a
bicycle with a ladder over his arm. He leaned it against the
lamppost, climbed up, turned a valve, and then moved on
to the next, and so on, until he suddenly turns off the path
and cuts across the grass, bicycling through the dark.
WINDOWS:
also walk within a different break of light the warmth
of it again is several hands; acres sway. Of an amber
almost rose coming through the leaves behind behind
which thrives an empty world in which we watch
a single finger rise and etch with a fingernail in which
a diamond is set a proper noun on the other side
of the glass. We tear ourselves away at once apart
we turn from a great weight back into the crowd
in the greater light of anonymity and cold.
OTHER WINDOWS:
These are toys: They fit the palm they are the shops, and
such are full of distance composed of objects, which is
the definition of distance is this emerald and coral and a
an eternity of pearl. And just to prove it, the next shop is
a watchmaker’s thus tiny watches follow us or follow on
and unconcerned walking always counts under its breath
you stand next to someone at a corner waiting for the traffic
to thin upon the number and the number upon him.
Woolf was an urban walker, seeking excuses to wander
the streets among goldbeaters, accordion pleaters, and
the halt and blind, believing in night and in winter, which
shine. They bring things bright and hard, small, indestructible
things that inexorably mix with a flagrant fracture left unanswered
breaking its hands on the human, all its body and eye. Virginia
blinked in the sudden glare of the stark dark amid a general fall,
a house she’d only imagined surging up and sweeping them off
to a rhythmed sleep they could all walk into and more into.
FROM HENRY DAVID THOREAU: WALKING
It’s in his essay “A Winter Walk” that Thoreau asserts walking
as the structure of literature, literally, as charpente with
detour deriving. The line is always quietly an altered forest.
He was living in New York when he wrote it, in which a forest
is the city of nature, walking on in its long lines
until the page lands. Thoreau started many of his greatest essays
while out walking, jotting down notes on whatever was at hand,
an envelope, an old receipt, a leaf. And though he would not be
the one to write it, he dreamed of an epic titled The Leaf because
he saw in leaves the essential principle of generation as a nonrigid
form of crystallization, a skyline of trees carved from rock crystal,
and thus a city composed solely of windows. And that sand, too,
and even stone, has leaves, has its own infinitesimal glass hands.
Thoreau, in his notes, notes the fact that a leaf has no inside,
that shadow stills a breeze. Standing slightly inside the gate,
he leaned into the architecture of all living things, is the
cathedral of trees. “Surpassing stained glass,” he said of the light
coming through the leaves of the dwarf andromeda in April.
He lost a digression in an argument about the proper place for
perfect things in an imperfect world, looking in, as does a glade,
like nothing else upon which promise is built
in the mind
the sun strikes and shatters
into a stand of pines
flickering
“a spring the world has never seen”
and a ghost leaf, or the leaves of ghosts, he said of frost, lost
a bird in a labyrinth
frozen hard
in different exit.
From Brightfellow
Rikki Ducornet
When huts they had procured and pelts and fire,
And when the woman joined unto the man,
Withdrew with him into one dwelling place …
And when they saw an offspring born
From out themselves, then the first human race
Began to soften.
—Lucretius, On the Nature of Things
The linoleum swells with stories. As he plays, darkness rises from the floor and slowly claims the room. Outside, a heavy rain falls and then it ends. Outside, the world spins and he is the only one alone.
He steps from one island to the next and he does this cautiously. Cautiously! His feet are bare and they are small. Sometimes he considers them with curiosity. He is a beautiful child but does not know it. He does not know that he is lonely and that his fear is not of his making, that his fear will haunt him for the rest of his life. It will impede him years from now, twist and
turn him just as an incessant wind twists and turns a tree—just as it will in unexpected ways nourish him. Yes: It will both nourish and impede him. And this is a terrible thing. How can he undo such a tangle? Sometimes I wonder how anyone survives childhood.
The damage, already there, is subtle, as is its progress. It reaches for the future like smoke. The world bends beneath the weight of such malfeasance. There is a smell to it, a flavor and a mood, a familiar weather. Although he is six only. Six! He is accustomed to it, it is the atmosphere that somehow sustains his tirelessly imagining mind. Oh! How tirelessly he dreams! He cannot know it, but already he yearns to live richly. That is to say deeply and with excitement. He is thirsty but it does not occur to him to drink.
To begin: It is late in the day. Early evening if you will. And he is alone. I wonder why he is alone, why there is no one else in the house. He is a good child, far too good for his own safety. The house is in shadow, the woods beyond in shadow, and, behind his door, the familiar rooms—all are in shadow. One day the word penumbra will appeal to him. But he is too small to know it. Only six, he plays at explorer. It is his way of claiming and knowing those charmed islands that burn so brightly in the mind. Here, he says, his head tilted to one side, are antelopes. (Antelope—a word he loves.) Parrots in the trees. Parrots with beaks made to crack nuts, and with wings strong enough to master hurricanes. He draws a breath and, crossing over to the next island, the island of elephants, blows it out. Trumpeting elephants, their toes fused together. And snakes! Even more beautiful than the garter snakes that live in the backyard there where the sumac grows. More beautiful than the copperheads that rule the woods where he walks, sweeping the paths with a solid stick just as if those paths were planted with explosives. Poised on one foot, he says: Be careful. Again he dares confront the linoleum’s treacherous waters. Giraffes, he nods, greeting them, coming to rest. Solidly planted and still, he looks at the world around him. The islands are all alike, gold-colored blossoms floating on an indigo sea. Volcanic islands with lakes, caves, quicksand. How he loves these islands! These epic journeys!
There is an archipelago that begins under his bed and goes all the way to his door. It shines with beauty and danger. There are flowers that have voices and sing to children. There is a poison toad that speaks in riddles, and the wrong sort of snake, thick as a chimney, concealed in the dappled light. Beyond the door is the bathroom he needs to visit but dares not, nor the kitchen, his parents’ mysterious bedroom (a place of disquiet), the living room, the small dining room where he likes to draw pictures because the table is so big his crayons can’t roll all the way to the edge and fall to the floor. Crayons, he thinks, are like baby snakes in rigor mortis (his mother’s words). He thinks a boy can never have enough crayons.