The statistically average American family, consisting I suppose of motherfather, nemesister, brotherape, each in their separate seedpod of distraction, inhabit a house without a single active verb to keep them warm. They are all learning how to be outcome-oriented. If time weren’t still lurking among the flowerpots in the kitchen window, their lives would become joined in one vast wound, I wrote, standing on the stone bridge over the stream. The sound of water: something I used to think of often when I sat in classrooms waiting for the bell to bring us back to our senses. I always pictured a clearing deep in the forest where a spring welled up, unseen by anyone including myself. Later on, this favorite image symbolizing something like hope gave way to the cry of a night bird – a black-crowned night heron, a wild goose. I gave chase without avail. That cry offered the promise of shade in a land too brightly lit, like dark foliage in a 15th-century illuminated manuscript with hardly any blank space left in the margins. I hadn’t thought about this for many years, until the other night when I stood in the road looking back at my own house. It was all dark except for one window, dimly lit by the glow of the computer monitor – though to anyone who didn’t know this it might have seemed to emanate from the pilot flame on a gas stove, or a florescent nightlight. I stood outside in the darkness wondering what it might be like to have that statistically average family, wife and however many kids, remembering computer-generated images based on averages from hundreds of different, real faces. Male or female, such average features always turn out to possess uncommon beauty.
Building a better heffalump trap
When you are hidden, count me among the infidels;
When you appear, count me among the faithful.
What possessions do I have, apart from what you have given?
What are you after, thrusting your hands in my pockets?
(Rumi)
Writing about it – even just thinking about it – chases it away. That’s the problem. And there’s nothing you can say that hasn’t been said countless times before, sometimes even by people who knew what they were talking about. The only way to get at it in a halfway authentic manner is to approach it obliquely, without trying – hell, without meaning to. Write about something you saw on a walk, the lint in your own or somebody else’s navel, or maybe the idea of redemption – pretty much anything, so long as it isn’t self-indulgent. Because if this is going to work, you have to care about these things for their own sake, both in an aesthetic and an ethical way (where “ethical” means “hospitable and respectful”).
–Can’t I just issue a blanket repudiation of everything I have written and will ever write?
–Sure, but this is America. People expect other people to say what they mean and mean what they say. 1 If you keep going the way you’re going, by far the largest proportion of Via Negativa’s readers will forever continue to be transients, people who drop in from god knows where, read for a few minutes or a couple weeks and leave again, vowing never to come back. Can you blame them for feeling used? I mean, what the fuck?!
–Okay, so I’d better just keep the link to that so-called Apologia in place. I mean, I haven’t read it in many months. I don’t want to. I’m sure it’s a whole lot of nothing. But at least it’s there, so people who like to think of themselves as smart and reasonably well-educated can read it and say “Ho-ho!” in a knowing sort of way, like Piglet’s imagined Heffalump, and proceed to plow through a number of posts with relative equanimity, secure in the belief that they know where this is all trending.
Remember, Small was only found after they gave up looking. He ended up somehow in the Heffalump Trap. 2
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1. Which somehow makes us the most gullible people on the planet, not only tolerating the pitch and the spin, but actually begging to be lied to and happily paying for the privilege. But that’s a topic for another day.
2. Only the illustration leads us, rather arbitrarily, to believe that Small was a large beetle. Nowhere in the text is his identity spelled out, beyond saying that he was one of Rabbit’s innumerable friends-and-relations. Which is, of course, tantamount to saying that he is that Friend who stands in the same relation to every seeker.
Words on the street
Cibola 11
Beginnings (cont’d)
In the cities on the lake
in Mexico, too, the Aztecs
wax nostalgic for a fabled past–
a story they may have stolen,
like everything else, from those
they sought to surpass: how
their fathers once inhabited
seven caves far to the north
& half the tribe remains there
while the rest wander southward,
shunned by everyone.
When they rise to power
they strip the chronicles of all
competing accounts. This world
needs to be flayed. But in
the songs, the Flower World
beckons from every horizon,
true home of jaguar & eagle.
The knife-winged vulture
casts one eye
toward its former haunts.
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Flower World: The chromatic, flower-laden spirit world in pre-Cortezian and 17th-century Nahuatl poetry. Versions of the Flower World also occur in oral literatures in many other Uto-Aztecan languages, including Huichol, Yaqui, Piman (O’odham) and Hopi, as well as some of their neighbors, including Zuni.
jaguar & eagle: Totems of the two, main warrior societies of the Aztecs.
knife-winged vulture – Knife-wing, in Zuni cosmology, is the guardian of the Zenith.
Transcript of an editorial meeting
YAH: Almost everything you’ve written here is wrong – or at least, seriously misleading and lacking essential elements of context. No one will read it.
MOSES: Can’t we just dispense with the text and go straight to the commentary?
YAH: The Oral Torah concept? Yeah, but remember: the devil is in the details. Basically, everything you think you know is wrong.
MOSES: Wrongness, then, would seem to be an existential attribute of – um, I mean, the unavoidable condition of Your creatures, correct me if I’m wrong.
YAH: I will, trust me. Generally speaking, to be wrong is to be consumed – by burning, say. Though just once, I would like to feel that myself. It’s hell to be right all the time.
MOSES: I think if we want to write a real bestseller here, we have to put in a lot more angels. Tell me about the seraphim.
YAH: Beetles! I never tire of them, their hard & shiny outer wings, the way those diaphanous inner wings unfold, their way with flowers, dung or carrion. Their almost infinite variety.
MOSES: O.K., maybe I’d better stick with violence and begetting, then. But something you just said made me wonder: philosophically speaking, would it be fair to say that Creation is the only escape from tautology?
YAH: Stop trying to pin me down! I ain’t no beetle! Despite what some Egyptians might have told you.
MOSES: But I heard that you gave Abraham something called Sefer Yetzirah, The Book of Creation – like the Chicago Manual of Style for the cosmos. Where can I get a copy?
YAH: That was just a test, like the Binding of Isaac – which he failed miserably, by the way. What a tool he turned out to be! A cog in search of cogma. Haven’t spoken to him since.
MOSES: “Teaching to the test” is wrong, though, isn’t it?
YAH: He was supposed to figure that out on his own. That was the test. This is not a test! I don’t play dice.
MOSES: But, I mean, is it really possible to create new life forms by combining and recombining the letters of Your name, over and over, in precise and non-intuitive sequences?
YAH: Genetic engineering? Yes, but it’s a waste of time – and leads, of course, to hubris and atheism.
MOSES: Suppose, however – just suppose! – there were a need…
YAH: Look at the way unrelated species come to resemble each other, so-called convergent evolution. What are they converging toward? Look at how species co-evolve – the flower and its pollinator, an intricate pas de deux for which it took billions of years and a couple supernovas to set the stage. Beautiful, yes? But let me tell you, Moe: It’s all in the smiting.
MOSES: O.K., but let’s think of our target audience. The priests are going to want to know: how can we be holy, as You are holy? I mean, that is what you said you wanted to communicate, right? In a nutshell?
YAH: As some German Christian heretic will say in the fullness of time: “If you want the kernel, you must break the shell!” Tell the priesthood to suck on your left nut.
MOSES: That’s not very constructive.
YAH: Then tell them to pay attention. That’s it!
MOSES: What is?
YAH: PAYING ATTENTION! What Adam and Eve had such a hard time with. You know, “the only escape from tautology.” Or solipsism, to look at it from My point-of-view, for once.
MOSES: Come again?
YAH: Bugger off, tablet boy!
Words on the street
Cibola 10
Beginnings (cont’d)
Where memories fail,
where the chroniclers fall silent,
songs spring up to fill the void:
Seven bishops set sail on seven ships
in the year of our Lord
seven hundred & fourteen,
fleeing the African invaders,
the Moorish warriors for a new faith
irrupting in the heart of the old.
Thus the Iberian balladeers
for centuries keep stringing out
new verses: the freedom-seekers
settle in the West,
rebuild their Seven Cities
on the blessed isle first envisioned
by pagan Greeks. Antilla,
growing in the minds of errant
knights & vision-questing friars
until it occupies most
of the space on the globe
between Portugal & Japan:
unspoken goal of Columbus,
Vespucci, Cortez.
A kingdom without a king, marked
by all the purported virtues of
the early Church–peace,
brotherhood, charity. No use
for jails, no heretics,
no famished lions.
One-line poems
William Matthews was an extremely versatile American poet and translator (of Martial and Jean Follain, among others). Almost everything in his Selected Poems and Translations is quotable: he was one of those poets with a real gift for aphorism and memorable lines. (The complete text of his third book, Rising and Falling, is available on-line; check out in particular the closing piece, “Long.”)
But what I want to do here today is reproduce from the Selected Poems and Translations his selection of “One-liners” – possibly one of the most difficult poetic forms to master.
In the book, these are presented just two per page. I’ll leave a lot of white space around them, to try and preserve the effect.
__________
One-liners
by William Matthews
THE NEEDLE’S EYE, THE LENS
Here comes the blind thread to sew it shut.
LUST ACTS
But desire is a kind of leisure
SLEEP
Border with no country
HOW CAREFUL FIRE CAN BE
is not for fire to tell
SPIRITUAL LIFE
To be warm, build an igloo
NO TRUE RHYME IN ENGLISH FOR “SILVER”
“Pilfer” is true enough for me
DAWN
Insomnia, old tree, when will you shed me?
WHY I DIDN’T NOTICE IT
The moss on the milk is white
PREMATURE EJACULATION
I’m sorry this poem’s already finished
THE PAST
Grief comes to eat without a mouth
SNOW
The dead are dreaming of breathing
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That’s the lot of them. Anyone care to try an imitation? I’m intrigued by the fact that
EVEN THOUGH IT IS ESSENTIAL
The title doesn’t count
Words on the street
Cibola 9
Beginnings (cont’d)
And according to a few accounts
in the chronicles of those who entrust
their memories to nihil obstat
& the notary public’s India ink,
way back a half-millennium ago
when the Old World irrupted
in the heart of the New, two men–
one African, one European–
appear as suddenly as rivers fed
by far-off storms,
with their hundreds of Indian guides
surging north from the newly
conquered province of Nueva Galicia.
The Spanish call them Esteban
& Marcos: ciphers, almost,
names evoking the incense
of another desert–olive, terebinth–
& another beginning,
back when Christianity was still
a sectarian group of Jews
& St. Stephen–San Esteban–
played out his role as original martyr
of the Church-to-be: A man full
of faith & power, who did great wonders
& miracles among the people (thus
the circle of scholars authorized by King James).
And they stirred up the people &
the elders & the scribes & came
upon him & caught him
& brought him to the council.
And set up false witnesses, which said
This man ceaseth not to speak
blasphemous words against
this holy place, and the law . . .
And St. Mark: first
among missionaries, traveling
with Saul & Barnabas,
climbing with Luke & Matthew
into the thin air of history.
The very model of a pilgrim,
however sidelined by the bellicose
Santiago. Retaining even now
his rightful patronage among
the Catholic Indians of the Yaqui
River valley, who honor San Marcos
as a messenger, one who is sent ahead
to scout things out.
* * * *
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Nueva Galicia: Originally a separately administered colony from Nueva España, it comprised roughly the modern Mexican states of Jalisco and Nayarit and the southern half of Sinaloa, with its capital (after gaining its charter in 1548) at Guadalajara.
“A man full of faith & power…” Acts 6:7 ff.
a messenger, one who is sent ahead to scout things out: This is a direct quote from Felipe S. Molina, Yaqui Indian co-author, with anthropologist Larry Evers, of Yaqui Deer Songs, Maso Bwikam: A Native American Poetry, University of Arizona Press (1987). In that context, he is referring strictly to folk belief about the Christian saint and not making any connection to the historical Marcos de Niza, about whom there is no specific oral tradition among the Yaqui, to my knowledge. Yaquis likely formed a significant part of Esteban’s and Marcos’ respective entourages when they entered Hohokam/Salado territory (modern south-central and southeast Arizona).