and the burns too. The stone house man had built upon the shore, with the station-master

  in it.

  Speaking of which the weary sap next comes to your door.

  What right have you to consider yourself anything but an enormously eccentric though

  not too egocentric character, whose sins of omission haven’t omitted much,

  whose personal-pronoun lapses may indeed have contributed to augmenting the hardship

  silently resented among the working classes? If I thought that for a minute I’d…yet,

  remembering how you didn’t want to get up today, how warm the bed was and cozy, you

  couldn’t really begin with a proletarian, accustomed as they are to backbreaking

  toil and so (you’d like to think) don’t feel it that much. Besides they never read Henry James’ novels.

  Just for the sake of argument let’s say I’ve never done an honest day’s work

  in my life. It’s hardly heartbreaking news, not

  a major concern. Calling shots

  is something I’ve done a lot of, and I’m here to tell you as referee that too much

  isn’t enough, and that coldness must get boxed out by somebody

  or the universe would get derailed. Besides, maybe they do feel it less, as infants

  and the feeble-minded are said to. My first concern (in any case) was to build up

  a graduated series of studies, leading to the alchemical perfection of one who says,

  I can do that. The fabrication of it lasted nearly a lifetime,

  leaving me, at the end, unable to perform the most banal act such as tying my shoelaces

  in a double knot, and vulnerable to the japes of skeptics

  who would have preferred to die a thousand deaths rather than undertake the course

  of study I had so painstakingly elaborated. And as for me, sad to say,

  I could never bring myself to offer my experiments the gift of objective, scientific

  evaluation. Anything rather than that! So I feel I have

  wandered too long in the halls of the nineteenth century: its exhibits,

  talismans, prejudices, erroneous procedures and doomed expeditions are but too familiar

  to me; I must shade my eyes from the light with my hands, the light of the explosion

  of the upcoming twentieth century. Nobody asked me whether I wanted to be born here,

  whether I liked it here, but that’s hardly an excuse for cobbling a palace of mendacious rêves

  into something like existence. The entry is inconspicuous, more like a sentry’s box,

  but the grand regularity of the insides, spoilt by a profusion of ornament, is

  (however) my main contribution to the history of sitting and licking.

  Over the door

  a weathered board scratched with impossible-to-make-out letters, and for this

  he was a child and we grew up knowing him, at least some did, and he

  was fair as any, and stood in open cornfields sometimes

  to give the scale

  to his dreaming, and the dreams of one vast civilization.

  We can see the effects now in devices we use in everyday life without thinking of them,

  in traces of the slightly altered climate and the disproportionately enormous effect it has had

  on geography, roads and productivity. Someone in his class

  should have made him a marshal. Still, he never had the courage to follow his bent

  to the exclusion of petty distractions, nor they to follow him when the wind stood

  in his sails, and he on the poop deck, calling, Arise,

  ye unchained millions, and realize your consequences

  only before it’s too late! I’m afraid it’s all busywork

  for the historian of manners, now. Trash and understanding. When they collected

  on the balcony, some curious, it was only to listen to the upward whoosh! of air, to learn

  how the week of seminars had gotten canceled due to circumstances beyond our control,

  but out of spite, actually. Whose? His or the provost’s? When they said, Does it buzz?

  he replied, yes it does. And there was an end to making arrangements. Many had

  already mounted the homeward trail, headed for a warm bath and a good fuck. Others

  noted a change in the atmosphere: surely it was lighter, but thinner?

  So you tell yourself you’re going to show yourself and say no to yourself

  before witnesses are dragged in to recant. It works so well—how do you manage it,

  dear? Being able to go in and out at any point, I mean. In this case

  it’s back to the hurricane. When we last looked in though

  there were party streamers suspended from ceiling fixtures, and everything

  seemed to be in full swing. Now, Marsha’s baby occupies center stage.

  Whodunit? Dunno. But let’s listen in: “For the fourth time I want you

  to go over there where the washing is and stand the nasty question on its head.

  I mean, what are mussels?” And so it goes, down to the loading and unloading,

  the pretty bleak exteriors. For some, it causes eye cramps. But the boldest line

  on today is Cedric’s “Hey how’d we get this way, eyeful? And the fault of whose buns

  ran it aground in Norwalk, if only you’d had an antenna out for the main, the central

  occasion and dash after it like a slaphappy Weimaraner and diddle it, ’cos

  it’s ours, dig? Of course, after I was ‘slimed’ for the first time, and by

  you, no less, I became increasingly withdrawn for years and the case dragged

  through the courts before finally being settled. And by what right

  do I imagine you this spring day?”

  Mostly the others are more secretive, or were,

  until this new bombshell hit the stands. Now, full of remorse, we ask ourselves

  what we could have done to prevent the calamity. But there was nothing,

  of course, beyond waiting it out, under a dripping awning, on the beach.

  The “elegancy” which Malone imposed upon it was in the direction of that generalization

  dear to the eighteenth-century heart, which the modern temperament finds

  so uncongenial. Clearly we were to blame in some way we cannot know

  other than by divination or recourse to charlatans, which, I’d better say

  right off, is totally out of the question. But when fear pelts down

  one forgets such resolves. I was ever

  determined not to reveal myself a stoolie. I had sat in a metal chair before,

  yet had always assumed that with age a mingled straggling peace and dignity

  came along. Even in my late forties I patiently awaited

  this. After dinner she played Kjerulf. We sipped tea, looking at each other.

  I find appealing the quality of danger

  inherent in thunder, though of course it’s actually in the lightning,

  which I don’t much like at all. I’ll take my jacket off now, and be off.

  Another day we read the thunder its own prepared statement.

  The effect was stupefying. I always do get that feeling

  of being prepared for anything but this, usually followed by a postscript

  about deciding to mend my ways, abjure evil delight, from this day forward.

  This, however, was something else. I may never speak the truth again,

  knowing it to be compounded of false mottoes and aperçus, and that trying

  should be good enough. You get A for effort, but the road to hell is paved

  with good intentions. But I’ll take the blight,

  thanks. I’m good at working under pressure,

  as indeed we all must be.

  Sure, he was still at it by the time the others left. Some protection.

  We had just time to get out. I had mislaid the thermometer. And pill. I bet

  your sweet life I had to do it, to come up with something, for weren’t we all equals

  under the law? And how much should I let that excuse him? Ethical questions

  were never my strong suit, but I wished to pass the gravy anyway, and in that

  I was successful. Never to come round here again. Listen to politics

  or someone filing on the word, and then a gush as from a well

  occurs and no one is fit to stretch anymore. The old bomb was

  having its say, I didn’t know they allowed that, I thought it was still

  that they outmoded it, sometime in the fifties. But to me, the last war

  is World War II. I thought youth began then, is still going on, but for printing that

  I’d be “libel” to legal action, so I pretend it’s not like my youth anymore,

  that things have grown up and gray. One or two friends and I, well we

  get together and talk about it no oftener than once a month. You see,

  the colors are in here in the dark too, only you can’t see them, just feel them.

  Don’t touch. But these are in some way more satisfying than the others,

  though also more eclectic. Did I say hectic? Yes, they are that too…

  The wheat was the color of old men, the robin…Well these are what I had got

  to offer you; I suppose it doesn’t make any difference now because you have something new

  that was not in the catalog I have. Something sweet, turning over, something unbuttoned.

  But now there is no dose you can tolerate, no

  sitting in the sun like a chunk of wood or a large broken fungus; it scarcely

  matters which. See, I’m like you, a believer. At the same time I want to believe in things

  that are endless, even though we don’t get to see them every day, that are

  what color is to a colorless surface, which I believe I have inhabited

  once, or once upon a time. My politics shouldn’t matter. It’s my finger

  that should—it’s here I’ll take my stand. I want over and over

  to tell you what we are is digital, that no other form exists, at least if it does it

  is as a function to the other great, existing forms, and they are already published,

  it seems, in places. I have no desire other than to survive the endless extremes

  of heat and cold. For a dollar I could put it in the mail to you,

  my little tract, but so many others wanted it and spurned it. But I’m

  thinking of you anyway, shall not go away, lest another be duller

  than I’m, and I’m not trusting myself to get away

  except on a lawn roller moving one to two miles per hour, and that

  means we shall have to change when we get there, if we’re tired, or be hired

  by some straw boss and be sent to the rockpile for our pains, our talents

  in getting lively others to talk about ourselves, how

  they came down from Canaan in a wood car, and all was a frozen dump.

  Why don’t any of you want to come back with me,

  where I see, from nesting, where the tree is? Long I’ve labored…

  But others come along and do the job so much quicker, I’m almost

  out of breath, and arranged to go home with them for the night.

  I’d like more children around,

  but that’s it, not everything can be right, there must be a small hole

  near the base, and all must get along, and not try to cover it

  with anything. A shawl or turban would of course help.

  But what does it matter if no one sees,

  if there is no one to take attendance, and meanwhile the dam is overflowed

  by some water, even as it comes rolling even to your feet. And what do you say

  about it then, what ask for? If there are ideals in this society, let them speak

  or afterward hold their peace since no job is going to get done until whoever

  is here has explained the technical language in ways that I

  and a chambermaid can understand. We’ve had so little help,

  of late, been so understaffed, that even quite important logs

  have rolled into the fireplace unbidden, and I

  was never going to screw again, though there may have been error there, until the time

  inscribed in colored crayons, upon the wall. And a distant

  sister comes to take over, nurse you back to health and heresy

  of your time, put one interest ahead of all others: staying still! Not talking! Pretty soon

  it’s everyone’s job, the obligation to have a work-force be here

  at times when no one else’s is. Peace, and a thread of breath: that’s all

  they want; there’s no reason to be excited

  by their shout. And the poor little ones get some attention; it’s as well,

  you might think, and are sent off to the hills

  once they have recuperated a bit from the noise and accident; oh what

  disaster is closer to us today, and how do some others cope

  in the meantime, until the vice-president can be here? And what cops

  are talking together outside? Under the grape-arbor? Ah well it’s no more of a season

  now than it ever was; this year has got to be flooded out, and then it’s

  up to who can play. The morris-dances

  are superseded, and others, who wish to join in, cannot. That is all what our rime is about,

  we who are running, falling, reacting. In case the coat of burrs got overstated

  we can sing operetta, or resurrect pliant golfers,

  trying one’s hand too at vanity in order to catch everything else.

  Meanwhile the meat has been prepared and divided.

  It was time to climb up, to pull the ladder up, having construed pith in the latest verbal

  assaults from onlookers who wished to be crowned too. And that was really all it was about:

  why, then, did it get blown out of context? In another decade there’d be no duel,

  no stony silence in the media, only a little sunlight and frowning

  before standing up again, past true forgetting. But in the meantime

  its warped head wanders; there can never be a peaceful settlement, only further

  reprisals and squeamishness, each day a curdled dawn, and no one remembers

  why we were angry, only that a strict vengeance must be enacted. Even those

  on the deck of a steamer departing for new free ports whose stone breakwaters will not have learned

  of the mystery before are like sleepwalkers amid the gaiety, the greetings: did we say

  it was to end here? And the sky of late spring and promising summer, deeply

  saturated as always during times of war and occupation, promises no quick unraveling

  of the skein of secret misery lobbed from generation to generation, though it does promise

  much in the way of atmospheres and easy repose, and so may lighten the

  burden for future cliff-dwellers, when it shall be seen and printed that all our care

  is quaint anachronisms or prompt-scripts for retro chic. Yet they too, followers,

  become lost in ever-narrowing canyons as day wanes, unwilling

  to relinquish the post of court-historian to a younger and grubbier clientele,

  and so history constantly dwindles, although one can still feel remarkably fit and well-adjusted

  to life in an era more decadent than anything that has preceded it. These stylized

  floral motifs the world offers aren’t meant to be consumed, mindlessly,

  before the waltz ends and fashion begins again; neither

  is it a comment on one to have lost them, to arrive without memory at twilight,

  which in any case spares no one. Blips from the maritime

  provinces made it all disturbingly real: that anyone should have to die

  so that we may stay on here, sodden but alive, fortunate

  to be able to contemplate our mortality from a distance amid kindness

  and late imperial emblems, golden dregs of another civilization

  than the one we gulped down just a short time ago.

  Its vanity pardons no one though, and there are other cudgels for defending

  one’s secret inclination than wisps of hope, transplanted, never acclimated,

  that betray you at the end. How fast the children have grown this year!

  No lovers undefeated? No time to return to the technical college? Then

  you should have made a promise not to seek redress. The charm can’t contain you now.

  Apologies to all and sundry, and for the green that impedes

  whatever I do in my writing, like a bias. Why hold that tiger? Or perform six other

  acts before lunch, when all writing is putting aside something

  in one’s lap, like a sandwich, juggling priorities? But at least in this case it went well

  until the long, late-afternoon-solemn street led first

  to a shiver beyond it and next to a ship absurdly bedded in the snow, like a guidepost.

  And then, finally, the year’s shifting gears got to me, though I know

  enough to be prepared for whatever explodes in your face. Still,

  nobody amuses me anymore. I think now that in another time less would have been made

  of all this. Formerly I was of a different opinion. But we moderns have to “leave our mark”

  on whatever we say and do; we can let nothing pass without a comment

  of some kind. Even rural lapses like water provoke us

  to exquisite nitpicking, and then we don’t know where we are when we stop

  for the night. It could be one of the United States, it could be a European country.

  But we are so riled at what has come secretly to possess us that it can’t make any difference

  to the maggot in one’s sight, the flea in one’s ear: all is basically kindling for the late

  greater conflagration in which we think we shall see our destiny: our fate and death

  as one. And when a shining thing approaches, rush out to meet it half-cocked

  and laughing hysterically with worry. “This is my psychopomp; I ordered it!” But all that

  is writing at the margin where daddy-long-legs tend to congregate. When we need

  wackier prescriptions, we’ll let you know. Meanwhile, be one of those

  on whom nothing is lost. Organize your thoughts in random lines and, later on

 

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