Obligations of the Harp. Arthur Saltzman
stalked about the stage with what seemed to be a bad nosebleed. Instead of ennui, I got petulance; instead of dignity, daze; instead of studied contempt, the look of someone who’d swallowed sour milk with his cereal. Contemplation came off as constipation, existential crisis as ADHD.
Yet dutifully I drilled them late into the evenings they’d have preferred to fill with television and soccer. A veritable encyclopedia of despots, generals, rebel leaders, artists, martyrs, and other luminaries kept hours after class in rarefied detention that spanned centuries. Those who did not know their history, who did not have every jerry-built gesture and syllable of it down pat, were doomed to repeat it and, every afternoon for nearly a month, repeat it again. Such was the history they inherited: a show that must go on.
And on they went, serving up bite-sized highlights of Western civilization like turns on a bill. Twenty-three elite personalities dredged out of the archives. (Dredged, indeed, going by the baggy, overblown figures they presented.) Twenty-three sundry tragedies strung together to constitute a pageant, our very own ruin with a view, which we offered up gamely to enchant an audience ready and willing to be enchanted.
And going by the applause and the judging sheets, we got away with it. We apparently pulled off Pericles without tarnishing the Golden Age of Greece. We led out Lenin and the putsch went unpunished. We paraded our Columbus, Kennedy, and Sacagawea, and their reputations somehow survived. And afterward, all clutching certificates of merit, our miniature diplomats and makeshift sovereigns were embraced by grateful teachers and parents, who felt, for once, that the dustbin of history had been redeemed, that the past, theirs and ours, was not lost time. Because it clearly featured students from their own school district, because their own children headed the cast, history was assured a level of significance that no textbook, file tape, or document under glass could match. Nothing was as preposterous as the version of posterity we put on that day. As it turned out, though, intimacy, not integrity, was the point of it.
I used to wonder what it would be like to watch the network news as if I knew everyone involved. If the nightclub fire had exclusively claimed my classmates, the eight-car pile-up had restricted itself to the relatives with whom I’d just shared Thanksgiving turkey, and the evening’s inventory of burglary, rape, and murder victims had all had my last name, how would I bear up? How would I persevere under all that personal implication? Then I’d realize that, of course, every assault and battery, every killing blizzard and embezzlement, every accident and spectacle had sought out someone’s husband, wife, parent, or child. Everyone who was interviewed on screen or made the papers was someone’s significant other, just like everyone who did not.
“What seest thou else / In the dark backward and abysm of time?” asks Shakespeare’s Prospero. The answer is always the same: the faces of our children, which remind us of our own, long since ravaged and irretrievable. The children, flushed with their performances, will discover that, too. For parents are fated to let their sons and daughters in on their mutual doom. That was one definite lesson that came out of the day’s proceedings. All of us, sooner or later, will be history.
5 Watch This Space
We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.
—Henry James, “The Middle Years”
Unpack any molecule and you’ll find it’s mostly empty space—like space itself, chiefly composed of soots. A monotony of black, an ecstasy of it, with barely a break in the mute and unremitting night. “From Blank to Blank—/ A Threadless Way,” went Emily Dickinson, whose groping disclosed nothing more definite than the determination that “’Twas lighter—to be Blind.” True, one might find a brief gash of star or an arguable flicker of intention somewhere, but in the main it’s a formal evening every evening, and nature’s wardrobe is basic black.
The overall lack of habitation goes against the psychic grain. We prefer to interpret our Solar System, with its massive planets running unopposed, conducting their ancient oval offices around an eternally tenured sun, as the result of the primary election, when actually it represents only the returns from the nearest precincts, which are not very reliable in the long run. In the main, science finds only a modest ration of atoms allotted to every astronomical acre—the monopoly of darkness is that undeniable, a comprehensive locking out and locking down. The chances of anything occupying a random shovelful of universe, much less of any being being there, are so scant that they barely bear mention.
John Updike wrote about the need to edit our ambition: in the absence of supernatural certainty, he suggested the consolation of “the small answer of a texture.” But on a macrocosmic scale, even that may be too much to ask. Our constant barrage of radio waves, television signals, and other electronic sorties notwithstanding, no technological “Marco” is likely to get anything resembling a “Polo” in response. No, from all reports, it’s an agony of emptiness all around, a crush of nothing, and just looking up is enough to threaten your religion. Talk about vistalessness. Talk about empyreal disease. We yearn for surfaces for eyes or instruments to light upon, something to satisfy our starving for contact and contradict the nil, but in the big picture—and in the last analysis, there is no other picture showing tonight—matter is a smattering. In sum, the universe is an exaggerated zero, with barely an erg or iota to wrap your mind around.
And doesn’t the brain conceive of itself in much the same way, not as the wormy clod that surgery exposes, not as any solid per se, but as all sheen, unblemished atmosphere, infinite sky?
As I say, as for sentient company, apart from the usual terrestrial subjects, forget it. According to textbook illustrations of the Milky Way, astronomers have placed us far from the metropolitan center, in the lower left-hand corner of the spill, which is still hypothetically dribbling off the page. We’re in the equivalent of western Kansas, cosmically speaking, and no witness protection program could have so successfully hidden us from view. And don’t except Earth from the dim statistical probabilities, either. The odds against our own presence, much less our perpetuity, are unimaginably long. Indeed, if we were a bet, you wouldn’t take us.
Some poets may invoke an instress that guarantees the intactness of all things, as if every grain, each precious smithereen, were firmly tucked in the hip pocket of God, but our subatomic burgling tends to prove the tenacity of nothingness instead. What is the atom if not an individual instance and symptom of the general nullity: a nucleus surrounded by vacancy like a baby asleep in its bedroom or a planet turning and turning through a bad dream of vastness. Break the lock on any structure and you’ll discover it’s already been looted. Creation seems to have been cleaned out before we got there, so it’s mostly ransacked atoms you come upon. So are you. Matter’s densest concentrate is mostly hole. And so are you. Think of those diagrams of atomic squadrons, columns, and stacks your high school textbooks offered to insinuate the hidden scheme of sine qua non, spread out like so much bubble wrap. All those containers of unoccupiable space, like those see-through office buildings in overgrown cities whose economies have gone bust. In a sense, made up of molecules made up of them, we are more or less already gone.
Run the vacuum as long as you can stand to, and you’ll see it’s impossible to upholster the universe with poetry. The sky is a catastrophe of blackness, which proves so absolute that writers have been casting every conceivable turn of phrase into it for centuries and never hooked a thing. Mary Oliver writes in Blue Pastures that misbegotten forms—badly edited bodies and stillborn prose—are consigned to “the oblivion of the ill-made, nature’s dark throat.” But deftness fares no better, finally. Welcome to the validation of Wallace Stevens’s “Domination of Black,” which blots out even his images. And if canonical writers can’t dissolve their detachment, who can?
What Gertrude Stein said of Oakland—“There is no there there”—in the universe is writ large. Crawl out late at night when nothing but physics is on, and it’s only so much Oakland everywhere you look. All poetry can do is “there, there” you back to bed and put another blanket over you against the cold.
In the absence of alternatives, artists consign themselves to nocturnes, banging their imaginations against the wall in the hope of waking some deity