Weltstein / Antschel / Worldstone

Matt posted a Paul Celan poem, radiant in its simplicity:

Was uns
zusammenwarf,
schrickt auseinander,
ein Weltstein, sonnenfern,
summt.

[What tossed us
together,
startles apart,
a worldstone, sun-distant,
hums.]

At one and rent; solid as world, ethereal as sun; near as earth, distant as star. Summt: music, maybe, but hums and buzzes are not the melodies of the spheres. A world that comes together too swiftly breaks with the same rush apart. I think of Celan before he was Celan, thrown into a ghetto, surrounded by spurned Yiddish. He translated Shakespeare's sonnets into German. Did he hear the world around him buzz?

Weltstein, worldstone. We long for an immobile world, shores to clutch when the tsunami comes, but that rock never does hold firm. A ghetto opens where a city stretched. The warm sun recedes. Paul né Antschel had a father and mother who would not hide. He lost them to German camps, and became Celan.

The hum that tosses us together.

Seven, or Eight

שבעה / Line Crossing

I. 1929
Simon Cohen of Bangor had many children, and lost three to the Irish.

On a new decade's brink he lost more: every store, every building, every dollar in the city bank. I wonder what he felt then, bereft of the world. Did he mourn that he had mourned for Ana, for Nathan, for Robert? Did he remember those days when he could not shave, did not bathe, mirrors covered and shirt rent? Did the comforters whisper to Simon and to Fanny Hamakom y'nachem etkhem b'tokh sha'ar avelei tziyon viyrushalayim -- shiva for the living? Alone in a crowded family, as empty of relation as the peddler he once was, did he wish for the past that might have been?

II. 2009
I have four sisters and none of them are lost. No Cohens any more, but a litany of the globe: Connolly (Ireland), Meikle (Jamaica), Delgado (Puerto Rico), Demers (French Canada).

Not happy. Not unhappy. But not lost.

The world does not halt because we mourn its jumbling. To love the past is to unbind it, or bind history to strange futures, release advent from return.

Kaddish / Keys

קדיש
Yom Kippur, a good day to meditate on a text with some Jewish meaning. I pulled A Yes-or-No Answer from the shelf by my bed. Sun and warm breezes are just giving way to a rush of dim clouds and rain.

Jane Shore is my colleague at GW, as well as my friend. She and her husband Howard have been good to my family, signing books to give to my children, inviting us to their cozy home to dine. Like many writers who are not from Vermont, they spend July and August in its verdancy. A few summers ago Jane and Howard gave their DC home to a fellow poet. The woman lived in their house with her eight year old son. After several quiet weeks of residence, she murdered her child and herself. The bodies were discovered by a mutual friend.

Jane and Howard tried to reinhabit their home. They stripped bloody floorboards, repainted, renewed. Judaism has no ritual of exorcism, so they asked their rabbi to invent one, to rid the place of its clinging sorrows. Despite these efforts, they could dwell in the house no longer. A Yes-or-No Answer contains several powerful poems that quietly make reference to the sad deaths. One that haunts me is entitled, simply, "Keys." I quote it today as a kind of kaddish for a boy I did not know, but whose death has touched me deeply through my friend and through her art.

KEYS

What do I do with the Post-it notes
she stuck on the fridge?
Do I delete her email asking
was it okay
if her little boy played
with my daughter's old keychains
stored in the shoebox under her bed?

Yes, of course. Be my guest.
While you're housesitting,
Mi casa es su casa, I said.
Then I showed her
how to lock the front door
and handed her the keys.

Such a nice little boy, said our neighbor.
Such an attentive mother.
Tony, the locksmith down the street,
would reach inside a grimy jar,
as if fishing for a candy,
and hand the boy another key or two --

a bent key, a worn-down key,
a key with broken teeth,
old mailbox keys, luggage keys, and sometimes
as a special treat he'd let the boy
choose a shiny blank key from the rotating display
and cut him a brand new key
to add to his collection.

The morning she locked the doors
and turned on the alarm,
and stabbed her son and slit her wrists
and lay down on my dining room floor
to die, she left a message
on my best friend's voice mail:
Let yourself in.
Bring your spare key ...

Now, it's as if my house
keeps playing tricks on me.
I open my lingerie drawer and find a key.
Whose is it?
Which lock does it belong to?
I find a key under the coffee table.
A key wedged between the sofa cushions.
A key with a tag to a '71 Chevy.
Cleaning under my daughter'd bed,
I find rings of keys, lots more keys,
none of which fits any lock in my house.

Sunday Morning, Rain and Owl Pajamas

Because I heard noises I stayed in bed for a little bit and then I came downstairs into the kitchen. I saw dad working on the computer. He ALWAYS works on a computer. I sat on his lap. I hugged him. "I love you all around space and back and space never stops." Now I am sitting here writing this. Both of us are writing this. He is typing. Yes, I am done.

Consolation

Because Wendy is away on business, Katherine tucked a monkey into the parental bed where her mother should repose.

She tucked for me, I know: the rosy animal an offering at a time of desolation, a gift so that I can slumber through the night. Pinka Monkey (as the creature's called) sat grinning on the pillow with the simper only children's toys attain. Plush as cloud, dead button eyes, a smile of devilry to come.

I told Katherine that I cuddled Pinka Monkey through the night, that I slept well. The beast was exiled to my closet, though, and emerged from time to time in troubled dreams.

There is a joy to it / Interlace

A Mercian hoard from beneath the ground in Staffordshire.

Let the analysis begin: re-evaluate the Dark Ages, reconsider the Midlands, rethink martial ornament and aristocratic identity, return from Bede full of story. A sudden exclamation by Kevin Leahy (National Finds Adviser/ Portable Antiquities Scheme) says more: Amidst the necessary taxonomic mentions of "Anglo-Saxon Style II," his observation of the artwork alone, its strange animals embracing with long jaws: There is a joy to it.

That joy is difficult to speak. And so much of the reporting on the hoard consists of scholars reduced to exuberant cliché. The treasure's discovery -- the unlooked for impingement of the ancient past [our medievalist's beloved past] upon the present -- is an affective event first, a historical one after. Academics are asked to describe the cultural and historical importance, to narrate some cohesive and containing story about Mercia and hoards, but the joy keeps getting in the way.

My favorite piece from the find: the biblical charm. Is it because I am so textual, or because those words on the gold shimmer, quotidian fusion of Christian and pagan into an amulet, its warder long gone but its impossible hope still resounding?

Existential Comet Ping Pong

Gayle was speaking about her new book, a biography of Rosetta Tharpe.

Single parenting, and both children compelled to attend. Sometimes they watched. Sometimes they poked to make me shush them, as if I were a toy with string to pull. Sometimes they took books from the shelves, lingered over Mondrian or Picasso. We were hidden in the art volumes, where rustling and poking and shushing would not disturb.

After the talk, hungry and restless, we left the bookstore. Comet Ping Pong was nearby, and who can resist the promise of table tennis and pizza?  A January day followed us through the door, raising paper napkins into little ghosts. A young man seated us not far from the door that was having trouble keeping January outside. "Will we be cold here?" I asked.

He considered my question with a poet's attentiveness. Serious with wonder. "I don't know," he said, "Will you be cold here?"

It was not a mocking reply. I knew what he meant. Your coldness or your warmth are yours alone. How can I ever tell you your own subjectivity? How much can I know you from our fleeting seconds? Can I judge what you feel, can I know what is mine and what is yours?

"It's an existential question, isn't it?" I said.

We sat not far from the door. January did enter from time to time, but we were never cold.

Why having a medievalist as a father won't necessarily assist you in your social studies homework

Tangible benefits accrue when your dad is scholar of the Middle Ages.

You might become inordinately drawn to sports involving swordplay, for example. Or you might author modern versions of medieval romances. You could create medieval-themed toys. Or enjoy languishing like a princess. All in all you will be well equipped for lifelong participation in Society for Creative Anachronism events (see illustration, dating from Februray 2002; my son Alex will kill me when he sees it here).

But when it comes to practical things, like excelling on minor social studies quizzes, your medievalist dad is likely to be of less use. Alex has a test today on definitions of medieval terms. You would think that I'd be of the greatest use possible when it comes to getting the facts straight, but alas our conversation went something like this:

Me:  Define vassalage.
Alex:  Vassalage is the state of owing ...
Me:  WRONG. A vassalage is a drinking utensil, such as a wine vassalage. It can also be a synonym for a boat or ship.
Alex: Isn't that a vessel?
Me:  Who has the PhD in this room? Define serf.
Alex: A serf is someone bound to the land who --
Me:  WRONG. Serf is what you do on the waves in Hawaii. Don't they teach you anything in school?
Alex:  I seriously doubt knights went to Hawaii. They would also sink in their chainmail if they tried to ride waves.
Me:  I think you underestimate how transnational the European Middle Ages were. They also owned armored Speedos for just such aquatic sport occasions. Define fealty.
Alex: Fealty is sworn loyalty to a --
Me:  Again, WRONG. Fealty is what happens to bread that is left out for too long, as in: "Are you sure you want to eat that slice? It looks kind of fealty."
Alex:  I think I can study for this quiz by myself, dad. Thanks.

[x-posted at ITM]

On being pissed off with god

Though fairly observant, my friend K. is not attending high holiday services this year, for the very good reason that god allowed his brother to die. Like many of this world's injustices, the death came without warning, during a morning bike ride. A sunny day, an ordinary day, and lives then in ruin. I met K.'s mother this weekend. She confided that she'll remain at home for Yom Kippur, the first time in thirty years.

When without omen death seizes a vigorous life, when death leaves a blankness of space where a friend or a son once dwelled, who would not feel betrayed? Who would not grow angry towards the future that should have been, the future that now will never arrive? Gone, all gone: the prospect that included the graduation of children, the bar mitzvah of a nephew, the grave of parents rather than parents at a grave. As much as these absences-to-come sting, though, present impossibilities cut more. The sudden thought I will call him on his cell is  answered immediately by He is not ever there again.

As for me, though, I doubt I could feel betrayed by divinity, mostly because I've never felt the presence of gods in my life. Yes, I acknowledge powers outside myself that move the world. I am satisfied with fragment names like gravity, wind, entropy, beauty. At those times when religious calendars bring communities round to celebrations -- Rosh Hashanah, Eid, Christmas, Passover, Easter -- I can never be full enough of watching the congregants gather. They feast, they sing, they celebrate, they feel something awesome that forgot to inhabit me.

The impress of your sleepy mouth

[illustration: Andy Goldsworthy, Icicle star, joined with saliva]

The day will come when my shirts do not bear the stain of a morning embrace, or the mark of my half heart strive at erasure.

Because that day must come, ineludible, the freckle of morning saliva, almost the shape of a five year old's mouth, remains at my shoulder now.

My New Year's Resolution for 5770

Resolved: to use this ancillary and somnolent blog to record the passing of a year, and the traces of that year upon the projects that now hold me.

Taslich at Gravelly Point

תשליך / Casting Off
The new year, and with its arrival a disburdening. Tradition: cast bread or crumbs on moving water. Let the heaviness of the ended year convey.

The Potomac is murky at Gravelly Point, its little waves loop eddies. Our cast bread refuses transport. The ducks will not devour it, the fish will not devour it. And who would want bread sopped in discarded burdens? We watch at shore the flecks of rolls and challah loitering. The Northwest flight from Saint Louis roars, 10:58 to National. The plane skids as it lands. I was aboard a year ago, returning from a world I didn't choose.

The regrets in the water do not sail when we cast them, but the year proceeds regardless. We attend while another plane descends, another, a fourth. It was not a day to await a jettisoned past's departure. Let the remnants linger at the shore, let them witness the planes in noisy decline. Let them wonder how metal things, things of heft that make us feel small and earthbound, voyage weightless. Our burdens were in the water. Our burdens had nothing of air.

Katherine's dream

Katherine awoke during the night, screaming. She had had the following dream:

A bad man took dad away. He was carrying him like that [hugs herself]. Then me and mom tried to get dad out while Alex was in the shower. And then Alex came out but he forgot to put one arm through his shirt. He didn't really forget, he just wanted to do that so he could punch REALLY hard. Then Alex ran down the stairs and punched him in the back. This was in the middle of the night I think. The bad guy got killed. No he didn't get killed actually he just ran out the chimney because he was scared of us and he never came back to any houses again.

A bad dream that gained a happy ending in its renarration the next morning. I told her that for me it would have been a truly bad dream if when the bad guy took me out of the house everyone cheered and said thank goodness someone finally got that sourpuss dad out of here.

5770

At left, Katherine next to the birthday cake we are making for the earth to celebrate Rosh Hashanah.

The aquamarine marbling is the oceanic layer, the orange and yellow one the sunrise (top) layer. Needless to say, the cake when frosted will taste mostly like food coloring.