Eisegesis 9 (a-d): The Futureless

During the loneliest stretch of my life, before or since, I had transferred schools and was a stranger in a new town. My roommate set me up on a pity date with a woman who was also alone but more sad than alone, as if it wasn’t the loneliness³ that was making her sad.⁴ Our first date was at a pool hall. She was so quiet. We parted that night without a kiss. However, she told me that she was house-sitting for some friends who had gone abroad. She asked whether I would like to come over the next day. She received me wearing the homeowner’s apron. She served me a casserole. She had to look for the plates. We went into the living room and sat in uncomfortable silence until I told her, “Now I know what it’s like to be in a long, sexless marriage.” As if she had taken offense, she got off her couch and straddled me in the Lay-Z-Boy. For the rest of the weekend, we played house, the house of a doomed marriage, which was not even a relationship. The make-believe made everything brighter. Even her persistent silence. Fucking on the marble countertops. In the pantry. The laundry. In a child’s room. Along the basement stairs. We made it seem as if we were playing for something real, something that mattered and carried weight, not just an idea like romance. The last night together, we slept in the California King amid another couple’s cellular waste, sinking into their stench, separately, facing away as if we were old and ruined by a long life resentfully sacrificed for the other. After I left, she called me and told me she never wanted to see me again. It was the only relationship I ever had in which I didn’t feel the need to beg forgiveness. I was completely myself when I was someone else. Yet, she was sadder than my loneliness and in the end she taught me how to enjoy being alone. Everything brightened, as I mentioned. Everything dazzled in comparison to that icy inferno.⁶
I remember the gift she gave me. She could not take it for herself.

¹regret: It wasn’t true at that time, when he told me, because I was too young to bear any real regret. It was prophetic and the prophecy only came true when I lost my youth. But that was the thing with time.

²old drunk: Like most drunks in my life, it was difficult not to admire their wisdom and position.

³loneliness: I miss my loneliness now. Sometimes I can reinvent it by drinking, but it is a lie. The art critic-historian Peter Schejeldahl wrote that Baudelaire disliked Gustave Courbet’s portrait of him, perhaps because it looked like a “caricature of genius” that “didn’t even try to empathize with Baudelaire, whose loneliness must have throbbed painfully when he saw it.”

⁴making her sad: I mean this to be contrary with whatever I felt my loneliness to be at the time, which was shallow and formed by insecurity. She was working on another grid altogether. I couldn’t name it because I did not recognize her suffering, the depth of it. See Robert Hass’s poem “The World as Will and Representation,” in which a child puzzles over his mother’s alcoholism as she “gagged and drank,” a haunting memory of a past that formed him and one he left behind as Aeneas left a burning Troy in Virgil’s Aeneid. We do not know what we will carry until it is our own.

⁵No teeth: He had lost them one night suddenly, on a curb.

⁶icy inferno: Dante’s lowest realm, we are paralyzed by sin, trapped within ourselves and separated from God.

At work I had been schlepping an idea for an educational consortium about the nature of work. It was a machine that would glom onto a high schooler’s energy, no matter which cards they were dealt, or held, nor the distance at which they held them from the vest, and no matter how few fucks they gave, due to the old futureless thing. I was thinking of going back to school myself and becoming a marshmallow engineer (see 9c). I had, near the apex of my nightly sleep regimen, considered towering architectures bound together by the rebar of uncooked spaghetti. Collapsing triangles. A new sort of structure. I believed in something unbelievable. I quit teaching long ago. College classrooms are filled with impressionable youth who are ironically unreachable. This is always the case. Near the end, I gave a pop quiz. It was a discussion topic to which, dependent on response to prompt, would decide whether each of them lived or died. This last bit, I did not mention to them. Though it was meant to be subjective, not one student answered correctly, or, that is, with the conviction that I felt was owed. The disc of history would continue to turn them under like weeds. Would you do a thing you loved if you were the only one who loved it? I quit the job and the rest of my life really took off. I mean, I can’t say I have been horribly successful. But I can say, with some mustard, that the darkness in the boughs that gathers after the birds have divested of the sun is my own plot and droplet.¹ The alarm that wakes me in another darkness is also mine. I can feel syrupy negative spaces pouring over my body’s contour as I rise or retire, defining that which I am not or have not done or did not choose. I’ve heard the Frost² poem, “The Road Not Taken”, read at commencement ceremonies, but I keep thinking about that other road. It’s the kind of dream that keeps me from my actual sleep. A liminal nightmare.

¹droplet: It begins to rain. The party is disrupted. But you know, it’s spring and birds begin their private desires in the high branches, and though we cannot see them, it transcends this domestic affair. Again the iced magnetic percussion on our skin. We do not deserve this. Again the houses begin to sparkle.

²Frost: said unrhymed poetry was tennis without a net³, whereas I think wrestling is really tennis without a net. Lots of senseless sport. And anyway, just consider the net now, missing, discarded, the thinnest skin around one looping hour of eternity. Which is my way of saying, I tried to have compassion for the other side of things. I would have succeeded, too, if only I let myself. Can you see me now, in the dark? Blink twice if I persist.⁴ I meant no disrespect. My tennis was simply netted by a net³ that does not exist.

^2,3The culture is an invisible net connecting us, a kind of conspiracy, and we hold serve only when on the other side of it, for then it appears.

⁵get behind this one, Jimmy: corporate speak for if you do not do what we say, if you do not conform, you will be out of a job. Compliance often runs counter to justice and fairness. Otherwise, it would not need to be compulsory. Also, a kind of playful ironic phrasing my wife and I share when effort has been afforded to achieve stasis or when we royally fuck something up. Nice job, Jimmy. We are, all of us, Jimmy.

What I meant to tell my employer³ this week, especially on Monday: Over the weekend, a kid had driven a truck into a fertility clinic and detonated. We think we are a long way from the mad bomber. But no. This bomber belonged to an organization that, as central philosophy, holds that humans should not procreate. Death to the future is the most passive yet strictest form of homicide. It is the underlying image of every country’s flag. They managed to save the main part of the clinic and all the eggs. Preserved all ten thousand future fertilizations with exception of just one less major world fucker whose biology was caught in a preponderance. I wonder how many mad bombers are in the midst of a budding generation. At least he had conviction. As with Hamlet, conviction goes a short way. Unlike Hamlet, it is often based on the idiotic (including religion). Selected range of time often predicted our historical analysis. To tell a story had been dependent on the timing of the telling. But now? American politics. Valentine’s Day, a television advertisement of a little girl in a fancy bracelet and British accent gushes love for her mother—the woman who, as it happens, was hawking the bracelet and who had also financed the ad. I wanted the mother dead, of course. But the child I wanted to live a long time and wished it might ponder that timeless ad every Valentine’s Day, the one in which she had been instructed to act.⁴ Would she think anything real? I hope not. But the I is not really me. It’s just a feeling that demands no particular reaction. It is a coloration. A mood. It is a marshmallow, engineered (see 9b).

¹martial artist: Typically one would say, “practiced in the martial arts.” However, I once ran up against an aggressive Scotsman who fashioned himself as such after nearly putting a knife through my hand on a bar top, had I not drawn it back. When he said he was an “artist,” I knew he was only kidding. Yet, the knife stood on its own. I mistook him for Irish.

²not a very good one: Same as I was/am/always will be as a writer. Creative, yes. I could relate one disparate idea or object or event to another thing. I was a little sloppy in process. I’m a bit thick when it comes to finding my voice.

³my employer: I fear that most of my actions as an employee signal a lack of ambition.

⁴she had been instructed to act: King Lear, in order to foolishly divest his kingdom, asks his three daughters to praise him and pledge their loyalty and love. Only the youngest, Cordelia, doesn’t put on a show. For which she is punished, banished. We love her. She is authentic and her sisters are posers. But it’s too late when Lear realizes he has screwed up. Children owe us nothing/everything. Lots of forms of blindness in that play, including the literal.

⁵how to take it: The “it,” of course, is loss. Whitman loved baseball and this is my justification for loving it too. Even though I did before I knew Whitman. Each season reteaches us loss, each pitch. Sometimes it feels victorious. The summer is an allegory. Baseball is built on failure and limiting it. But every player eventually succumbs. Exception: Clemente.

²It is interesting that a careless image could trigger an awareness that I was drifting. This was a casual scene of shoppers. I had been furtively taking some time off from living. I was also working at this time of inaction, just sort of thinking it through day-to-day, though the thinking turned.³ All these years, and I still do not realize my own willful neglect until it’s too late. I was reading James Tate⁴, John Ashbery, Charles Simic, others of this ilk/ink, what I call image-based ultra-solipsism, in which the self in the poem was nothing yet everything, was a feeling whispered the way a bumblebee in a far pasture ascends to the flower. Tate was the best at it because he rarely wrote from the first person and, even when he did, you could tell it still wasn’t him. Maybe a kid from Kansas City washing dishes at the back of a restaurant. His non-self self. If one could name his grief, it could only be intentional misrepresentation. My lost brother, like a lamb was left on a hillside. So long ago and yet he casually wanders over, sits by the fire.⁵ Sometimes it takes me a while to see him, but sure enough. There he is. There I am. I’m not saying I believe in ghosts. I don’t. But we are haunted. And not because we want to be. It points back to the idea of authenticity. And Jimmy, when the fucking robots take over everything, the only thing we will have on them is authenticity. Authentic human flaw. The hardest are the days that do not matter. Where the light is useless. In which you are not worth reporting upon. That thing Mark Jarman said about the fox embodying grief.⁸ Don’t appropriate a slowly dying fox crawling out to place itself at the road’s center. Leave the fox out of this. The fox is dead. This is your fucking grief, Mark Jarman. Not mine.

¹Picasso’s Weeping Women: A series of paintings in which his lover Dora Maar is depicted in a state of wretched grief, chewing her kerchief the way King Priam pulled his hair out weeping for Hector, his fallen son. The object of Maar’s grief was the same as Picasso’s: Guernica. The object of their grief was the same: a lost city.³

³turned: soured

⁴Tate’s Lost Pilot: His first book, which won him the Yale in 1969. The title poem and perhaps the
whole of it was a kind of elegy to his father, an airman killed in WWII.

⁵A fourth-grader hangs himself from the door of a bathroom stall. My wife tells me this matter-of-factly and chases it with salt. A child’s brain cannot explain its loss to those who survive. Of astonishing conviction. Resigned to their own unbeing, existed was upon them unfairly foisted. The belt is around the throat when they push shut the door. Why, they ask, perpetuate torture—just because joy out(lightens/)weighs? That unpromised joy⁶ overrides even though it has been an infrequent visitor, abandons us quickly, and leaves us waiting for it to come again. To know it even once is addictive. The artist lives in this in-between. Not joy, but the ability to carry
disappointment for the long haul.

⁶joy: Joy is not happiness. Bach, who was uncharacteristically “happy” among all artists, fathered 20 children with two wives. His home life was filled with creative musical composition. Although, Partita No. 2 in D Minor—the chaconne⁷—is known as one of the most profoundly sorrowful in human existence. Written upon the death of his first wife, we can hear joy rising from within sorrow.

⁷the chaconne—my awareness of this musical form and Bach’s piece came to me by way of Cormac McCarthy’s Stella Maris.