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 who’ll tell them to keep it down. Facing vacancy, poets posit themselves by producing poems, just as under the very same conditions potters would produce pots or cobblers shoes. They are all reflexive gestures—stanzas, ceramics, soles. So are Christo’s canvas installations, his curtained valleys, battened-down beachfronts, and wrapped woods. So is Alain Arias-Misson’s Pamplona text, an extensive deployment of gigantic punctuation marks intended to manifest the city’s underlying grammar. So are the sales of stars as birthday gifts, which the purchasers can register in honor of loved ones. (One might buy a nebula to commemorate a nephew’s graduation, a constellation for a special cousin’s bar mitzvah, or a whole swath of astrology for a twenty-fifth anniversary, as his budget allows.) So is the naming of every rise and declivity on the moon, not to mention every other boulder big enough to detect up there. And so is “Black on Black,” a ten-foot-square black canvas painted black, which dominates the west wall in a room of the Chicago Art Institute, where it draws in and spooks the patrons, anticipating by example the announcement of “Lights Out.” All craft and supplication pitted against the void, which has all the room in the world and all the time.
And if all that weren’t unsettling enough, rumor has it that the universe keeps retreating from us, somewhat the way millions of Russians did from the incursions of would-be conquerors during war, leading them ever deeper into the zero. Science is pretty frank and unforgiving about this, and we don’t need all that much science to find out how far we fall short in our approximations. Even a layman’s appreciation of Einstein is enough to tell us that the clocks and rulers we might carry into subatomic interstices or the endless uttermost prove useless, there where an hour is not an hour after all, and not an inch an inch. Instead of formulating space, we merely alter the terms of our futility. One might say we’re down to desperate measures, had that not always been the case.
A monarchy of darkness. An obscure constitution. But no matter.
If all goes according to one current theory, Creation will come down to an omnivorous black hole, the final Final Solution and last collapse. There will have been nothing so ecumenical in existence as the end of it, which might be envisioned as an inhalation so complete that even our ghosts will get sucked in. Our holy and unwholesome ghosts, our inconspicuous and colloquial, our silent and sociable ghosts; the abject and the unacknowledged along with the indomitable ghosts; the familiar and the faint, the teasing and the malignant, the availing and the uninvoked, the intimate and the exiled alike; our wistful and forbidding spirits, those that leave spectral evidence behind and those that remove all sign; all the carping, cloying, coy, incorrigible, and unaccounted for ghosts, all at once and all together; the ghosts we were and those we’ll become, accumulated and compounded into the one period put to space and time.
In the meantime—which by that implacable definition, it always is—on afternoon television, they are consulting with the dead. Reality may be escaping in every direction every instant, but the premise of this particular show is that dying is centripetal. Our own ghosts return to us like repercussions, and apparently they can be encouraged to do so on cue. It’s a comfort—one way of countering the expanding universe by reeling something personal back in. They seize eagerly upon their namesakes to secure themselves, much as etymologists clutch words by their roots. Even if their departed have come back to complain or to punish them, the audience welcomes those possibilities over an eternity of the silent treatment.
Not a single guest judges. It’s as Don DeLillo wrote in Mao II: “Only shallow people insist on disbelief.” Why assume that a television studio is less conducive to rarefied visits than a chapel or a cemetery? Spirits might insinuate themselves anywhere. Consider the portable auras saints wore in old paintings like high collars turned up against the wind. It stands to reason that like everything else in Creation, divinity can come upon us out of nowhere, from behind.
The uniquely accessible host is the only one who’s actually occupied by the ghosts, and he translates for the studio audience their queries and talismanic memories, their jokes and concerns, their good wishes and regrets. The posthumous rush he reports occasionally befuddles him, and it occasionally takes him a minute or two for him to connect a given ghost to its family—afterworld traffic is snarled, and entities are crammed like commuters on a subway car. Eventually, though, he is able to home in on one or more idiosyncrasies recognized by selected members of the gallery. And so, this hour’s arbitration between incorporeal and carnal Callisons, followed by a reunion of a departed Furillo and some who’ve arrived in the flesh, is under way.
Tickets to the show are hard to come by. The disappointment and envy of those whose missing familiars do not show up is obvious. Everyone hopes to be summoned (by the host, by the impalpable—there is no discernible difference). Before the program goes to air, their prayers are abstract—customary petitions, more or less equally divided between “Please” and “Please don’t.” On camera,
