advantage in conversation: for who could tax him with transcendentalism or over-refining that found him always skilled in facts, real experiences in objects which made their objects + experiences appear artificial: and yet his position was in Nature, + he commanded all its miracles + infinitudes.
One of the things that has only grown in degrees of obscurity for me is what the fact of the poem might be. Even that grammar feels wrong. Might be? Then it’s not a fact.
Or is the possibility of the thing not yet made a fact? A fact beneath the matter of the fact, barest bound against infinitude, that says, Here in this space something can come, but the saying of such a fact is silent.
If it can be said at all.
Experience agitates itself. Eventually the fact of it appears artificial.
You keep recalling it and each time, though you cannot notice it, something changes, something alters, until perhaps the memory appeals to nothing experience means. You forget even what you’ve forgotten.
Turn the page.
Emerson quotes and reminisces for twenty-five pages and then inserts between two blank sheets a newspaper article: “Thoreau and His Writings: His Habits of Thought: Cape Cod.” The article is just a single column, but long, and folded in thirds. It opens by saying that Thoreau “addresses Spartans in taste and Spartans in life,” that he does not appeal to the sentiments of readers that have made other authors more popular. I don’t know what the rest of the article says, or if Emerson himself wrote it. I was scared that unfolding the old paper would destroy it. But what I did take note of is that clipping is followed by twelve blank pages in the journal and the next entry is a torn-out sheet of ruled notebook paper on which, in deep brown ink, Emerson wrote: “His ‘nightwarbler’ June 19 1853 seen + described.” On the backside:
1853
Feb 13. in the driving snowstorm, a dense flock of snowbirds out under the pigweed in the garden.
The torn page nesting in the blank white sheets a kind of songbird lost in the snow.
Then Emerson transcribes Thoreau’s poem “Inspiration.” The first line is: “If with light head erect I sing.” At first I think light means dizzy; then I think it means light. Behind my eyes there’s a dim glow better than the din of thought. It’s dizzying.
Let those I love try to forgive what I have made.
The rest of the journal is blank.
And then I opened Stevens:
To find of sound the bleakest ancestor,
To find of light a music issuing
That the desire for truth seems fatal to truth . . .
Appoint me my place in the music . . .
So that my presence alone ceases to hush the thrush . . .
Replace the click-clack of reason with the hum of thought . . .
Let is not be be my most accurate song . . .
Sensation of staring so long through the bars of the window that the bars appear in front of anything I see. The field is a kind of jail, but the jail is inside me, inside my eye. What is there when I stare at nothing and look at the field? Some grid so fine I don’t know it’s a grid. Or a sheet of ruled notebook paper like a child learns to write on. Look up at the sky and it’s ruled. That’s why it’s blue. All those lines have run together.
Is it a depth, or a surface, or a distance, or is it so near as to be within?
To say something like: the difficulty of blankness.
But so much of it all isn’t quite right.
Paul Celan in Paris, walking with his friend, so fond of repeating what Kafka said: “Sometimes God, sometimes nothing.”
A stain or strain of music. Stain: tinge with color other than the natural one. Strain: to draw tight.
When I had my first child I felt inside myself what I never had to feel before: my solitude. I felt it strain under the new shape. Those first days when eternity is the caul, the child’s timelessness leaks into time, staining it with some tone so pure it creates a rift in what hardly exists—the place within myself, more mine than saying I can mean, not where I am by myself, but where solitude lives its own involuted, involuntary life.
I didn’t know it existed until it was broken.
Singularity not of the self, but in it. Gravity from which not even sound escapes. Fear of the infant crying, also known as the event horizon.
The letter aleph, which makes no noise, draws silence tight and then a sound can follow.
Heraclitus might say, As of the bow, the arrow.
Sometimes I think we carry within ourselves an aleph somewhere behind our heart, or is it within the liver, purging noise as blood is purged of its stain. I guess I don’t know. A transplanted spiritual organ given to us on loan. But I don’t know the terms of the agreement.
Keep quiet. But I fear I can’t.
The letter bet is the first sound. Just silence precedes it. It is shaped like a house missing a wall, and mystics say it should be thought of as a house or a tent. When I studied the mystical importance of Hebraic letters I read that we house ourselves within the fear of God and the letter bet informs us of our position. It is a letter that acts as a portrait of the human condition. Or is it that we live within the love of God? I can’t remember exactly our condition. Bet says we begin to exist by dwelling. Buh-buh-buh, the first sounds a baby makes. Maybe the letter is a kind of shelter from whose safety sometimes we must grope our way back out into the unlettered universe through which aleph blows her silence. Housed in fear or housed in love and silence at the door. Learning to speak.
The words for beginning, head, and blessing also begin with bet.
Where I learned this I forget. Midrash Rabbah, or the Sefer Yetzirah, I can’t remember. I forget how the blessing began in my head.
The source goes astray or it goes missing.
At the edge of the solar system a spacecraft named New Horizons just woke up. It slept for nearly three billion miles and now it’s opening its eyes to take photos of Pluto. Astronomers are hopeful to find craters, mountains. Any features clearly seen would please, as the best photos we now have show only a blurry rock.
Maybe they’ll
