"This sort of thing can be good."
'I begin to feel as though my thoughts and voice here are in some way the creative products of something outside me, not in my control, and yet that this shaping, determining influence outside me is still me. I feel a division which the outside voice posits as the labor pains of a nascent emotional conscience. I am invested with an urge to "write it all out," to confront the past and present as a community or signs, but this requires a special distance I seem to have left behind. For a few days I exercise instead — go for long, shambling runs in jeans and sneakers, move some heavy mechanical clutter out of my uncle's backyard. It leaves me nervous and flushed and my aunt is happy; she says I look healthy. I take the cotton out of my ear.'
"All this time you're communicating with no one."
'I let my aunt do the talking to my parents. I do, though, have one odd and unsatisfactory phone conversation with my eldest brother, who is an ophthalmologist in Dayton. He smokes a pipe and is named Leonard. Leonard is far and away my least favorite relative, and I have no clue why I call him one night, collect, very late, and give him an involved and scrupulously fair edition of the whole story. We end up arguing. Leonard maintains that I am just like our mother and suffer from an unhappy and basically silly desire to be perfect; I say that this has nothing constructive to do with anything I've said, and that furthermore I fail to see what's so bad about wishing to be perfect, since being perfect would be… well, perfect. Leonard invites me to think about how boring it would be to be perfect. I defer to Leonard's extensive and hard-earned knowledge about being boring, but do point out that since being boring is an imperfection, it would by definition be impossible for a perfect person to be boring. Leonard says I've always enjoyed playing games with words in order to dodge the real meanings of things; this segues with suspicious neatness into my intuitions about the impending death of lexical utterance, and I'm afraid I indulge myself for several minutes before I realize that one of us has severed the connection. I curse Leonard's pipe, and his wife with a face like the rind of a ham.'
"Though of course your brother was only pointing out that perfection, when we get right down to the dark, cheese-binding heart of the matter, is impossible."
'There is no shortage of things that are perfect for the function that defines them. Peano's axioms. A chameleon's coat. A Turing Machine.'
"Those aren't persons."
'No one has ever argued pursuasively that that has anything to do with it. My professors stopped trying.'
"Could we possibly agree on whom you might ask now?"
'He said real poetry won't be in words after a while. He said the icy beauty of the perfect signification of fabricated nonverbal symbols and their relation through agreed-on rules will come slowly to replace first the form and then the stuff of poetry. He says an epoch is dying and he can hear the rattle. I have all this in letters he sent me. I keep all my letters in a box. He said poetic units that allude and evoke and summon and are variably limited by the particular experience and sensitivity of individual poets and readers will give way to symbols that both are and stand for what they're about, that both the limit and the infinity of what is real can be expressed best by axiom, sign, and function. I love Emily Dickinson. I said I wasn't going to pretend like I understood and disagreed but it seemed like what he thought about poetry was going to make poetry seem cold and sad. I said a big part of the realness that poems were about for me, when I read them, was feelings. I wasn't going to pretend to be sure, but I didn't think numbers and systems and functions could make people feel any way at all. Sometimes, when I said it, he felt sorry for me, and said I wasn't conceiving the project right, and he'd play with my earlobes. But sometimes at night he'd get mad and say that I was just one of those people that are afraid of everything new and unavoidable and think they're going to be bad for people. He came so close to calling me stupid that I almost got really mad. I'm not stupid. I graduated college in three years. And I don't think all new things and things changing are bad for people.'
"How could you think this was what the girl was afraid of?"
'Today, a little over three weeks in Prosopopeia, I am sitting in my relatives' living room, with the cotton back in my ear, watching the lunchtime news on a Canadian station. I suspect it's nice outside. There is trouble in Quebec. I can hear my aunt saying something, in the kitchen. In a moment she comes in, wiping her hands on a small towel, and says that the stove is acting up. Apparently she can't get the top of the stove to heat, that sometimes it acts up. She wants to heat some chili for my uncle and me to eat when he conies home for lunch. He'll be home in the early afternoon. There's not much else for a good lunch in the house, and she's not fussy for going to the IGA because she has to prepare for a French quiz, and I'm certainly not going to go out in the wind with that ear acting up like it's been, and she can't get the stove to work. She asks me if I could maybe have a quick look at the stove.'
'I'm not afraid of new things. I'm just afraid of feeling alone even when there's somebody else there. I'm afraid of feeling bad. Maybe that's selfish, but it's the way I feel.'
'The stove is indeed officially acting up. The stovetop burners do not respond. My aunt says it's an electrical thingummy in the back of the stove, that comes loose, that my uncle can always get it working again but he won't be home until she's already in class, and the chili won't be able to simmer, reblend, get tasty. She says if it wouldn't make my ear hurt could I try to get the stove going? It's an electrical thingummy, after all. I say no problem. She goes for my uncle's toolbox in the closet by the cellar door. I reach back and unplug this huge, ugly old white stove, pull it away from the wall and the new dishwasher. I get a Phillips out of my uncle's box and remove the stove's back panel. The stove is so old I can't even make out the manufacturer's name. It is possibly the crudest piece of equipment ever conceived. Its unit cord is insulated in some sort of ancient fabric wrap with tiny red barber-spirals on it. The cord simply conducts a normal 220 house AC into a five-way distributor circuit at the base of the stove's guts. Bundles of thick, inefficient wires in harness lead from each of the four burner controls and from the main oven's temperature setting into outflow jacks on the circuit. The burner controls determine temperature level at the selected point through straightforward contact and conduction of AC to the relevant burner's heating unit, each of which units is simply a crudely grounded high-resistance transformer circuit that conducts heat, again through simple contact, into the black iron spiral of its burner. Energy-to-work ratios here probably sit at no better than 3/2. There aren't even any reflecting pans under the burners. I tell my aunt that this is an old and poor and energy-inefficient stove. She says she knows and is sorry but they've had it since before Kennedy and it's got sentimental value, and that this year it came down to either a new stove or a new dishwasher. She is sitting at the sunlit kitchen table, reviewing verb tenses, apologizing about her stove. She says the chili needs to go on soon to simmer and reblend if it's going to go on at all; do I think I can fix the thingummy or should she run to the store for something cold?'