XLVII
A wonderful word, that. It creaks like a board laid over a chasm. Onomatopoeically, it beats ethics. It has all the euphony of a taboo. For the ultimate boundary of a tribe is its language. If a word doesn't stop you, then a tribe isn't yours. Its vowels and its sibilants don't trigger your instincts, don't send your nerve cells into revulsion, don't make you wince.
Which is to say, your command of this tribe's language is just a matter of mimicry. Which, in turn, points at your belonging to a different evolutionary order. Sublingual or supralingual, at least as regards the language that contains the word "treachery." Which is to prevent the sudden reversal of a bone to jelly. Which is to say, evolution never ends: it still continues. The Origin of Species ain't the end of the road; at best a milestone. Which is to say, not all people are people. Might as well add this stamp to the Shells and Mollusks series. It's still a seabed.
XL VIII
You can only enlarge a stamp, you can't reduce it. That is, you can, but reduction will serve no purpose. That is the self-defense of small items, or, if you will, their raison d'etre. They can only be enlarged. That is, if you are in the graphics department of a literary paper of humble strikebreaking origins. "Blow it up," says the editor, and you cheerfully trot off to the lab. Can't reduce it, can you? Simply wouldn't cross your mind. Nowadays just push a button and it either grows or shrinks. To life-size, or to the size of a louse. Push it once more and the louse is gone. Extinct. Not what the editor asked for, though. He wants it life-size: large. The size of his fantasy, if not his dilemma. "Would you buy this man a drink or shake hands with him?" The old English pickle, except now it's grown chic, with perhaps a touch of retro to it. Ah, these days you push a button and the whole mental swamp gets heaving and gurgling, from the Pas de Calais to the Bering Strait, from the 1930s onward. For that's what history is for the generation currently active: for lapsed Catholics, editors in chief, and the like. For nowadays everything is chic and retro: this isn't the fin-de-siecle for nothing.
There is little to look forward to save your bank statement. Whom would you spy for nowadays if you had access to secret information, if you still ached to defy your class or your country? For the Arabs? For the Japanese? Whose plant, let alone mole, could you be? The village has gone truly global; there is a dearth of allegiance, a dearth of affinity. Ay, you can't betray Europe to Asia any longer, or, I'm afraid, the other way around. It's goodbye to conviction, goodbye to the good old godless Communism. From now on, it's all nostalgia for you, old boy, all retro. From your baggy pants to the matte black of your video, stereo, or dashboard echoing the burnished steel of a gun barrel. That's about how radical, how chic it's going to be: in Europe, but in Asia, too. So go ahead, blow up that louse from the 1950s, for reducing it might rob you of your emotional history. What would you be without that, without a big-time traitor never caught and never recanting in your past? Just a cipher in tax-bracket hell, not dissimilar to that of the old wretch when he still drew his salary in pounds. Go ahead and blow it up; pity it can't be made three-dimensional. Pity, too, that you have no idea, as you are pressing "enlarge," that in less than three weeks the whole thing on whose behalf your man toiled all his life will go bust.
XLIX
In a dream. A cross between a meadow and a communal garden somewhere in Kensington, with a fountain or a statue in the middle of it. A sculpture, anyway. Modern, but not very modern. Abstract, with a big hole in the center and a few strings across it: like a guitar but less feminine. Gray. Sort of like by Barbara Hepworth, but made of discarded thoughts and unfinished sentences. Lacelike. On the plinth there is an inscription: To Beloved Spider. Grateful Cobwebs.
L
Twangs of balalaika, the crackle of atmospherics. A hand fiddling with an eye-blinking wireless. It's Moscow, Russia, anytime between 1963 and 1988. More atmospherics and balalaika. Then the first bars of "Lilli" Burter and an upright female voice: "This is the BBC World Service. The news. Read to you by ..." In her thirties, perhaps. Well-scrubbed face, almost no makeup. A chiffon blouse. White. And a cardigan. Most likely beige, the tea-cum-milk color. A broadcloth skirt, knee-high. Black or dark blue, like the evening sky outside. Or maybe it's gray; but knee-high. Knee-high knee-high knee-high. And then there is a slip. Oh my oh my oh my. Another Boeing is blown up in a desert. Pol Pot, Phnom Penh. Mister—a split-second pause—Mugabe. Knee-high. Main thing, the lace. Fragile and intricate like circumlocution. Minuscule dotty flowers. That never see the light of day. And that's why they are so white. Oh blast! Sihanouk, Pinochet, Rudi Deutchke. Chile, Chile, Chile, Chile. Dotty little pansies smothered to death by light-brown tights from a shop in Islington. That's what the world came down to. From the step-by-step approach, from the silks/ flesh/garter/bingo system to the either/or of pantyhose. Detente, SYGINT, ICBMs. New tricks, but the dog's too old. For these, and for the old ones, too. Well, looks like. And going to end up here after all. Pity. Can't win them all, can you? Another whiskey, then. "The main points again . . ." In her thirties, if you ask me, and on the plump side. Dinnertime anyway. Methuselah fancies dotty littlepansies. Methuselah fancies ... All that matters in this life is that cobwebs outlive the spider. How does that thingummy— Tyutchev's! Tyutchev is the name—lyric go?
We are not given to appraise In whom or how our word may live on. And we are vouchsafed oblivion The way we once were given grace.
Dushenka! Dushenka! What's for dinner? "Ah, dahrleeng, I thought we would eat English tonight. Boiled beef."
1991
An Immodest Proposal
About an hour ago, the stage where I stand now as well as your seats were quite empty. An hour hence, they will be empty again. For most of the day, I imagine, this place stays empty; emptiness is its natural state. Had it been endowed with consciousness of its own, it would regard our presence as a nuisance. This is as good an illustration as any of one's significance, in any case; certainly of the significance of our gathering. No matter what brings us here, the ratios are not in our favor. Pleased as we may be with our number, in spatial terms it is of infinitesimal consequence.
This is true, I think, of any human assembly; but when it comes to poetry, it rings a special bell. For one thing, poetry, the writing or the reading of it, is an atomizing art; it is far less social than music or painting. Also, poetry has a certain appetite for emptiness, starting, say, with that of infinity. Mainly, though, because historically speaking the ratio of poetry's audience to the rest of society is not in the former's favor. So we should be pleased with one another, if only because our being here, for all its seeming insignif-
Delivered at the Library of Congress, October 1991.
icance, is a continuation of that history which, by some accounts floating around this town, has ended.