One must read "In the Heart of the Heart of the Country" in a tactful way, sometimes skipping, forward and back, from one square of prose to the next. It isn't so much a series of moments, but a set, a slide show, a contact sheet, a webpage of thumbnails. They can be shuffled, reordered, repeated. I swear when I read the story in different anthologies, sections are missing, and new ones added. Each section floats independent of the others, yet all are borne by the same breeze, the conflicting currents. Paragraphs, like continents, drift apart and together from reading to reading. That can't be right. But it does feel right.
Boston
Once, I found William H. Gass. I was working in Boston, and he was visiting to lecture. I had been recruited to introduce the concluding session of his two-day gig. I was from Indiana, an oddity, and had told everyone in Boston about wandering around that state in search of B., a small town fastened to a cornfield. This admission made me stranger still to my colleagues in Boston, which is the hub of the universe. Quaint to be from such a place, Indiana. It might as well be India. And strangely touching, this quixotic search for an imaginary place. "You simply must introduce our guest," they said and put me on the spot.
Gass was nothing like I had imagined. He had bored the local audience with his current passion, a slide show of amateur snapshots glossed, glazed with his lovely language about the language. Each slide launched an elaborate essay about itself, prompted by a pedestrian picture of, say, an anonymous doorway in some nameless street of an unidentified town in a vague country. I think he was promoting an aesthetic of the ordinary, an anti-aesthetic, but he couldn't help himself. There was a world in each photograph as there are worlds within each word. I have sailed the seas to see.
By the second night, the crowd had contracted to stragglers and hardcore fans. In my introduction, I related the history of my voyages in search of B. I sailed the seas, I said. And I drew their attention to one of the last sections of "In the Heart of the Heart of the Country." Entitled "Church," it recreates a moment of a high-school basketball game in Indiana.
Then the yelling begins again, and then continues: fathers, mothers, neighbors joining in to form a single pulsing ululation-a cry of the whole community-for in the gymnasium each body becomes the bodies beside it, pressed as they are together, thigh to thigh, and the same shudder runs through all of them, and runs toward the same release. Only the ball moves serenely through this dazzling din. Obedient to law it scarcely speaks but caroms quietly and lives at peace.
I had wanted to make a point, I guess, pointing out the contrast between the things in rest and in motion, the agitation of rest and the quiescence of movement. It's how I feel I felt driving aimlessly and with an aim through the space of Indiana. It is how I felt, I feel, reading the story in which nothing and everything seems, seemed to happen. I sing of what is past, or passing, or to come.
On the way to the reception, Gass told me that my expeditions in search of B. might be beside the point, that the place did not exist. Or existed only in the story, like a variable in an equation. X. B.
"I knew that," I said, "I knew, know that."
Baptism
Robert Indiana, the artist who sculpted LOVE, lives on the island of Vinalhaven, a jigsaw puzzle piece of rock off the coast of Maine. Hidden in that rusting fragment of the alphabet that stands for LOVE is the heart-shaped cutout in the sculpture's heart. It is made by the V-ed rays of the V's angled legs and their curving serifed caps curving inward to form that other, shallower V. What was his real name, Robert Indiana, like Gass, another architect of loose associations between the state of Indiana and the state of love, of longing?
Breast
On the first day of classes I always ask my students where they are from. Force of habit and habitat. "Where you from?" There are always the ones, more than you would guess, who answer that they are from nowhere and everywhere, usually self-described brats of the military, the conglomerate, the academy. Once a woman, anticipating the question, I suppose, or homesick, or both, pointed to a spot on her chest. She was wearing a T-shirt printed with a map of her state. She pressed her finger down indicating the region above her heart. "I'm from right here," she said, turning left and right so that the entire class could see.
Battlefield
My frail father sat, a paltry thing, at the card table sorting the puzzle pieces by color. He had defined the boundary of the puzzle, piecing together the edge. Inside the edge, he added to the mounds of separate hues. Each individual piece was nothing but an abstraction, a cloud of color. He tossed a piece into one pile and another piece onto another. He chewed on what looked like a bit of the sky, considering. He read the terrain, the declivities and defiles. He surveyed the shattered landscape before him, nowhere near the moment when the landscape pictured on the box art becomes the tiled landscape on the table.
Basketball
My father played guard. There is a picture in his yearbook. He is posed in that antique stance, the underhanded free throw. It is a composition of curves. His oval face. The arch of his bowed legs. The parabolic cradle of his arms around the ball. The squashed ovoid of the foul circle inscribed at his feet. The 0 his mouth is forming. The eggs of his eyes. The twin black scallops of their irises. And on his jersey, double zero.
Baptism
After the Battle of Tippecanoe, William Henry Harrison became 01' Tippecanoe. The history of a piece of ground is recorded in a deed. Here, the deed was deeded to the man. Of all my addresses, not one has attached itself to me. Nor have I made any place memorable. There are times I want to lose myself in this place or, better yet, confound all that I find while looking. I want to be the fixed point and the vector, the tangent. I want to wrap myself in this field as if it were a robe, rob it of its name, and then roam.
Byzantium
Today Sparta looks so midwestern. Cornfields, fastened all around, surround it. Its streets are arranged in a tidy grid; a green or red tractor putts by. The famous Sparta of antiquity was long ago laid to waste. The present city was built only in the last century along modern functional lines. But up in the hills, in the mountains outside Sparta, above the neat order, I stumbled on what is left of the red brick walls and buildings of a provin cial Byzantine outpost, Mystras. The Ottomans sacked it last, in 1453. It isn't touristed much; the crowds more are attracted to the famous marble sites, the classics. Even in ruin it's a backwater, the B. of the Holy Eastern Roman Empire. The afternoon was hot, and I wandered the dusty streets between the intricate piles of rubble, thinking of drowsy emperors.
The few restored churches came equipped with their own featherbedded guards who, honestly, sang for me when they turned away, magnanimously ignoring my prohibited picture taking of their faded frescoes. A convent stood extant in the heart of town, and through the bars of the gate, I watched one old tattered nun sweep the same stone square of the courtyard for the rest of the afternoon.