We’re getting warmer. Harder than double-checking the god is double-checking a checklist for desensitizing the room of a "breather" with a known-to-unknown allergy. Ready: damp cheesecloth over forced-hot-air inlet; no auras; no toys or stuffed animals, no pennants, no books or bookshelves, no rug, no pillows made of mold-prone foam rubber, no chenille bedspread; no ornately carved furniture; no flowers; no large, luminous reptiles; use powerful tank-type vacuum cleaner (a good buy) and vacuum the vacuum before using, and (hear?) always air the room after vacuuming, and (hear?) never ever vacuum with a breathing child in the room.
Which child? One of them is a breather, one a bleeder, which is which? Let’s not take any chances. Shall we listen to them?
We wanted to hear voices. And then we did, but while the voices were promising and boiled down from a cloud of near-angel voices (awfully like ours on a good day) to now and then one voice, they proved to be a band of tortured archaeologists, or anthropologists anyhow: pros, but tortured by doubts and with a pair of earphones at the ready, you see they were sitting on top of something big, they knew of a hidden city and they were sitting on top of it. But they found themselves tortured by professionals in a room and a next room, above a dungeon in the Southern Hemisphere, rooms fitted only with bare needs, an outlet for the earphones, a chair to be seated in, a floor to be stood up on, familiarity waiting to receive routine, plus the sound of the sea and, for those who don’t smoke, the old smell of the sea’s cool sweat down your own little wormhole’s thread.
While this other was going on, we didn’t think much of opera. Opera was high-classical singing in a second language. It wouldn’t go away, we found, and the stars meeting and proliferating onstage spread their arms taking curtain calls before a giant meaning of brocade, the three women, princess, kavalier, and bride, and the bass baron puffing in preparation possibly for a seizure. The weight of the world can be negotiated — is not this the music, the lordly loveliness ongoing on and on of opera?
They turn to each other, baron and kavalier, a smiling moment between singers. Tonight is an articulated structure that gives play to a multiplicity of small-scale units. They turn away together into the broad face and mouth of the audience. They are female and male — separate as we already recall the music being from the plot, but electric magnetic singers.
But what memorable thing did the infamously gifted general officer of a South American republic’s navy say to our diva offstage a few minutes hence when she had feared he might extract from her her secret the tapeworm? It was her autograph he wanted, raising the Japanese pen, that’s all, her signature. And as she was reminded of the Ojibway-Sioux medicine man now long since back in Mille Lacs, she saw over the mufti officer’s (the civil villain’s) shoulder her breathless doctor entering backstage with a host of silver roses, and she answered her military admirer in translation, "Oh — autograph me." But when on bended knee the mufti officer now made to write across one satin thigh of her kavalier breeches, she raised him telling him softly to take her literally and then she introduced the physician her long-time friend who now materialized and tilted his head at her for he was off balance asking her without words if their secret had fared well. "Supper?" he murmured, old intimate that he must be at this moment, coveting hours of moments, old listener at her breast, breath cutting life into words, a sentence into meanings. But she put him off for the evening: "Can we make it tomorrow late brunch instead?" — flashbulb lighting—"I will be responsible for the coffee and orange juice, my darling, if you will bring… the brioches and—" she waited for a flashbulb—"and the atabrine."
He felt her know some moving part of him, then instantly swim away and know another part, and he loved her and he hated her for reading his mind. But she said, "You know me like a book." "A libretto," he murmured amazingly. But she shook her head sincerely with that ultimate sensuality that was not for him, her tongue tip tight against her upper lip: "Darling when you try to be clever. . forget it."
Atabrine, did she say? His presence drops him. His cerebellum wheels like the wind spoken of by Indians he has known. Can he cope? Is he equal? Hairline fracture arcs slowly slowly down the doctor’s face. Atabrine? Time to flush out the worm or worms? Has she, then, achieved the desired weight loss? Does he matter? He does not like the look of sehor who’s been introduced to him and he recalls this man’s name from somewhere, an important man, was that what it was? Latin, upper middle class, a light cruelty in the soft eyes (sex? tradition? some task?).
Opera’s not for everyone, especially at these prices; and in itself is overweight. We willingly recede down the wormhole but with an expansible width-capability such that we can avoid passing out with the wormhole when it’s flushed away next day long after that specialist brunch. But at our end now let us not breathe so hard as to suck in the tunnel’s membrane, we know that that far end, now a pinhead of experience, was our end, too, and remember what we should have seen more closely (for luminaries are entitled to have fathers, too): the diva’s endangered father glistening somewhere newly incarnate in her eye, far away along a coast where he was born and she was, too — she who in Rome, Milan, Vienna, Geneva, Paris, London, and here in New York is acquainted with so many exiles better than herself; and, half-knowing, she knew ahead of time more fully than exactly how she would feel when, later, sometime between love, her dashing questioner of the night (not now in mufti) who is himself a question asks her what she in the deep recollection of her body needs to ask him: How is her father?
For we have, you know, more than enough information on other matters. Yet for what? For remembering? To do what? We already remember we have changed toward life. The unexamined life is well worth changing. We knew life, yes even when we were least together. Though not how long it was. While knowing life was brief next to light. Had not the Latin thinkers called light longa? A good question, though just what light was seemed lost in mass and speed.
We will — you will — change your life on May One (why wait? asks Grace K. gently touching up her voice with revelation). Buy yourself a plastic speculum and examine your body/self; you have a hand mirror already, feel yourself, look at the surplus, are you getting anything out of it? eat live food, take the time to chew and especially if the live food is moving — lasts longer and so will you if you can not be so available to your family all the time, right? and look at your posture, you’re round-shouldered, what are you protecting? — got money of your own? this is nineteen seventy-seven almost. Do you even begin to know what you’re capable of, honey? even if (so long as he doesn’t specifically make the request) you are a Sunday cocksucker, investigate alternative sources of protein, information is all available but we don’t share it, honey, we didn’t share it like we should.