Scientists had a harder time getting up in the morning, much less addressing their spectroscopes and proton skimmers. It was not that they were still dreaming of the unified field. It was the feeling that we all had missed something.
Which in turn kept us going. Which in turn kept alive — if memory is alive — the memory of our sometime bomb’s discrimination profile and what might ideally have happened if its aim had not been dispersed by so much adjacent non-living material. And so it was that we overheard, by chance or our own nature, that somewhere a People-Oriented Bomb would be set off in a chamber surrounded and sealed by life alone: a chamber planted with soil and ceilinged by soft, breathing skin, a chamber walled by leaf and hill, by live animal flesh and blood, containing at its target center an unborn child.
Spiraled back then into the waking night, we saw we should have believed ourselves when by the light of our own broken breath we had guessed ourselves to be relations. As among pockets of weather bagging here and there out of a rubber sheet of atmosphere; or like stories of the unknown that our light bends into in order to come out as some further end that we make near; or like these witnesses, some known to each other, watching a man wake in the middle of the night hearing his name called across grass and gravel and stones of a burial ground, each with its own name.
But it’s going to be O.K.
For whatever else we said, our relations are ourselves and there’s still time, though for what? It kept us going. For we had succeeded during that moment of the people bomb in forgetting all that had preceded it.
The past, though, is beautiful and, according to recent healers, "done with" (what you will) up to but including a singer’s physician with a countryhouse interest in plumbing, so secretly arrived at a New Jersey cemetery that he had a long walk from his car with his anguished companion, and he remembers as if it had happened this same dear magic one beside him somewhere in a dentist’s chair and leaning over to the porcelain bowl and vomiting such worms that his imagination apologizes with silent passion adding then the vacuum system he knows of designed in all its lines (and, not least, into the straw-mode-tube mouth-sucker) to handle a sea of saliva under city regulations "hopefully" ensuring that in the event of cloggage in the basement, the backup won’t upflush the plumbed waste of the building’s other users into your very mouth happily tickled or alternately press-sucked by your dentist’s gurgling tube. A definite mouthful! but why — in the medic’s darkling mind at the instant when a woman’s voice called a man’s name in the night cemetery who stretched and stood up as if we had been asked if on the horizon we lacked anything by chance or our own nature’s guesswork and suddenly a figure proved it such as an event that collapses two years into one, or folk, or two lost instants.
And when the man’s voice, its hand upon a New Jersey headstone under a moon multiplied only by all who saw by it, called back hoarsely, "You were right," our heart had burst had it been not already divided through all of us and more.
Though he had not sounded a word during his whole sleep.
The wind had come and turned about him.
He had been returned from one surface of the universe to another.
He was thinking, The unborn child was Margaret’s; was Sarah’s; was what you do as the result of the dream, wherever it slipped into you.
We stood on not the head of the pin but pin-pointed. So we’re upside down-loded only to find in that state of liberation that gravity is what you make it. Long as you keep talking round or under the tables of power. We could talk not so much in our sleep as in others’. Light pursuing other light. Which is what light is the pursuit of. As when (as Shakespeare could have said) throwing the gist of life’s book up against an adhesive partition you can’t throw it all up at once so it arrives in its own time but then is known to have got there also all at once, its speed everywhere the same, and to describe a curve. So life describes itself, in which event it must take full responsibility.
"The Hermit-Inventor!" called the man across the Windrow night cemetery suddenly aware of others here besides the young woman walking toward him. "He said that!" And in the silence he turns a degree or two staring toward what might be in back of him, the direction of the wind? no the presence of or scent of someone else here in this stage of his life where he came he recalls in order to test his windowhood tracewise like a do-it-yourself EKG (for don’t go near a hospital, his plant-waterer neighbor Norma, now happier in her marriage, reported the woman Kimball virtually ordering her when Norma had a serious, even painful dragging in her uterus and her husband lately engrossed in non-invasive medical technology, malpractice precedent, and newly opening areas of environmental law had told her it was fibroids while himself contemplating a new Kimball workshop in part because Grace Kimball had intrigued him with strange talk of new weather generated by new air in part told her by a manic old lady who remembered only that she was from New Jersey, which is not why Mayn is here in Windrow cemetery in the middle of the night having dreamed what he can only now know was not his first dream): while we, who will take his part even if he will not, recapture the events of three hours or so ago that now remember us, having happened in the ancient city fifty miles from here; and, remembering us, these events find local habit in us; and, in twin next rooms, two screens we’ve found out how to join in us need no Dreaded Modulus to trans-hither and trans-yon.
But we don’t now know how we found out how — except we had the heart for it because, come to think, we had bypassed the phosphorus-detecting trace that told us once upon a time if we could only digest its information about the left ventricle’s muscle tone! and learn to join two hearts and more.
As to what had happened at the dress rehearsal, prevue, or one-shot deal, Clara and her eminent, bald eco-husband were in agreement on no surprising number of things regarding Hamletin, Hamlet, and the real show out in the audience. E.g., that the newly basso Prince (after eighteen previous Hamlet operas where he’s a tenor), singing of poison that was so vividly heard trickling down the ear of his in-process-of-being-murdered father’s hearing that some heart in him failed ere henbane could curd his fine milk or waste his glands of smell that felt like they’re at the rear of his brain, uncannily paralleled the lovely aria in Verdi’s Otello though the parallel seemed curved or semicircular where in the soft opening two alternating notes and succeeding amorous fourth Iago love-songs his dusky master’s ear and soul’s aorta to seal some tornado of his love forever in the amazed semen framed by jalousie — surely Verdi here in this warehouse Hamletin! — and Clara and her beloved agreed also that collaboration had here flowed everywhere on wings of love pressure plus other arts unknown: for Luisa’s father had been released from house arrest but then had disappeared in Santiago while Ford North’s stammer had, albeit operat-ically, invaded his singing just before or just after the pianist-composer-conductor in the pit (such as it was, shallower than other pits) his doughty, diminutive young boyfriend in lush black evening clothes had angrily shaken his head during Fordie’s aria compounding the "my offense is rank" soliquoia normally Uncle Claudius’s in Shakespeare’s family drama, with Hamlet’s own "I must be cruel to be kind" speech da da "That monster custom…/… is angel yet in this / That to the use of actions fair and good / He likewise gives a frock or livery. . / but heaven hath pleased it so, / To punish me with this, and this with me" da da deliver’d message-like some shadow moulting from some dream, where the boyfriend’s ambition shoehorned Ford into this warehouse showcase and Ford’s bulk compacted to manipulative pathos for Luisa precisely at a moment of her history when guilt for fatherland tinctured in her body to a terrible readiness of her house-arrested father that there let flow along the satin legs de Talca kissed such lust and tenderness for that elegant, terrible, vulnerable agent trained in Chile’s fine ships that she would fuck so deeply with him as to risk her and her father’s life by making her favor seem to depend on the favor of de Talca’s influence in Santiago, himself already stranger to himself than he had known, here "variable and uncertain" (Clara’s husband quotes to her in bed) as Hamlet when placed in a predicament worst possible for the display of his nature and gifts, where like Shakespeare (Clara’s lover gently quotes again from some critic read long ago) Hamlet had not fully planned the course of his action.