Some Cloths

1.

The color wrung out of a wrung-out cloth, a flock of city pigeons on the roof is no one's notion of exalting. Lumped like wads of used-up hankie tissue, littered on prodigiously beshitted tiles... who could work up interest in their lax--their close to coma'd--doze in the vitiating late-afternoon Wichita sun?

But then a cue--invisible to me, and silent--clicks them into shared awareness . . . and, as one, they lift in the single undulant length of some Baghdadian flying carpet: keeping that roughly oblong shape, they sleek their aerial way throughout the maze that city skyline spires, antennae, and towers are to a flight of birds. They're one communal motion now, all zip and grace and speedy slink.

Invisible to me, and silent. . . . Not a sign: there wasn't any slam I heard, there wasn't any sudden, overlooming dangershadow, nor could I detect their alphapigeon shrugging subtle coded orders backward down his shabby ranks. Whatever it was, it passed for spontaneity. However it worked, its nanoincremental links engaged themselves somewhere below my threshold of perception . . . the same unknowable level where magic cooks, before the allakazzam of its being served well-done on stage; the place where quantum physics zizzles with its here-then-not-here, if-and-almost, sub- and anti-particles.

Amitov Ghosh: "For about five hundred years Aidhab functioned as one of the most important halts on the route between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean. Then, suddenly, in the middle of the fifteenth century its life came to an end: it simply ceased to be, as though it had been erased from the map. The precise cause of its demise is uncertain." That's the level I'm talking about!--where cities-sundering vectors of climate / high priests / economic curves / political alliances . . . exercise themselves, like fault lines, miles under our ability to notice . . . except, of course, for the effects of those accumulated movements, finally immanent in the terms of our daily world. A city: vanished. A city: lost to sight as easily as a hen's egg up a magician's sleeve.

And in fact the magician reminds us that my reverie on Aidhab is misleading in scale. Every second, every inch, it happens; every time the atoms of a solid, any solid, decide--if "decide" is the word--to remain inside the field of the molecules of that solid, it happens. Under our notice: it happens. Here, in the world of our notice: we have "stone" / have "cloth" / have "flesh." A rush of pigeons: "rush" as a singular noun.

Below the table, inside the dark, the dozen unremarkable preparatory steps get made. What we see is the bird in its astonishing arc from below the conjuror's hat, flapping in the air like a jellabeya snagged on a summer day's wind.

2.

One dandy understanding the politicians are pleased to have (and put to use) is that they don't have to lie: if only two half-truths are placed in a smartly artful proximity, we'll fill in the blank between them. What the brain has been evolved to do: make wholeness. It's how movies work: the brain makes continuity out of two distinctly separate visual units. "Life" and "afterlife": the mind imagines a link called "the soul," and moves it (often with a rich religious drama) across a ligature of its own devising. Give us point A-1 and point A-2, and we'll elide, we couldn't not.

It may be thirty-seven pigeon-language signifiers that ultimately get those birds airborne: and it may be a process that, to the view of a god or a hawk or a moon rock, is a staggered and gradual thing: no doubt, the orchestration of optic nerve and hormone-trigger and muscle-contracting across the population of a rooftop flock is multi- and omni- and pan- . And yet for us it's one gray tablecloth
pulled off the roof: a snap.

And what of the fires that were burning up my Auntie Hannah, eighty-nine?--alone in the world (except for myself and my sister) and alone in its representative space for her: a Medicare hospital bed. "It's burning me up alive," she'd tell us seven, eight times in an hour: we could see the surface of her shrivel and blotch, her tongue crack in the act of speech. But no one--and here I'm including the corps of indifferent medical specialists--could see inside remedially to the cause. Those fires licking her clean were each just the size of one cell in her body. Every nucleus in her had its own inferno, somewhere underneath the line that separates the unknown from the comprehended. Calling this by a latinate name, a textbook designation weighty in syllables, didn't explain it at all.

And what of the dinosaurs? Something gigantic, naturally, it would have to be: the impact of a comet, at least, a crash the size of an ocean. Although the lesson of The War of the Worlds is that the monstrous military might of Mars is vanquished by a sneeze. It seems ridiculous to say it, it's so obvious: an invisible comet is equally unseeable as an invisible microbe.

Macrobe: why isn't that a word? Those ancient Mayan cities that were emptied of their populations seemingly overnight, the way a chrysalis is left behind, or the jettisoned flesh of the Rapture... these are terraces, though, and altars and avenues... monuments and granaries and hallways of empiric power...
those cities with names that sound so exotically floral to our ears, that hint at such exotic appetites: emptied of their people in the blink of a Mayan eye, abandoned and left behind like sloughed stone skins... with no clue of invasion, revolt, or rampaging disease. Whatever rock it was that toppled this Goliath of an ancient urban network, it's as deep beneath our notice as the algae in the bodies of the polyps that, by thousands, make a branch of coral we hold as if it's a single and uniform timing.

It's what I do with these two photographs--eighty-five years apart--of Auntie Hannah. She's four in the first, a wide-eyed child stiffly standing in a checked dress (with a matching bow in her hair of such enormity it looks like a lavish Amazonian jungle moth that's preening on a tiny cake-top figurine). In the second--only a month ago--she's eighty-nine, already almost smudgily translucent in her illness: there are patches of tarnish under her eyes and, under her skin, the look of heavy webbing. What I do in my mind is fill in the blank between. I reminisce--invent, extrapolate, and reminisce--and make, between those poles, the bridging arc we call "biography." "A life."

"Knock on wood for me, kiddo." Right: "wood": "diamond"; "brick"--as if in these we'll come upon a final, an unparsable, solidity to count on. Sure: as if that hard, impervious shape way off in the sky--that thick dark bolus--doesn't settle down somewhere on a rooftop as a scatter of birds


3.

Amitov Ghosh: "I would go up to my room alone and listen to the call of the muezzin and try to think of how it must feel to know that on that very day, as the sun travelled around the earth, millions and millions of people in every corner of the globe had turned to face the same point, and said exactly the same words of prayer, with exactly the same prostrations as oneself."

The phototropic cells in a leaf. The gawkers at the premiere, as the sex goddess exits her limo: a star, and its magi.

On the all-nude side at Showtime Lounge, the strobes and the series of lights along the apron of the stage, and of course the poses of the dancers themselves, are all arrangedd to finally funnel attention to the erotico-gynecological vee--shaved this year, and often clit-ringed: there's no end to sexual fashion. The women are prideful, playful, paid well; and the men--whether only two or a full two hundred--are a single organism, a hive of an eye, obedient, following.

After a while, of course, the novelty wears off. And when a dancer steps off at the end of her three-song set, and opens the door to the wardrobe room--a single column of light in the relative dark, which marks the entrance to a world that's still forbidden to the audience--it's interesting to see the head of every man automatically turn to the door's six seconds of teasing promise, turn as if practiced, choreographed... perhaps we could say evolution is a million years of practice... as if this slice out of the darkness might reveal some amazing bodily sanctum even beyond the naked force of the official show.

On the roof of the building across from Auntie Hannah's room they land, then rise and circle like a kite, then land and individuate in the sun for a while, then rise and circle. All morning I watch them... when I'm not watching her, in her stuttering half-sleep. This is the time, her time, of breaking back to the body's constituent elements. This is the time of their being released.

And even so, she's alive again today. Is that good? There's some pain, but we still think it's good. My sister pats her forehead dry, then we both help Auntie Hannah sit up. "You know," she says, "I'll be with Uncle Lou soon." That's a chilling thought to me, but hey: this isn't about me. Auntie Hannah's smiling, as if she's just said a wonderful, comforting thing.

It's a morning of little miracles. For instance, the atoms inside the glass she drinks from... which aren't so different from the atoms in the air, or the walls, or my prickled skin ... they all come from the furnace hearts of stars... the atoms inside the glass remain in the glass, cohere, don't effervesce away, and the glass is a glass.

The wall is a wall: a real nail could really be driven into it. My skin is my skin. The sheet on her body remains the sheet, as stable a shape as that square of birds, which rises now, a prayer shawl in the air, a wedding canopy.

--Albert Goldbarth, from Combinations of the Universe

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