Asemics, #33, image by Irene Koronas
A Lesson & A torso excerpts from Ciphering
A Lesson
She speaks
the sentence. Then, a
student at the board writes,
In English, there are three
to’s. Next one, …there are
three too’s.
Finally,…three two’s.
Prof: “So,
you see it?”
Usual
silence.
“No
one?”
Usual blankness.
Prof
again: “And how about
these:
‘ I watched my mother
exhale for the final time.’ ‘My
little boy looked up with his
sad face, and smiled.’
‘We saw fog spread
across river flats.’”
Usual
inscribing in notebooks.
A torso (for Walter Benjamin)
Fine flag over it,
sleeping, rethinking
ground from
the ground up. Having
fallen from the train
that does not leave until
everyone
is on board. A kind
of escape, at that, from its
marble block. But this
isn’t narrative, not
with lightning flashes
out there and,
in here, messianic
sparks. The
minor boredom
of order will come
knocking, but there isn’t yet a
door in this fabric.
Or
a Saturday night rolls
around like death, to cleanse
all filth from the body.
Then, maybe, chess, quick
game against that unbeatable
automaton with the
mystical dwarf hidden
inside. Seven
thimbles, 49 levels of
meaning, with nothing
seamless. The upper
torso seems not just high, but
blocky, huge. From
Zero Zoo,
a tiger leaps into
the past: Adam,
father
of philosophy, named it.
This one says, Just wait
until daylight, and I
will go forth and learn how
to shudder. Then I shall have
a skill that will support me.
On a stone pillow,
it waits, not
for Empty Time’s
continuous flow, but --
under its flag, at
a crossroads
in the labyrinth -- to
see
when and where it will sit
in history, in its own
modernity that possesses
antiquity
like
a nightmare that creeps
over it. That afternoon,
they stroll through
the arcade, sky’s
narrow, gray curve
overhead. Money and
rain belong together.
The child thinks about three
bluebirds on one
branch, lunch, a map,
fox, turtle,
squirrel. A
flashing at her feet. What
entrances her: Not
what the moving neon
red sign says -- but
the fiery
pool
reflecting it
in the asphalt. Though
what this
little one
really
desires is to
exit
the tunnel and, on
the
other side, to see the new
construction site’s fine,
jagged detritus
enlivening hard-packed
earth, gigantic
dumpsters. Then
still more men fell down, one
after the other
from the chimney. They brought
two skulls from dead men and
nine bones, then set
them
up and
bowled. Lying
beyond the black,
daft
border of their
territory, a dirty
heaven: young loris with
its thin
shadow; two
grains of wheat on
which
a
kindred soul
had inscribed the complete
Shema Israel; pieces
of toast in a playpen;
white sprinkles edging
a gully; taxed
numbskull; blank bank; virtue
mill. Recurrence
of transience, a
rhythm of downfall, leading,
when embraced, to great
humility and to
happiness. His
ability
to see the remnants, the
ruins inherent in grand
ideas; not to deface,
but to leave the face within
the block; not to leave
his work to become
a remnant,
but to fashion it,
from the first, a made
remnant; to remove the extraneous and
leave
his Atlas Slave, imprisoned in
its own body and
pose, unrelieved
by any opposing
force. And
disruption.
Rupture. A truth, charged
to the bursting point with
Time. Chip
of
Messianic Time,
reclaiming lost
voices. Property
relations in Mickey
Mouse
cartoons: here we
see for the first
time that it is possible
to have one’s own
arm, even one’s
own body, stolen. These
prunings and the moon’s sliver
should be
enough. Camp
Divine:
tapestry; rhapsody; rested
quill; gym; garage; yellow
wire; vast key; outdated
globe; square fool; courtyard;
river; flight; flint;
road, with robbers who
make an armed attack and
relieve an idler of
his convictions;
film. Sitting, she
helplessly stretches
her arms for a fruit that
remains beyond
her reach. And yet
she is winged.
Nothing
is more true. She, all
those leavings, ruins,
all under
a fine, blank flag that must
now be a home, the new
home. We
have long
forgotten the ritual
by which the house
of our life was
erected…But the human need
for shelter is
lasting. Architecture
has never been idle. Its
history is more ancient
than that of any
other art, and its claim
to being a living
force has significance
in every attempt to
comprehend the
relationship of
the
masses to art. Massing
under the new house. And here is
a new someone.
Her
clothes are
impermeable to every
blow of fate; he
looks like a man who
hasn’t taken
his garments
off for months;
she is unfamiliar
with beds; when
he lies down, she
does so in a
wheelbarrow or
on a
seesaw. That fine,
blank flag of the
Now Time. Only he
who can view his
own past as an
abortion sprung
from compulsion
and need can use it to
full advantage
in the present.
For what one
has lived is at best
comparable to a
beautiful
statue which has
had all its
limbs knocked
off in transit,
and now yields
nothing
but the precious
block out of
which the
image of one’s
future
must be hewn.
—Joel Chace
