Black Light (13 page)

Which brings us to the question of what we are to think and feel about Jamshid and his fate at the end of this tale. Kinnell the older poet would be widely admired for the way in which he demanded from poetry intensity of living. In his poems about sexuality, about the American streets, about married love, the birth of children, the lives of animals, the brutality and stupidity of injustice, he seemed to follow his masters—Whitman and Yeats and Rilke and Villon, among them—in wanting poetry to give intensity to life, perhaps of meaning also, but above all of
lived life
, to crack the bones of it and suck the marrow, or more accurately—because his mind turned always to the work of poetry—to find the song of cracking the bones and sucking the marrow. “Whatever happens,” he wrote in a late poem called “Prayer,” “Whatever/
what is
is is what/I want. Only that. But that.” Reading
Black Light
, it had been my impulse to read the younger writer through the lens of the older one. It's clear, for example, that in Jamshid he was not anatomizing conservative Islam, he was exorcising devils of his own, whether of the New England or the Irish Protestant variety. And that the book was a meditation on the perfectionist and idealizing impulse, on the one hand, and what he called in his description of the Persian bazaar “profuse, flagrant life,” on the other. The story is framed by the perfect square of sunlight in Jamshid's shop at the beginning of the story, where he repaired woven images of paradise and touched up its colors, and the description at the end of the nocturnal breathing of the sick, young Goli, the old, mad, syphilitic whore, and the fat, old madam in the brothel in the middle of the night:

The noise of the snores seemed to grow louder. It was as if the sounds had slid over some last edge of the human world. The room filled with deep, throaty noises of animal suffering. A breath gurgled like a new baby as it went in, and death-rattled as it went out. There arose a great seething, tearing, sucking noise, of an enormous mouth gobbling compulsively at life itself.

Are we to read sheer revulsion here? Is this the world that has to be embraced somehow if we are to not be endlessly repairing the rugs of a crippling paradise? Exactly how to read the last chapters of this extraordinary, harrowing, occasionally beautiful, occasionally comic tale will belong to each individual reader. Here, to have it before us again, is how the book ends. It's a paragraph he chose to rewrite slightly when the novel was reprinted in 1980, so it is exactly where—in that year, anyway, he was an inveterate reviser—he wanted to leave us and Jamshid:

From a garden somewhere in the New City he heard a cock crowing. Perhaps, he thought, it is a bird of paradise, the original one, crowing in the mud. Jamshid sat down in a doorway. He stared at the empty gate. He took out his little package of matches and opened it. He struck one against the wooden door. Was it the match, or the wood, that was damp? He struck another. This did not light either. The world was dark, and we who inhabit it are also dark. He struck another, and another. He wanted now, more than anything, to see. Then he struck the last match. It flared a shrill, yellow, upwardly blackening flame. He got up and passed through the gate under the distant pale sky of early morning.

—2015