Or to Begin Again (7 page)

Do you have a name? Alice asked one day as she was walking toward the river.

 

 

Yes.

 

 

What is it?

 

 

I was christened Goggle, but most people call me Gog, I think because I seem to be
the same coming or going. I'm not really capable of making distinctions and I am
without a direction.

 

 

Then you aren't human.

 

 

I thought I had made that clear. How many invisible humans do you know?
Many, but most of them are in books. Your name, for example, is in a book by
Samuel Beckett.

 

 

He took it from an earlier source, the Book of Revelation. Here it is direct from my
favorite source, which, by the way, I invented:

 

 

 

 

Are you evil? Alice asked. The question itself made her heart race.

 

 

Evil is as evil does. It is an interpretation, not a condition. It isn't innate.

 

 

But what exactly are you?

 

 

I got caught in the crosshairs of brain and technology. It was a crisis, or crux.
So I am neither one nor the other. That's the reason I wouldn't know a poem if I fell
on one. Just then, the Voice stubbed its tongue on something.
Damn! said the Voice, it's the Weather!

 

 

The wind picked up, blowing a few last leaves across the ground.

Alice wondered if, when she is old, she will be wise.

 

 

Is wisdom something that comes naturally, along with gray hair and wrinkles? Is
that old woman sitting on her porch wise?
Wise
rhymes with
eyes,
so perhaps
wisdom is a way of seeing especially clearly, like a clairvoyant.
Madame Sosostris is
known to be the wisest woman in Europe
. What a silly name for a wise person, Alice
thinks, not
like Athena, which sounds wise. Athens must be named for her, but a city cannot be
wise. Madame Sosostris is reading cards and she says:

 

 

 

 

This sends chills through Alice's soul.

 

 

Who is the Hanged Man?

 

 

Alice saw in her mind's eye a man, with dark eyes and hair, and another, in a mask,
placing a kind of scarf around the dark man's neck. Then the masked man takes a
great thick rope and places it around the dark man's neck. The rope turns into heavy
coils. The dark man looks complex: resigned, intelligent, amused, hidden, cruel.

 

 

The Moon was in eclipse. A shadow passed across its face. The Cat was looking out on the snow seeing something Alice could not see, even if the Moon came out from behind the shadow. Someone phoned and left a message. Alice thought about the idea of an answering machine. It seemed an odd idea. A machine would always say the same thing, no matter what question it was asked.

 

 

Are you there?
Are you there?
Are you there?

 

 

The
you
of the question was not the
what
of the machine.

The place of human action, Alice thought, has moved off and left behind only actors
wandering among broken, leftover sets. The Moon, in shadow, was part of a set.
The tracks in the snow, the greenish sky, the single star: sets. Someone
would come out before long to sing a song of longing. What, Alice wondered, is love
among machines?

 

 

Sappy, the Voice said, and dated. Get real.
There was a silence that filled with ambient sounds.
At last, Alice exclaimed,
I know what you are!
O?
Yes, you are a by-product.
A what?
By-product, a sort of leftover from other processes that left you, like ash after fire, or
slag after the copper has been removed.
I don't think I like that idea, it sounds even less attractive than
recycled
.
It is. You have no further use. You're an end in yourself.
Another silence.
Watch out, said the Voice, you are in danger of thinking us both out of existence.

When Alice woke up it was still snowing, a fine, salty snow that moved like a veil in
the wind. For some reason, she began to weep, and her tears turned first quickly to
icicles that then as quickly melted, leaving almost invisible tracks. It was impossible
to tell the time, since the light was almost uniformly a gauzy pale gray in which the
darker trunks and branches of trees seemed to be suspended. But for a cardinal that
tore a fresh wound through the air, and a few dark hairy hemlocks, color seemed
also to be almost gone. But none of these things had anything to do with Alice's
tears, which seemed to have come from a far-off source, so remote and unknown that
they felt like those of a stranger. Perhaps these are not tears at all, she thought, but
only the melting snow. But her eyes kept flooding from within, and the tears kept
breaking over their lids like spill over a dam. She wondered if she were crying
because of something in a dream. She could not remember her dream.

 

 

In the smudged air something stirred.
What ails?

 

 

I cannot say. It is as if before.
Yes, as often. Mine, also.
Before?
Aye, another time, when there were violets.
There are violets now.
These sang among rocks.
Singing violets?
They belonged to the winged.
Winged violets that sang?
Spoke also as they lay down along the path.
The path to where?
It was not to anywhere, it was from everywhere.
O.
Aye, a sort of O, an ambit.
It is snowing.
Aye, the O is caught inside of the snow; it is in pain.
Am I crying because of that?
Perhaps.
It seems strange to cry for an O.
It isn't for an O, but for entrapment, for the fact that it is caught in snow.
Once, it was my mouth.
Your mouth was the path from everywhere to nowhere?

 

 

Aye, it was the news of awe. It was the scandal of Omission and the law of Oblivion.
It was the Overt sign that filled itself with nothing, leaving all else Out. It was an
Ocean whose spoon lifted the whale from its Origin and poured out its Oil into the
hot gold lights along the bridge where the lion roars.

 

 

I once saw that bridge.
But did you hear the lion roar?
No.
Do you hear the cricket?
Yes.
Can you describe the difference between the sound of a lion and the sound of a
cricket?
I cannot. It is ineffable, outside of the linguistic index.

 

 

You cannot point at it, nor to it.
No.
My mouth once could say the difference between the lion's roar and the cricket's
song.
By mimicry?
No, by coming from many places and going nowhere.
Then your mouth was not entirely for sound?
My mouth was the route through which sounds pass.
So is mine.
Aye, but your sounds all know where they come from and to where they are going.
The snow is like fog.
The foggy foggy dew.
She wept, she cried, she pulled her hair.
Air trapped in
hair,
as the O is in
snow
.
The only only thing I did that was wrong.
That was then also.
With the winged speaking violets?
Aye.

 

 

Alice watched the birds in the snow. Some were dark gray with flashes of white you
could see only in flight, and others a tawny brown; some were tinged with a yellowy
green along their wings while still others wore small black caps. Many had
delicately woven stripes and stippled chests. She knew some of their names—
chickadee and nuthatch and finch and song sparrow and tufted titmouse. A pair of
mourning doves huddled on a bare branch of the hawthorn tree. Before the snow
came, robins had begun to appear, and she worried about them now, wondering
where they were and how they could eat with the earth snowed in. She wondered
how these names came into being: robin, titmouse, nuthatch, finch. They do not
know their names, she thought, and yet they seem to know each other. Knowing
their names and being able to describe them is insufficient and meager; these do not
bring me closer to them.

 

 

The tricky ordeal of words. They are elastic frets, bringing us closer at the same time
as they push us away; we think by naming things that we capture them but this is a
ruse, and you see how we are trapped by it, trapped in use
. Ruse use us
. Every word
contracts and exfoliates thus. Folded into each
core,
an
ore.

 

 

Everything must come from somewhere.
Thing, where, every, some. Mine, alas, from the undone.
Your ore?
Yours also.
What is the undone?
Not a what, nor a where, nor a some. Yet still, a sum.
Many?
So many.
More than how many?

 

 

Whatever your count, more. The stars and the non-stars, plus: always, the sum plus
one. A call, indifferent and dangerous yet without even a trace image, horizonless,
unstacked. The faulty implosion and aftermath of sight which is why, here in snow, I
return briefly. I cannot be remembered, so do not be alarmed. I am merely the
eternally Open, as in the portrait of the monk's mouth, into which and out of which
time pours.

 

 

What you say is impossible.

 

 

Aye, also contaminated. The numerical is a dungeon. The murderers are there,
counting and pondering tomes and licenses, always counting, counting. They breed,
although they have been unsexed. They return as blame.

 

 

Alice sat in the snow, watching the March birds, the grackles and juncos and tits.

 

 

Only if I am invisible, she thought, will the birds stay. If I materialize, they will fly
off because they fear me, except it isn't me, Alice, they fear, but the ways in which I
am not one of them, not a bird. There was no way to assure the birds that she had no
intention of hurting them, or of persuading them that it was she who had scattered
seed across the snowed ground.