World Book

“It is no longer possible to think in our day other than in the void left by man’s disappearance. For this void does not create a deficiency; it does not constitute a lacuna that must be filled. It is nothing more, and nothing less, than the unfolding of a space in which it is once more possible to think” (342).

This quotation from Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things (1973) seems for me to get to the heart of where we are now going. World events in the past two years press the novel with astonishing speed into its next phase, and in some way the place it has been tending toward for a hundred years. “Orts, scraps and fragments, she quoted what she remembered of the vanishing play” Virginia Woolf wrote in her war-torn and broken hearted Between the Acts (1990, 133). As the novel breaks apart, becoming shards, a debris field, without a real audience or raison d’etre it free falls into the space of pure radiance, a place of unimaginable intellectual and emotional freedom. Cut off from the quaint scaffoldings of narrative and character—for this no longer makes any sense except as a sentimental record of human folly, we write now wholeheartedly into our own obsolescence, our own obscurity—a place at once tender and absurd and fierce. We chronicle figments, and it is as if we have already disappeared and our shadow words are trailing us, leaving their extraordinary, flickering residue:

It shall be a record of our vanishing one of the voices offers. It shall be a book of scraps. Last messages left on answering machines, trace elements, in the Unfinished Book of Hope—a sort of reliquary, a dome, a memory of bread, a dormer, a basket, a rabbit path. It shall be a cradle that holds time. A prayer. More and more a prayer. It shall speak to what mattered most—as much as it was possible to do so. It shall be a pageant, a celebration, a mourning grove, a history of our suffering at once intimate and epic, the progress of our regret, the passage of yearning. My mother’s voice, the swing swung, the way you looked that night. The bells. Birds, migration, peace in our time. A philosophy of wings will emerge.

It shall be our lives—eclipsing the darkness. Our lives passing brightly before the darkness and obscuring it for a moment.

She was busy, should she be asked. She was mid-stream. She was standing in front of the illuminated manuscripts in that ancient Italian city. She was alive. We were working, should she be asked on an erotic song cycle. It shall be a record of heartbreak. The dust in her hair—what is left now of those two tremendous towers and their daylight inhabitants. What is left. Remnant of a beautiful, blue morning—New York City—just the words once before we fall back into forgetfulness: surrendered, evaporated, dissolved, perfects. That fragment of flame that was my life. Trailing daylight.

To see the sky one more time through those towers, the view they arrange. The light as it made its way across their skin. They were your friends—you always called them that. The boy you loved who had worked at their summit carrying cool, blue drinks. Windows on the World.

Things that maybe you did not know. I loved rain, snow, anything that purely, recklessly and without harm fell from the sky to grace this earth.

I used to find my self on Sullivan Street, where from one angle I could see the gorgeous Empire State Building and then by turning, by pivoting without lifting a foot I could see the World Trade Center. I must have done it a thousand times.

The pivot now made silently in the dust. A habit I know.

A record of our resourcefulness and longing and our folly.

There were things I wanted you to know.

There’s a list I’ve been keeping.

What did you think was beautiful there?

My father bee laden among the roses. Peace eludes us, I can scarcely believe...