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The Opening
- Northwestern University Press
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THE OPENING [54.160.133.33] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 01:04 GMT) 17 i. There are some turning points from which there’s no return. I had been meditating on women & their mouths as I stood in Columbus Circle’s swirl of traffic, my mother’s death mask, subtle & blue, under one arm. I hailed a cab & what followed was a power ride, a voodoo trip downtown, courtesy of Job Caesar, #1079863, singing Haitian hymns as we made a U-turn at Houston & the light went red. Louis, when I cataloged my mother’s death mask as reticena facetiousness et interruptus I didn’t mean it to sound so negative—those concepts are like rocks to be turned over to see what’s lying underneath— what’s to be found in such rotations. These are grave issues, indeed, letters of instruction for those who would bury the dead. My father was confused by his feelings about predestination, the missing child in the woods, & wanted to rescind all letters of intent inscribed on the psyche of a black candle skull he placed on the table before us. “It’s only life,” he said, as though that makes any difference when the eyelids close to the waterfall of light as you blow the candle out & lean back in the swivel seats for blastoff into the inner dark, Africa of your ignorant soul—“the black and merciless things that are behind the great possessions,” as The Master wrote. & so we go on, don’t we? & yet, & yet I’m still dazzle-dimmed, double-indemnified, & blinded by that proleptic light as my father, lying backward in the sand, bicycles my mother spread-eagled above him, naked, in that brilliant sun-sprayed ocean air. Who is guiltless? Wears not the Badge of Dishonor, my Daedalus, wandering the labyrinth of the convoluted brain’s decaying cells, echoing hallways, U-la-la-lume! You cannot know what it was like—don’t interrupt me—being in her presence. She opened up to me 18 as though time were a fan, instantaneous moments of perception like splinterings of light, the nebulous network of sensations that are seemingly infinite in their refractions so that I became aware— in an instant—of everything that made up the moment & could see my deflections & what they deflected off & could be aware in a flash of the seventeen simultaneous & echoing aftershocks of a moment not yet arrived at. As when, for instance, getting out of the cab I spotted a policewoman at the crosswalk & could see, acted out, as though I walked free of my body, my sudden desire to fall upon her, saw her body flung on the pavement, beaten senseless, squirming under me, then still, lifeless & the afterimage staring up at me refracted through pools of blood, my mother’s face—masked by something more ancient, Incan or Aztec, maybe, some stony solidity, some baba, some witch, & within that, opening out of it, another child-face, a small shriveled homunculus, & soon I could read in everything the multitudinous branching of time, fanning out before me, the multiple mirror of any moment—its motives both simple & overdetermined & I knew then the roots of all violence lay not in the clash between men, but the desire to subjugate the woman, to annihilate the mother in all of us, as in battle men shed against their will the blood of their adversaries, rendering them “symbolic” women. But, listen—don’t interrupt me—listen to me—that is a castration—I will not be interrupted—I remember as a child not speaking for five whole years & even when I could my throat felt constricted, vulnerable, as though it were cut & the sounds escaped below my mouth, out of some airhole . . . 19 ii. During my Cold War Wanderjahr, I stayed in postblitzed London at a hotel where they served no food, just silverware, exquisite china plate, puckered red roses in an unkissed glass. I heard Poulenc played by Landowska & later the polished Pollini, so typically Italian, tender toward Bach, indifferent, finally, to the audience, which in some ways was a relief. At the table next to me sat the mother & the mother’s daughter whose conversation turned to “the affair”; spoken of in the elliptical past conditional, although if you listened carefully it became clear or at least one felt more clearly that what was spoken of was still continuing— “the affair.” Direct speech, the declarative, was in their case really diversion. I met them a second time at Waterloo Station. It was a choice of killing myself or going to Austria. I...