The Invention of the Kaleidoscope

The Invention of the Kaleidoscope

 the invention of the kaleidoscope Sir David Brewster, 1830 click, say the gems in their golden cell The idea occurred to me of giving light to objects, the inventor writes, at home: the birth of his first son. These items placed loosely in a cell at the end of an instrument; sleeve of brass or glass, polished, rough-ground, varnished— on the outside—black. A house of stone. I wanted to give light so that every simple form could be converted, beautified by being combined with an inverted image of itself: so click, say the gems in their golden cell I’m out for inversion, invention, reconstruction ; myself disunited yet same enough to point any hour across the room and still say, Me. The drug you’ve given me is not working. Or working in a way it should not be working: blood sizzles and the brain’s gone champagne;  where the sober headache was, only fizz remains, resists, the way consciousness resists this power surge blackening out my body every twenty minutes, turning the mind to a beach in France and the senses to a lighthouse beam in fog. What’s the angle, angel? you ask as my mouth goes (again) slack and my head lolls against your pillow dusted with cat hair. Nausea, is my reply but the word spins within me, clicks and rattles up against new syllables: Sauna, followed by Sane Seas, followed by the Gaelic, Naes. Outside, Dublin whirls in rain-slick streets goosebumped with cobblestone, the heavy, chocolate scent of hops and filthy quays, the slaughterhouse behind your flat. On windy, windowless nights when I press my nose against your naked neck I can smell the blood beside the blood—I’ve learned to love the meat of you.   Last week, they tried to set off a bomb on Grafton. You arrived outside my dormitory in an Austrian military jacket stiff with rain and spilled tea, packet of opium stuffed deep into a bouquet of flowers. I hate having been born Catholic, you hissed. And looked at me with such envy then, my blank, ahistorical gaze overseas— To be American is to avoid everything, isn’t it? you’d asked. Your body’s slump perfectly symmetrical with my broken desk chair. I suppose it is an accident anything is beautiful. So click, say the gems in their golden cell Brewster, 80, postulates: Only the same apparent magnitude and nearly the same intensity of light are conditions necessary enough to the production of symmetrical thus beautiful forms. I suppose it would be better to describe than define him: hours assembling the lush egg whites bleeding into pockmarked blues, red pearls bubbling out of whippet glass, the millefiori and metallic bead festoons— 8 feathery gems, ampoules of yellow oils. His son giggles in the crib. Brewster plucks then puts cat whiskers in his first object case. Even the slightest tilt changes everything but everything just slightly, he writes. It is possible this obsession makes him admirable. It is possible to point at this person from across history and still say, Me. What I knew: the pill looked so anonymous. One fat tablet the color of cicada wings, coffee crystals, moth antennae. Six hours later the walls pulse. Reds and pockmarked blues, ampoules of yellow oils. Even the most disgusting forms, notes Brewster in his book, exhibit chaste combinations of shape and color. I wanted to reconstruct, remember myself out of shards of glass. I said: I wanted to write a body out of light. click, say the gems in their golden cell The body of a man on his green knees on Grafton, the bodies of police waving everyone back: back from the bomb cover like a yellow helmet, the man’s clever fingers nimbling under it—  The stone exam halls cleared, students and I stand smoking cigarettes cheerfully outside the lobbies. We wait for the explosion that never comes which is why we feel safe waiting for it: millefiori of splintered glass, cement tumbling in dust like a billion moth wings. This could go on forever, the newspapers said. During choir practice I saw you cross the square humming the requiem you loved, the notes of the father’s shattered body commended to God and death. At least you’re trained to believe in something, I’d replied (stupidly) to...