and
furthermore,
Far or forgot to me is
near—
But the brownish man with
the blue eyes murmured, "Very good, very
good." And
Margaret went on:
If the red slayer think he slays,
Or if the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep, and pass, and turn again . . .
And when, on hearing her name closer by yet in a new way so she felt she was much older (this she told her grandson one day half a century later), she was asked by the Inventor her birthday, she told him hoping for a present; and then she felt a grip upon her arm that drew her away toward other pieces of the Statue so firmly the grip is like the tone of her father’s protective voice, with whom she is jointly visiting Bedloe’s Island. But(?) Go west, young girl, young woman? Who has the time?
For we felt late.
Yet replays are available. As we for them. So we saw whatever from new angles and in an order not up to us but we at least felt it could have been. Just as we got to be at high times the very angles we saw by, and knew in a rush this was none other than the angels sharing what they could with us— their intuitions not unlike what we term telepathy; their sympathy with another being or beings as close as what our own recent formulae infer to be Simultaneous Reincarnation; their patience much like the mind-bending trip our recent research promises, mapped of detours that arrive by curves that prove parallel by crossing. The replays will help and we should be able to replay them in future in any order why even a child could think up. But then we came down unavoidably and into another medium also watery but then we felt no more like angels. We did feel collective knowledge in excess of the event our preparation targeted: an event which was almost too much like itself, to wit a sort of execution. Weren’t we sure? And weren’t we there? Weren’t we even the ones meant? Breath breath breath breath breath. If you’re upset it’s because you want to be, it’s coming from you, you know, not the squad facing you in the prime playground. We already remember, and have we even seen it? Whatever it is, it weighs less while costing the same, yet can get into the habit of looking like it weighs nothing or is divorced from the concept of weight until we step quickly to one side of its shadow and see that, sure, it has weight. And then we see we remembered, unlike prior angels who needed no such process.
How we remember is something else, a whole nether question down the worm-road’s thread eroding some exact degree of blood between the diva’s doctor’s friend the Ojibway healer and guide and his one-third-Sioux part-Navajo cousin, a father-sky of turquoise upon his shoulders, a mother-earth beneath his pony’s hooves. And this cousin is in turn so distantly connected to a Navajo Prince of the early 1890s that we need even more justly define that kinship, maybe with this very patience coming to us periodically like refractions through waters of rain and bright dusts of air. So that in doing so we know more than we did or thought; and it will not go away, the northern bison tongue which that Navajo Prince held fast to the study of until violently interrupted and held fast to still, while he crossed the Pacific-Atlantic land-bridge between New Mexico and New York, holding always in his bag or pocket a section of bison’s tongue which he knew could yield active force immeasurable if only the layers of its fiber and light could be touched in a manner that the Great Spirit must already have told us in the loaded dreams some wide mountains experience. Meanwhile, we might just reduce that kinship to questions that are more lasting and alive than answers, if it had not already been done.
By at least one of our number. A grandmother who told stories upon stories to a grandson James or Jim long before his mother took her life if not her drawn, apparitional face away from him, and sometimes afterward also. Stories that often did not finish and were easy to understand, he thought; stories that passed the time. Stories that he retold himself to remember in new form, across the gap between what she had said and what she had not.
He kept an eye on both. This left him by our count one eye free for what was in between but put his moving feet in two places often at once like East-West magi even of that time, wise persons who they say could be in two places simultaneously, Grace Kimball on second thought among them though not for that feat (for she was always only here) but for having a total view, including healing change, finding as she must on what we will call her wheel a place and time and power for just everything:
Women and men each other’s axles, she felt on good days; each other’s future and frontier—Words, words, words, Grace Kimball quoted herself, getting to the point by getting away from some other, women and men each other’s separated cooperative, for this is the future, she said, this is it, babe, and we are it, ‘cause we know if we don’t do our thing, why darling nobody’s going to do it for you.
(What is this "thing"? asked voices of a later age, and what was this "future"? and what was this "abundance"? Answer: we didn’t mention anything about abundance yet.)
And where did that one free eye leave James Mayn?
It was his secret from himself, while his use of it was his secret from others.
What secret? That he didn’t believe his mother had left? That he held his father responsible? No. Rather, that, falling far into the horizon, he had slipped into—that is, without benefit of much known science (he being an ordinary person) or any wish to hold a long view—or any view—of history, its thriftless drift, its missile balances, strip mining, and multinational corporate selves but also linked sphere of weather stations called the Earth, all which he helped record, journeyman that he was—slipped, yes, into future (the word is out), and from there he looked back like a shadow thrown upon us by a part of ourselves, but Mayn looked back so to the life that past was present and his secret kept—we mean he was in future as he casually joked once with not his son but his daughter, he was in future imagining our present as his past and so we may have felt truer having been imagined by him to the life since he is one of us.
Which brought him not a will to power but the reverse—and didn’t bring him, but did one day yield, Grace Kimball herself.
Now, they two aren’t to be thought of in the same breath here. Yet if the chance remains that they should never meet to our satisfaction, still we ourselves are their relation, think of them as being like married folk who have so much between them they need friends to be between them too.
"So much between them"? So once more we caught ourselves saying two things at once, and late children whom we have come up to are heard saying, What? as if we’d thrown them a curve—so it is wondered if they will turn us in.
For, say two things at once—that’s double-talking, and the man with a foreign voice making inquiries, who has you in the next room and removes his late-model jacket and has the legs of a soccer player and moves toward you now where you await him in the one available chair, wants to know, All right, which is it?—make up your mind—I’ll read you back what you said: you refer to and I quote "a time that would rush us into bastardy if it could," which means either that where we are makes us bad people, or makes us illegal: because we know what "bastard" means as well as you, but you are saying two things at once, so which is it?
The room’s silent, your mouth dry as a drunk’s, knowing less than nothing more than that the brass circle-with-a-collar in which each chair leg sits or stands is what they screw down ship’s furniture with—you too when you look back on that after all quite fun crossing it’s so to the life it is a very picture, painting not the town but the ocean red and the thirty-knot floating town blue and white on the outside, and wet on the inside, color no problem, it’s still done to the life (before air fares much less matter-scrambler beamings got prohibitively cheap); and the power vacuum a daughter found for father out in the hinterlands that stayed with her into later life is more of this insidious finding two or more questions for only one answer; ditto the sons of the mother who sent them away but seemed herself the one who’d left, those two sons (one who went and one who stayed put) who were secretly if we remember one as well as two, does that mean they two were one or that one of them was two, the one son sent away where he belonged to be human? the inquisitor wants to know, our hands are connected to the arms of the chair, the man conducting the interrogation can’t wait, his time is worth its while, O.K., he’s said, which is it? The earphones with hard-to-beat frequencies are almost upon us while the wire for the earphones uncoils by itself, the man says he’s going to offer us some encouragement, some inducement to decide which of two things we mean. (Wide Load!)
Did we lie, then, speaking doubly?
There in our inquisitor’s eyes are shades of our danger which maybe he shares by knowing what is going to happen to us here no matter what we say maybe, or in the other room which now that we’re here becomes what this room once was, namely the next room, hear the silence, you could cut it with an electric prod, and you should; hear within the silence a high-frequency tuner rising in pitch or volume you can’t tell maybe both.
Just talk straight, honey, said Grace Kimball again and again, late in her century, tell it like Mama didn’t teach you; go public, come out (you know?—spelled TV O) be up front, like the money, everything else is guilt and manipulation.
James Mayn on another track thirty seconds away by phone, two three four five hours by air, said, Include me out of this Discussion of the Void and what is supposed to fill it; look if they get me under the lightbulb how do I know what I might say, I’m not one of your great talkers but under that kind of interrogation I might become human, I mean I might elect to survive, I’ll do what I have to do if I’m lucky, I might even make up what I’m supposed to know, I might get inspired, I’m human I don’t know how I’m going to react, I’ll say this, maybe I don’t even know my sources to divulge, maybe I can’t say what I saw or what someone said, but I would go easy on the jokes, I think, because those guys who do the interrogating have a sense of humor to begin with but on another wavelength which when it hits my skin-ends could just get into my wavelength or is it width, overloaded width? ouch, I’ll keep myself going maybe by thinking, What if I had this guy interrogating me alone man to man in a shopping-center parking lot, no secret weapons, nothing fancy, equals you know, just a couple of temporarily missing persons settling a difference.
Yeah, yeah, that’s how men settle their differences, a female voice on two firm thighs is piped in.
You mean how man, growls a male voice on two suspect knees.
A child is heard observing to a fellow child, See I had this block that was chipped, my dad threw it against the wall, there’s where it hit, he got a long-distance call from my mom, and he came back and we were working on this launch pad and suddenly he picked up this block and threw it, you see where it got chipped?
Breathe, said several people softly in unison and it was a comforting command.
In those days there were breathing problems they were called. We’ve cleared all that up by now, looking back, and that’s a promise. But in those days, from the city citizen in one’s high-rise apartment caught between the sounds of the sky and the sounds of the street, to the grand diva singing her guts out for the cheaper seats up in the troposphere interface as much as for those in the dress circle and closer in in seats so inflated they were out of sight, there were popular misconstruings as to the future evolution of our equipment, for instance what song we would be singing fifty years later. We’ve said "future" to be clear, for according to our historians picking up after our anthropologists, the past is also evolving, as the old song ("My Dreams Are Getting Better") had it, "all the time."
Looking back we found that we too had gone in for human sacrifices. To get where we were, we’d made them, and included others among us.
We have been busy. We have worked on it and some have become in fact busy bisons. But dispersed along our respiration’s warp that gets us together and expels us, flows us and stammers us, We have worked on our collective awareness of, as the poet says, similarity between us, which is liking, and difference between us, which is loving, in order as a long-range project to become single.
***
Yet inside this noise a silver needle is heard over its compass rose still in its package vibrating less Obstacle Race than Obstacle Hunt. It’s what I’m getting—O.K., what we are getting—as an imprint through glass, cardboard, paper, and skin from the wildly jiggering compass needle. Obstacle Quest it sounds like. For you can’t get around the ob. until you locate it through what gaps between.
Like what a father didn’t say or a mother didn’t do. Gaps where somebody wasn’t. So we took up position there, O.K.
But fell through.
That’s the horizon for you.
More to it than our mother and our father, who can’t take all the blame for the fix we’re in and who now turn out to have been obstacles inspired by our trying to get through to what we’ve chosen to forget may not be there.
Except as a wind that takes you where wants go. To the next obstacle. If it doesn’t pass you by. That you go past, then, to see it back there as if it was, my word, "the limit," that’s what a fantastic grandmother called a snoring grandfather in his and her sleep, "you are the limit!" whom she probably would sometimes dream of punishing for dropping cigar ash in his pleasant bed-dreams on such carpets as connected in later years their separated bedrooms, Persian carpets almost meeting in an L-shape, whose angle is both the gap between them and the threshold into which we turn to see the other.
Who has . . . what? disappeared?
Not quite.
Is it the Buddhist monk, who as he burns away even this last desire to burn so seems to spin, as a creed enjoins? As ye reap thus shall ye sow, the western observer of this event quick-quote-reports on tape, and she is a beautiful, dusty little woman in a Stetson hat, and her cam’raman and his gear have disappeared, and she reports on tape the crystallized advice of this dying Buddhist burning with purpose. No microwave oven he, no Sugar Crisp bargain fed to the air which knows he can’t be totally consumed, a piece of him will survive the fire’s fuel, there’s a fossil shortage. Also his economic teachings will survive him, if we remember. They’re on tape don’t forget; some anyway, if we recall.
Later the muddy-faced dramatic little woman’s voice is joined by her body Stateside. She’s draped now in one simple length of uncut, unsewn saffron matter illustrating a principle of economics that other women at Grace Kimball’s loosely structured Body-Self Workshop who know this correspondent-woman’s reputation expect to be but a preface to history when this small, beautiful, now clean woman removes the garment that represents a maximum of well-being and a minimum of labor and consumption, but instead, there, then, she is, naked, "lovely" (somebody says) and not at all the confident person thousands of miles away graveling on magnetic tape the burning monk’s economic doctrines of full employment for its own sake and purification of character as opposed to multiplying goods and wants.
But an articulate structure, we’ve heard that one before if not been messenger for it when actually we had thought it up—was it a promise?—weren’t those the words—articulated structure? The tape ran out, the void keeps spinning, the leader flaps, James Mayn has appeared in several places in the audience, which in its haphazardly individual or single way has some claim to be itself the real show, and this is not quite the opera house (which was full in any case though Mayn with his press connections could have obtained a ticket but he doesn’t like opera, he arrived at this view with a minimum of sweat and independently of Grace Kimball, who also does not go, she hasn’t got the time for that puffed-up stuff, it’s ripe for a high colonic enema, all those overweight transverse colons up there and it’s not her show anyway, she honestly upfrontally unclosets. Mayn himself meanwhile an audience of one hearing a tape rotate (faulty), against its plausible (read poignant) crackle background of enthused (read kindled) flesh, three or four familiar tenets of ancient economics, and who is elsewhere in another audience either in an all-purpose conference hall near the Santa Fe opera house or at Cooper Union in New York hearing from another foreign thinker (an increasingly gaunt South American economist with red hair) that this "articulated structure . . . can cope with a multiplicity of small-scale units," Mayn will just jot that down, and, as quoted by the thinning-red-haired Argentine, jot down also that "people matter."
A multiple child in the next room rotates a whining pencil sharpener and reduces something or other to R, which may then be positioned between any two other things to make them equal, hear the noise. But what am I equal to? I said I preferred not to think about that Wide Load approaching (with typical Danger signs) down the high road, our mind having been cross-multiplied into a various we with new powers but less room to operate in.
Yet if we are multiplying, who were those two who were together for a while and then there was one? That’s what it seemed—suddenly one instead of two, one citizen, one bonded messenger. And we for one can’t at present say it better but add that we deny, at least categorically, that anyone has disappeared from the country, for one thing we’ve got to feed them, they keep coming, out of the hills and the forest, later the woodwork and the closet space we didn’t know our property had in it squirreled away.
The two who disappeared, frankly we question them, this reported disfunction called disappearing, though this suddenly seeming-to-be-one where there were two isn’t unheard of as if one had spun behind the other. So we’ll get right on it, there’s got to be an angle, for we now can’t see the one supposedly in front for some reason yet the state of our knowledge is such that this in front may be a thing bleeped out to the naked eye (think of it) yet blocking with its invisibility that certain someone behind it that, if we could only see it, is visible to the naked eye. But we’re looking good wait one sounding good whoosh going out on all power vac bands, good old sound waves, they’ll stretch a point if you need one, they’re a lot longer than light waves, don’t you know, so they work round an obstacle, whung, they stretch, they bend right round it, lose nothing; nevertheless, elastic as it is, the sound front has been altered by that obstacle, what we call a sound shadow, really don’t think about it, we’ll take care of it, why of course people matter, your very child agrees "people matter" and signals this agreement to the terms by introducing an R between them—but we’ll take care of it, we are some power to be here, we have a history of this, though we are not the first angels to conceive of the obligation to adapt, we understand the structures involved, if for our new coastline development we need a tree without a trunk then let’s go get it because we don’t need to ask, we know we’re it, now some of us get into worrying ‘bout what we don’t just understand, and that is bad, and maybe you know him, he is a citizen, a noise-mac her, a singer. He lives . . . with himself. Not always a good idea because he lacks . . . patience, let us say. Yet patience shared is just the rent reputed angels lately express in us for using us in their own life-changing, potential-seeking experiments, you feel them in your speech, forms of dreamt advice if we can only listen to these apparent visitors, these learners, using our language as they can.
He lives, to go on, in a multiple dwelling covered by rent stabilization not to be confused among apartment hunters with rent control or statutory tenets; an old endangered apartment house, old building, but well built originally with walls sound-proof, we’ll be repointing the bricks in a couple of years from now but in the apartments the walls of the rooms are sound, in fact soundproof from unit to unit, that is apartment to apartment, if not within a given unit: still this well-known singer, a basso rotondo, would get out of here and buy himself a townhouse had he not recently become afflicted with a secret he cannot bring himself to tell his doctor or his friends: like the recently divorced tennis pro who one day in the middle of a match he’s met starts thinking about his wrist which at that instant becomes suspect, he finds it tilting to hit the ball up over the fence or down into the net; or the long-time diver, his tanks like rockets on his back, who suddenly questions his lung capacity and can’t stop breathing faster and faster—well, our resident basso one day finds himself thinking about, ye gods, his larynx, his head register, his wind, his glottis (narrowing its void-like passage almost to non-existence to increase the frictional vibrations in the famous membranes either side); also, above the true, the false vocal cords that close, then cough-like quick-release to attack a note—ye gods, these are all parts he learned long ago to forget except as love of self but now can’t help remembering, part by part, lest it all fall apart, eh?, his acoustical equipment, to the point where now he’s gone on to thinking about his difficulty swallowing and now here he is, not in his own living room between a baby grand and a giant divan that belonged to his mother that, what with the declining state of the elevators in the elegant, turn-of-the-century building you could never get furniture movers to move out of here so we’d just have to get a rigger’s license at an astronomical hourly rate—no he is not at home between piano and divan but he’s onstage across town, you know, having all evening puffed his way around problem after problem, ye gods, doubt upon doubt, as if this Strauss opera Rosenkavalier equals an attempt upon his life by dramatizing this secret that’s wrecking his confidence, and now at curtain call he’s breathless, swelling his sternum like a victim of slow vacuum torture.
Yet at that instant he sees in the gaps between his parts a dark-haired bald man out there in the windowed world beyond the stagy brink frowning but applauding and beside him a light-haired lady smiling but not clapping; and seeing them turn to each other, the basso rotondo, for whom tonight performing was never so like work, turns to the woman in kavalier costume beside him and because he’s inspired by the look of that couple in the orchestra why he is suddenly released, loose, afloat, pure angelic promise turning in space, empty as if hearing his own delicious requiem; so he’s put in mind of the story going round about this slender lady beside his own wide load, she’s looking out into the full house she whose father far away in South America is said to talk louder and louder the older he grows so that his daughter the diva thousands of miles north is alarmed for his safety, so to the basso rotondo she seems newly frail; so he, betrothed for a moment by her innocent thigh, takes her hand, forgetting himself oh forgetting himself as two more singers come from the wings, and he and this lady who is dressed as the Kavalier move left with the Princess on their left toward the center of the great stage, and the basso, busy bison (it comes to him from nowhere), angelic bull at large within the delicatest discipline of total ballet, knows in his heart that he had always known that there must be infinite room for People, here and over the brink of the stage, for the magical individual, the limitless person, in this—what?—loose-strung grand opus the ongoing gods he feels in all his oh suddenly relaxed registers are giving us to live gorgeously and gratefully in, bravo bravo bravo, he can smell already the lasagne verde, the forbidden mussel-shrimp-and-oyster-stuffed striped bass, the artichoke stuffed with mor-tadella, and before the liquid freckled pear or fleshly orange persimmon, the ripe blue gorgon foiled in the oven then mashed with sweet butter (and give us a soft nugget of ash-enveloped chevre!) and through all this across the restaurant table his friend with a roslein in the button hole and such fingers on the keys to one’s self as even the great cogent Verdi could not compose!
Elsewhere in a broad-based effort to recycle, they’ve started without us, and we need to get over there, as if not there already bringing our prestressed flange units in postponement of perhaps pain, whatever news pain is. What, though, have they started? A woman looks forward and backward to have a baby naturally with her husband; elsewhere, another does the same if she only knew it, and meanwhile lies incarnate in a motel bed near Cape Kennedy hearing from her new lover, who does not dream, dream-like memories murmured till she can’t stay awake no more no more; elsewhere, a man tries to hear what his new lover instructs him to hear, like a third party between them—news to him. Oh, these people, many more, are sharply felt yet minimally known, of an articulate community that is our representative blood but, like inmost organs and habits, unknown to us or word we bring sealed by the sender, whose parting words were that there is no neutral messenger.
For in this brief-turned age or interlocking place we were thrust back to the drawing board. To find that our understanding could prove to be just plain light—for there’s no reason to think angels can’t learn too—while light in our case had recently proved sometimes sound. And, given off from us, this sound had more to it or less depending on the viewer’s place—that is, how much you were, and where you were coming from, and how. What mattered, though, was that among all points of view the more Much averaged a shade greater than the less. So we had not just differences in point of view: we had a net more Much given off, and this might mean so much in the long run that the shade greater More felt downright massive. And so we chose for Much the new term Mass.
Yet how came this net More? From the sound at source in us. Even us in the sound. Trying to know when our tenant angels spoke in us.
But given a net More given off, the source must suffer net loss. Net loss of mass material which could be weighed. Which meant (we had to think) that sound had weight. So weight in some state might have sound. Yet if our light was only sound, sound could well be light. If so, light too had weight (which became it never so much as in the losing of it).
This was hard. But actually not on us. Beset by abstraction we many of us thought to hang in a little longer. If light had weight to its mass and on good days proved relatively endless, must not we its sometime source be endless, too?
Whether or not we needed it in this seeming endless supply, it seemed to need us less. We hated to lose light like that. Yet coming to us, leaving us constantly, it seemed still to know its place. Which we kept it in. That is, its place of use to us. For reading. For gardening at sunset. For cave weekends. For open-ended incandescence. For seasonal definition, if at times light’s swift generalizing power transcended such particulars as that Chile was not South America, New York not the Capital, the Statue of Liberty not art. Lately, we used light for Obstacle Manipulation, where Eye-light means Contact, and we had learned by chance that at a distance and without touching we might move a plum away from a lemon if not toward ripeness; move a person—say, one half turn; or move a mountain with its half-known contents, yet do so only so long as we saw the movable thing as in a beautiful relation to us (thus Optical Kinaesthesia). And first and last, we used light for interrogation and inquiry.
Inquiry was not new to us. We had long since isolated through shifting densities light’s lightning turns, refractory quirks, and strangely confident bends impromptu and for all the world like thought—light’s fantasies or dreams no less! These we had plans to guide through staggered densities prism’d to sooner or later get back to us so that refract might come round to mean reflect. Until one day, angling and bending in hope of mastery, we grandly thought light’s refracting mediums no other than ourselves. Yet now the sound of voicing such insight shed light in us. Right down inside us. So light, losing mass to us inward, must find itself as if anew. Thus received in us, it must be in us conserved.
"Kept in its place," did we already remember saying? Its speed stayed constant even now, and if we now first surmised that, like its speed constant to all passing points of view, we could have our light and be it too, we still could not for sure maintain in bulk the illumination now shedding itself inwardly. We looked out on others of us and at our stars and at light’s bent through our waters and slow motions, and entertaining the possibility that we might through adaptation experience the first angelic senility. We looked inward and felt curious. We thought not just that if light never slows nor speeds up how can it be us?, but since its sacred speed seems an unalterable inertia, why not an inertia of no motion? For we already remembered we had been told that we might make it stop.
Stop? But be itself. Let light, say, stop with us and be a pause.
And we half-listen, breathing, and with half ourselves wonder if it is by some awful standard exactly half. We can go in the front or back, the top, the bottom, one curve or another, or segment or seam or width of century, city, apartment house, gossip network, weather-station system doubling as arms-control monitoring grid, newly designed head, articulate structure that can accommodate a multiplicity of small-scale units, one gets the idea—though what about the long hills of soil turned over by hands? now this is small-scale agricultural homework inefficient and wasteful to one vision, body and soul by another, these hills are ours too and content to be not a model of the whole but a piece of Earth that’s one of many places we might be reflected, while some of us may be found elsewhere trouble-shooting to see where sunspots cross depression, high belts of auras fuel deep quests for the power source we were always meant to have, the gods told us through holes quietly drilled in our heads, if we could only look at it and see it, that power source which may be mere talent for prophecy. We’ve got a multiple child that’s equal to anything, exploring it, researching it, playing around with it—the harvest cycle, and Maunder Minimum rotation, deep steam from Earth’s magnetic engine, pure clean power from nuclear (say after us) Fusion, the race to find the tack to harness the void, for that’s where the power is.
Which Jim Mayn in later life listens to. At least there’s the machine and there he is, the tape recorder on the table and he’s sitting by it, used to being two or so places at once, staring along the desk at a picture of a global weather network.
Why has this life happened to him? Questions threaten to be unearned questions. He’s a guy—oh that explains everything!—a little more independent, more up on things by virtue of his work which he works hard at but at a leisurely slope. But why has what happened?
Nothing much. But a turn that your head takes and you aren’t all there for a while. I mean you can work out, go to a movie, have dinner with a lady, take your plane, or like now hear the flown-in tape, make a note or two, stare at the sphereful of weather stations doubling as other centers: But he’s looking down at it, the globe with little towers like a satellite’s antennae, a Christmas orange that grandma’s just getting started sticking with twig-hard little cloves the ends blunt so she has to bear down against her own flesh; but wait: that pomander’s a secretly familiar obstacle to this uncanny other.
He wouldn’t speak of it, this turn his head takes, they could lock him up for what he might know, but here it is, O.K.?, he’s listening to the dusty correspondent-lady twang—no, simply say—her Buddhist quotes against the paper-thin crackle of fire she’s also reporting, within the larger, quiet, flesh-smooth breathing of the flames subsisting on an imperial gallon of non-renewable fossil fuel, fed too, in Mayn’s head, among all our multiplied voices, by an official back in Washington who got round the obstacle of dire new taxes if not death by beaming right through his compartmented economic advisers who said you can have these but not this, these but not this, substitute tat for tit but not both, Mr. President, through this and these the aforementioned official—future inflation be damned—beamed a budgetary implication that the war in question would cost ten billion tops and be all over by fiscal year-end—until Mayn is back where he’s been before quite really, yes quite really, and where, double-bodied, he is mile-years (scale-wise) above this weather-sphere.
He is in the future, not shedding light up to his full potential.
That’s right; in it. And a future boding ill for that past of ours we’re now in, that he has now in helpless interest or sympathy doubled himself back into, so that it might as well exist. But he’s not the type for this warp-vision; rejects the patent. Not crazy or original, a newsman who’ll carry the ball if it comes to him but has never agreed to take a view of history, no not even that it makes no sense. But he can’t get out of the way of its waste-oriented debris that, once seen, relate—and thus graduate their vectors of distance, disaster, hence perspective out of thin air like mind (it occurred to us) till this process of relation could turn (read flush) waste into flesh.
But he know that he in the future and from there hav’ thought back up a few familiar angles of the past our current present, which includes—
But wait, for while we wait for it to pass, it was a Wide Load transferring itself down an interstate in the middle of the night roughly eastward in the middle roughly of the continent. We had heard this Wide Load was mineral matter relative to us; its frequent no-show felt like it had something to hide (you ol’ Wide Load!) if only itself: as highway widths changed, so did spot reports of the overlap, until margin was our main worry, but if mineral or other substance receded, where to? No one must have seen the Wide Load at this instant we feel from how it looks through the Flying Camera keeping pace with it above the telephone lines and fields and treetops, while, long-lensed and intimately at this distance of fifty or seventy-five feet, the camera ear listens in on at least two voices somewhere there inside that Wide Load behind shingled walls and moon-pale Venetian blinds. A Wide Load being shipped interstate and at this dark hour without benefit of advance patrol—wide and immobile as a home, this unit, and hanging out over the edge of its great, low carrier trailer and out over the edge of the road as if the road’s been narrowed or a mountain had arisen widely from a moving molehill, so if a section of us other than the camera being flown beside this night cargo came the other way now, we’d have to swerve off this speeding road, foray out into farmlands of uncomfortable earth ridged and mapped with memories of soy seed and feed corn, or a brief forest of some sleeper’s saplings shadowing the far side of a dubious bridge, landbridge or any edifice to travel through. But if this other part of us, at large upon the interstate at this hour, must hold the road in the opposite direction approaching this high truck cab and its sweeping Wide Load, we would have to make a leapfrog dive up and over like the nationally screened daredevil who stands in the approaching vehicle’s path till the last instant, or alternatively we’d have to be clotheslined like a fat (as they say "a little short") fast ball wham into the middle of Indiana or Ohio, or (to skip cartilage in favor of bone) we would have to have a gap in us between our land-gear / undercarriage and the rest of us for this Wide Load to pass with its fore and aft signs through us going the other way. Unless, that is, this Wide-Load container of at least two room-type spaces—this room and a next room—prove penetrable!—as that tired voyager Columbus imagined when, having been offered by the Indians an herbal pick-me-up, he found "the illusion of ‘arriving from the east at the Indies’ more composing to his lofty spirit than any tobacco," or the thought that he was the first and therefore the beginning. For Who Was Here First proves to be a function of Where You Coming From.
But wait: elsewhere, they’ve started, apparently without us, and we want, kind of, to get over there. But we were always getting started, until of late we saw again us getting started, yes there was the word like the event itself, until we saw it wasn’t our fault, we were larger than life until life caught up and wouldn’t have if we hadn’t been larger as an incentive system. We can’t get out of the way of Mayn’s claim that he is at times in the future—because it is literal but also because it is so private as to be imaginary. He means what he said: and from that future that he at times is really in he has thought our current present up—not too consciously, though, and with help—thought it back up as if it were the past, which includes (within random wide-load boasting possibly two angry voices exploring the subject, and within the routine parameters of Mayn’s work where meteorology and arms control have met primarily since the reconnaissance scandal of the U-2 plane high as some satellite sculpture but without an orbit came crashing down through even its own surveillance upon another continent it was not meant to touch but beamed into as a bend of our own potency angles from the glass of the air into the layers and waters of our lands) . . . and takes in (because we don’t wait any longer) . . . wind and weather as a cover for the powers that be and also for a mother—
But where is she? And won’t we find her amply covered with tales the grandmother Margaret told of the Eastern Princess nee of Choor who arrived by great-circle detour doubtless upon a large bird that consumed Navajo horses under its wing? Add to this the account of the headman’s son the Navajo Prince, who once far north of his home saw a herd of bison nudged like a shadow off a cliff and felt in the stillness of that fall through the late light a waiting force somewhere in the nature of their bodies as yet not found; same Prince who even more obstinately pursued the Eastern Princess not back to Choor but along a curve of Mother Earth across a continent to where the Hermit-Inventor of New York who had given emergency counsel in the West but earlier had urged her as a girl named Margaret to go west in the first place, turned her, at last back East near home, into a sun-drenched mist to make her escape from her literally continental lover into by one account the now assembled Statue that harbored her as her disguise then compacted her cooler and (by another account) shapelier, when swift, soft, footsore steps of one tired Indian wanderer were heard climbing nearer and nearer, ascending the foreign keep of the Statue’s towering interior till they passed through her, and she passed downward like the wind, leaving him her one-time Navajo Prince to reach for himself the Statue’s eyes and look out toward the ocean he had seen only in the curves and wave-motion of his home deserts, prairies, and plateaus. But had heard of it in the Hermit-Inventor’s talk who himself was curiously never to be challenged as to his name of "Hermit-Inventor of New York" or chosen by those people or by the Eastern Princess he helped get into trouble and get out, or the Margaret she also was or even the grandson she told tales to later. In fact the Hermit garrulously sojourned upwards of half the year in those western lands to which he had sent that girl and later woman Margaret whom at more than twice her age he secretly loved, and though he lived by himself the balance of the time in New York and worked alone, he talked loudly into the night and lived among his schemes of buildings yet unbuilt, wind shadows yet to be cast, underground-wind-powered subways, floating underground buildings made of mirror—designs of weather that he hoped would make his skyline prophecy resound in all the colors of its building material and the powers of people these future buildings contained— Which we now all together have been saying include— To go on . . . with no more waits ... for even Margaret’s daughter Sarah, Jim’s mother, who heard but one of Margaret’s tales the one Jim did not hear, of what happened when the Navajo Prince met the East Far Eastern Princess once of Choor and her long-time betrothed and who else or other trace of future lay windowed in that turf so patient, but . . .
Wind and weather a secret familiar cover, as we said, for the powers that be, and wind and weather a sandman’s cover also for a mother who went away where salt waves rolled and eyelashed upon a beach but who then, as a future absence, brought herself close inside her offspring, furnishing a gap. And through this gap a future would always come back, as she did not: except a breath that came firm and steady, expelling, drawing back, the night, the day, human, animal, those who are known and those who are also known.