some more lines.
And will I give you nothing else? Nothing! But nothing is not so easy. It is harder to give nothing than a ready-to-hand something, pre-made and worth less than nothing.
Outsiders—such as I was, a brief year ago—might think of the university as a haven, a protected place. We have our own squadron of police, here, ostensibly, to ward off gangsters but really, I think, on patrol against time. Or if it isn’t the police, something must keep it back. Outside, things come and go; trains slide from one end of the day to the other; there are traffic jams, elections. Inside, only the unchanging quandrangle; an earlier century of buildings and neckties; the same sag in the same upholstered chair. I read the first editions of books, things with frontispieces, pages that have outlasted their publishers.
All this is misleading. The university does perform a remarkable feat of timing but it is not a case of arrest. It is a case, in fact, of never stopping, which gives the illusion of a thing holding still. There is a time-warp, but it screws the other way, accelerating the weeks and months rather than stalling them. Coming here I had an idea of ducking into some large apothecary, a place of fascinating mold, whose only rhythm was the papery slide of drawers. I would fill up some jars of my own and watch them pickle. But I’ve walked, instead, into a centrifuge, where things whip around so fast I do not snatch many words from the air the first time around.
So I wait for it all to loop around again—which it does—and I suppose that is one solution to this miraculously charged configuration: stay put, it’ll come again. But it is not the safest solution, because the idea for us subparticles in the centrifuge is not actually to keep spinning, but only to spin around enough times to sail up and out. Because the risk is becoming a perpetual wind-up, of the kind that Henry James used to chew and chew.
Adapted from J. W. Schopf’s top ten (1974).
1. Life (and eating)
2. Blue-green algae (photosynthesis)
3. Eukaryotes (reproduction by mitosis)
4. Sex (reproduction by meiosis)
5. Multicellularity
6. Vertebrates
7. Vascular plants
8. Warm-blooded animals
9. Flowering plants
10. Man
11. Muppets
Thank God for the word
Category. Without it I would hardly know
What to do with myself.
There would be nothing to compare, reject, establish, or
Best of all, problematize.
There would certainly be no disciplines
And without disciplines, nothing excitingly
Interdisciplinary. In short
There would be nothing to say.
There may not even be any Notions
And without that the University
(But let’s face it, the world)
Would be a real free-for-all, an utterly
Unclassified ether. So a toast
to the constant vigil,
dividing, defining, drawing the line
That we tow. To the first categorical imperative: a priori
There must be a category.
A dream came in through the window and perched near the edge of my desk one day, not saying anything. I didn’t notice it for a while, because it didn’t disturb my books, which sat full of angles, unaccommodating to one another. Papers moved from one side of the desk to the other, and back, and all the while the dream was quiet. Then it got bored and began to hum a low tune, and that’s when I realized it was there.
I put down my pen. It kept humming.
Finally I said, “That’s neither here nor there.”
It hummed on.
“I don’t have any place to put that.”
It ignored me.
“How did you come down so low? Why didn’t you stay with the others?” I said. “It’s better up there.”
It hummed a little softer, and then a little higher. It was the color of butter.
“I can’t do anything down here,” I said. “I’d make a mess of it. My hands—they tremble. My heart is too small and my mind is full of holes.”
Its tune became lighter.
I thought of the last one, which had sung as lightly, some time ago. It had made me laugh. It had tried to get me to sing, but I would bungle the sound. Then one day, floating in and out of the room while I sat at my desk, it tore itself on a nail in the wall and I turned to see the life go out of it. I went and held it as it sank to the floor and bled its dream-stuff all over my trembling hands.
So I was afraid when I heard myself say, “But if you want—you can stay.”
The bed I made for it was from a low crate that had once held a small harvest of clementines.
During the day, while I sat at my desk, it would sometimes spread itself across the ceiling like a coat of paint. From there it would draw up my thoughts, so that each would begin somewhere in the seat of my wooden chair and rise up, in a lemon haze, into an unanswered question. The papers held still at my desk. The books jutted but did not complain.
Sometimes we would go walking in the woods and across the frozen pond. Outside, in the snow-lit day, it would become transparent. I would not see it—it would simply fade into everything. I would listen to its humming, though sometimes I was not sure if this came from the dream, or if it was from me. Sometimes it would pretend to be afraid of something and hide behind my eyes, and then everything would take on that buttery hue; everything would seem soft to the touch.
We stayed out later. In the falling light, it would deepen into gold and glow with a mineral intensity. I believed then that if I held it within me it would burn through me, breaking all my atoms apart. Its humming would be a roar through the twilight branches, startling the owls. I hated, and was relieved, to go home.
And then one night it refused to come back in. That’s when I knew that I had lived to see the end. I took off my hat and looked at it for some time, while the cold bit at my ears. It hummed shyly. I closed the door.
The fire was low; I kicked it up. I looked at my desk. I saw the motionless papers and the books, askew, and I thought, tomorrow—I will break their stiffened spines.
in my pocket at the end of the year was a poem.
I was wrong again about the weather. It’s the mass of the continent that keys up the elements, the lake that holds steady. Something paradoxical about water—much more imperturbable than land (and you would think, what’s more stoic than a rock?), and yet so much of the climate is bound up with its moods. In any case I managed to get the whole continent wrong. And someone who might have set me straight sooner is gone.
Did he also, in leaving, answer this question of Darwin’s: “Why is life short, why such high object—”?
You might think, as I did, that on a flat pan of land in the smack middle of the continent nothing can really happen—no heights to draw thunder; anything roiling in from the coasts or the tundra would only be a rumor in the wheat stalks by the time it gets this far. Far from extremes here in the interior; everything tempered by monotonous distance in all directions. That’s wrong. There’s the lake—I know hardly anything about it, except that it also has shores in such extreme places as Indiana. But I suspect that even to people who’ve lived by it a long time it is an unknown quantity. This afternoon a sudden mist filled the neighborhood smelling like ice. The ground has turned yellow with leaves in a day, all the trees in one unseen fit of trembling. At any given moment here there’s nothing to see—a suburban plain, nothing that bears thinking about—but there’s mystery all the same. The lake commands a changeling sky; it is at perfect liberty to raise any hell it wants.
and more will come. But first another site—the reports of the Hawk Count in Peterborough, New Hampshire, where my friend counts raptors, and loons, and butterflies, and people. He is an Official Counter; he counts. And writes. And to read him is to rejoice.
curls up like a housecat. I’ve put up photos with the Montana story, so you can see. If I’d thought to turn my recorder on, I might have kept its growl. It sounds nothing like a housecat.
