Read Online Book of Numbers: A Novel by Joshua Cohen - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Joshua Cohen
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selfcataloging by materials, date, place of finding,
provenance: carbonbased hominid, 2011, Manhattan (via Jersey)—a plaque and relic
both, of paunchy dad jeans, logoless tshirt untucked, sportsjacket missing a button,
athletic socks, unathletic sneaks.
I visited the Met for the women, not for meeting them new, but for the
reassurance of the old. For their forms that seduced by soothing—for their form,
that vessel shape, joining them in sisterhood as bust is joined to bottom.
I visited to be mothered, essentially, and it was altogether more
convenient for me to get that swaddling from the deceased strangers buried uptown than
from my own mother down in Shoregirt.
The physique I’m feeling my way around here is
that of the exemplary vase: a murky womb for water, tapering. I’m remembering a
certain vase from home, from the house I was raised in: marl clay carved in a
feather/scale motif, the gashes incised by brush or comb, then dipped transparently and
fired, and set stout atop the cart in the hall. That was the pride of my mother’s
apprenticeship: a crudely contoured holder for any flowers I’d bring, which
she’d let wilt and crumble dry, as if measures of my absence. Yes, coming to the
museum like this, confining myself behind its reinforced doors and metal detectors, and
within its most ancient deepwide hushed insensible receptacles, will always be my safest
shortcut to Jersey, and the displays of the Master of Shoregirt—Moms the
potter—who’s put together like this, like all the women I’ve ever
been with, except Rach.
\
Just to the left of the entrance of the Met, where civilization begins,
where the Greek and Roman Wing begins—there it was: the dwellingplace of the
jugs, the buxom jugs, just begging to surrender their shapes to a substance.
Curvant. Carinated. Bulging. The jar girls, containments themselves
contained, immured squatting behind fake glass.
I used to stop, stoop at the vitrines, and pay my
respects—breathing to fog their clarity, then wiping with a cuff.
I should say that my virgin encounter with these figures was in thecompany of Moms, who’d drive the family up 440 N across all
of Staten Island for culture, for chemo (the former for me, the latter for Dad, whom
we’d drop at Sloan Kettering).
But that Friday this past spring, I didn’t see any maternal
proxies. Coming close to these figures, all I could see was myself. At each
thermoplastic bubble, each lucite breach, I hovered near and preened. I was shocked,
shattered, doubly. My chin quadrupled in reflection. My mouth was a squeezed citron.
Stubble bristled at every suggestion. What had been highbrow was now balding.
Returning from that first chemo visit, Moms went and bought some clay, a
wheel, some tools. Impractical platters, flaccid flasks: she’d been inspired to
pot, moved to mold, vessels for her depression, while I had been, inadvertently,
sexualized.
Moms had intended to inculcate only a fetish for art, not for what art
must start as: body, the body defined by waist.
Dad, weakened, shriveled—a mummy’s mummy—had six
months left to live.
\
That day, signing day, I took my tour, conducted my ordinary circuit by
gallery: first the women, then the men. Rounding the rotundities, before proceeding to
those other busts, those heads.
Staved heads—of the known and unknown, kings of anonymity with
beards of shredded feta, or ziti with gray sauce—separated for display by the
implements that might’ve decapitated them. If it’s venerable enough,
weaponry can look like art, just like commonplace inscriptions can sound like
poetry—Ozymandias, anyone? “this seal is the seal of King
Proteus”?
The armor of a certain case has always reminded me of cocoons,
chrysalides, shed snakeskin—all the breastplates and armguards and sheaths for
the leg just rougher shells from an earlier stage of human development. The armor
provenance: carbonbased hominid, 2011, Manhattan (via Jersey)—a plaque and relic
both, of paunchy dad jeans, logoless tshirt untucked, sportsjacket missing a button,
athletic socks, unathletic sneaks.
I visited the Met for the women, not for meeting them new, but for the
reassurance of the old. For their forms that seduced by soothing—for their form,
that vessel shape, joining them in sisterhood as bust is joined to bottom.
I visited to be mothered, essentially, and it was altogether more
convenient for me to get that swaddling from the deceased strangers buried uptown than
from my own mother down in Shoregirt.
The physique I’m feeling my way around here is
that of the exemplary vase: a murky womb for water, tapering. I’m remembering a
certain vase from home, from the house I was raised in: marl clay carved in a
feather/scale motif, the gashes incised by brush or comb, then dipped transparently and
fired, and set stout atop the cart in the hall. That was the pride of my mother’s
apprenticeship: a crudely contoured holder for any flowers I’d bring, which
she’d let wilt and crumble dry, as if measures of my absence. Yes, coming to the
museum like this, confining myself behind its reinforced doors and metal detectors, and
within its most ancient deepwide hushed insensible receptacles, will always be my safest
shortcut to Jersey, and the displays of the Master of Shoregirt—Moms the
potter—who’s put together like this, like all the women I’ve ever
been with, except Rach.
\
Just to the left of the entrance of the Met, where civilization begins,
where the Greek and Roman Wing begins—there it was: the dwellingplace of the
jugs, the buxom jugs, just begging to surrender their shapes to a substance.
Curvant. Carinated. Bulging. The jar girls, containments themselves
contained, immured squatting behind fake glass.
I used to stop, stoop at the vitrines, and pay my
respects—breathing to fog their clarity, then wiping with a cuff.
I should say that my virgin encounter with these figures was in thecompany of Moms, who’d drive the family up 440 N across all
of Staten Island for culture, for chemo (the former for me, the latter for Dad, whom
we’d drop at Sloan Kettering).
But that Friday this past spring, I didn’t see any maternal
proxies. Coming close to these figures, all I could see was myself. At each
thermoplastic bubble, each lucite breach, I hovered near and preened. I was shocked,
shattered, doubly. My chin quadrupled in reflection. My mouth was a squeezed citron.
Stubble bristled at every suggestion. What had been highbrow was now balding.
Returning from that first chemo visit, Moms went and bought some clay, a
wheel, some tools. Impractical platters, flaccid flasks: she’d been inspired to
pot, moved to mold, vessels for her depression, while I had been, inadvertently,
sexualized.
Moms had intended to inculcate only a fetish for art, not for what art
must start as: body, the body defined by waist.
Dad, weakened, shriveled—a mummy’s mummy—had six
months left to live.
\
That day, signing day, I took my tour, conducted my ordinary circuit by
gallery: first the women, then the men. Rounding the rotundities, before proceeding to
those other busts, those heads.
Staved heads—of the known and unknown, kings of anonymity with
beards of shredded feta, or ziti with gray sauce—separated for display by the
implements that might’ve decapitated them. If it’s venerable enough,
weaponry can look like art, just like commonplace inscriptions can sound like
poetry—Ozymandias, anyone? “this seal is the seal of King
Proteus”?
The armor of a certain case has always reminded me of cocoons,
chrysalides, shed snakeskin—all the breastplates and armguards and sheaths for
the leg just rougher shells from an earlier stage of human development. The armor
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