montage seemed to me at the time a kind of sideways game, a parade just begging for metonymic substitutions and displacements. I entertained my mind with the construction of montage after montage while Steimmel and her lackey tried to sleep.
spacing
a) the doctor pulls me from the womb
b) my mother and father smile at each other
c) the clock on the wall registers the passage of an hour
d) my mothers is putting a question to a nurse, who gestures for her to wait
e) the doctor talks to my father in the waiting room, puts his hand on my father’s shoulder
f) my father sits on the edge of my mother’s bed, tells her something that makes her cry
g) I am tiny and encased in glass, my little hands squeezing nothing, wires and tubes everywhere
h) outside, birds fly through a park and children play with dogs
ootheca
Ezra Pound said, “Every word must be charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.” Let it be the case then. But words need no help from anyone. Bet thew ords kneeknow hellip freeum heinywon. Context, story, time, place—don’t these work like Bekins men, packing the words like so many trunks? But finally, words are not cases to be packed at all, but solid bricks (and, of course, like a brick, even a word’s atoms are not motionless).
exousai
Sint cadavera eorum, in escam volatilibus coeli, et bestis terrae.
To me, Steimmel and the Steimmels of the world were jackals. I grew, irrationally, angry with my parents as I watched the jackal sleep. My parents might have worshipped my bones, I thought, but my flesh they were willing to give over to wild beasts of the land. I viewed myself as dead and left on a platform for weather and birds to tear apart.
Steimmel and Boris slept fully clothed, the doctor’s dark tennis shoes on the floor by the bed. She snored slightly and by the light from the television I could see her parted lips and her tobacco- and coffee-stained teeth. She and her accomplice were so peaceful as to appear dead. I wondered what might come and eat them. I thought that perhaps we would be found and presumed dead, only to awaken and find that we had been sentenced to the gibbet. And there, while on display for passersby to gawk at our corpses and count our crimes, we would open our eyes and scare the life out of all the onlookers.
Down the close and up the stair
But and ben wi’ Burke and Hare
Burke’s the butcher, Hare’s the thief
Knox’s the man who buys the beef.
supernumber
1
Only an efficient net or spray of myopia could have kept Steimmel or Boris from realizing that transporting me was going to be a conspicuous matter. Although, being a baby, I had been spared the realities of racial attitudes in the culture, my readings in genetics and history and current events made it clear that the people on the street were going to find the discrepancy between my skin color and my abductors’ at least notable and perhaps worthy of some explanation.
2
Have you to this point assumed that I am white? In my reading, I discovered that if a character was black, then he at some point was required to comb his Afro hairdo, speak on the street using an obvious, ethnically identifiable idiom, 5 live in a certain part of a town, or be called a nigger by someone. White characters, I assumed they were white (often, because of the ways they spoke of other kinds of people), did not seem to need that kind of introduction, or perhaps legitimization, to exist on the page. But you, dear reader, no doubt, whether you share my pigmentation or cultural origins, probably assumed that I was white. It is not important unless you want it to be and I will not say more about it, but a physical description of one kidnapped baby would have to be released to the police and that description, being delivered by my parents, would be more or less precise and therefore, two, rather pale, white people traveling up the California coast with a baby possessing at least one of the attributes of the rendered portrait
spacing
a) the doctor pulls me from the womb
b) my mother and father smile at each other
c) the clock on the wall registers the passage of an hour
d) my mothers is putting a question to a nurse, who gestures for her to wait
e) the doctor talks to my father in the waiting room, puts his hand on my father’s shoulder
f) my father sits on the edge of my mother’s bed, tells her something that makes her cry
g) I am tiny and encased in glass, my little hands squeezing nothing, wires and tubes everywhere
h) outside, birds fly through a park and children play with dogs
ootheca
Ezra Pound said, “Every word must be charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.” Let it be the case then. But words need no help from anyone. Bet thew ords kneeknow hellip freeum heinywon. Context, story, time, place—don’t these work like Bekins men, packing the words like so many trunks? But finally, words are not cases to be packed at all, but solid bricks (and, of course, like a brick, even a word’s atoms are not motionless).
exousai
Sint cadavera eorum, in escam volatilibus coeli, et bestis terrae.
To me, Steimmel and the Steimmels of the world were jackals. I grew, irrationally, angry with my parents as I watched the jackal sleep. My parents might have worshipped my bones, I thought, but my flesh they were willing to give over to wild beasts of the land. I viewed myself as dead and left on a platform for weather and birds to tear apart.
Steimmel and Boris slept fully clothed, the doctor’s dark tennis shoes on the floor by the bed. She snored slightly and by the light from the television I could see her parted lips and her tobacco- and coffee-stained teeth. She and her accomplice were so peaceful as to appear dead. I wondered what might come and eat them. I thought that perhaps we would be found and presumed dead, only to awaken and find that we had been sentenced to the gibbet. And there, while on display for passersby to gawk at our corpses and count our crimes, we would open our eyes and scare the life out of all the onlookers.
Down the close and up the stair
But and ben wi’ Burke and Hare
Burke’s the butcher, Hare’s the thief
Knox’s the man who buys the beef.
supernumber
1
Only an efficient net or spray of myopia could have kept Steimmel or Boris from realizing that transporting me was going to be a conspicuous matter. Although, being a baby, I had been spared the realities of racial attitudes in the culture, my readings in genetics and history and current events made it clear that the people on the street were going to find the discrepancy between my skin color and my abductors’ at least notable and perhaps worthy of some explanation.
2
Have you to this point assumed that I am white? In my reading, I discovered that if a character was black, then he at some point was required to comb his Afro hairdo, speak on the street using an obvious, ethnically identifiable idiom, 5 live in a certain part of a town, or be called a nigger by someone. White characters, I assumed they were white (often, because of the ways they spoke of other kinds of people), did not seem to need that kind of introduction, or perhaps legitimization, to exist on the page. But you, dear reader, no doubt, whether you share my pigmentation or cultural origins, probably assumed that I was white. It is not important unless you want it to be and I will not say more about it, but a physical description of one kidnapped baby would have to be released to the police and that description, being delivered by my parents, would be more or less precise and therefore, two, rather pale, white people traveling up the California coast with a baby possessing at least one of the attributes of the rendered portrait
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