Read Online Women and Men by Joseph McElroy - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Joseph McElroy
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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
***
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
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