Speaking Volumes

Speaking Volumes

Conjunctions, Vol. 63

Edited by Bradford Morrow

CONJUNCTIONS

Bi-Annual Volumes of New Writing

Edited by

Bradford Morrow

Contributing Editors

John Ashbery

Martine Bellen

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge

Mary Caponegro

Brian Evenson

William H. Gass

Peter Gizzi

Robert Kelly

Ann Lauterbach

Norman Manea

Rick Moody

Howard Norman

Joanna Scott

David Shields

Peter Straub

John Edgar Wideman

published by Bard College

Contents

EDITOR’S NOTE

Samuel R. Delany, From Eclipse: A Romance

Melissa Pritchard, On Bibliomancy, Anthropodermic Bibliopegy, and The Eating Papers; or, Proust’s Porridge

Edwidge Danticat, Please Translate

Elizabeth Robinson, Four Poems

Frederic Tuten, Some Episodes in the History of My Reading

Julia Elliott, Bride

Paul Hoover, Five Poems

Aimee Bender, Three Found Books

Robert Kelly, The Book: Prelude, Andante Dolente, and Fantasia

Cole Swensen, On Walking On

Rikki Ducornet, From Brightfellow

Emily Anderson, Three Little Novels

Nathaniel Mackey, Lone Coast Recension

Laynie Browne, Letters Inscribed in Snow

Adam Weinstein, Two Essays

Chris Tysh, Ravished

Minna Proctor, On Translation’s Inadequacies

Eliot Weinberger, Fragments from Lost Zoroastrian Books

Edie Meidav, From the Dung Beetle’s Perspective

Paul West, Memo to My Muse

Ranbir Singh Sidhu, The Lost Chapter of John Jourdain

Maxine Chernoff, Three Poems

Anne Waldman, Offworlds

Brandon Hobson, From The Book of a Thousand Deaths

Donald Revell, The Watteau Poem

Carole Maso, World Book

Elaine Equi, Mystery Poem

Andrew Mossin, From The Book of Spells

Joyce Carol Oates, The Childhood of the Reader

Daniel Nadler, From The Lacunae

Rebecca Lilly, Rubrics

Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Pages from Days and Works

Brian Evenson, The Particulars

Joanna Scott, The Knowledge Gallery

Notes on Contributors

EDITOR’S NOTE

Books are, to those who live and breathe them, all but sentient fellow beings. When a book is closed, it is asleep. Perhaps dreaming, inspired by its reposing words and images. But when a book is opened, it awakens, vaults to life, and interacts with the reader, collapsing time and bridging space. Even the most modest book is by far the finest transportation device ever invented and can carry its reader to every corner of the cosmos. Once closed again, however, it never fully returns to sleep but remains in the reader’s imagination.

If, as Cormac McCarthy proposed, books come from books, then the volume in your hands comes from writers who have considered the myriad ways in which that process occurs. It is a gathering of essays, poems, stories, and unclassifiable works that examine what books mean to those of us who deeply depend on them. Every book ever written, from classics and epics to personal diaries to, yes, literary journals, is something of a secular tabernacle that houses not only the history of thought but of life itself—and death. And, as readers of Speaking Volumes will quickly discover, each writer’s voice here explores the book in unexpectedly different ways. Factual memoirs are nestled beside faux histories. Translations of invented lyrics find themselves alongside narratives that investigate the origins of how writing is read and how writers come to write.

If indeed reading is a kind of writing—in that collaborative readers recreate the signifiers and images on the silent printed page as vivid, even vocal, personal imagery and meaning—Speaking Volumes might be seen as a notebook that invites meditation on just how that happens. On how daily engagement with the book enlightens daily lives.

—Bradford Morrow

October 2014

New York City

From Eclipse

A Romance

Samuel R. Delany

Do you believe that you lived three thousand years ago? No. But for me, I was at the subsiding of the Deluge, and helped swab the ground, and built the first house.

—Melville, Mardi

Woe to him who seeks to please rather than to appall!

—Melville, The Sermon, Moby-Dick

Just … call me—Ishmael?

It’s not my name. Try Harry, Hank, even Horace, the Egyptian god of writing and Rome’s odist, epodist, and satirist, and the classical world’s finest critic till sublime Longinus. Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret, et mala perrumpet furtim fastidia victrix, as Horace put it in his epistle from the country to city-bound Fuscus. Drive nature out with a pitchfork; nevertheless she will hurry back and burst through your futile contempt, the victress. It’s something to consider: That was written by a man who died during a Roman November nearly a decade before the birth at Bethlehem. Nor do I think he was speaking only of sumac and saplings, brambles and berry bushes got out of hand, any more than if he had said it today.

Bankruptcy and our flight to Albany notwithstanding, in their gray silk hats and blue and black scarves, the creditors found us anyway. They arrived early to make their circuit through the house. The first thing they did was step inside, past Mother—she’d been up and dressed in the dark by lamplight for more than an hour—and ignored her Good morning, gentlemen. Won’t you be so kind as to— Then, blinking, she stopped, since they hadn’t even looked at her. She drew herself up in her high-necked mourning dress—brown bombazine traded for the black one she wore to funerals—as if dazzled by a dawn so gloriously golden just breaking outside the door frame, between the hemlocks across the street. She may, however, have simply been nonplussed by their rudeness.

Hauled by three black boys who’d probably been drinking already and an Irishman who certainly had, four long carts creaked and rumbled after them through our front hall door, to press their wheels into our carpets. The mick went open shirted and without shoes. Seconds indoors, he smelled worse than any Jew.

Hired by the real creditors, I suppose, but I didn’t realize that either. At least the niggers had jackets and shoes.

But through the morning liquor, all four fellows trailed the odor of laborers’ sweat unwiped away for days. Following them, watching to see what Mother would do, we got used to it in minutes, if not moments. It was a bit of the urban outdoors coming within.

Mother followed the men into the kitchen and we followed Mother. The shortest of the three turned and said, Please, Mrs. Melvill, give me all your money—coin and script, whatever you have in the house. All of it. Now.

Of course, she said, lifting her purse from where it hung on her hip. "I have it right here for you. I’ve gotten it all together. By the way—I thought you might want to know. I’m changing the name. It’s going to be Melville with an e at the end. From now on. I always said to Allan, my husband, that’s how it should be spelled: M-e-l-v-i-l-l-e. She paused, then frowned. Write it down, please. You mustn’t think I’m changing the name to … well, to elude you."

Ma’am, that’s your business, not ours. And Mr. Abernathey’s. You just give us the money, now. Then we’ll start.

Oh, yes … Mother opened her purse and handed the shortest and dumpiest some folded bills. But I just didn’t want you to … Then she went on. There … A mixing bowl (ceramic, not wooden), in which Gerty used to stir up cake batter and pancakes both, while I used to watch, was a third full of silver and copper. That’s all the … all the coins in the house.

You went through and got all the children’s, now, didn’t you? Often they’ll try to hide some. If we find any when we’re going around upstairs, we’ll just have to take it.

Oh, no … ! she said. No. They’re good children. They understand. I hadn’t understood, actually, though grudgingly I’d given up my pennies and nickels and dimes and the silver dollar Father had given me. Tommy had cried when Mother took his five pennies away, and for moments I’d thought she was going to relent and let him keep them—and, when I thought that, I hated him, and was glad that she’d made him cry. Really, that’s all we have in the house. He’d only cried ten minutes.

Turning to the taller of his well-tailored partners, the short creditor said, See, she didn’t give me no argument. He looked at my mother sternly. You’re a wise widow. Nodding and slipping them into a wallet, he returned it to an inside jacket pocket. Good, ma’am. He picked up the entire bowl and took it out under his arm.

When we came out of the kitchen, we were already curtainless (I remember the black porters holding the rods, the ivory rings slipping and clicking along them as they came free, and how the black boys stood by the bare windows and clumsily folded them, one summarily taking them away from Paddy’s hands, clearly not trusting him), and even while I watched, we became carpetless (another memory from outside the sitting-room’s arch, looking in and seeing beneath them, as they come up from the floor; from the horsehair pads beneath them, the ticks and squeaks as tacks tugged loose, another and another. Once a pad and rug were rolled to the side, tacks lay around the boards. The planks had that smoky discoloring they get when they’ve been covered with rugs for several years. Tacks were scattered like black bugs, till Helen stepped on one—in her shoe: It pierced to her sole, though, so that she cried out—and hopped about and pried it loose with her nails. In exasperation she went to get a broom and a dustpan, from one of the carts. (They were taking those with them as well.) She swept the black things up, realized they’d taken our big wicker refuse basket too, so took the rattling dustpan into the kitchen and pitched them out the window, while the porters inside continued their devastations. Would the roving nighttime Irish get them in their feet? Paddy managed to avoid them, though he cursed the loudest of the three—and the most obscenely—when he saw them). At first, it was just as though we were moving—and had almost the same excitement about it.

Then—the five of us children, with Tommy in Helen’s arms—we followed them through the house. The bowl was left in the back bed of one of the carts; the temptation to retrieve a handful of coins was like the temptation to plunge a hand into a cold spring, when you look down and see a mosquito about to feed on the back of it. The porters left the barrow carts downstairs too, one in the hall, one in the kitchen, and two in the sitting room (in one of them the money bowl), then tramped up to collect things and carry them down, singly or in pairs, while—in the hall—we looked up at them through the banisters’ newels. The oldest black boy (certainly forty, possibly fifty—at any rate more than twice the age of the others) said the least but was the one to whom the gray-hats gave most of their instructions. He conveyed them to the barefoot Irishman and the other two shod Africans by silent signals with roughened, gray-black fingers.

Finally we grew bold enough to mount behind them and follow them into our rooms—shockingly bare. They’d taken our toys—and the beds they had broken in pieces and carried down, they’d been ours! (I swear, I’d watched till then and hadn’t realized it!) My heart began to bang again behind my ribs, as it had on the morning I learned of my father’s death, but I didn’t feel I could protest any more than my mother did. Soon, in that lingering state of fear, I began to fathom the headman’s hand wavings: Now, wait, faster, stop, get that, take this over there, the two of you move that, make a pile of those, load it, wrap those in that, use the rug for padding—to which the other three—the Irish fellow and the two blacks—responded more quickly than they did to the occasional spoken orders from their human masters, lingering at the walls and watching, as we children watched.