Jordan Zinovich

 

Detonation

All speakers are, of course,
shrieking news about the bombings.

Remember the war photos?
Clustered images of crisis—
mock heroes and
saintly stone-deaf creatures
whose virtues we should admire?

Remember disturbing conversations that veered
between ecstasy and explosion
as if, without realizing it, poetry connected them?
Remember wilderness voices consumed by messages?
Gentle, absolutely open gazes?
Gray eyes bright with accomplishment?

Stars spangle the vilest soul.
Suppose the bomber sat beside you—
benign, human,
perhaps a few inches taller than you
but just as ridiculous.

All systems leak and fail:
All philosophies; rituals; corpses.
Accidents of time and space and fury
overthrow lives.

In a sunset vibrant with the smells of burning
don't bother alleging that what you do makes sense.
It's the world that pulses—nothing else.
A blood-red streak slices the darkening west.
The roar. Those falling, failing, stricken systems.

The Voyeur

At precisely ten o'clock each evening a rich golden light floods the main room in the top-floor apartment diagonally opposite mine. The illumination unveils, at first viewing, a broad wall completely fronted by book-covered shelves, a large computer screen resting on a desk at window height, and one small perfectly globular crystal bowl containing a single enormous acanthus bulb with a thick forking shoot emerging with some force from its crown. Each time the light pours forth from that room I feel a new sense of revelation, as if a strange and unsuspected galaxy were somehow spinning itself from the dark. I am helpless against the urge that draws my eyes to that window, unashamed of acquiescing to the power it holds over me, transfixed by what it reveals.

For the first four weeks I lived in this new apartment I barely glanced at that window. In fact, there was nothing much to see in it: I noticed the light come on, glimpsed the packed wall of books, but a broad, blanketing curtain screened the inner life of the room from the outside world. Only a long narrow wedge where the curtain had fallen away from the upper right-hand corner gave any indication of the attractions that lay behind it. For me, of course, those attractions concerned the single shelf of books I saw there and what they might lay bare of the mind living behind the screen. But Freud was the only word written boldly enough on a spine for me to read; not at all an encouraging invitation. So I seldom glanced that way, though I did occasionally allow the books to exert a temporary and bemusing kind of appeal.

The life of the mind is an isolating one. Attempts to pierce the general solipsism of my days never quite satisfy my deepest needs. Rather, I would have my projections take form, let my imaginary field extend itself despite Lacan's embittered and convoluted prohibition. At times I succumb to the impulse to throw off my restraints, and cast myself into humanity's genetic stream. Or I allow visions of divinities and demiurges to root themselves in my world, and let the velvet intensities of their colors stroke the outer extremities of my ganglia. But I find these days that I never entirely lose control of myself—though that is not always how it seems to my compatriots and companions—because I believe, when all is finally said and done, that there is a certain limited freedom in simply making choices; whatever lunatic form they might take. Whether an artist, an intellectual, or a mental or emotional cripple, it is the choices that seem to me to impart intensity to life, and it is always a gripping intensity that opens my heart.

It was with some curiosity, therefore, that during the fifth week in my new space I noticed the curtain gradually slipping from the window of the bookish apartment. At first only the second bookshelf come into view, the boldest title there being Verzameld Werk on one wide golden spine—which, though my Dutch is very bad, I accepted as an awareness of collectivity. This, at least, was an alluring invitation, a suggestion that the mind behind the curtain was searching for some kind of general solution to life's problems that involved communities and other humans. Did I merely imagine that this new title suggested that my interest was not entirely unwelcome? Of course I did, but that is still what I chose to believe.

I remember with a clarity that still surprises me that the curtain finally fell completely away (or was it removed?) on the third Wednesday of the second month. Throughout the preceding week I had gotten into the habit of glancing toward the window when I finished my reading for the day, trying to decipher more of the newly exposed titles. I was generally unsuccessful, and never saw any sign of the person who inhabited the room, so I was surprised on this particular Wednesday to see the light come on just as I glanced over. The curtain was gone and I noted with satisfaction that the whole wall was indeed covered with books. I saw the desk and the computer monitor and an empty chair, and on the third bookshelf shelf from the ceiling I made out two titles: one fat black spine marked The Complete Works of Shakespeare, and a narrower volume had the name Juliet written in black on red.

Wednesday, the day I've always imagined that Wotan gave his eye for a drink from the well of wisdom. The empty chair and pregnant titles. A sense of conspiracy took hold of me; a hint of paranoia. We voyeurs must assume that we are unobserved. Had I been discovered? No. It was dark, and no light lit me from behind. It must be coincidence, or synchronicity if that is how you choose to view the world, that the light and my glance coincided.

As I was exploring these small dark corners of my small mind, a woman came to stand before the desk. Her figure was diminutive and slight but not emaciated; which struck me as somehow odd because I had been told that Dutch women are the tallest in the world. Her hair was dark, and lifted in the kind of blowsy bun worn by Alexandra David-Neel, Maya Deren, and the young Collette. And when she sat framed by the window and the wall of books behind her, I saw that she was classically beautiful. By that I mean she had the features of a Greek sculpture, some Goddess, Athena perhaps: a long straight nose, broad serene forehead, arching eyebrows, clear cheekbones, and sensual fearless jaw. Not that there was any stiffness to her features, they were mobile and intelligent. And though she seemed pale, the slight darkening of drawn skin around her eyes dispelled any sense of glacial perfection.

These impressions were drawn in an instant, because the moment that she leaned forward she shattered the fantasy of serenity that I had assembled around her. I realized immediately that the computer was on, because her face exploded in a dialogue with the screen. She glared at it, her narrowed eyes moving across what I took to be lines of text. She spoke with just barely moving lips, then with more animation. Then she raised a long fine-boned hand, placed it against her mouth, and began speaking through her fingers, plucking and stroking her lips as if they were instruments of some kind. (This, I soon recognized, was a compulsive habit. As the depths of her thought took hold of her, she always raised her hand to her mouth and began caressing her lips.) And when she had finished speaking to the screen her hand fell to the keyboard. Soon she was typing furiously, racing to put down the substance of her conversation.

She did not sit long that first evening before standing and staring furiously at the computer. Then she turned her back and darkness came down. And so it was with some anticipation and fascination that I found myself awaiting her appearance the following night. She did not disappoint me. At precisely ten o'clock, on came the light and she strode into the window frame. As on the preceding evening, the computer came on and the moment she sat down she launched into a tirade against it. This time, however, a young man appeared behind her. He wrapped his arms around her waist and kissed her neck and she smiled and grew calm. After speaking a few words to him, she turned back to her adversary with slightly more control. On the bookshelf behind her shoulder I read the title Discipline and Punishment.

Soon the screen had taken hold of her concentration, and before too long, it and she were deep in conversation. She referred to a stack of paper beside her, pointing as if to emphasize a fact. She paused, rolled her eyes to search her memory for examples, glared, and with a wave of her hand dismissed a thought. Her fingers caressed her lips; she rolled a cigarette and smoked it, distorting her mouth in grimaces at the ignorance she faced. Then she stood and appeared to shout, turned and again the room went dark. In the shadows I saw her companion take her in his arms.

Before too many days had passed I was trying to influence the relationship. I have tried to visualize her naked—though her head, neck, shoulders, and arms are all I ever really see. I have imagined small nipples like dark plums brushing the fabric of her blouse, her blue-veined breasts shaking in fury as she ranted at the inane comments from the screen, her man coming up behind her to take them in his hands. But much as I believed then that I desired to see the actions of their love, I found myself returning more and more comfortably each night to a satisfied admiration of the intensity and commitment of her struggle.

In the weeks since this story began, her friend has ceased to visit her. Why, I wonder, does she allow this thing such control over her life? She is not more than thirty, but in her way she is as compulsive as I am. Watching her contorting face I have recalled poor Marsyas, who took up the flute that Athena cast away when she realized it distorted her features; and know that I am not viewing a Goddess, but a woman entirely more complicated than that. Her furies can be awe inspiring, but I have also seen her weep in abject frustration. I have seen her fall into an exhausted sleep, head down on her folded arms. Once I saw her slap the screen and shred her paper pile of facts. Yet each night she returns to confront the ghost in that machine; sometimes, now, pausing in a kind of tranquilized stillness to contemplate the three scarlet blossoms that the acanthus has put forth, extending a tentative finger to caress a petal. On occasion a strand comes loose from the hair that once seemed so composed and slides across her face.

Her light-filled window has come to frame a relationship as complete as any I have ever known. In observing her, whom I have come to respect and admire, I feel no overt sexual attraction—my breath does not shorten, there is no tightening in my gut, my testicles do not begin to contract and roll, no small pulses of blood throb into my penis. Instead, from the deepest, most perverse centers of my heart, I wish her warmth in her struggle, triumph in her endeavor. I wonder if I'll ever read the text that has so enslaved her—I wouldn't even recognize her name upon the spine. But even if I don't, I want to thank her. Drawing on all the gods and powers that I have ever conjured to assist me, I extend the only blessing and benediction that a voyeur is capable of offering: May she, too, sometime experience the ineffable joy of sharing another's unsuspecting creative agony.

 

Autumn is the Listening Time

On deserted afternoons
that dawn between
the rising splendor of the east
and eternal western decline,
withering flowers scatter at a touch.

Unsteady dreams reconfigure
an oppressed but obstinate earth.

Recall the conspirators
and their celebrated captain,
whose tread crushed
confused generations
of jumbled, brittle leaves;
whose statues now command
that enigmatic hill and
its surrounding marshes.

Beyond a rigorous prose
of fundamental vagueness,
a literature of epic and legend
that never adduced reality,
they were not violent men.

As you stand beneath
the unrecoverable colors of the sky
reflect on facts: maligned or disfigured,
in life they suffer reality;
once dead they aren't even ghosts.

Ask yourself why it is
that we often imagine
a temporality retrieved from place?
Why we seldom apprehend
that cause-and-effect
is just one association of free ideas?

© by Jordan Zinovich