Robert Lunday: Paradise, Attained By Touch

Paradise, Attained by Touch

Robert Lunday 120 Cutting Horse Trail Bastrop, TX 78602 (512) 718-9352 [email protected]

Inside every thought a hand, Inside every hand a world —George Quasha

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Acknowledgments: “When he was three...,” “Once after lifting...,” and “A guy in the bus station...” appeared in Agni online. A version of “We were sitting in the car…” appeared in The Blue Moon Review. A version of “In the gallery…” appeared in The Prose Poem: An International Journal. A version of “In the old books…” appeared in Artful Dodge. A version of “Amos Tutuola...” appeared in Provincetown Arts. A version of “You're pulp, chaos of flesh” appeared in Sentence. Versions of “After she’d succeeded…,” “Cupid cut his mother’s nails…,” “An ornithologist brought his equipment…,” and “Someone asks of the severed head…” appeared in The Weight of Addition (Mirabilis Press, 2007).

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After she’d succeeded in resealing the box, Pandora took a moment to marvel at the living movie of release: ribbons of pestilence and rape, earth-trembling, madness, kwashiorkor, hurricanes, drowning – all winding and spreading, but so alive with color and motion for a moment, she simply had to watch;

shut the lid –

then, in horror at her fascination,

and marveled at the box itself, its craftsmanship, its beauty and lightness. Hope alone remained inside, scintillated, weightless; were she to open it again wouldn’t the box, the beautiful box, be empty?

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Everyone sees against the blindness, face up against it; our blindness is the thing. Every part of the world stares back and we call it history. It’s nothing but heat upon the screen, a night's entertainment; but when we live it, it’s everything.

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When he was three, my son asked me to juggle, and I had to admit that I couldn’t. I pointed out that I could, on the other hand, catch – one ball at a time; but it was juggling he wanted, so I had to learn. I found a book on the art that came with three juggle-objects in a mesh bag. I read and practiced: for weeks, a thousand misses, a thousand times bending over, a thousand times crawling under the couch, a thousand curses, a thousand times watching my hands like drowning men who couldn’t grasp the rope; but slowly, somewhere in my brain, the ropes grew, and came together. My arms and elbows, my wrists, my shoulders and neck, my eyes, my nose, my lower back, my legs – all of me learned to be my hands. Behold! – for thirty seconds at my best, the floating trefoil of polystyrene-filled, polyester sacks. And then I called in my son and showed him. He clapped with joy, and all the effort was worth the sight of it. I thought, in my vanity: “This is good parenting: your child asks you to juggle, you buy a book, and you learn.” Then, rather rashly for a toddler, he demanded I try four. My immediate retort was that he should try himself to do two, or even one! Years have passed, and we have only once or twice revisited the matter. 6

We were sitting in the car and she took my thumb and put it in her mouth. She didn’t suck it; she just kept it there, and after a while I could feel it getting wet, and cold, and bored. The sea rose and fell. The car looked out toward Mexico, past the horizon; and the sand shone bright on either side of us. I was a thermometer, a probe, or merely a wilting trumpet. I thought of my mother, cooking over the stove, sweating, moving a lock of hair back into place as she stirred. Then the sea seemed to freeze, and I pulled out my thumb and I leaped.

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Hand to hand a laser and across its beam an image is suspended/ within whose stream an image is suspended refracted on itself – split – like a knife in water.

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Frying the left eye of a hedgehog cures insomnia. Worshippers at Benares circumambulate with their right sides toward the temple. The left testicle generally hangs lower than its mate. Male fetuses tend to the right side of the womb, as they will later tend toward the right side of the political spectrum. God’s hands cannot be mirrored.

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“’Tis well, Lavinia, that thou hast no hands….” 1 · ...resolving the tartaric acid into its two components allowed Pasteur to show that one form caused a polarized light to rotate this way, whereas the other rotated the light equally the other way; and so, she understood, a molecule from one solution mirrored a molecule from the other, as a left hand mirrors the right. But what she most keenly apprehended was that such handedness was fundamental to nearly all organic substances. And life, clearly, was a matter of fitting in; or not fitting in…the profundity of this made her cry. · Dear Pat: your report on Louis Pasteur was wonderful, and I have given you an “A-” for the assignment. To explain the “minus”: you seem to have mistranscribed Pasteur’s first name, putting an “e” on the end, and so wrote your otherwise excellent report under the mistaken impression that “Louis” Pasteur was a “Louise.” He was not.

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Meanwhile, in a parallel universe where women do science and men do nails: “[They] should be clear and like balas rubies tied with flesh-pink roses and pomegranate leaves; not long, not round, not completely square, but with a fine shape and a very slight curve; bare, clean, well kept, so that that little white crescent at their base is always visible.” 2

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With an arrow Cupid cut his mother’s nails as she slept; the parings fell into the Indus, sank to the bottom, becoming jewels – onyxes, black and white, day and night, phase-states, competing absolutes – · or fell into a lover’s phrases, pearled commas: shimmering waste, as each superlative gives way to an ascendant, silent praise.

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Once, after lifting an armoire in Yokohama, I threw out my back. My wife and in-laws carried me to the car and we drove to a doctor of chi, a Chinese man they knew, currently in their debt. Years ago, during the war, he had been a surgeon in Hanoi: my mother-in-law told me this to chasten me (as if the back pain were not enough). I am American, you see, and my father fought the communists in Vietnam. Now this man whose hands had touched the children mangled by our bombs would heal the consequences of my over-reaching…something to that effect, I guess; an artful bit of moral origami. Their Tokyo apartment was small. The doctor’s wife was making dinner, his six-year-old daughter was watching a cartoon. They laid me out on the living-room floor, and after everyone had conferred over my body (including the six-year-old daughter during a commercial break), the doctor set to work. It hurt like hell nonstop for thirty minutes, and then the pain was entirely gone. During this time, the doctor would ask a question now and then in Japanese; my wife would translate into English; I would respond through clinched teeth in English, and she would translate (taking her sweet time, it seemed to me) back into Japanese. I imagined the doctor putting my answers into a Chinese box, in a clearing in the autumn woods, near a tree with two remaining leaves that were really his hands; which, when we entered the apartment, I had noticed were long and stained with nicotine. Later, I was told in the most solemn tones that the doctor had stopped touching me halfway through the treatment; had simply 13 of 59

waved his hands vigorously for several minutes above my back before continuing the massage. In sum, I believed he had never stopped touching me; they saw with their own eyes that he had. They believed he had exorcised my pain; I only knew that my pain was gone. The doctor of chi knew what he knew; minus the usual fee, waived on this occasion to repay a small portion of his debt.

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At the end of City Lights, the blind girl has regained her sight; and selling flowers in a shop, she encounters once again the Tramp, who sacrificed so much to help her see again. By sight, he is a stranger. Only when she takes his hands to put some money there he has refused – only when she gives her hand to his, does she discover who this stranger is; and sadly, who before he was not. There is absolutely nowhere the movie could go after this: she could not marry him, she could not not marry him…it is the most perfect ending ever fashioned.

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Put your hand out and bring it back bloody and the time it takes to decide if it’s your blood or another’s is the brightest moment of conscience: is the pain only pain or is it empathy or is it merely the color red? A beautiful moment!

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Do we begin at the mouth or the eyes, the fingers or the toes? Do we take shape around the face or the heart? Do we sprout from the brain stem, are we beanstalks growing down from the sky? · …the press of the bashful hand, 3 that moment of new touch like an open eye, the whole body seeing through the lens of skin, all of life in the brace of four winds blowing all at once, pulled into the vortex that is you.

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Why is right correct? How much wrong needs to be mixed in to give it form, to make it have some taste? How much black, in parts per million, makes white aware of whiteness? 4

The leaves are falling, as if to tell us that gardens in the sky have died 1 – leaves vermilion saffron-gold and brown, a little dying that makes the world more colorful and more alive.

1 a version of lines from Rilke

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Once upon a time in Holland there was a great monster who mauled any man that came his way. · Silvius Brabo, hero of Antwerp, fought the fiend, Antigonus: soulless brute, his here no more than here, clasp and cling his first and only thing. · Brabo ripped the monstrous man-killing hand, claimed it as Beowulf laid claim to Grendel’s axle (though Grendel’s mother came and took it back) – declaring, like any hero, 19 of 59

a real estate: throwing the monster’s claw as far as he could see and there grew the city.

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In Yojimbo a dog trots past the startled samurai with a hand in its jaws: a proprietary look in the dog’s eye, the hand palm up and empty, perhaps surprised as well.

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In pilgrimage we meet an endless stream of others who, returning from the source, pass on to us our reasons for embarking.

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If the mind had a little carburetor and could remove traces of irrational belief… · hitch hack handle hasp hinge latch – Eve goes shopping for fig leaves, Adam digs in the patch.

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…let not thy left hand 5 left hand know what thy right hand right hand doeth: …that thine alms may be in secret: and thy Father who seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly; but when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know.

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“When I woke up, I had no hands.” 6 · “One day I awakened on a planet with people whose hands occasionally disappear…” 7 · The future is handless. · My fingers are tied in tight knots, they’re strings; they’re cigarette butts littering the ground, and each one reminds me of some direction I’ve lost, each finger points out a path. · “The second week they taught me how to open and close windows, to dial phones, to turn lights on and off, pick up water glasses, use knives, forks, and spoons, stick coins in a slot, drink from a cup, handle faucets, blow my nose, flick the pages of a book, newspaper or magazine and play checkers….” · …but I still had dreams that they’d grow back, that my hands would be there come morning; · and I thought I was a monster, 25 of 59

and how could I marry my girl now? Who’d want a guy without hands? When I was getting ready to go to the chapel for the wedding, for chrissake, how would I tie my own tie? And the guy in the bed next to me, the guy without his legs, he looked at me like he just wanted me to shut up; so he said, “listen, Bub, just marry the girl, and then she can tie your damned tie any time you want it.” · Well, I still had my legs; but this guy, he was all stubs below the waist, and they were fitting him with some mean-looking equipment – even worse, it looked to me, than my “buckets” – and they even told him he would be able to dance again! That was too much, I thought; why do they need to tell him b.s. like that? I got angry about it, I guess because I still wanted somebody to blame; but this guy already had it figured out. When they told him that, he looked serious, and hopeful, and then he said: “Really? You think I’m gonna be able to dance…?” – and – well, you know the rest of the joke: about how he couldn’t dance a lick when he had legs; but it really made them shut their yaps, for a while.

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Both hands should be shown in a portrait, insisted Sir Joshua Reynolds, lest the viewer wonder what the missing one is up to. · Portraits seem to possess a certainty that they’ll outlast the one who stands before them. Parmagianino’s self-portrait, however, with its hand extended, is an offering to the viewer:

this is my shell, my spiral through time, join me here; or perhaps I will leave it and walk with you, down the long hall and into the busy street!

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Theodora, “Beloved of God” and pantomime: hands, sexual wands, wove an elaborate theater only an emperor could enter. But most of what she was the envious Procopius unwove, reweaving as lies. He claims, for example, that Theodora announced to all her fervent desire “to fill every orifice to the fullest and at the same time!” – depravity’s cheerleader team and playing field all in one.

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It was about this big a bracket of hands with the absent fish inside, and the next necessarily larger, bracketed fish bracketed in further brackets; the ego from its command post in the elbows spreads the hands somewhat more, and the fish, the dead fish, grows.

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Glance a finger, look a hand, gaze the handle opening the gates.

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A blind sculptor, Rudolf Arnheim tells us, can apprehend both front and back at the same time; though I suspect not completely at the same time, but staggered between moments, framing the idea of a moment. If the sculptor, blind or otherwise, could sense the whole simultaneously, he’d be as fixed as his sculpture.

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Amos Tutuola, creator of the “television-handed ghostess,” visited Houston, Texas in 1984. I asked to interview him. When I entered his room at the Holiday Inn, he welcomed me warmly with both hands, as if we’d met before. My prepared questions were absurd. This was a storyteller, a man of visions, and when I asked him about “literary influences” or “political subtext,” he would furrow his brow slightly and then expound on whatever he pleased. Usually, he would just tell a story. I had many absurd questions, so he had many stories. We avoided the hotel furniture and squatted across from one another over the carpet, as if there were a fire burning between us. His voice was deep and his English turned each word to heavy wood, carefully carved and battered by devotion. I depict a noble savage: so was he framed by many in the West, though not in his native Nigeria, where, among the literati, he was somewhat disparaged. But if everything is eventually balanced out – if magic is magic, and words are words, whether Yoruban or Iowan – then he was simply another sort of suburban: a man touched by the country and the city, and resolving himself somewhere in between.

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Lunar rays in a mirror revealed the flow of futures backward; clerical masters of divination, chanting names of demons, anointed fingernails with holy chrism until images appeared in them, imparting secrets. · Or looking at your own nails, discover the “quick” from which grow faint, ghostly spots or darker, devilish errors of nail-hammering and car-door-slamming – the angelic dot, the mineral-lack, the blood-cloud, slowly moving upward toward the edge, a four-months’ journey; then we pare the mark away.

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You're pulp, chaos of flesh, food in the gut, the gut. You're a mote in your own periphery, a hawk bearing down on its shadow, prey the belly of the predator. You're poor, you get rich, live in a palatial spread, chase the maid one day and get locked blue-balled in the laundry room. You find your poor-clothes in moth balls, try them on for a lark – for the first time ever, you are yourself. It's a trip how wide-angle the moment is when you get locked into it. It's a trip that this queen of the hand-to-mouth holds the key. You stretch your limbs but the walls stretch back. You've been trying to live by straddling horizons, now the horizon is you. You've been trying to do 69 with infinity, but infinity is already doing a number on itself: that sideways lazy eight. You've been trying to fuck with fuck – fuck cannot be fucked. Take a gander at the past just passed, fly off on a four-engine reminiscence; once you're there, however near or far it seems, you can't focus forward again: where you are is a bug on the windshield, a stringy mash distracting the driver you used to be.

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An ornithologist brought his equipment to the forests of the lyrebird; he set up his recording devices and listened. Instead of the mimicking bird, he heard the Doppler effect of a passing airplane, the teeth of a saw, the shouts of workmen who were building a road not far off, but weren't there at the time. He heard an anthill; he heard eyelashes and his own ear. He recorded everything, but he didn't catch the lyrebird. Then, one day, he did come upon the lyrebird, barking like a dog on its mound. He chased it down a hill to a clearing near the mouth of an abandoned mine. There, he found many more lyrebirds, roosting, flying about, as if they were themselves all of creation. The ornithologist recorded it all, until he could hold no more; he was overstuffed with the mockery, he was beginning to feel indistinguishable from it. Then he played the tape back. The lyrebirds seemed offended, either at themselves, or at the scientist, and flew off in one great concert of departure. Instead of the beating of wings, the man heard something like applause – loud, watery applause, even after the birds had disappeared.

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In the gallery, I stood before a beautiful canvas; it was of a mysterious Indian woman, beckoning the viewer into a further, indefinite reach. I wanted to touch it, but the guards wagged their fingers and said, “Don’t touch!” But when they were wagging elsewhere, I did touch. Then I found out why museum guards warn us not to touch: I fell into the painting and could not get out. And this is what happened: ·

Come into the temple, she said. Stay out of the temple. Come in, stay out. The most sacred place in the temple is just outside the temple; no, in the threshold. Stay out; come in, stay out come in. Stand in the threshold and let me anoint you: this is the font of flames, that one, of water. 36

Actually, that one is flames and this one, water: flesh, flames, water – all are the same. Extinguish yourself. Get out. Come back get out come back. Come in, come into the temple; get out and come back. Get out and wait for a sign, wait for my eyes to signal, then return. That wasn't the signal. Stand in the threshold, let me anoint you: here is the fire, and there, the water. Or there the water, here the fire: water, fire, flesh – one substance. Stop howling and put yourself out! Come out; get in. Return with a candle, 37 of 59

put out your candle and go in darkness; go by the light of my eyes which call you, which don't. Flames, water, flesh, words: I must have devotees of a tempered faith. These are my eyes, this is your sign: this is the font of flames, that one, of flames. 8

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… of course it’s impossible to “change” your life; it would be like holding your right hand with your right hand or leaping and then pausing a moment in air as if to decide whether you’ll return to earth or not. · It’s just that you can’t know if you’re living the right-handed or the left-handed version of your life; but the fold, the curve is in any case so subtle, you also never know if you’re changing or staying the same. · … this heuristic, as it should be called when life lies mainly ahead, is to be referred to as a protocol when you are in its midst, making choices responsive to others; and the redeemed life, when one turns back upon time’s wreckage, is to see that the heuristic and the protocol were in fact an algorithm all along; that a rule threaded every choice, the curve was constant, and “living” was merely a recursive instance of “having lived” – unfortunately. 39 of 59

On the other hand, it’s worth believing in some things even if you suspect they don’t exist; believing that there’s a treasure one could obtain, like a Grail; and finding it, we’d also find that anything called the Church is no longer of any use at all (except as those little umbrellas they put in our drinks), that the Constitution relates to rights not as map to landscape but as hand to wheel, and that the State is a thing entirely portable, chewable, compatible, reversible, and most important of all, disposable.

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Our instruments play us to silence. · The poem appears to float; it’s the inner ear, the sense of balance, and the margin’s a performance.

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In the old books, schizophrenia was the liberal art of all madness. It could be learned, it could be taught, but like all transcendent wisdom, it had a price. Talk washes up in waves, swims out, as far as the stars. Who knows what it’s all about? — the price has gotten astronomical. But I stop to listen. All the drums and brasses of the zodiac are there: among them the constant masturbators, who complain of being underpaid for their labors; the quiet insulters, walking the fine line between being overheard and wasting their breaths. In the old textbooks, madness was a ladder: morons were higher than idiots, idiots higher than imbeciles; fools were both above and below. Dementia was a free state in the Balkans. Hysteria was a thin, willowy English girl in a plain white dress: some Pre-Raphaelite sweetie with a twisted crown of flowers. Don’t think she was hysterical herself. Rather, she was deep and calm; an echo past suffering, and the echo’s ground. Words upend: imbeciles become kings. The hysterical bears us into the world; sometimes it carries us away.

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A guy in the bus station was spitting at everyone’s feet. On the bus, he decided to sit next to me. He started talking about himself: nothing important, but a lot of fragmented and inconsistent boasting was involved. He wasn’t talking, really, so much as killing time. And it was fine, because it killed my time, too. But after a while I stopped listening at all and noticed an old woman a few rows ahead on the left, behind the driver. Sometimes she’d turn to look out the windows on the right, and I’d get her profile, which was very noble and even beautiful, although she was old. It was dark already, but I could just see her by the glow of the reading lights. The guy talked – he didn’t seem to care that I wasn’t listening – and I had a waking dream: I was an old man, and I was living in a seaside cottage with the old woman. Somehow the sea made us young, and we both had these amazing profiles. And I sat on the beach most of the day, and I carved scrimshaw out of everything that came into my hands. The road was long and winding, and it hummed in my intestines. My waking dream took a different turn: the old woman was the spitting-guy’s mother. She was his mother and he was fresh out of prison and going home, and she was already there but getting no closer, like the moon when we drive. The spitting-guy took out his wallet and shoved an old photo in my face. He said it was his girlfriend waiting for him in Portland. It was an old-style Polaroid, folded and mangled, with a white border and perforated edges. Parts of it hadn’t been swabbed properly, so there were rust-colored streaks in the 43 of 59

corners. It had a date clearly printed on the bottom – “April 1950” – but the guy still said it was his girlfriend, and she was in Portland. He couldn’t have been born earlier than 1980 himself, but I didn’t have anything to say about it. The young woman in the photo was wearing a white dress. A tousle-haired mop leaned on the fence behind her. She was pretty, and I thought for a second about her being my wife, and our living together by the sea. Typically, my waking dreams involve the sea.

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In the brain the hand is our largest continent; nearly so, in Cold War with the mouth. One has gesture, the other words, neither can live without the other, and so they divide us as between two restless empires.

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Put your hand in the box: the putting is trust, the hand inside is faith. Will is what waits with you outside the box, its own hands safely behind its back.

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In dreams we sometimes have no hands or perhaps our hands are the hands of dolls, or of infants, that appear and disappear to the infant’s eyes like drunken fairies. Gesture is born from this and its first task is to create in pantomime the form of the spirit which resembles the body in motion, waving and dancing.

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Tilled below, tolled above, toiling all the while in between. · It’s said that the infant Abraham was fed milk from the finger of the angel Gabriel. It’s also said that Noah, who was contracted to build the Ark, was made the first man with fingers, who thus were the first sub-contractors. · Technology is the hand of many fingers, each exuding a different food: milk, butter, honey, water, and the varied juices of the desert fruits; all of it, frankincense to benzene, dripping from the veins of angels.

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Death had the light of day about it, though it seemed sleeping to us; its gestures, serifed, filigreed the air and made of winter gray a photographic silver, the evidence we made ourselves, to answer:

there is no safe distance to the Heraclitean claim that the soul is a far country. · It’s not the stars or the planets that hold sway, but a corpse dreaming life: 9 mortmain, phantom hands, spirits in chains. · The thing born backwards, dilated over the arrowhead of time, is the Dead Man. The Dead Man supine so long 49 of 59

the sun sets over his lengthening hairs and the moon rises through his fingers; The Dead Man retired from the game of words but cheating still with his sign language and mimic-faces; The Dead Man whose flesh resists x-rays and other seductions, whose chief measure of time is his own decay – putrefaction, as they say, the only proof of being dead.

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He’s not much of a party guest: doesn’t dance, doesn’t talk or laugh. What does the Dead Man want? The Dead Man wants to say that there’s nothing there, nothing “deep down,” nothing precious; though he himself is practically nothing without it. · Once, when no one was looking, I picked at a blemish and caught a little knot that proved, as I pulled, to be one end of a very long string: a congealed pus that had hidden coiled and packed for a long time. I imagined it all the poisons of life reduced to a single thread. This tendril of dried pus I rolled into a ball and placed on the back of my tongue, to digest and let it worm its way out all over again.

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There was an aura around God, or perhaps it was a fog around the observers. The air was never not moving. It was hard to look through the eye and not see the eye and its parts, or the lenses we were forced to look through; it was hard not to see the moving air, which then became the image we believed we were seeing. Digitized, every pixel became a diamond. The image of God was floating and in its slightest fluctuations told us histories of ourselves we couldn’t afford to miss. All of living, concentrated in that cinema of devotion:

to live, to touch, to breathe, we opened our eyes and saw; a blink was to sleep; closing our eyes, to die.

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…then something happens off-camera: we realize we’re not in the kitchen, not in a morgue. We’re not in the movie-house, either, for the poet has lost control in his own poem. We might be in a cave, in a space below ground, or even below the waves of the sea, where our flickering lamp is the last handful of life. Through a high window a pathologist stares at us; thank God someone’s in charge! Meanwhile, the Dead Man just lies there. Time was frozen but slowly thaws: drip, drip, drip, as the shadows of the audience get up and move about. Someone stands and shouts: “don’t let this happen! The shadows are putting on our hats and coats and walking out; don’t let them! Wake up, don’t finish the movie – you already know how it ends! – wake up, before it’s too late!” – · but this light, which comes from the pathologist’s probe, is twenty billion years in the making, and we’re just an upstart foxfire. What do we know? Everyone in the audience is a cut-out, a doll. The corpse on the stage is the one in control: the poet might be the poet, but that’s lower than water-carrier. 53 of 59

The Dead Man signals with his hand, imperceptibly; in fact, it might have been the wavering light, or the sweat dripping off your brow; but what was the signal? – Nothing but the hand itself.

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In the bottom corner of the Annunciation is an electric eye; an alarm trips when we enter. The womb is a camera obscura, a bubble chamber; our projections carry us forever.

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The things around us throw life our way. The spirit we claim is a battering from outside; some moisture and air seeps in. When we cut each other open we think it’s the sap, the very marrow; we think this life is ours.

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Someone asks of the severed head, lying there in the basket beneath the shining blade, if it didn’t remain aware for several seconds? – long enough to hear this question, and judge it meaningless. · When I skydived for the first time, I was keenly aware of the whiteness of the air; my experience completely encircled me, I was stretched out like a giant hand, I was aware of nothing but the sky, there was no up or down, no left or right, and the earth, which I knew was beneath me, seemed sunk below its own horizon. I could see, but my seeing stopped at the eyes, my eyes were like fingertips, and all I knew was I was there and falling. If there was a ladder, my hands must have been the rungs.

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Notes

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1 William Shakespeare 2 Agnolo Firenzuola 3 Walt Whitman 4 Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man 5 A variation on Matt. 6:4 6 Variations on a memoir by WWII hero Harold Russell 7 Anne Carson 8 After a painting by Birash Bhattacharjee 9 Tsvetan Todorov, of Lenin