Angle of Yaw Read online

  TO BUILD THE WORLD’S BIGGEST MIRROR, to outdate the moon, to dream en masse, to sleepmarch, to watch earthrise from the anonymous depths of our diamond helmets, screams Hamsun, and the general will will fall to the earth as highly stylized debris. For all that remains of the public are its enemies, whose image will not be returned, so let them eat astronaut ice cream, from which we have abstracted ice, let them read magazine verse in the waiting rooms of plastic surgeons commissioned to implant breasts into their brains. To pave the horizon with silver nitrate, to simulate the nation through reflected light, to watch over ourselves in our sleep, to experience mediacy immediately, screams Hamsun, raising his glass, by waking into a single dream, THE STATE.

  A LARGE GROUP OF PICNICKING CHILDREN is struck by lightning. Four girls and four dogs are killed. Twenty-three children suffer burns, cataracts, macular holes, tympanic membrane rupture, and skull fracture. At the church service, the pastor organizes his eulogy around the trope of being called. God reached down with a finger of light, etc. But the positive charge originated in the ground and climbed an invisible ladder of electrons skyward.

  THE PROSE IS DENSER than the plot, which pushes the plot to the surface. Walking around the hospital saying, People, we can do this. The style is rubbing off. Chicken again, or a satisfactory print thereof. It’s amazing what we’ve accomplished, considering we’re locked in the bathroom. It’s OK to laugh. They can’t hear you. Can you hear me? See: nothing.

  THE ARTIST PROPOSES A SERIES OF LIGHTS attached to tall poles, spaced at intervals along our public roads, and illuminated from dusk to dawn. The public is outraged. The law’s long arm cannot support its heavy hand. The public is outrage. Kindergartners simulate bayonet fighting with the common domestic fowl. Does this blood look good on me? Does this blood make me look fat? If you replace a cow’s stomach with glass, don’t complain when you cut your mouth.

  READING IS IMPORTANT because it makes you look down, an expression of shame. When the page is shifted to a vertical plane, it becomes an advertisement, decree, and/or image of a missing pet or child. We say that texts displayed vertically are addressed to the public, while in fact, by failing to teach us the humility a common life requires, they convene a narcissistic mass. When you window-shop, when you shatter a store window, you see your own image in the glass.

  WHEN NIGHT FALLS IN THE MIDDLE WEST we divide the multiple fruit of the pig. A drunk man calls out for traditional shepherds’ music addressing the theme of love, scratch that, the theme of boredom. The children are made to recite the Office of the Shutting of the Eyes. The saltshaker is full of pepper. The peppershaker: glitter. At the bottom of every drained pool, there I are. There we am, openmouthed, awaiting the small, angular rain. A drunk man brews a second cup, one for each fist. Great tufts of white carpet pulled out in grief, scratch that, in boredom. In the planar region bounded by our counterglow, no means no. So does yes. Everything we own is designed to be easily washed, unlike the aprons of the butchers that we are.

  WE DREAM OF RAIN that, in lieu of falling, moves parallel to the earth. Sheet after sheet of rain. Then an upward rain that originates a few feet off the ground. You can get under the rain and watch. With the disappearance of public space, we dream a rain that’s moved indoors. A miniaturized rain restricted to one room, one wall, a box. Then we dream snow.

  ONE WHO WOULD PURSUE a career as an assistant cannot be picky about what or whom she assists. Even the luckiest among us will spend years looking up precedents. In this we are ourselves assisted, usually by men who know nothing of surveying and have no tools. Shovel snow from the path; file snow under snow. We pursue our terminal degrees while watching somebody else’s kids. The law student chases around the usher’s wife. The inspector laughs because you’re laughing. Not having read the author in question is no defense against the charge of plagiarism. Our boss is the hushed tone in which we discuss him.

  THE PUBLIC DEPENDS upon private sorrow. Well-regulated peacetime sorrow. I respect no office founded before the invention of the pistol, before an emphasis on brushstroke. We decide on a motion. The body vetoes. Nostalgia is futurity’s privileged form in this economy of downturns. Is the television a linear descendant of the musket or the hearth? In American motels, the lamps are nailed down so that you will want to steal them, a Christian notion. Get off my property, she says, when I try to calm her down. Get out of my car, she says, when I try to wake her up. We stop our rotten teeth with gold. We drink a crystal cola. We counteract unwanted odor at inestimable human cost. As if you could choose between loving and leaving the weather. The rich kids in Providence are moving to Mexico. Rich kids in Mexico are moving to Providence. I’m on my umpteenth Pabst, awaiting order, making difference.

  RETURNING ASTRONAUTS almost always fall into a deep depression. They are stricken with an uncontrollable desire to gain weight. At dusk you will see them circling the park in silk pajamas, mocked by children, trailed by dogs. Prolonged weightlessness destroys the bones, the muscles, and, eventually, the larynx, which is why when astronauts return to earth we find that their speech has been reduced to a kind of quiet piping, at once soft and shrill, that is intelligible only to other astronauts, a piping that approaches, but is not, despite the government’s assertions, song.

  IF IT HANGS FROM THE WALL, it’s a painting. If it rests on the floor, it’s a sculpture. If it’s very big or very small, it’s conceptual. If it forms part of the wall, if it forms part of the floor, it’s architecture. If you have to buy a ticket, it’s modern. If you are already inside it and you have to pay to get out of it, it’s more modern. If you can be inside it without paying, it’s a trap. If it moves, it’s outmoded. If you have to look up, it’s religious. If you have to look down, it’s realistic. If it’s been sold, it’s sitespecific. If, in order to see it, you have to pass through a metal detector, it’s public.

  WE ARE A MEAN AND STUPID PEOPLE, but not without smooth muscle. When we get offended, we say, What’s the big idea. The rest of the time we don’t worry about it. Instead of national genius, a native lyric twined around the latticework of grammar. The bees we sent to space stopped making honey. Like a grown man, the monkeys wept. The night the shuttle crumbled on reentry, you were allowed to hug anybody you could find. We just stretched out on the beach. Best night of our lives.

  A WELL-PLACED BLOW TO THE TEMPLE and it’s 1986 in aeternum. Like a kid in a candy store crossed with a bull in a china shop, a depressive in a garage. After your uncle hooks you up, a sudden inability to recall where you got your doctorate, let alone in what. Walking around the basement asking, Whose blood is this? Not the beauty of the bottle rocket, but its justice. The infinite sympathy of breakaway glass. Bro, you said that already. Another summer spent searching for something to nurse back to health. Finding yourself.

  THE GIRL PLAYS with nonrepresentational dolls. Her games are devoid of any narrative content, amusements that depend upon their own intrinsic form. If you make her a present of a toy, she will discard it and play with the box. And yet she will only play with a box that once contained a toy. Her favorite toy was a notion about color. She lost it in the snow.

  THE DETECTIVE pushes red tacks into the map to indicate where bodies have been found. The shooter is aware of this practice and begins to arrange the bodies, and thus the tacks, into a pattern that resembles a smiley face. The shooter intends to mock the detective, who he knows will be forced to confront this pattern daily on the precinct wall. However, the formal demands of the smiley face increasingly limit the shooter’s area of operation. The detective knows, and the shooter knows the detective knows, that the shooter must complete the upward curving of the mouth. The detective patrols the area of the town in which bodies must be found if the shooter is to realize his project. The plane on which the killings are represented, and the plane on which the killings take place, have merged in the minds of the detective and the shooter. The shooter dreams of pushing a red tack into the map, not of putting a bullet into a body. The detective beg
ins to conceive of the town as a representation of the map. He drives metal stakes into the ground to indicate the tacks.

  WE WORK IN ACCOUNTING for taste. True, Mallarmé wasted a lot of paper, but less than your average American. Liner notes eclipse the music, like eating the rind and discarding the flesh. How many Indians remain on the fence, they asked her, to see if she were gifted, then locked her in the closet with a carton of smokes. From the land’s natural depressions arises the affect of home. Where the lines break of their own accord. Where shockwaves pulverize our stones. Let the machine get it, she was wont to say, when we didn’t have a phone.

  THE CAMERA WAS DISCOVERED before painting was invented. The first paintings were made on the inside walls of cameras. Still, painting was the first medium to attain a verisimilitude capable of confusing birds, the highest achievement in any art. When Wu Daozi painted dragons, their fins stirred. The rest of the story is about flatness. Onesided surfaces. A skin that speaks a vocabulary of rights. To explore color, we realized, leave it out. Like exchanging genius for its stroke. The bald girl is interested in boredom. I’m interested in algal cells and fungal hyphae. Our grant is awarded in installments of cigarettes. We are trying too hard not to be funny.

  THE GOOD AND EVIL, THE BEAUTIFUL AND UGLY, have been assumed under the rubric of the interesting. Non sequitur rendered lyric by a retrospective act of will. Tongue worries tooth. Repetition worries referent. Non sequitur rendered will by a retrospective act of lyric.

  HIDEAWAY BEDS were not invented to maximize space, but to conceal the unseemly reality of prostration. Thomas Jefferson, who held the first United States patent on a hideaway bed, devised a system of elevating and securing the bed to the ceiling. Each night the bed would be lowered slowly, and with great ceremony, thereby associating the animal fact of sleep with the plane of the divine. The contemporary hideaway bed, which is stored vertically, has snapped shut and killed at least ten businessmen. Most people can be trained to sleep standing up, to sleep with their eyes open, to somniloquize, to somnambulate. Mobilizing this tremendous dormant workforce is an ancient dream. Astronauts sleep strapped to their beds, like lunatics, like the lunatics they are.

  PEOPLE WITH ALL MANNER OF PHOBIA, a fear of heights or crowds or marketplaces, public speaking or blood or prime numbers, have been known to overcome their panic by wearing glasses, not with corrective lenses, but with lenses of plain shatterproof plastic, which not only impose a mediate plane between them and the object of their fear, but apply a comforting pressure to the bridge of the nose. When you encounter a person seized by terror, softly squeeze this bony structure, and he will be instantaneously subdued. In an age of contact lenses and laser surgery, it is safe to assume that a person who persists in wearing glasses is undergoing treatment.

  A BACHELOR made from a cake of shaving soap and a tin of dentifrice, pursued by an admiring throng of whiskers and teeth, announces a willful deadness of surface called publicity. The animate talks back to the animator, blowing his cover as delicately as glass. A poorly painted explosion either resembles a bunch of flowers (static) or a nosebleed (overly rich in color); the brushstroke itself must be made to mime the direction of the pressure. When our story opens, gas begins to stream. The crowd yawns with wonder. History, screams Hamsun, the junior senator from Wisconsin, will vindicate my mustache. When a vanguard in bowlers mows down a vanguard in tarbooshes, you’ve reached modernity; leave a message at the beep.

  LASER TECHNOLOGY has fulfilled our people’s ancient dream of a blade so fine that the person it cuts in half remains standing and alive until he moves and cleaves. Until we move, none of us can be sure that we have not already been cut in half, or in many pieces, by a blade of light. It is safest to assume that our throats have already been slit, that the slightest alteration in our postures will cause the painless severance of our heads.

  A SIDE OF BEEF ON A SILVER PLATTER, a slice of life on a silver screen. A beast with two backs, a war with two fronts. Búsqueda en Google an Abraham doll with realistic trembling. Her exit is emphasized by the receding lines of the parquet floor—who says art criticism is impractical? I’ll grant the world doesn’t need another novel, if you’ll grant the novel doesn’t need another world. The smugness masks a higher sadness, a sudden chiasmic reversal mistaken for love. I just want to be held, but contingently, the way the mind holds a trauma that failed to take place. Realistic suction, realism sucks. Ah, Bartleby!

  III

  DIDACTIC ELEGY

  III

  Sense that sees itself is spirit

  Novalis

  Intention draws a bold, black line across an otherwise white field.

  Speculation establishes gradations of darkness

  where there are none, allowing the critic to posit narrative time.

  I posit the critic to distance myself from intention, a despicable affect.

  Yet intention is necessary if the field is to be understood as an economy.

  By economy I mean that the field is apprehension in its idle form.

  The eye constitutes any disturbance in the field as an object.

  This is the grammatical function of the eye. To distinguish between objects,

  the eye assigns value where there is none.

  When there is only one object the eye is anxious.

  Anxiety here is comic; it provokes amusement in the body.

  The critic experiences amusement as a financial return.

  It is easy to apply a continuous black mark to the surface of a primed canvas.

  It is difficult to perceive the marks without assigning them value.

  The critic argues that this difficulty itself is the subject of the drawing.

  Perhaps, but to speak here of a subject is to risk affirming

  intention where there is none.

  It is no argument that the critic knows the artist personally.

  Even if the artist is a known quantity, interpretation is an open struggle.

  An artwork aware of this struggle is charged with negativity.

  And yet naming negativity destroys it.

  Can this process be made the subject of a poem?

  No,

  but it can be made the object of a poem.

  Just as the violation of the line amplifies the whiteness of the field,

  so a poem can seek out a figure of its own impossibility.

  But when the meaning of such a figure becomes fixed, it is a mere positivity.

  Events extraneous to the work, however, can unfix the meaning of its figures,

  thereby recharging it negatively. For example,

  if airplanes crash into towers and those towers collapse,

  there is an ensuing reassignation of value.

  Those works of art enduringly susceptible to radical revaluations are masterpieces.

  The phrase unfinished masterpiece is redundant.

  Now the critic feels a new anxiety in the presence of the drawing.

  Anxiety here is tragic; it inspires a feeling of irrelevance.

  The critic experiences irrelevance as a loss of capital.

  To the critic, the black line has become simply a black line.

  What was once a gesture of negativity has lost its capacity to refer

  to the difficulties inherent in reference.

  Can this process be made the subject of a poem?

  No,

  but a poem may prefigure its own irrelevance,

  thereby staying relevant

  despite the transpiration of extraneous events.

  This poem will lose its relevance if and when there is a significant resurgence

  of confidence in the function of the artwork.

  If artworks are no longer required to account for their own status,

  this poem’s figures will then be fixed and meaningless.

  But meaninglessness, when accepted, can be beautiful

  in the way the Greeks were beautiful

  when they accepted death.

  Only
in this sense can a poem be heroic.

  After the towers collapsed

  many men and women were described as heroes.

  The first men and women described as heroes were in the towers.

  To call them heroes, however, implies that they were willing to accept their deaths.

  But then why did some men and women

  jump from the towers as the towers collapsed?

  One man, captured on tape, flapped his arms as he fell.

  Rescue workers who died attempting to save the men and women trapped in the towers

  are, in fact, heroes,

  but the meaning of their deaths is susceptible to radical revaluation.

  The hero makes a masterpiece of dying