The Problem of the Many, page 3
also in quantity in okra, whose seedpods are said to have
been taken from Africa to feed the colonies’ growing slave
population as cheaply as possible. High on the list of
heat- and drought-resistant crops, okra means to live
despite untenable conditions and deserves a tribute
unique among those owed to every plant whose leaf, root,
flower, berry, bark or fruit has gotten us as far as this
without complaint: aloe, apple, artichoke and asparagus
to start, then aubergine, a favorite of Alexander the Great
who carried it from India and into Babylon despite
his astronomer’s warning that the thunderous local deity
Marduk had enough already, but the Macedonian was pretty
sure a promise to repair Marduk’s temple—in ruins since
Sennacherib toppled it, and felt by fringe historians
to have been the true Tower of Babel—might serve to soften
the god’s heart. But apparently not. Alexander’s coffin,
all gold, filled with rumored honey and carried west, far
from his deathbed in the palace built by Nebuchadnezzar
centuries earlier, came to rest in Alexandria, founded by
and named for himself, site where his successor Ptolemy
eventually built the celebrated library that Callimachus
worked at, and whose fiery destruction was traumatic as
a blunt force to the head of humanity. You can still feel it
today. Cherokee drank a tea of sassafras root to dispollute
the blood in Raleigh’s day, but knew never to drink it more
than a week at a time. English colonists came, saw
and concocted a copycat tonic that mutated into the diet
root beer I have here, its frothy head no longer an intricate
play of sassafras mucilage because the FDA determined
a principle in the root was hepatocarcinogenic to rodent
life in 1960. Now most manufacturers add extract of soapbark
to parrot the effect. In his Life of Alexander, Plutarch
recalls that the hero was born on the same day Herostratus
set the Temple of Diana in Ephesus ablaze so that his
name would live forever. Soapbark acts as a foaming agent
in many fire extinguishers. Without his imprisonment
and brace of assistants, Raleigh wouldn’t have produced
The History of the World, whose first book states the greatest
wonder of the earth is the palm tree. I have stood beneath
a tall one in L.A. and watched its full fronds seethe
like the mane of a lion. Diana’s temple the way the Ephesian
workforce fixed it is remembered as one of the seven
wonders of antiquity, its chalk white blinding under chicory-
blue Turkish skies. I hear the fingertips of history
thrum on tabletops in Roanoke and when popcorn bursts as it
spins in my microwave. When I open the bag opposite
my kitchen window, the night reflects my face back in at
me through the steam expressed from kernels to fascinate
its way back into the water cycle, in order to be the rain
that fed the sassafras we hid in before I had to be human.
Malamute
When I was a dog I pulled the sled with the other dogs
and to the crest of my ability, for never was I a snob about it
moreover never lazy, day into night through the cold
pine forest we were bred to and for which I came to feel
love as fast as others as a blur that slowed around us
at our suppers, then watched us twitch in our heavy sleep.
When I was a dog I pulled the sled with the other dogs
mile on mile convincingly, my tongue construed the forest
no condition not to drape in, identical its pinkness
from my open mouth as theirs, the nylon tapes between us
reinforcing sentiment, a kind relief through constant
focus but from what I failed to grasp, as did our language.
When I was a dog I pulled the sled with the other dogs
who didn’t know I didn’t know, but that was what we were
meant to be there for to begin with, yet I could follow
them who followed anyone behind us through the forest
where what seemed to know but was a shape without
sufficient contour hovered, and it proved some trouble to me.
When I was a dog I pulled the sled with the other dogs
concealing my disquiet like a shoulder bone the forebears
said to hurry up now bury, but everywhere the dirt
rebuffed my larger purpose, a fortitude from all the earth
had frozen up against me, the paws of whom had brought me
nowhere but to shame to let it drop for another mouth.
When I was a dog I pulled the sled with the other dogs
the way a roof collapses—inevitably, and even as the wind
must always push, or it isn’t wind, it’s air, and I was air
that had come to think of it, in some trouble to me the others
felt no twitch of, or if they did, our language failed what
must have been its purpose, or I won’t soon be a dog again.
The Problem of the Many
1
When Alexander found Diogenes sunbathing in Cranium,
a suburb of Corinth whose many philosophers and statesmen
had clamored alike for Alexander’s attention doggedly, Diogenes’s
indifference felt special to the king, kind of bewildering,
but in the best way, as with the elevation of a grape popsicle’s
color into the most elusive and cerebral gray-violet possible
if you commit to sucking on it full-force—almost as if to surpass
the sun’s own aptitude for rendering something something
other than what it started out as. Alexander approached him
therefore with respect, asking if there was anything in particular
the philosopher might require of the king, and in response
Diogenes sighed a sigh that history has no choice but to recall
as philosophical, and, opening at last his eyes to the long
shadow the king cast, said in the company of many the only
thing he wanted at the moment was for the king to quit blocking
his last drops of afternoon sun, which had until quite recently
been blocked by many clouds, themselves composed of many
drops, or droplets, a variant whose suffix serves to diminish
the small thing further, if not in actuality, then at least in one’s
perception. However, and don’t get used to it, here the two
truly coincide, as the droplets of water that constituted the clouds
over Corinth and surrounding areas, though seldom without
admixture of salt and soot, would not only have looked smaller
to most observers, but in order for them to stay suspended
in that atmosphere, they would have to have been objectively
minute, on par with those released from the drug-delivery device
marketed as the nebulizer, or “maker of mist,” familiar to the many
sufferers of asthma, rather than, say, with tears, or with drops
of enzymatic fluid expressed by human hand from the rubbery
anatomy of murex snails in the manufacture of the famed purple
dye named for its origin, the ancient Phoenician seaport of Tyre.
These would run much larger in size. The snail, unfortunately,
held so few of them in the treasury of itself it took as many
as 10,000 (crushed in time and boiled in quantity in vats rather
than each milked individually) to yield one gram of Tyrian purple,
its hue reported to have been first identified by Tyros, a consort
of Melqart, the local god of the sea, commerce, colonization,
and so forth, when her lapdog found a heap of murex on shore,
ate many, then scampered back slobbering all over Tyros’s chiton.
Others say Heracles and his own dog discovered it that way
and that’s how Rubens painted it: poor Tyros just a nymph now
hovering out of frame, and in place of the murex’s trademark
many-spined shell, the dog’s unconvincing forepaw rests
on the smooth moon-helmet of a nautilus. Not Rubens at his best.
Either way, Alexander, who felt in his heart his true father was
Zeus-Ammon, not humdrum Philip, making him proud half brother
to Heracles, wanted to visit Melqart’s temple on the island-
half of Tyre but the locals didn’t want him hanging around any
more than Diogenes did. And so, recommending the lovely
mainland temple instead, they declined, with Alexander riding off
on Bucephalus and in a huff, the sun setting on an era’s end
much as it does for us now: the same wide sky deepening
up the horizon in shell-tinted white to white-blue then gradually
closer to sapphire as the sun slips down behind the black of
Earth, the roundness of it apparent through glimpses that waver
like air above lit candles in rooms where forgotten meaning
is restored, and you can almost see it but it’s already smearing
out of focus as last clouds achieve a true pink that appears to inch
into watermelon candy in places, as, above, a half-moon tilts
out of time in a field of mature indigo, the chemical compound
of its pigment in many respects identical to that extracted from
murex but lacking the redness that bromine provides, which turns
it more purple than blue. Indigo is the reciprocal, more blue
than purple, and can be harvested fairly cheaply from the cash
crop that bears its name, having been given it when Alexander,
whose army marched as far east as the Asian subcontinent’s
northwest corner before giving up and turning back, came home
with black pepper, cardamom, possibly the scalp of an elephant,
and indigo, vast plantations of which would come in time to grow
in Indian soil under British rule in order to feed persistent European
appetite for the tint through the late nineteenth century until
at last a lasting synthetic form of it was engineered in Germany,
whose Wehrmacht marched as far west as the Bay of Biscay,
its waters unloving to seafarers, its airspace in satellite images
a trapezoidal basket-weave of ship trails, or clouds seeded
by aerosols in the crossed exhaust plumes of cargo and pleasure
vessels, but no less clouds for that, no less composed of many
drops, or droplets, none measuring over a few tenths of a micron
in diameter, any one cloud’s boundary feathering ambiguously
into the next, but free from all anxiety, and with nothing to prove.
2
Drifting in and out of tearfulness on a bus trip up the peninsula
into the city, a pair of merged clouds appeared to drift like tragedy
apart above the emphatic half-sour pickle green of mid-April
in Ireland. One smaller than the other, they looked to be moving
in opposite directions at different speeds. If it was the smaller
pulled away from the larger over the space of many minutes with
detachment in order to perform its loss as prerequisite to relief
in resignation so strong it approaches bliss, it was also the larger
retreating by contrast into semi-stasis, suggesting stability is only
ever relative. In time, the smaller cloud, inarguably on its own
voyage, and many meters into it, grew more distinct as its outline
grew vaguer with tiny bodies of the same vapor surrounding it
passively by my eye, by turns incorporated into the cloud and then
rebounding off it into cloudlets contemplating an independence
it fell to me to grant them or deny, underscoring again (and again
because I’m human) the difficulty of demarcating with confidence
where it all begins, how many droplets it contains, which merely
exist alongside. If reality didn’t need to be defined we might
leave it where it is, but common sense says it does, or something
else inside us, although in practice it has less to do with space
than with time, a desire reaching out from the present into an idea
of the future the subject finds itself in possession of new knowledge
of reality in: something like a handle on it or even like a charm
against it and, historically speaking, a greater likelihood of being
able to yoke it later on, when water needs drawing from the well
or the field needs plowing. Here, it doesn’t: the many bright stripes
of young oats pulsate musically against the homogenized chestnut
brown of sun-warmed tillage as a shadow the size of an aircraft
carrier migrates across it. If I draw a border around the classically
soft-sided mass casting this shadow, then I am making a claim
about what is, and is not, reality, which droplets belong to the cloud
legitimately, which are left out. Remembering a cloud is nothing
if not the sum of its constituent droplets, if I draw another equally
arbitrary border around the selfsame mass but this time include in it
with firm resolve or sloppily one droplet more or less than I did
in the previous attempt, I’ll be defining a set of particles whose sum
is nonequivalent to that of the first, which is to say, and in a very
real way, I’ll behold a whole new cloud. And if I include another
droplet or leave another out, now there’s three, now ten, now many,
now an infinity of clouds crowds what still looks like an ordinary
sky with one cloud in it, an absurdity like a sunflower stemming
up from ground so solid you can pull a tractor over it without ever
giving it much thought, or its relative elecampane, said to have sprung
into being when tears shed by Helen in the course of her abduction
commiserated with properties of the land she was torn from,
and what they felt took expression in a flower. All the metamorphoses
of myth make it seem like the human is turning into something
else but in truth it’s just the manifold stuff of reality recombining
in response to key events free of regard to what it is humans take
to be necessary distinctions. Extract of its root is indicated for
sufferers of homesickness, bronchitis, or pains of dislocation; also
asthmatics, consumptives, and accidental adherents to bad ideas.
It will benefit breathers of air around manufacturing plants or any air
with too much grief in it. It warms, it stimulates. It permeates
the bronchial tree. It grows in many shady places, eases expression
that has been thwarted. It is a proven counterpoison. It elevates
many not ever at home in their world, home, or status as human.
The plant itself is thought handsome. Pliny said it fastened the teeth.
Some call it horseheal. Others call it elfwort, and say it nullifies
elfin magic. It would be hard to stand beside it and not sympathize.
It would be hard to think of anyone held at its borders or without
consent and sit still. It is ruled by Mercury. The brain is a mechanism
designed to collect, filter, and sort. It is a downy, shrub-like herb
tall as Alexander. From a cache of past experiences it will attempt
to predict the future. Evolution rewards it. Its many flowers pop
like plush gold buttons dozens of flattened bright yellow filaments
nerve out of. Agrippa refers to its medicinal properties as occult
virtues because the intellect alone can never reach or find them out.
It calls for long experience. It will attempt to control the flow
of experience. It will establish relatively fixed points in its extended
networks in light of what patterns it picks up in its information intake.
Some say Helen wasn’t abducted. Some say she didn’t resist or cry
tears remembered in yellow flowers. Its freshly harvested seeds
smell like frankincense. It often discounts confusion and overlooks
complexity in favor of assurance that life is simple if you let it be.
Some say she stood in a field of them, waiting. It will mirror aspects
of dominant structures and not notice. Some say she had them
in her grip. It is a frequent playground to the honeybee. Many say
she doesn’t exist. She is daughter of Zeus, half sister to Alexander.
It can’t behold the infinite inside itself. It will only see one cloud.
3
Two floating islands rove like clouds above the surface of the sea.
From the larger grows an olive tree. It is perpetually on fire. Sunset
laminates the water black-tangerine, glistening like the skin
on a many-spotted salamander. At the tree’s top branch, an eagle
perches, unperturbed by the flame; at its base, and wound around it,
a fed snake sleeps, cool in the constant wind of the unfolding.
Melqart wants the Phoenicians to rope the islands, to climb ashore.
He has taught them to build ships. He has given them navigation,
perseverance. He wants them to capture the eagle and to sacrifice it.
When the sacrifice is made, the islands will stop floating, fall
into the sea. Here they will build the great city of Tyre, prosperous
metropolis, visited many eons later by Herodotus, who wanted to see
firsthand its temple to Melqart, whom Greek custom smartly
