The Problem of the Many, page 6
The way the darkness makes the stars stand out
more intensely, appear more precisely themselves,
likewise the many
canisters of Pringles, this entire supermarket
aisle of them, make me more humanly aware of my human
than I know what to do with.
Nietzsche says that in order to make life bearable
step by step the Greeks had to dream up an array
of new gods, shiningly
exemplified by Apollo, who through ongoing
battle lays order to chaos and puts an end to the Titans’
“divine reign of terror.”
Most sources say your misuse of technology
for destructive ends compels Zeus to deploy his
weapon of choice
against you; others say Poseidon, your own
foster child, rises from the sea like architecture to impale
you with the seismic
trident you forge for him; while Servius’s gloss
on Virgil’s epic attributes the honor to none other
than Apollo himself
taking the shape of the wolf in part to beautify
it from within, “as roses burst forth from the thorn-bush”
to quote Nietzsche again
in a context different but not unrelated, like tropical
milkweed to the native variety, whose scent
the Times describes as
“sweet, spicy and ripe with an overtone of honey.”
Well-meaning gardeners keep planting tropical milkweed
in droves in their borders
to provide habitats and food for the monarch butterfly—
who affixes her eggs to the undersides
of the milkweed’s leaves
and whose larvae eat nothing but—in hopes
of offsetting all the native plants you continue to destroy
along the fringes of corn and soy
fields throughout the Midwest, but unlike the plainer
native species, the tropical doesn’t die back
in winter, a fact agreeable
to monarch-infecting parasites, but flummoxing
to the monarchs themselves, many of whom,
taken in by the luxury of a year-round milkweed supply,
end up forsaking their famous migratory flight
to Mexico, an exercise which has come to ensure
the overall strength
of the swarm. Enthusiasts like to call a swarm
of butterflies a “kaleidoscope,” another practice which to
my mind means well, but fails
to do justice to the monarch, in effect diminishing
colonies that curtain fir trees in the tens of millions
per hectare into a single
handheld toy meant to enchant the eye away
from the truth in front of it—deforestation, extreme weather,
dozens of species lost every week.
From your maternal grandparents, Darkness
and Night,
you inherit the knack of existing largely
in the figurative
but with tangible impact. Not as entities
with distinct
shapes one might doodle in the margins
of an almanac
like Cheney’s face on the body of Cthulhu,
but as a human
tendency to destroy a thing as a way of
controlling it
and with no regard for what effects this
might have on
things nearby, things over time, or things
not immediately
apparent, e.g., our groundwater supply—
which glyphosate
snakes its way into, here and abroad, despite
biotech’s reassurance
that the compound’s slow soil mobility
in effect prevents
groundwater contamination—and then
there’s our gut flora.
Looking back, I remember the BeltBuster,
and fondly, as comprising
two meat patties, two cheese slices,
seasoned taco meat, Fritos, and possibly more cheese
in a more liquid form, like a queso sauce
or its approximation, served
on a fairly straightforward bun
that fell apart halfway through—
not a problem, because by that point my belt
had, as advertised, been busted,
again in the figurative, and I ate
with my hands what remained
of its meat, which by that point had grown
inseparable from the cheese,
because, as a rule of thumb, if a higher life form
dies for my meal, I do what I can.
On the way home I tried
for twenty minutes to photograph
streak lightning on my phone
but failed every time, all I could capture was
a gravel road, dead and living
trees, cacti and the purple clouds
where all the lightning had been happening
and which, for Callimachus,
might call to mind the fury
of Zeus, but I thought of the comedy The Clouds
by Aristophanes, whose heretical
windbag depiction of Socrates—who in act 1
calls clouds “the only true gods”—
is believed to have played
a role in the philosopher’s
trial and execution just shy of a quarter
century later. In The Birth of Tragedy
Nietzsche says Athens, mindful of the eyes
of posterity, would only have gone
so far as to punish its self-described “gadfly”
with exile, and supposes it
was Socrates himself, so tyrannically
opposed to instinct, including even
the instinct to live, who proposed his
own death as the answer to
the charges of impiety against
the city-state’s gods and corruption
of its youth. What’s more, Nietzsche
also says Socrates, now a daemonic force
via Euripides, was responsible
for the death of Greek tragedy,
which was once “that most magnificent temple”
and then just another pile of
rubble when what Nietzsche calls “the murderous
principle” of aesthetic Socratism,
i.e., “In order to be beautiful,
everything must be intelligible,” sank
anchor in a harbor far deeper than
sense, pointed skiffs like viruses to shore
to infect dull reason into the amphitheater
where the individual, once valiant
as a golden pheasant among porcupine,
had come to face the abyss
with pleasure because it meant
constructing an illusion over it in front
of everybody, a new bridge
leading not to the conclusion the abyss
wasn’t there, or wasn’t real, but that it’s all
that’s ever either, and the truth of this
infuses the illusion with necessity.
Regarding his assessment of Socrates’s
asceticism, Nietzsche may have gone a bit
overboard. It is known
that Socrates exhibited robustness
here and there, having served in three battles
as a hoplite and excelled at masonry
in his youth. He wed
Xanthippe late in life, and together
they brought three sons into a world
we might be wrong to imagine
him too eager to escape from. After
hemlock, they made him walk around
until his legs went heavy-numb.
After lying down, and as the toxin eelily
found his heart, he told his companion
Crito to remember the cock
owed to Asclepius, god of medicine. Nietzsche
interprets this as a tribute to be paid to the god
for curing him of the long sickness
of existence. More recently, Asclepius
was remembered in the plant name
Asclepias syriaca, our native milkweed.
Here the grasshopper Apollo says bid a hardy
welcome to the emptiness
already inside you. Sit down together
on the verandah
of coming to know it and what it will do. It will do
what it will regardless. It is in
your interest. Also in your interest—
offer me beet greens on a nonreactive platter
at my temple at Delphi
as has been customary
for several millennia. Just make sure
that they’re harvested
at least six miles away
from the nearest sugar beet, as all the sugar
beets in America, which account for
roughly half your country’s
sugar production, are genetically modified
to be glyphosate-resistant, and at a distance
less than that, transgenic contamination
with plants in the same family,
e.g., table beets and Swiss chard, isn’t just likely,
it’s inevitable.
As for the emptiness, you can depend on it
the way strings
depend on the hollow body
of the guitar. I know you don’t ordinarily
trust rhetoric like that, but I see
you have already taken my word for it.
One night I will walk out under a sky so clear
I’ll forget I am anywhere. The landscape won’t regard
me any differently than itself—I’ll be the portion of a somewhat
greater density than beeswax, lesser when inhaling
at maximum capacity. A movement through lashes
of wind-bent June grass; counter to the wind, but only
in velocity. That figure of the human as loge towards which
Earth’s orchestra exists to tend its point will sit
quaint then, or irrelevant, like an excavated pull-tab
harvester ants paraded out the mouth of their habitat
in order to make life bearable. I took their photograph
on my phone but it looks for all the world like the surface
of the moon. Then I took another of a lone jackrabbit
I thought might be the jackrabbit I saw earlier today—
when I turned, I saw maybe a dozen jackrabbits ricochet
into the scrub and vanish. In a way they were
all the same jackrabbit, just as I’m the same human
they’ll always run from. But we have lived too long
in the actual to let ourselves cave into the thought
we should now try living in the abstract. There’s a knot
in the wood floor where I am I keep mistaking for a scorpion.
It keeps mistaking me for Socrates, pacing the room
as we lose the feeling. But what I’m really doing is
trying to get it back, weaving to and fro if not to sweat
the toxin out, then to stage a demonstration to myself I am
alive. In the prologue to his long poem on the many
causes of what is, Callimachus says he feels mortality
sliding off him like “the three-cornered mass of Sicily.”
I don’t feel that. I feel malevolent forms of rationality at play.
I feel the Arctic flounder’s gene sequence allowing it
to withstand frigid temperatures patched into the DNA
of flavorless tomatoes in 1991. I feel trembling in the milk
of today’s goats in Utah tinkered with to produce a high-
grade spider silk for military jumpsuits. I feel the pull of Earth’s
newfound moon on the aquifer beneath me and a panic
rustle wings awake on hot hexagons in Mexico, and then I
don’t. But I still feel hands around my throat. I still feel
Stevens when he says: “a violence from within . . .
protects us from a violence without.” I feel ribbed undersides
of milkweed’s leaves and a silkiness to its parachutes
split from pods in airborne childhood. I feel at odds with
what I feel but not enough to stop. My finger in the dark
aligns the divot in the drywall with the sad last gasp of GMO-fed
catfish. I feel the sickness of existence and its portal
back in. I feel the times I walk across dissolve but I still walk.
I feel the only way to make life bearable is to make it.
The Earth Itself
To quantify the foolishness of the already long since failed
construction project, the famous German polymath
undertook to calculate the precise number of bricks
the Tower of Babel would have required had it ever been
finished. The figure he came up with ran an impressive
eighteen digits in length, climbing all the way up
to that rarely occupied hundred-quadrillions place.
Looking at it now, between loads of laundry, the figure
calls to mind an American telephone number—area code first,
then the prefix, then the line number, followed in turn
by a trail of eight additional zeros. I feel a little lost
through the hypnosis of those zeros, but I still pick up
the phone and dial that number now. A recording says
the number I’ve dialed isn’t an actual telephone number
after all. Please try again. I do. Same result. I try dialing
that trail of zeros instead. This time the recording says
that the call I’m making might itself be recorded. I hesitate a bit
at the thought of that, when all this pseudoscience, all
this poking into mysteries, panting for answers, always
harder, higher, my phone calls today and the recordings
and the laundry, the laundry—it all comes crashing down.
I don’t have time to experiment. I’m hanging up the phone.
But wait, there’s more! On my rush back to the laundromat
I remembered I forgot a part. The polymath figured out, too,
that if the tower had reached its destination, it would have
taken over eight hundred years to climb to the top.
And further, his calculations say the mass of all those bricks
would have outweighed, albeit slightly, the earth’s own mass,
meaning the tower would have used up all the matter of
the planet it was built on, which is foolish enough, and then
a little more, which is absurd, unless the tower is secretly
just the earth itself, with the added weight of all the living on it.
Happiness
Even if it could be felt
all at once, instead of
in installments, instead of
this staggering
out over a lifetime
of feeling it without
warning, or even
without wanting it, seize
before sliding back
into its opposite, seismic
event, so that
by analogy, being itself
grows corrugated,
as sand does recalling
the motion of water,
or like ridges on the roof
of a good dog’s mouth
science says serve
to stop the water from
escaping when lapping it
up—then again
by analogy, the feeling
of how it would feel
likewise would escape me.
Hymn to Edmond Albius
Too busy peddling my fire and trying to keep the mouths fed
and packing up belongings of the recent dead right now to access
your luxurious philosophy, though one looks forward to a time
when the universe permits, I said to my electric correspondent
who came at me puffed pink in thoughtfulness when what I needed
then as now was a quiet high enough to envision a half-gallon
brick of all-natural vanilla ice cream softening on the hot hood
of an idling cop car: the earliest rivulets, a slow loss of strict
rectangularity, then the wild gliding around on the beautiful bleak
enamel paint job as its sweet fragrance fills the air like a gift
from Madagascar I can breathe. Rapt Cortés transported cuttings
of vanilla across the Atlantic during his plunder of the Aztecs;
the Aztecs themselves fell captive to its magic after vanquishing
its first cultivators the Totonacs, who paid their conquerors tributes
of baskets stacked to heaven with cured vanilla pods like long
sentences of salutiferous essence. This is one of those instances
history likes to push your face into to try to stir your appetite
for cruelty a little, or at least make you covet the perks of it: I too
want vanilla in quantity. I want it all around me, like a fortress
of mellow dangles. It will move with me as I move and it will ward
hateful people off. For centuries Europeans tried to cultivate it
outside its native Mexico and failed. They could get the vine
to flower, but in the absence of ancestral pollinators, specifically
hummingbirds and a stingless bee, the flowers dropped off podless.
Meanwhile, Edmond Albius—born into slavery on an island
east of Madagascar known then as Bourbon, lush French colony
and home to roses, home to one active volcano, one dormant, and one
arena-like caldera that holds the record for most rainfall shed
in one location by a single tropical cyclone ever, namely Hyacinthe—
knew enough from orchids at age twelve in 1841 to think to lift
with a bamboo splint the flap of the rostellum dividing the pollen-
heavy male anther from the female stigma in order to rub the pollen
on the stigma’s eager wand. Within weeks the pods had begun
to form and lengthen into joyous beanlike squiggles laden with
tiny seeds like secrets of the universe as Albius at the shore and under
bright southern stars breathed out I hope in a kind of enlargement
akin to liberty from time, so that on that occasion he might feel
