The Doubtful Notebook


The Russians have already canonized Nicholas.
Now a radical faction wants to do
Rasputin and Ivan the Terrible.
Their rationale for the latter is that, since
the monarchy was holy, its founder was holy.
And Rasputin performed miracles, saving
the life of the Tsarevitch;
other stories about him are Jewish lies.
The Metropolitan of Moscow says the whole thing
is ridiculous, but these people have support.

I need to put saints in the religion
I'm constructing.  Am asking everyone I know.
Reactions vary.  Those 
who are residually, desperately egalitarian 
or rational claim
to despise the image of ignorant, black-clad women
lighting candles to them, however fervently,
in grandiose structures whose details 
remain to be worked out.  Some appreciate my Paterian
emphasis on liturgy, smells and bells
at the expense of metaphysics, but worry:
what would they have to do?  Or: what is my equivalent
of "grace"?  
You're all more-or-less alienated (I say)
from the social and economic system
we live under.  That
is a portent, a guarantee
of a better state to come.
Likewise with our ad hoc, awkward, hope-for-the-best 
values.  Sandra, who maintains into her fifties
the sexual imperialism of youth 
could be the patroness of courage; Drew,
who lives for science fiction, could be invoked
by those who need a fresh infusion
of faith in external processes.
You'd only have to be, I say,
more *real than other people.
Generally they turn me down; but Rafe,
hooked up to his ventilator,
gestures with the hand that isn't
thrombosed from intubation, smiles, and says
he'll think about it.

                *

What do the aliens want?  From
their ship-fortress (vaguely geodesic,
with an odd Seventies effect
of black-glass panels, behind which tentacles
irritably writhe), the 
science they broadcast,
our scientists say,
is "as yet unassimilable," 
which pleases New Age types and relativists.  
Their other communications
no longer fill the front pages:
epistemological speculation saved
from complete sophomorism only
by obsessiveness.  They haven't
offered to help us.
Ignore the praying, self-immolating,
dwindling crowds.
*We are not alone.*  So?
The greatest story in human history
is subject to the "ten day" rule, and fades;
the "we" of the first week 
splinters; terrorists and movies reappear. 
Not an invasion ... 
no confirmed viruses or weirdness.
We'd respect them if they had invaded.

                *

Idea for a novel.  A Nazi
agent under deep cover perfects 
a time machine, jumps fifty years into the future.
In the wide-open New York of the Clinton era
(as exotic, the way I'll treat it, as the Forties), 
he gathers data
about the Bomb, jets, generals, battles, radar.
Conceals his loathing for Jews, 
blacks, and what has happened
to women.  Returns every day
like a vampire to the tomb
to his seedy rooming-house in '42. 
There a cute, feisty, Rosie-the-Riveter type,
who was attracted to him at first, suspects him.
She purloins (how?) some papers, which 
she takes to the FBI, 
which ignores her.  However, in the present,
an operative (Ben Affleck would be perfect) 
stumbles upon her file,
setting the stage 
for a hot romance between the decades
and the final mano-à-mano *in
the gadget, as it crosses the temporal void. -
Could make money.
Depends on the movie.
Absolutely no subtext
about, say, changing images of women,
perverseness as heroism, 
the congruence of good and evil hope.
  
(Why can't he go back to the Thirties, even the Twenties,
and return with his notes on a leisurely boat to Hamburg?)

If I'm overwhelmed with contempt, I might instead do 
something sensitive, literary.
And timely.  A recent graduate,
unable to find a job, moves back 
with his parents.
Sane people: only
the standard disgusts of 
midlife.  They were anticipating
their son's success, even their own freedom; 
now they and he are thwarted.
(Gombrowicz, *Ferdydurke.  But here, economics
alone compel a return to adolescence.)
The catalyst is a younger friend
of the mother's, perhaps her mother's former nurse,
the object of an early crush
of the boy's, which he had transcended, or thought
he had.  And I will make her solitary, inward.
Little happens.
Women will like it.
Silences, oodles of understated moral
conflict and bodily metaphor around the
few, hopefully unembarrassing
sex scenes.
Humane, mature aceptance of the weight
of the past, our inability to change much.

Failing that, I'll use my base in the academy
to engineer a devaluation
of prose, that unaristocratic genre,
Fate Lite, the corrupt root of media.
Poetry, as in Presocratic times,
will be the workhorse, with Imagist interoffice
memos, tankas in Cosmo, blank verse
summations.  Once a decade - no,
once a century - 
someone will be allowed before a board
to plead some thousand-page The Way We Live Now
and the solons will smile, "Let's not, and say we did."

                *

In the space between 23rd and 34th,
the train stopped and the lights went out.
Sudden fake peace,
its brevity proportional to crowding.
Then the clearing of throats, the shuffle:
I descend even now
to the smelly external world; I hope it pays
the price.
And Spanish saying something else.
The car remained
dark.  Beyond the window, 
the head and shoulders appeared of
a mole person.  There are something like ten thousand
of them, and some are children
for what that's worth.
"The 'I' is always contemptible
in modern and postmodern poetry," I said,
loudly enough so he could hear.
"But I've realized that if you subordinate it
to action and context - make it
a function of events - you take the curse off."
"I see your point," he said,
voice amplified
by the power of the third
rail, "but you'll forgive me
if I tell you it doesn't make my day."

                *

The reading over, I sign books, and after
that, four people linger.
By now it's late; the bookstore casts
its light upon an empty sidewalk,
an orange streetsweeper flirting with the curb.
After so many of my words, familiar
quips and explanations, 
I'm desperate to float free,
drive back to my hotel and watch TV,
but must remain in character
another hour.  A woman ruffles, back
and forth, the pages of my book
as if it were a Slinky; will not buy.
A huge man in a plaid shirt scowls,
but hopefully has made within himself
the smart remark he has been seeking
since they applauded and I asked for questions.
It's the two girls - one shy
or terminally locked in her mystique,
the other not - who are important; 
I sense they have one poet and/or reader 
between them, not how she's distributed.
I fantasize the taller, vital one 
will ask if I will ever simply
celebrate something, without irony,
and am so tired now that such a question
might draw upon that wistful store
of narcissistic griefs that are
most real and therefore better left unthought.
Instead she says, "I love the way
you read.  It's so dramatic.
Poets don't usually …"  "No," I say
when she does not resume.
"There's a discrepancy
between the image of the poet as
half-mad, locked in his vision,
and the requirements of showmanship;
that's why they drone or mumble."
What does she see, I wonder, past
my baldness, bulk, and liverspots?
Nothing, which is as it should be.
And she, of course, is lovely
despite the bits of metal stuck
in eyebrows, nostrils, ears, tongue, lips, and navel.
I'm tempted, not for the first time
to ask her what they mean.
Perhaps she'll say, "That one should look beyond
the body.  Or that beauty is abstraction."

                *

The aliens have left.  On CNN
a general said,
"I won't trust them till they've passed the orbit of Pluto."
Today they did.
Some scientists have bowed to a certain pressure,
and slur the conditional
when saying the alien data
may lead to cures for cancer, war, and hunger.
Those other broadcasts
remained consistent to the end.
The last was, "I am utterly alone."
(Group mind? or mistranslation?)
"The bulk [of things?] is cold and dark 
and will grow ever more so."
Then why …? one wants to ask them, or But what …
- Questions like that. 
(About the projected breakthroughs, someone
was bold enough to say
If it's there to be discovered
we'll find it anyway.)
Now that they're gone, the field where the ship stood
is again crowded
with people praying and partying
and generally carrying on.
They babble for the cameras, hopes and wishes
become fact, unhampered 
by logic;
and seem to be enjoying themselves,
though yesterday the rain came,
and they are all extraordinarily muddy.

                *

Rereading Coleridge.  The marvelous
criticism, of course, but also the poems.
Have reached the stage of reviewing
what I already know,
not seeking anything new.
The *Dejection Ode*.  Yeah.
The inscription within Romanticism
itself of disillusionment
with Romanticism.
Already rheumatic, neuralgic, addicted,
married to the wrong woman, pointlessly
in love with a better one,
three days after Wordsworth read him
*his Ode,
he invokes - not people,
whom, still a radical,
he wants to help and reform -
but clouds and
*Those stars, that glide behind them or between,
Now sparkling, now bedimmed, but always seen:
Yon crescent Moon, as fixed as if it grew
In its own cloudless, starless lake of blue;
I see them all so excellently fair,
I see, not feel, how beautiful they are!*

I see, not feel, how beautiful they are.