The Expansive Howl (Part III)
…the starry dynamo in the machinery of night…
Ezra tells me this story every once in a while as we sit and drink his whiskey. He used to own a telescope, and although it’s difficult to see anything past the haze of the city lights (especially on movie premiere nights, when spotlights blast out their expanding trails onto the sky) he would spend hours on the roof, combing the sky somewhat aimlessly. And back in the days when Anny was around, he’d take his daughter up and show her the constellations, the moon craters, even tried to view the moons of Jupiter, before giving up, realizing these are specialized rich-people activities to be done out in the countryside, at the cottage, or summer house, or something equivalent. Guys like us aren’t built for astronomy, apparently. All the books always talked about how you set up the equipment in your backyard, or atop a hill. That’s nice, but have any of these writers heard that in the last 150 years humanity has concentrated itself into cities? Or is that just the mass of people deemed unfit for any kind of higher aspirations? (At this turn in the story, Ezra usually points out how there is nothing “higher” than astronomical reasoning, and I’m never sure whether he has made a terrible pun or not.) He’ll tell me about how people who live around here have astrology shoved down their throats and a curtain of light from neon marquees to keep them from noticing and wondering at the lights in the sky. Because if people wonder why they don’t know about something so apparent, they become curious about everything else. He’ll point out how astronomy is usually the first science to grab a child’s imagination. Such was his experience; such was mine. I sympathize; I always do, but I also remind him he’s probably going overboard with the imagined conspiracy theories. But I still lament with him at the murder of something frail and beautiful, a little pinprick of light surrounded by unfathomable black, something to make us both shudder. We both usually look at the naked bulb in the hallway by this point, at the circle of illumination, and beyond it the scraps of half-couches, wooden sticks ripped off from futon frames, cardboard boxes containing scrap metal—the whole sad assortment of every tenement hallway ever. By this point I usually hope we’ll finish the whiskey, because I need to go back to my apartment and turn off some symbolic lights, without even touching a book descend to sleep and the unconsciousness which I feel everywhere about me. Or on some nights I wait for Therese to come home, just to look at her. Why? Sometimes I think I see a glimpse in her eye, a kind of lament at the man I am. The man who will never be able to give her that cottage or summer house she dreams of. Never mind that we both work. Never mind that the “economy” is doing well. It’s something in me. She looks at me sideways, and probably thinks I don’t notice, thinks I’m happy to toil with her with my vision bound in a tight tunnel. To make it up to her I blow on her earlobes when she’s in deepest sleep.
Consider: "what, alas! do we carry across? Not the beholding we’ve here / slowly acquired, and no here occurrence. Not one. / Sufferings, then. Above all, the hardness of life, / the long experience of love; in fact, / purely untellable things. But later, / under the stars, what use? The more deeply untellable stars?"
Ezra tells me this story every once in a while as we sit and drink his whiskey. He used to own a telescope, and although it’s difficult to see anything past the haze of the city lights (especially on movie premiere nights, when spotlights blast out their expanding trails onto the sky) he would spend hours on the roof, combing the sky somewhat aimlessly. And back in the days when Anny was around, he’d take his daughter up and show her the constellations, the moon craters, even tried to view the moons of Jupiter, before giving up, realizing these are specialized rich-people activities to be done out in the countryside, at the cottage, or summer house, or something equivalent. Guys like us aren’t built for astronomy, apparently. All the books always talked about how you set up the equipment in your backyard, or atop a hill. That’s nice, but have any of these writers heard that in the last 150 years humanity has concentrated itself into cities? Or is that just the mass of people deemed unfit for any kind of higher aspirations? (At this turn in the story, Ezra usually points out how there is nothing “higher” than astronomical reasoning, and I’m never sure whether he has made a terrible pun or not.) He’ll tell me about how people who live around here have astrology shoved down their throats and a curtain of light from neon marquees to keep them from noticing and wondering at the lights in the sky. Because if people wonder why they don’t know about something so apparent, they become curious about everything else. He’ll point out how astronomy is usually the first science to grab a child’s imagination. Such was his experience; such was mine. I sympathize; I always do, but I also remind him he’s probably going overboard with the imagined conspiracy theories. But I still lament with him at the murder of something frail and beautiful, a little pinprick of light surrounded by unfathomable black, something to make us both shudder. We both usually look at the naked bulb in the hallway by this point, at the circle of illumination, and beyond it the scraps of half-couches, wooden sticks ripped off from futon frames, cardboard boxes containing scrap metal—the whole sad assortment of every tenement hallway ever. By this point I usually hope we’ll finish the whiskey, because I need to go back to my apartment and turn off some symbolic lights, without even touching a book descend to sleep and the unconsciousness which I feel everywhere about me. Or on some nights I wait for Therese to come home, just to look at her. Why? Sometimes I think I see a glimpse in her eye, a kind of lament at the man I am. The man who will never be able to give her that cottage or summer house she dreams of. Never mind that we both work. Never mind that the “economy” is doing well. It’s something in me. She looks at me sideways, and probably thinks I don’t notice, thinks I’m happy to toil with her with my vision bound in a tight tunnel. To make it up to her I blow on her earlobes when she’s in deepest sleep.
Consider: "what, alas! do we carry across? Not the beholding we’ve here / slowly acquired, and no here occurrence. Not one. / Sufferings, then. Above all, the hardness of life, / the long experience of love; in fact, / purely untellable things. But later, / under the stars, what use? The more deeply untellable stars?"
posted by A. D. at 6:00 PM
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