I WENT HOME. MY MOTHER WAS HANGING ON THE WALL; I looked at her and in my strange distraction the image turned a corner in my mind’s labyrinth, and for a moment a thought of the Furies put the Furies in my eye, sitting on a grassy knoll catching their breath; and then I looked away. I went into the study and pulled out the novel again—the hundreds of pages held together by rubber bands, the first pages written on my father’s musical sheets, then a thick cream watermarked vellum, then thin newsprint and more gray, and so on, as if the book’s progress could be measured in geological strata, sedimentary layer upon layer, pressure pushing the book into form. The first pages weighed heavy on the last, a fossilizing pressure. Written by hand, over the scales of the musical staff so that the lines cut through the letters, the title: An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky. I read the last sentence written, It was my sister—words written just that morning, but which felt an age ago. I have no memory of her. I picture a baby with her mouth open, but I’m only imagining it. Or I see her milky-blue eyes looking up as if into the other world from which she was just pulled and back to which she must soon return—the look of nostalgia. But I’m making it up. Father wandered through the halls holding her as she died, as his wife lay dead in their bedroom, but he never bent down to let me see her. I heard her breathe, and I heard her cry; I heard when breathing and crying ended. I turned the page back over. Blank. I looked at the thick volume of all those handwritten pages, of all those thousands of words, each one of them containing a little breath. I thought the pages held their breath, that this was the meaning of a book—that it was holding its breath for as long as it could. It was afraid it might drown. I pushed the breath aside on the desk, and pulled from a drawer a sheaf of letters I’ve read and reread, read and reread, for what feels like my whole life. My whole life spent holding my breath—
Call me Daniel. I have a gift I keep to myself, the gift of self-abandon. It is the orphan’s lesson if he can learn it—not to feel abandoned, but to continue his abandonment past the bounds of where the loss should end, parent’s death that prefigures one’s own. Fate is everywhere speaking; it does not call you by name; it tells you to name yourself. Call me Daniel. It is the name my father called me, and it is the name I call myself. It is as real as any name; it works just as well. Call it out to me as I walk down the street and I will turn around, smile or wave, perhaps even walk over to you to chat or reminisce. I have trained myself to do exactly this, as I know you’ve also trained yourself. “Daniel”—and I turn around and say yes quizzically but warmly; I look up and recognize you because you recognized me, whoever it is you are, who knows what it is you know of me. The Furies pursue names through the desert places, the guilt on the names, repeating the names between each other, Daniel, Daniel, Allan, Allan to incite each other to volcanic anger, spitting the names out ahead of themselves to run all the faster, Allan, Allan, pursuing the guilty names. A writer (I’ve learned to make no mistake about it) is a lesser Fury—writing down the names while a moth climbs back up the leg of the chair it fell from—not accusing someone else of his guilt, of her misdeeds, but participating in the guilt, recreating it so as to relive it, to share it, not to judge it; the only accusation says in its fated tongue you were there without me, but now I am there with you, faulty and necessary witness, fictional but true, here I am with you, Father, Father, call me—
Dear Daniel,
I am in my stateroom on the only boat that would take me as a passenger. If I didn’t have money to offer, where would I be? The captain doesn’t trust me, nor do the men.
I won’t say sorry because I know you understand. I know you will understand. These letters will help you understand.
It is hard to write on the desk as the boat rocks on the waves. I hope you’ll be able to read all the words. I’ve discovered many new aspects of the scroll since your mother died. Her death has helped me as a translator. I hope that doesn’t sound callous to you. It made me understand something about this language I could not understand before. Maria, her name, when she was alive, I could speak it and she would come. Now I can say Maria and mean her exactly, but because she cannot hear me, she cannot come. The same word still calls out, even into death—Maria. This is one of the scroll’s lessons. Living makes us think that every word ends at the thing it names, but it isn’t true. Things live in the middle of their names to distract us from all a word says that is not discernible. We’ve learned to stop at what is at hand and be satisfied, a child asking for a bauble. But death removes from us what we love, and then the word pushes out past its normal limit, drops its reference from itself, and its sense turns into a singing in which a word ceases to mean any one thing, a singing that opens up abstraction, the interstitial connection between forms—the way an apple seed is also the apple tree is also the apple blossom is also the apple fruit, but more, the way it is also the pollinating wind, also the bees, also the child that, plucking a fruit from the branch, bites into it. “Apple” is a word in the myth. I’ve spent the morning translating it. It cannot be written down, for writing stills it—a kind of death. It must be held in the mind in all its singing complexity. Then the word contains in it all its history, every utterance is in each utterance, a line that stretches back to the first time it was spoken. The word is a realm that includes us all. The mythic word, the ur-word, spoken unknowingly by the fruit vendor on the street, by mothers and daughters, it reaches back to that first saying, when to name something was to create it. A dictionary—no one teaches us this—is a book of ontology. But a spoken word springs forward, too. To say apple predicts the countless times the word will be said again, forges the connections that do not yet exist, a man not yet born giving an apple to the woman he loves but she also does not yet exist; to say apple includes them. A word—and this is why your mother’s death has opened me to my work—has nothing to do with time. We infect our language with our own mortality. But the word is outside of time, and refuses to do time’s work. Some poets know this. “But you shall shine more bright in these contents / Than unswept stone, besmeared with sluttish time.” A word is a small thing in the world, Daniel, but it contains the world. To learn how to speak is to learn how to be in the world—not in the day, but the world past the limits of the day, the old world that doesn’t exist in time, the world in which nothing has been lost, the heroic world of monsters and gods. The singer’s world.
The myth on the scroll, it is a song of that unending, that never-yet-begun, world. To sing it opens it up. The mouth is a kind of door, or maybe the entrance to a cave. Plato’s cave—where in the mind a word throws a shadow on the wall. To sing the words turns us around, and we step out of our own mouths into the real world, and the words that tricked us into seeing a world that didn’t exist are the same words we use to describe the world that does.
I had to leave. I’m not sorry.
I’m sorry that you are too young to understand this letter. One day you will understand. One day I’ll teach you this song and then the song will be yours.
Love,
My father left and Grandma Clarel moved in, drinking instant coffee in the living room. She wouldn’t talk about him, save to refer in vague terms to “his trip.” Letters would arrive almost every week. A letter, Daniel, a letter, and in her exasperation she would fan herself with the envelope that she meant to give to me, looking aghast as I kept reaching up toward her face to grab it, saying stop it, stop it, and then seeing the letter in her own hand, give it to me, and, bright red, flustered, return to the kitchen. I’d go to my father’s study, sit under his desk, and read them over and over again. I didn’t understand them, but his handwriting was so distinctly his, the page in my hands seemed like a kind of embrace. I read them so often I memorized them—no, not memorized them. It was not memory. The letters imbued themselves in me. I couldn’t quote a single sentence from them; I saw the world through their pages. I would look up, once the letter had been read, at the bookshelf. There, in green with gilt lettering, sat Wonders and Tales. It was a book I never read from again, even as, in my child’s mind, it kept calling to me to retrieve it, calling me to it—
Dear Daniel,
I must tell you about the myth, but it is hard to do. To write it down too precisely betrays it. But you should know it, the parts of it you can know.
Beneath the sky another sky opened;
within the sea another sea.
In this sea one creature lived:
a white whale. It swam through the sea.
There was no land; there was only water. The whale was no god, but without the whale no god could exist. Time did not divide day and night; there was no day and night. The whale was like an island, but there was no land.
A flame inside the whale’s head spoke to it; the voice said “dive down.” The white whale dove to the sea’s bed, swam among the ragged rocks that cut the whale’s skin, carved into its skin words the flame inside its head chanted as it swam among the cutting rocks. The whale’s whole body was etched with words when the voice in the flame said “leave,” and then the whale left. It did not take a breath. The white whale swam to a desert place where the sea-bed’s soft sift lay deep and undisturbed by a single mark. The voice said “sleep” and the whale slept, and in its sleep it rolled in the sand, pressing into the seabed the words carved on its skin. It rolled in its sleep until every word carved into its skin was pressed into the sand it slept on. And in its sleep it dreamed.
The whale dreamed a dream of the sun over the land, a sun it had never seen; it dreamed the sun when it slept on the word sun pressed into the sand. The sun cast its warmth on the ground and from the ground a seed sprouted, and in the whale’s dream the seed became a tree full of white blossoms, and from the blossoms blew the seeds of other plants, of every plant, seeds the sun warmed until they sprouted, and then the land was green; the whale dreamed of this tree when it slept on the word apple pressed into the sand. There were no animals and no people in the dream. When the whale awoke the voice in the flame said “breathe” and the whale swam up to breathe, and there it saw the sun and the green land. The whale took a breath and the voice in the flame said “dive down” and the whale dove down, dove faster when the voice said “faster.” The white whale dove at great speed and when the voice in the flame said “die” the whale struck the seabed with its head, struck the seabed with such force its head cracked open and the sperm escaped into the ocean, each drop becoming an animal as it rose, every animal as it all rose, fish and turtles swimming in the water, birds springing into the air, deer and antelope, lions and elephants, stepping onto shore, and humans, crawling from the water and standing up walking toward the fruit hanging from the apple tree. The whale when it died opened a chasm at the bottom of the ocean, the bottom of the world. The whale’s broken body fell into the chasm.
There were two of every living thing. The man and the woman lived in the green world, eating from the tree, and another person lived inside the woman. She knew another person lived inside her, but could not tell the man; there were no words to speak, and nothing could be known. So the woman left the man and he watched her leave; she walked to the shore and walked into the sea and sunk down to the seabed where she read the words printed in the sand.
When the woman read the word “breathe” she tried to take a breath but could not; the air was far above her. She tried to swim up to the air but she could not, and when she could swim no more, she fell into the chasm where the white whale had fallen.
She fell into the whale’s open mouth; and the baby was inside her.
There is more, Daniel—but enough—this is the story you should know—
Love,
Father’s letters grew less frequent but more wild. He wrote to me as if he were telling himself secrets—
Dear Daniel,
You are another me and that makes everything harder and easier. The men here won’t talk to me. They go about their work, and it’s through their work they know the world. They each own a “sea eye.” They read the ocean’s surface and they read the clouds on the horizon. I eat at night with the captain, who smiles cordially as he pours me some wine but he eyes me suspiciously. I have no sea eye. A deckhand found me last night on the prow in a gale wind chanting into the storm, chanting the myth. He turned me around but I was as if in a trance and I didn’t see him but kept on in my song and so he left me there in the danger hoping I’d blow away. I know of it only because I hear the whispers. There are no secrets on a ship—everything will out.
There are words for the wind that can calm it, and there are words to force it to such violence it breaks a bird in flight in half—not words, one word said differently in the song.
It’s dangerous to speak.
Underneath the words on the scroll are a series of lines I’ve never understood. They don’t modify the words above them, nor is the line consistent—thicker in places, thinner in others, as is a calligraphic line. It is written in a different ink, I think by a different hand—as if, as if the old Jesuit’s helper had brought the scroll to someone, shaman or wise man or healer or singer, and that man added in these lines to correct or finish the scribe’s work. But last night in the gale I understood. Singing into the wind the gale spoke underneath my words, a drone against which the myth’s song could be heard. The song is double-voiced, can only be sung truly by two people. One must sing the unvarying drone, the ground against which the song itself with its words creates what it creates, opens what it opens. A song cannot be sung against absolute silence, a different kind of silence must be created, a silence that isn’t silence, a nothing that is instead of a nothing that is not.
I left, Daniel—and I’m sorry for it—but I left because I need help with some difficult points in the song, places where it seems a word must be sung twice in the same instant, sung in such a way where a word means itself and its opposite at once, as light in the song also means darkness, as the word for sun also includes the light of the moon.
So I am sailing to the island, the old island, center of the world.
There is one singer left, Daniel—only one person alive who can sing this song. He came to me in a dream and told me he was dying. Such people can do such things. In my dream he said he has heard me singing this song. He told me he must teach me what is unwritten in the words. He called to me in a dream, and because of this dream I left you. He told me he was dying. He told me time is short. He showed me a map. A tiny island in or near the Galapagos, those islands sailors for centuries would stop at to carry a tortoise away for dinner. Those islands where, when a sailor died while carrying a tortoise, died from heat or exhaustion or sickness, he was lucky enough to be buried on land so he still has a body to be mourned.
I also sound crazy to myself, when I am someone named Allan listening to myself—but I’m not Allan anymore. Not only. I’m someone anonymous. A singer. A singer is no one and then being no one becomes a kind of everyone. I’m a better father anonymous than I am with a name—
Love,
Father never spoke to me when I was a child as he spoke to me in his letters. When I would stand in the doorway of the study while he worked he looked at me as if I were only a child—the child that I was—and too young to be initiated into his thoughts. He would look up at me with a kind of pity. In the letters his voice was different. He knew they wouldn’t only be read by the young boy I then was, but also by the adolescent I wasn’t yet, and the young man, and the adult, and sad middle-aged me sitting in the night sheen trying not to cry.
Grandma Clarel would read the letters, too. She knew where I kept them in my room. I didn’t hide them, nor did I mind. I wanted company inside their strangeness. She read them sitting on the edge of my bed; I would find her when I came home from school, dabbing a wadded-up tissue to her eye, sniffling loudly, and saying to herself oh no, oh my in rapid succession, and when she saw me, she would say Daniel, you’re home, you’re home, so early too! Coffee, coffee, it’s time for coffee and a snack, as if singing a song to a tune ever present in her head, and, stuffing the tissue up the end of her sleeve, would smile broadly as if to hide from me her worry, as if I hadn’t seen her crying, as if I couldn’t see her eyes, her slightly disheveled hair whose strands escaped the bun she kept it in, and seeing that I saw the letter in her hand, would look at me and say oh this, I was neatening up and it fell to the ground. Come, come with me—pausing briefly—Your father is having quite a trip, isn’t he?—
Dear Daniel,
The woman in the chasm in the whale’s broken mouth—she is not alive but she is not dead. She is waiting with her child inside her. There are other stories you’ll learn. Orpheus descended into the underworld to rescue his beloved Eurydice. He sang a song the darkness itself loved and it parted veillike in front of him. Eurydice followed him, would follow him as long as he sang, as long as his fingers struck the notes, as long as he didn’t look back to see if she was following. But he did look back and she was swallowed back into the night, the night that isn’t the opposite of day, the other night.
I’m scared I will look back too—when the time comes—Love,
The letters grew shorter. He stopped writing our last name on the envelopes; they simply said—
Son, my Son,
Do you know how much of the world is real? All of it is.
It is dangerous to speak and it is dangerous not to speak.
Beneath the song other songs exist;
beneath the myth other myths.
The chasm-world is open.
Songs are doors. Singers betray thresholds.
Death is a chasm under life. The song sings it open.
Dark ink on white page.
Opposites embrace when they collide.
The song is a form of life that does not deny death.
Dreams do not teach us to sing but show us there is a song.
The song is a form of death that does not deny life.
Every singer is also sung.
Love,
Father’s last letter regained a clarity I thought wholly abandoned—at least, it began so—
Dear Son,
The ship will leave me on the island tomorrow. It will sail away and leave me here. You might receive no letters from me for some time, and I want you not to worry. I will be with the old singer, learning. And when I’ve learned—
(and here his handwriting changed, lost the canny precision of his cursive hand, closed letters remaining open, a lower case e whose line never crossed fully into its semicircle, an o incomplete)
I will arrive in
your dream and tell you—and I won’t be alone—
Love,