Joshua Cohen: A Heaven of Others

Nakedness is the formlessness of the void. In the Genesis of the Torah, in the first chapter of the first book of the first and only Torah (if only in the second “sentence,” perhaps), existence is described as being without form and void. And yet as beingness still. This means that existence before Creation was naked. And that Creation was a covering of this nakedness. Modesty, only. I say this because here where I find myself is naked. Here there is totally nude. Though I would like to think I share not much with those I encounter here I must admit we are all formless voids too. O naked us. Pity the nude, though I’m shod and selfpitied. Why we are all formless voids is because we have all long since surrendered — whether willingly or not — any pretense toward individuality. Freeing our souls has meant losing them. Forever, I mean.

I find here I am assigned eighteen mothers. As round and as pure as ostrich eggs, they are as round and as pure as the eggs of ostriches are my eighteen mothers and more, maybe more (I only say eighteen because only that means them all). Ostrich eggs burst fat filled with fat white grapes filled fat with enormous opalescent pearls or are they ostrich eggs I don’t know, I’m not sure. Eighteen eyes white around but black in the middle, Cancer Aba would have said if he wasn’t dead, living in another heaven, I hope. It is convenient that in this heaven we all speak or rather we all understand the same language or at least I understand what they let said to me and It all sounds — almost — like the tongue of America. Anyway all here are merely spoken through (and Queen Houri supports this, no, she embodies), and so our mouths open only to allow a saying that has nothing to do with the apparently individual or previously individuated entity doing the saying, mouthing and blah blah who says. Not the man named Mohammed, who has been shut up now in perpetuity (that is, the man named Mohammed has been shut up, not his mouth). Rather the One always saying the saying through them, through the man named Mohammed then through them by which I mean through us and through me (and does Mohammed picky and choosey through like the Queen did with me and the front of the newspaper?), that first sayer of sayings is said to be an entity that has been named by Who or an entity that has named Itself Allah. It is not to Allah however that we meaning I should address my appeal. I find myself saying this: it is not befitting Allah that Its words should be flung back at It. In your face. As if beets I’ll never eat. I remember. Like shoes to the Poor.

As these mothers, my mothers, have no individual names or ever had, or at least refused them and still do, they asked me all as One — and so as nothing and so as no one — to say to them Houri. A name.

We are a virgin was what they said and I suppose they knew that I was one too. We would be your lover and remain virgin forever they said but soon knew — through Allah? through the man named Mohammed? — that I needed a Queen more, a Queen and more: a Queen who is also her own attendants, her court and her courtiers, her subjects and guard.

Listen. When I ask them Are you my mother? or Will you be my mother? one says Yes, another says Do you want me to be, a third says Only if you will be my son, and a fourth Only if you will not be my son, and a fifth If that is who I am, and a sixth If that is who I am not, and a seventh If that is how I can best serve you, and an eighth If that is how I can best be served, and yet another If that is who I was, and another If that is who I was not and another If your father is God, and another (Only) if your father is not God, and that all of these promises, these blessings and curses course out, all saying the same if in words that appear to oppose — as if their very answers were only random words of a sustained prophecy fled into sound, propheticules just flowing through them like the fulminant foamings of watery wine: out from between their wide parted rubies that mouth long reaches of let’s say tentacle, of binding fringe, of curly lock these endless shafts of air that serve to vibrate a pitch in the air sympathetically all these pitches all wavering as if the rib of a leaf in a storm or the quivering cord by which sustenance would come up from the womb, though I still hear them now in my memory and will forevermore as strings not of puppets or universes but of an enormous piano emanating from the very massing of their mouths — the huge concertgrands Aba used to work on when he wasn’t called over to fix and tune a grandQueen’s fungiform upright — a huge skywide, skylong piano is what I heard and still hear that was strung with strings that were invisible, gusted not only from their very mouths but also as if from their always moist, tuned, tightening and loosening vaginas, from their also always moist, tuned and tuning, tightening and loosening anuses and nostrils and even from the very mutilated wombs of their navels, an A 440 Hz streaming out from their stomachs at the deforming scars of their umbilici, out from between the cleaved halves of their ebonite rubies studded with beryl and carbuncle this A down lower an octave below the middle of All, A the highest string of the Cello entry from behind pain: which was Aba’s favorite poem this A the Queen once played fluming von hinter dem Schmerz: coursing a vast candle wicked apart into plaits of hair to braid with the braids then braiding into a bow of one enormously strong length of flame sounding deep and too low maybe even for any perception except that of rabid dogs on fire, a ray of molten brass it seemed to part the iron clouds that would rain down nails to sound dumb pluck strung out to my own imperfection, out to the exploded hole in me in a too deep thrumming low rumble that seemed to harden into the pipe of an organ, into a diapason of thread knotted to a needle of only an eye, the vibration of the jagged wound in my stomach sounding a hollow note pitched so terribly beyond everything so as to blow the world entire back to void again, the universe crumbling, walls tumbling around the perimeter of Jericho where I’ve never been but an Uncle of mine Alex and the glass he brought back, the Bohemian crystal from the vacation years he took to Prague, the MOSER glassed in our pantries back home (back apartment) on Tchernichovsky Street, Jerusalem, all spidering into a web that was also the constrictive coil of an enormous serpent and its even more enormous hiss giving way only to silence, totally pure silence and still, the truest void though still unnamed and formless. Naked too. And nude.

This was how their saying was said to me or at least how I then heard it.

But to demur: It might be that in the wrong heaven I can only be wrong, and that this Queen of mine is actually clothed, or more accurately that all of her clothing, from the veils that admit only her eyes down to the sandy hems of her garments, actually comprises her nakedness, and further that her nude is just the accumulation, is merely the layering of these garments that are more like winds composed of such proverbial sayings that blow cool the heads hanging heavy from the boughs and branches of the Tree under which they all sit. Under the Tree that (do I trust myself?) grew them, a Tree that fruits virgins: first stemming their heads, then the secretion of their fluted columnarly delicate necks, the breasts blossom, the stomach rounds to pucker the navel, the vagina blooms expectantly until, so heavy, they fall to the ground to sit around the Tree with their sisters.

This Queen, this total massing of women, though they are virgins, is no substitute for the Queen who is immensely beautiful, who was. Because there is one flaw here that cannot escape — because it cannot bear — notice even in heaven, even in a heaven that is wrong, indeed a flaw that might be the very thing that renders them sisters, their relative scar: because when a virgin falls from the tree, having hung upside down for a longer time than any alive could ever hope to measure, with her own, to span, with her own, the virgin falls suddenly, almost unaware, or as if consciousness — hers — didn’t exist until this fall to the ground, which is sand. And so unknowing, unaware, the virgin falls with no ability or else, if you prefer, acknowledged forewarning to protect herself, and so with no help, inexplicably or not, from her sisters, hits invariably hard, a fruit bruised, on the fanatically exposed root structure of the tree, on the razoredged manicured nails of her sisters, upon the gems that star the tree’s trunk, and so each virgin, each of these sisters that are all of them a mother, has a flaw and will always: a dune on her nose, a gash royally smashed upon her forehead, a scar piercing the ear to the lip (it’s a long fall, taller than ten times to what I would’ve grown), a poked in eye or inverted nipple, a caesareantype incision inflicted by a single, windsharpened blade of grass, all imperfections, regrettable though never disqualifying blemishes on these most unbestial of creatures (women in shape, not in manners), which the Queen, my true Queen dead and in the heaven of her own belief, would have frowned a dark rainbow upon, betokening a covenant of disapproval and whether rightly or wrongly thought such physical imperfections a sign, a manifestation of an immemorial inner problem, the gradual emanation of a spiritual decay that would eat the woman alive, the women, eventually, and then any man she or they might ever have touched.