Joshua Cohen - Witz

Animals, mewling punching kicking beasts and curs. Animals, but animals with beards, suddenly with sidelocks, animals adorned in fringes, clothed in black, in new boots and hats and wigs, which are black, too, and even laundered; their hides the purest snow. Without, everything’s slushy, sullied, trashed. Horse dropping desecration. Old oil on the quivering gelled surface of the eye. Lenses smudged in ember, whorled fingerprints of ash. Gray burrows into drifts of boot and cart. Filling letter slots, mailboxes, even mouths to stut and spit, silence, then, as if in a renewed language, an attempt to expound again. Arguments batter every corner. These animals never relent. As the limousine takes turns, rights lefts, makes drastic swerves, turnarounds, Us and loopdloops, it passes packs of seething envy, parts resentful mobs to leave them in its wake exhaust to breathe on — the window cracks, a stone’s been thrown, or has fallen as hail, be charitable. The city has chosen, it’s changing: bodies dumped to bump drifts of fall long cleared; apartments have been repainted, appliances replaced on warranty usurped. Restoration’s in the air, He’s sensing even without a face…Ben’s limousine swerving as if driven by the quick pitiful flicks of His searching head, His form, Him an entrapped wounded mammal attempting only to window a view through the veil. They hurl into embankments, stagger around in skid to seek a throughstreet, a shoveled path, a route alternate if wild: maps are useless, fit for kindling, to stuff into shoes for warmth. Understand, there have been casualties, with service down if not delayed: the numbers have been unordered, readdressed, the grid has come undone. Junk juts up from pilings midstreet, mounds of sooty clump, dark humps of tar macled with ice in glittery brilliance. The limo takes a wide turn, cuts across meaningless lanes to curve into a straightaway, pacing itself against the Parkside sprawl, lined with streetlamps that’ve wilted from the crooks of bishops into logs obstructing, laid frozen across Fifth Avenue from sidewalk to the sewer. The Park’s overgrown in icicle fang, a flank of clods and butts bearded in white, rising to overflow the walls that stand to stop the spill from threatening the lane: walls of fieldstone, filthed, themselves walled with heaps of trash. Ben hauls over to the window facing, collapses against its blind: Uptown, the arching arctic crests and crowns, the dusted trails with the Reservoir rinked; low gusts winding frost along the floor of the Park, through tunnels, over bridges, then across its lawns, their bushes and shrubs snowed as if to cool and blameless monuments, freshly flush with light. Untrafficked, it’s this pure polarity by day, a golden pale suffused by latter dusk — with a strange and utterly clear crystal coddled deep and cold within.

Through the mist, this hulking ice preserve — a sudden spurt of metal, then the estrangingly sunsanded stones of Jerusalem: here, a towering assemblage of brute rock arrayed in courtyards, gated in blocks of ice never to melt, everlasting, or so it’s said. This, the once and future Temple, to be risen Solo-monaic in its particular design, Scriptural in its general layout, and updated to modernity in every other amenity known to mensch and God alike. At the foot of its stairs and their twin plinths makeshifted with fiberglass fronds, twin lions prowl starving, guarding only their own skeletons: they’re joined to the stairhead by links of ice in a chain of ice, frozen around their manes. From this ascent, an upward airing — spires to lance the sky, to thrust their wound and drag the heavens down: banks of clouds fallen, dispersed into the Temple’s wings to be nested on all sides in courtyards of their snow, circling ever more sacred, to be centered evermore holy, ringing around the steaming freeze of the altars and lavers. All here, within, however, is of this other substance, this openness divinely synthetic whether of glass or weather, this material that is both of them at once, and neither — in that the inmost walls of the Temple are not walls but screens or scrims of this wondrous transparency; a thoughtless clarity, though as solid as study, and as thick as its books; walls through which any supplicant — speeding to the site, His limo heading into the Park on the sole access road to park itself wide at the very foot of the edifice, unfinished — could gaze his or her prayer directly into the middle of the structure, through each circumambulating courtyard, tripping, slipping, past every barrier of the sacred and then, beyond; walls, though, through which only the one true supplicant, it’s been said, Ben, could find His way beyond all mist, the mystifying freeze, straight into its generative core, the coldest inner sanctum: a block or cube of this icy substance; some say hollow, others say not, but a block nonetheless — the barren womb of the Temple’s heart, the seed to this total husk. As Mada comes quickly official down the stairs to greet, a mass of surrounding workers in their blue reflectored hardhats and whiteblue parkas drop their picks and shovels and make to restrain the raving lions, which lunge weakly to take nips and nibbles, only to soon tire, quiet, and muzzle themselves with nuzzles of the limo’s tires smoking, sniffing, licking, then lying down against the heated hull asleep.

The Park — a world Hanna had freshly laundered, laid upon the table of Manhattan, a cloth usually reserved for festive use, for company, now here without guests for the glorification of its centerpiece, the Temple. A towering worship of Babeling chutzpah. Ben’s escorted up its steps, almost slips, regains the landing, a mustering for workers and supply, stands small before the freeze. A threat to melt with the rise of any morning’s sun: GrecoRoman pediments topped with gilded domes, minarets held up by columns their canopies heaped hectic with frozen fruit; styles melting into the style of styles, into a pure if meaningless grand, nonsensical, less complex than merely complicated, more interests, many inputs: hundreds of commentaries have been going into its construction, are still, and there are even more designs to come; melting into each other, into themselves, and away, in a pomposity of rubble, alternately modestly plain, and ostentatiously ornate: a construction out of every century, and of none at all, in appearance an albino or transparent roach grown gigantically ancient in the sky; a monster, then, or its fossil, set with unimaginable cubits of inaccessible chamber, gates that give out onto portals, which give out unto walls, its entire phenomenon overwhelming by committee, with apparently infinite seemingly only ornamental pediments and plinths suspending emptiness over trembling void, its buttresses not buttressing but bowing, not flying but falling to porticoes, which are being lined with a statuary that to remain permissible must retain facelessness, as if a gallery of the disappeared, the dispossessed, as if niches and arcades for the unformed and unknown; the structure entire and the hope its unfinished implies a mess of every style that’s ever occurred to money, every style ever evident, possible, and especially attractive, to wealth and associated intimations of posterity potential on the agendum of its legion backers and benefactors, its myriad donors and trustees, whose exalted names — those of revivified Palestein, the Abulafias, illustrious above the others — would have been carved in fiery gold upon the cornerstone, had anyone thought to lay one.

Ben’s escorted up, through the excessive doors, which have to be edged open by the harnessed tug of a unionized team who pause every exertion or so to mob Him and His massing twelve bodyguards unveiled, Ben’s rebuffing lookalikes accompanying, for autographs they won’t grant, and miracles He can’t. His breath comes short and private. Up a flare, as if a tongue on fire, a redcarpet leading into the outermost courtyard that feels as if it might melt under His stride — is already melting, squishing underneath with each step, a seepage; the entire space behind Him, in front, under and above, hewn of that outlandishly modified ice that seems as if it, too, must return to a form of water, of air, to nothingness, forgotten, only to pour out new histories to be decided upon the next hardening, the cycle coming — a world destroyed with its faithful then flowing only to solidify all over again, reformed. Ben’s led with His hands out in front of Him, to touch, to feel, to mold: Him to grope through openings forever made and unmade, perpetually unfixed, past walls hung with the fresh flayed skins of test sacrifices, flapping animal tatters, dampened imageless coverings and curtains in a knotted wash, a fraying whorl: through halls left unfinished in holy negligence, secreting the odd ornament or gingerwork, molding, swirls, whirls and flumes, flows and risen waves, Him flailing past candleboats, votivelike buoys, copper basins, casks and flasks and censers, then at the far reach of an inner courtyard, a tarp-shrouded, twinesecured package resting upon a wooden pallet — the Ark of the Covenant, on permanent loan from the Vatican, courtesy of the Pope, Pius Zeppelini. It feels as if this whole edifice around Him, behind Him, in front, above, below, is about to collapse with His progress, to drain away in His passage, swirling Him filthy as profane, profaning, toward the gutter and the sewers, to gurgle out to ocean. Dizzying. And inspiring of guilt that His presence might signal such disaster. A shofar blast, an avalanche. Three short toots followed by one long moot, a tekiah to sound destruction. Ben tries not to breathe, concentrating Himself on following the carpet. Through another momentary gateway, He’s entering the Innermost Courtyard: full of drift, a vastly unsullied spanse — expansively fictile, a world of snow and flake, of gusting dust, germing in white and clearer, to a bluish glassiness, suffusing…the weather here, as it appears this enclosure has its own, is not fall but the scrim of fall, its skin’s fall, this sheer air paling, and then again vivid, revelatory in changing skies, prismatic but always pellucid, like a piacular rainbow whose only color is light in every shade. Set against the furthest wall, another set of doors, also steel though these significantly smaller than those of His initial entrance, now requiring His stoop slid down a flight of stairs — there, under the ice, Der stands decorous, impeccably impatient, leaning against the arch leading to the Holiest of Holies.