Joshua Cohen - Witz

The purpose of this gathering’s hushed like a baby born into sin then flushed down the Nile, is to lay to suckling sleep the groundwork, in Jerusalem, for a lasting peace — and so nothing’s new under Ecclesiastes’ sun, Kohelet’s, which is as oppressive as it ever was, if only here, the shadow of its former dominion. Idea is to fix a ration of reparations to the remaining few Unaffiliated; who first need to be counted, who, Shade thinks, to receive such reparation would just love to be counted, and then and only then — it’s proposed — to get them their own nation, some small wound of bloody dreck somewhere, anywhere, to become infected, infecting…proposing to appease them, to shtum them up — to let the world get on with what it has to get on with, the Law. On the wall opposite the projection, there’s hung an extensively taut skinlike tatter, a parchment spliced then nailed as if to dry itself of slaughter in that light in from the one thin teardrop window still arcing, not yet walled: it’s a map, of the nation in question, that questionable nation, what to name it, why — partitioned wherever as an exclave, an excrescence, balmed in roughly the shape of B’s body, it’s said; that is, if you examine it squinting then sort of to the left, looking upsidedown, too, and through an obstruction, a column…Shade’s head in his hands, staring down, heedless, unhearing. What would’ve been B’s bodyparts: organs, glands, and yadda in that vein, leeching fourcolored inside these black borders some thick with others dotted as if for future severance, all sectioned then labeled with the names of the assembled, and to him the President what’re inexplicable numbers, indicating spheres of influence, responsibilities, domains of empire imminent only in their destiny, never to manifest…His forbiddenaround, tabooedabout hindquarters, there at the sinew of the thigh marked thickly in red with the term Undecided as if expecting, or provoking, a fight with any angel that would deign to sponsor; His heart’s hachures bearing the name Shade in black, His heart that is itself a Shade, which name is shadowed, too, under the tongue and then upon the forehead, marking due north toward a border that’s going to prove a problem, a pain in the international tush that’s labeled across the entirety’s lakelike middle Abulafia (its southern extremity, though, also marking the ocean, and so they’d be controlling what would be this country’s major port and largest city), a solution to which’ll probably eventuate even more death and, what’s worse for Shade, another invitation to a meeting amid the rooms of this scorched soaking Jerusalem tomb, yet another convocation of this body, and their seconded, protracted session of parceling His — this legislating of it parsed, skinned and grown then shed — this body that’s to be His not much longer, which will become as foreign to Him and to us as will be that makeshift nation to any, to be grafted onto the spine of whichever continent so deserves it, would deserve if only. And if, ultimately, amid all these arguments, these questions unanswered because still and forever unasked, unproposed, a solution can’t be found, and soon, by eventuality’s timetable, which is wellappointed, placecarded, and centerpieced, too, with Sinai’s two tablets, with the settings around them in place for first seating and already amply spread with the dew — listen, there’s always Shade’s solution, which is final, enough. Intifada. Plan B. It remains a Shem unnaming, however, this thirdtablet silence — for now not a label, placard, or scrap, but a gag. Hands are shook. If only in hope. All arches, their gates and their avenues, remain open.

The Arch

In the beginning as in its end — though Maimonides the Rambam might deny one — we are told Without form and void, and we listen, we respond, we repeat, Without form and void, generation after generation, Without form and void, generation Without form, generation And void…though we might add, if only now, forever late in a latening time, that it’d been soft, too, and as warm and as wet as a womb. Then the pressure from within, and then that from without, as substance separated and those separations separated; all was already old, existenced deeply. A mouth was forming, a mouth in the making — an arch. Then, the waters were divided into waters down here, waters up there, the waters were rent, the wet ripped, and hardness ensued, hardnesses, and we say — Darkness was upon the face of the deep…

An eruption down the dirtied throat, an irruption, others hold, dirtying, the blown breath of God, taking with its flow all the detritus that webbed the esophageal walls, venously scummy — ejectamenta, those spoiled little gel-fishes, and that vegetative stink, to fall laval down to the depth of the stomach’s valley. The stones, though, they went up the other way, were vomited up from where they lay like macle: there they sat as rock inside stones yea when they remembered…had been quarried up from deep in the gut, having laid there lo under layers and layers of layers maternal of rocks and the stony paternal for ages that weren’t yet ages but Then — finally to be formed, as found, unfinal, never. Verily, the finding gave them form, And it was good, then the form gave them function, and it was open, opening: these stones destined for heaps, which were found in other heaps, founded in heaps predating heaps, preterite piles, they were arranged, they’d be arranged — in an arch…into two arches facing each other, these arches of soaked stones rocking in vomit up from the gut, whites surfaced from the gutted river of tongue, not yet forked between the good, the bad, and the unsayable flow of the middle, which itself is never to fork. Rocks, punishments exacted to yellow. Gravestones. Teeth to lose.

B stands in front of an arched gateway once passingly ornate whose doming gold can now be found within the mouths of those around Him, those asking of Him, questioning with smiles that can’t comfort but glow, the untrustworthy wrinkles of the pious. It’s the opening here to a town with no name and, too, with every name they’re speaking in glinty hints, who knows the nyms, the polyonymous endos and exos, I don’t, onomastics masticating on and how, either, it doesn’t matter to nostalgia, never does…east from whence the world came from the belly of the bestial valley, vulvar and dark with a breath of its own that blows cold. He speaks none of the languages, I speak nothing. B yawns stumped, standing at its guardhouse, its gatehouse, passage’s home without guard, at least none that I’ve noticed, noticing me…His legs arched open to walk through the arch, to walk through this gate’s village, which town, then out its arch opposite, to flee toward the horizon then into the rise of the sun, from its set — all the while casting His own arch, against the day’s brightness, its shadow arcing His shade, behind Him then ahead its towns and its villages, toward the horizon that’s the rise of all arching and His, which wanders on with Him even while He’s fleeing it, too, and so arriving and departing forever, and never.

Hold on a moment, though, langsam, slow down, says the Guide — it’s that there’s this interesting thing about arches.

The Group quiets.

It’s that they’re built with crosses, just follow me here, the Crucifix…there’s mumbling, a snarky grumble — the cross being the frame, he says by way of quick explanation, hurried, hurrying FYI; they’re the gallows for the gallows, if you will, the construction of an arch involving the use of a scaffold, have patience, usually of wood, until the placement of the central voussior, the quoin as it’s often called, the keystone, or crown: a cantilever, that’s the stone that’s in the middle, to be placed at the highest peak of the arch, the stone that negotiates, that mediates, that bears every burden…the pressure, you with me — without it, all would fall.