Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

But if two pioneers into one comprises one beginning ongoing, here is already another: a room, a city room, a mid-room of a railroad flat: and on the chipped walls big blood-red, blood-black working drawings on brown supermarket bags opened out, cut up, masking-taped together. And you are listening to an elder meteorologist with a broken yet rebroken and lengthened face expound too fast (then too slow, ignoring you, Mayn) that these represent another weather that may arise from convergence of atmosphere with some coastlines that of late actually have seemed disturbed, have varied suddenly like subtle fronts.

And while the world doesn’t interfere now with this elder maverick’s work, he does have a few correspondents left. One is a native American adolescent, New Mexico Pueblo Indian, y’know, who calls the Hermit-Meteorologist "great-uncle" and mails him bright chalk pictures (they’re in the other room) of sunsets and faces and mesa-based Apollo rockets like individual ears of corn; the second correspondent is an established inmate of a penitentiary, and he sends — God! — tips of some telepathic iceberg, y’know, reflecting what he found in his mail: write a lot of letters, you get a lot, the Hermit observes: oh this fellow’s much exercised about the high cost of opera tickets (that popular art!) and the current claims of women yet their "will"(!) to give themselves up for their men; but more to the point, letters re: precipitation of New Weather in new self-supporting communities. In return for all these letters, the Hermit’s afraid he’s sent back only a postcard now and then (like the one you got, you bet, brief-scrawled so it looked like a sketch: come ahead — naming this afternoon).

The Hermit like a discoverer in this bare room chock-a-block with his concepts and his weather: it was there to be found. (That epithet "Hermit-Inventor" adhering like a given name he has lived up to — did you actually hear it given this man? There’s some hum he makes you resist around him of catastrophe. With it comes calm as sharp as a second voice, female far away in some next room of this dilapidated "railroad," babbling soft and old and dearly.) He has pivoted one coastline so it runs cross-country, you’d swear. He has replicated another so it comes on like crabbed waves across the continent. Mountain range, you suggested (to say something). What about a mountain? the man demands.

Is some time-defying coincidence afoot here? Hermit-weathermen-inventors-of-New-York talked their way into and out of histories your spirited grandmother told you portions of; your mother did not tell stories. Were those hermit-inventors all one hermit, as you were one boy? "Great-uncle" to an Indian? It hardly rings a bell; coincidence anyway is against your religion. Jim Mayn will settle for just this oldtimer, tall and irritable, who can’t afford an unlisted number to cope with these screwballs and probably foreign powers who call up (he guesses you’re O.K.), and so is phoneless, hence more concentrated on what’s here: snowflake-fringe coasts and diagraphs of pressureless voids that look like meteorite showers of infinitesimal equation on the wall of this Greenwich Village railroad flat — these could make their clouds of fingerprints considerably more than New Weather (as you clock these curious clouds — their curves of whorls blowing down to smaller and smaller whorls) — no, not just coasts of a weather but, up there on the walls across vertical piece after piece of brown paper, mountains seemingly as well (for your money) or just any old graph contour of some expert’s risk-benefit analysis yet coming right at you or your brain anyhow (friendly dried-out polyp of a still two-gun arsenal, leftrightleftright) receiving obstacles of turbulence that your guy’s differential equations for the evolution of the atmosphere and doubtless half a dozen other things at same time and/or unseen aren’t going to help you with (and if you’re this recycled man some woman called you warmly you have to admit the other day look around at the accelerated evolution of practically everything including these. . what? you feel the word move your throat and mouth, the word "angels," where’d it come from?) and hell anyway this elder maverick New York Hermit-Meteorologist says forget it if you’re not up to them, the equations, he as for him never got family relation straight, left it to the women — second something twice removed—"Great-uncle to an Indian?" you ask—"Oh my gosh who knows what the boy meant by that? Second cousin I would have guessed, if my uncle or was it great-uncle was his grandfather. Leave that to all our kinship hunters in the field," your host mutters. . " — where’d you say you’re from? Jersey?" People underrate the grandeur of New Jersey, he laughs the very laugh you heard in his postcard replying to your humble inquiry. Pretty much over your head, you had inquired if radioactive mists might breed atmospheric "sports" — freak fronts, stacked weather — say, like a tree with no trunk, you half-see, half-hear (but did not say in your letter), or a mountain you can’t see.

Word of this man’s bulletins launched from a local radio station near Cape May had come to you — the Coast Guard had complained — then elsewhere he was fired by an offshore pirate television station because, according to (he laughs) his prison correspondent, the hermit has powers of warning communicable in a beeline to others — so no need for wire service, radio, or TV. (Wait — the powers communicable? or the warning?) But "the grandeur of New Jersey"? For a second the old tales wander back — all of them and for just one second.

The old geezer’s not after publicity. Unless it could get him the funds to hire the plane and the infra-scan gear and a human or two on the ground to prove his guess. Oh you’re willing to believe weather and coastline connect: this is no hare-lipped hype for the news-margin traders — you could name one who will send and, yes, buy photo-illustrated rumor linking a mountain of mineral matter with an intelligence strategy undermining what might have been one of the more interesting socialisms in South America: whereas the hermit’s meteorology finds only a relation between unprecedented atmospherics and the behavior of little stretches of coast that may alter infinitesimally overnight: work he’s done that’s solid and odd: but hardly your staple all-points conspiracy theory like what the South American (Connecticut-resident) owner of newspaper chain you James Mayn currently work for asked you to look into: that has a Chicago industrialist’s estranged son thousands of miles south arranging President Kennedy’s Texassassination to impress a Chilean woman he is pursuing while he’s studying magic music-stories with which Araucanian Indian brujas in the South demoralized their Spanish conquerors, but at same time north of there near the port of Valdivia helping rebuild after an earthquake: and the woman? she’s a member of far left MIR (M for Movement) but soon to flip her coign to equally anti-liberal rightist revolutionary hive; nor is this New York maverick weather-discoverer’s coastline-atmospheric-pressure correlation any suspense-loaded Doom ding-a-ling in all probability, certainly not mystery’d like family closet within closet complete with (remember the Edison light bulb that goes on and off with the) door, so let’s make it last and leave the madness, folly, deaths, and their relevant skeletons back in there — for this isobar-tailed atmosphere freak in a railroad flat in New York’s legendary Greenwich Village is coming up with science that resonates. And while you don’t grasp all he’s saying, if he has found a New Weather of enclosed voids that like "strangers" do not draw outside pressures inward, the old guy’s right to call it "weather-possibly-without-a-cause" and at the same time relate it to "outlandish parallel phenomena" he describes as infinitesimal breaks in fanatic coastline indentations directly beneath the weather in question — breaks that are not supposed to be there—"where" both weather and coastline turn out to be expressible in these (he calls ‘em) "erratic shape equashuns" — "regular monsters, ‘fya look close, like each surprised by the other, sky, land, sky."