Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

But where, when, who — and also what statue? wakes the interrogator after an unsound nap, his finger never having left his juice button.

The answer comes, but he will have to settle for pure information because the person liable is absent, and the words "Bedloe’s Island, 1885" mean plenty — the late Margaret Mayne hearing at the daughterly age of twelve or thirteen a voice behind her mutter that they would never put this thing — this Statue — together, plus it was facing the wrong way, and "Go west, young girl" — and "Look her in the eye, you’ll see what she never will" — where by "what" we meant the more uncrated parts of the Statue of Liberty standing (Seeing is Believing and/or Belief) (shipped B.O.D.) lying in raw grass between the winds of New York harbor.

Yet purest of all information is your future fact, predicted yet unconfirmed: for instance, soon after the U-2 cover story the Hermit-Inventor’s prediction (and this is a later manifestation of the Hermit whom Grace Kimball and James Mayn separately and half-knowingly encountered one bright day in Manhattan in 1977) that a weatherman on Formosa would at some time in the near future guarantee that a storm with a feminine, often religious, name and eye, would not hit Formosa; moreover, that this Formosan meteorologue would be so wrong that the very next day (so went the Hermit-Inventor’s prediction) upwards of two hundred and fifty people not exclusively Formosans would die by the hand of that hurricano, and between seventy and ninety would (by the Hermit-Inventor’s calculations) end up missing; and that this unwary weatherman with his feet on the ground would stand trial for negligence with years of his life at stake.

But who are we getting at? or to? Was it our parents? (But) we are our parents by now, and in a miracle of memory now see they were angels of ordinariness helping us toward helping ourselves, we trust.

Well, not the child next door, maybe. That child next door multiplies slowly with a fresher, less-obsessed sexuality. And will never become the beautiful diva, who once in the embrace of her Chilean naval intelligencer felt virtually contained by the thought of the weight-loss tapeworm inside her. Opera singers are said to survive revolutions, we have reminded the interrogator more than once. But she was not there when the revolution came off, no? And it isn’t revolution much less fast food that brings her infamous South American amor to New York, but counter-revolution — if not music itself.

We come there from all over, always (as once Grace Kimball) ready to start out. We come there from the perimeters like we were Owl Woman’s words instead of people, words that come by the zoologist-woman Mena and her curiously historical gentlefriend Marcus Jones and the Anasazi healer and the Navajo Prince’s mother with a hole in her head who was said to have tried this very healer. Upon which the Anasazi told the Hermit-Inventor that he on the contrary had consulted her as if she were a healer in need of being healed. This was power and modesty, as Owl Woman, when she was visible and when she was not, exemplified to the Anasazi. Witness her reminder that her songs had been taught her by spirits of the departed in the form of "spirit-tufts of downy white feathers". . "owl feathers." The Princess of the East, parking her great eider-shaped bird — and she at once understood as a bolt from the blue that in this day and age whatever songs intermingled back home, she’s gon’ see the land. The Navajo Prince’s mother whose visiting demons only others (all others) could see junketing in and out, in and out of the capital cavity, took time out to welcome her. The Princess felt this as a fresh start. Yet this thought brought back the face of Harflex, a youngish noble back among her father’s loyal mountains who’s waiting for her hand. Yet on the way there, she had encountered premonition outside herself from high up like a break-in through the atmosphere as if the well-known breaks one in each of every layer of different breath sphering our world had for an instant sync’d together into one deep cleft letting in whatever was to be let in, oh cost and benefit both. But meanwhile it was the light of welcome brimming all over the face of the Navajo Prince’s mother that the East Far Eastern Princess noted, when she came to sense that out here in the West was for her a fresh start. Yet this brought to mind part of the face of Harflex, the bookish, great-footed noble back home to whom she was tacitly ‘trothed. So she didn’t quite see the known demons going in and out of the roof- or smoke-hole of that Navajo lady’s head observed by one and all, by all except the lady herself and the visiting Princess. Fresh start? Yet on the way to the ceremonial sing that honored the demons as much as tried to drive ‘em out, she had encountered from high up like a break in the atmosphere the Hermit-Inventor’s eye. Which conveyed, in addition to "Nice to see you again, we hardly had time to talk when you passed through New York" and "I may have told you I was going to be out here where I often vacation" — also, "You must decide one way or the other."

Or so she imagined he said, and she was right. Men meant what they said, and he meant she couldn’t have it both ways, maybe she was the Princess, but she was also Margaret on leave from home and from the mission her father had sent her on, to wit Chicago’s famed World’s Fair. Not, of course, only the New Jersey exhibition, which Jim generations later told a date was a pretty modest house (how gotten there? wide-loaded by wagon?), New Jersey’s temporary home away from home in 1893—and Margaret had drawn into the orbit of her open-ended trip the pampas of Dakota, the loco weed rocks of Col and a territory of Indians (as one used to measure them, supplying directional axes by vectoring God’s winds to get our aim), while He was essentially Elsewhere, it being a trait of Him to like being away yet always know His people were there back home keeping a place for His manifestations.

It is the late rediscovered ideal of putting something or someone on hold, that is, in order to know they’re there, a form of love if you think too deeply about it. As possibly the interstate computers knew on the night of a "held" Moon launch at least that the system was still there, which included the People, who in their turn, each at his post, knew that others waited there like latter-day angels for their wait to be dissolved and the curtain to go up on a new age in the form of a Saturn rocket until some among these journalists, economists, and seekers could find their own detour around time lost and say hello to the minutes of their being.

Easy to say, hard to manage, said the naked woman on Grace K’s workshop carpet in ‘76-’77 because I have had so many reasons to move fast, to fill a day with a dozen other days to come—

Right on, baby!

Say that again, Clara?

— until you can lose that presence that is yourself helping yourself first to what there is, reaching a place at which you hear each moment pass through you in order then to forget the time and these desperate demands on you— (As if you were being followed, said Grace—) (. . Exactly.)

(and Lincoln the saffron (dis-)robed correspondent added, "Just what I was going to say" — while she registered that Clara’s "Exactly" in response to Grace was held back a second: a curiously long and short second full of apprehension, yet Clara’s "Exactly" seemed full of simple acknowledgment and Lincoln knew that Clara was being followed.)

Which is, for the followee and follower, a similar though not "same-as" form to putting on hold, going on ahead whilst knowing They are situated behind and won’t go away.