Joseph McElroy: Women and Men

We already remember what’s been going on. How is another question.

Isn’t that a large shadow on the road running parallel to us or our dream? Is it loaded? — it’s approaching in some opposite direction too, looking for its light. Check it out. It is to be shared, and with us, we think. Do we deserve to know what is outside coming near? We really forget if it was in the prophecies, there is so much to do now.

Once a mother who did not tell stories sent her two sons away. To be human, she told one of them certainly. But each son felt that the leaving had been hers, not his. Though his own future motion was real enough: hence relative to hers as hers to his.

To go on, once there was a power vacuum. An as yet unfixed emptiness simply asking power to rush in. This much was agreed. By people sitting down together, all their legs near one another under a table. The table took shape from month to month, year to year — round oblong oval round — century to century, we heard — while under the table the legs of all the people developed protocol. A new kind of leg work. High energy, was the report. And aren’t they your responsibility too? we asked each other — and answered, The legs or the people? (Legwork, one called.) But while some of this was to be tabled, power vacuum was generally agreed a possibility. Like the human thigh, it had evolved in the mind. Like femur for "thigh." But power vacuum: think of it.

The words took hold. In them a daughter had a name for Father. But in the midst of a time that would rush us into bastardy, why we had a name for us period that got us off the ground bam bam whoosh thank-U-Dad; for Power Vac was just the label to market our dream. So take this trip, a leg of it anyway, to market, babe. Power Vacuum was all the handle we need.

Oh handle for what?

I know what’s been going on, an unknown child says to a changing grownup. Like, don’t think I don’t know.

Handle with care. The shadow on the road, the high road, is a Wide Load, its sign says it is, and this Wide Load (a house or other container) which we took to be running parallel to us we can’t seem to pass or not pass. Yet after it has been arduously and dangerously passed, isn’t it ahead of us again? That’s correct. Could it not stop for us, as we could not for it? It had windows and half-open blinds. It had signs on it wide load, and the back that we remember so well we can almost see it facing us was as wide as the dark scenery we passed through in our native, late-model vehicle, our bicycles on the sun roof fixed mountainous flashing their spokes like this Wide Load vehicle’s great double wheels now up ahead and spinning slowly backward as reflected in the mirror-faced low offices of an insurance-type firm at the outskirts of a new village.

We remember what’s been going on. Already remember what’s been here with us so long we had the time to see but now seem to have been waiting to remember. For who are we not to? Yet give ourselves permission also to forget.

Now, a thinker of the century in question, twentieth among many late centuries surrounding it that were on occasion repelled by the twentieth, said Meaning something is like going up to someone. If so, what is this that we mean to get over, and while we’ve got one another here, who is this someone we mean to share, we who were probably not here first yet who are no less natives at least of this motion. We deserve to know what approaches us.

Is there a break here? Or is it our breath together? It’s what’s between us, or we share. A relation, which we are all. And what a time for a breath or break. Before we’ve half begun. Which we are always doing, aren’t we? It’s the best time. A breather now.

For hear us falling. Toward the horizon albeit oblique, for we imagine it isn’t our natural state. We are some power to be here and to have changed toward life even to think distinct from these angels lately to be heard speculating in us as if they were learning to hope. We deserve to know what is in us.

Now, sent away by a mother who herself appeared to have been the one who left, those two remembered sons were secretly one as well as two. That is, we go on but we do not go on; go away but are still there. Mayn was the name, and of the two sons the one who eventually did go away was James.

And to go on: a personalized power vacuum a daughter found in place of father before she had ever even heard of a power vacuum out in the hinterlands stayed with her all along and into later life something of an inspiration. What would she have done with a more definite father? Call her Grace Kimball and she will hear.

Hear us all falling toward the horizon. It’s the wind the other side of an obstacle that draws us toward it. But the wind is our wind as was the obstacle we heard only as a prelude to whatever lay beyond. Hear what is in the wind. A song, says someone (grownup, to be sure). But, built into the song, hear the noise. The noise, it is a city in itself where not everybody knows everybody else. And each century is a person coming to that city. Like, for future reference, an ever-young, once-wed, once-divorced woman without children but with a following, by name Grace Kimball, who was bound to be heard from; and from another angle, for future reference (read residence), a family man and traveler, also once wed, once divorced, a man named Mayn, James Mayn, hear the noise. And should they never meet, we have been invited no less: like we are the news either way — meeting or not meeting — as we are the relations between them. And have we not felt we are more?

The angels to be heard at times in all this or in us were not here first. Sometimes we really don’t know what they are.

Once long ago a mother told one of her two sons he should go away and he was still very young, though a strong, manly boy. But then she left before he had the chance, and so he felt the leaving was hers, not his.

She never told stories, but his grandmother did, and his grandmother’s were made up out of an adventure she had really had in an earlier day, earlier century in fact. These old reports could sound sometimes a little like what was going on now in the grandson’s life, but he shrugged it off, trusting his grandmother’s little histories.

He belongs to all this which does not easily tell love and separation apart and is about both together. Unhappily he left his wife and his children. Yet did he not live, then, somewhat as he had always lived? It is a time of such changes. Life change is much the cry and we hear it and he probably more than gives it its true weight, which means he must take a longish view— maybe too dumb to be afraid, he jokes. Some brief, important people coming and going here more or less known to him — are they like parts of the work he does? are they news? — of birth, being in love, tenancy, privacy, children? To all this belongs also a woman he may never quite meet. Except through some of these same others. Unlike him she does think of these others as her work: aren’t they discovering body-selves? aren’t they designing their lives? exploring options? For all the world like traders coming and going around her. History passing through her helping hands and voice revealed to her twenty-four hours a day so that in the women’s groups she created and makes her living from in the mid-seventies of the century she runs things with a faith that comes from power more than the other way around. She can be fooled but not for long.

All of this speaks. In many bodies or, as our leaders have said, on an individual basis. Speaks also, we understand, in this "we" that we have heard. What is it? some community? Ours. Operating less than capacity then suddenly also beyond itself. So that in the zone between we have this voice of relations— is that it? — of possible relations too.