Joseph McElroy - Ancient History - A Paraphrase

“We came here,” you called, “not really to penetrate a Think-Tank but to confront ourselves. Not till the missile-man finds himself on the end of his own vector, no not till the pickers became the growers”—here a dramatic shift to grapes—“will you get what you think you’re seeking with your boycotts and your marches. I found as I wended my way from breakfast to teatime in a gentle curve up the coast” (you didn’t on this word veer into your brogue), “that this march is itself an abstraction. So whyn’t you kids become capitalists and change things.”

Well in the space between the Marxist pap and the black-capitalism-for-white-kids stood a charge of paradox that Darla first (through 180 degrees) cheered, then in her Manhattan Hash column next week attacked as the “threadbare neo-conservatism” of a would-be body-contact head who was “ultimately” little more than an “artist.” (Her personally asterisked footnote: “See his minor styrofoams said to be in private collections in Boston, Salt Lake, New York, and the legendary preserve of a rancher-recluse in extreme northeast Montana.”)

But I saw your greatness as your will to interrupt yourself, to be a hero who would not de-oscillate the dialectic. (And yet, Dom, oh the Field-Truth that sometimes seems to surround!) At Cora’s you interrupted my remark about space by gazing past me.

At your climactic equations your patronizing son-in-law the doctor shook his head in despair. Their cameras on straps round their strong tan necks, he and Lila turned to go and they parted to pass either side of me but as if they didn’t see me, which I found peculiarly pleasurable. You called those equations the beginning of a science called Structural Activism—“which,” you added, “is a bit different from a hard-on on a boycott, Darla.”

I could have added a twist of humor to my mouth to honor Lila and her husband’s voluntarily entering my Dom-scope and staring at me in total ignorance of who I was; but I couldn’t, because your equations suddenly so restructured my priorities that I had to review my Force-Field. That is, I found in your ABC’s reason to think I better crystallize your kinship with me. Silence accumulated as through your bullhorn you slowly said, “The relation between altruism and balls will always be to that between collaboration and division exactly the reverse of what the relation of Art or Babel to Commitment is to that between Collaboration and Commitment.” (My father would ask for a paraphrase.)

Simplified in my secret Centrifuge, and subjected there to certain separations and simulated gravities, this equation of yours I saw could mean that as the gap between Bob and Al closed, the one between you and me would widen. Which confirmed me in my long-time preference for keeping Al and Bob apart.

Yet I knew even then what my step-son Ted was to mean when he later said he was trying to buck rid of dialectic. He, if not Betsy, may have sensed a similar trap of forces when after canceling their appointment or appointments they left the doctor’s building and as they came onto that leaf-gray sidewalk Ted spied their doctor reading the newspaper in his car up the street. That night Ted shrugged and said to Ev, “Well it was your friend recommended him,” and Ev without thinking said to me, “Hugh Blood’s your old friend, not mine,” and Ted said gently, “Oh that shrink’s more interested in research.” Downstairs Ev may be washing her face and thinking what to do next. Emma’s speaking in her sleep, reviewing her day, the red light we had to wait at when I was in a hurry to get home, and the things we saw while waiting for the light to turn — she is dreaming of her dad, who seems to be expanding the old parabolic course he follows among his disturbances. But the red light doesn’t turn green, the red light goes off and the green goes on.

My parents were good. I could ask them almost anything. I didn’t ask about the terrible thing Sue had said, that I’d been a beast all covered with hair at birth and I was still a beast sometimes. My parents didn’t try to divide me, I soon knew I was the only one. One Saturday in June of ’39 or ’40 a moment after I’d been telling Al and Gail that I wasn’t my parents’ real kid because I’d been changed at the hospital, my father came around the house and heard me say that because my head was so big when I was born my mom couldn’t have any more pups. My father took me aside later and could not explain exactly why he hadn’t liked the way I put it, but anyway he didn’t like the “pups” part. Any more than I like transitions. Gail was emphatic: “‘Course she can have more.” But Al loyally said, “Cripes, he oughta know.” May Emma’s dreams always show legged, armed, smiling anatomies, not the linenfold abstracts facing Tracy’s youngest when that tan, listless, suburban child opens her coloring book, while her mother — phoning me for the first time in years — tells me she’s worried about her brother Hugh and can I recommend a psychiatrist. There is time, though no need, for Emma to come someday to her father’s terrible delight in the Force-Field. Its overpopulated commonwealth of distances can be ruled only in the exercise of a rare gift. This consists in that ripe triangle arcing between (a) the polylinked Pons Varolii, (b) the point in the Spinal Bulb where winking is controlled, and (c) a point so perfectly between the cerebral hemispheres as to be of neither. This gift, insofar as it is embodied within the body, I have named the Vectoral Muscle, and I’m beginning to feel that it is not at home with dialectic. “If you mean,” says my father, “just thinking in twos, why not say so?”

“We were getting grass on the picture,” said Al, ending his story and stopping in his skivvies to look out the third-floor window of the room he rented with two other sailors who were generally out on weather patrol when Al’s cutter was in.

“What’s grass?” I asked, still feeling the bear hug I’d given long lost Gail; and Gail answered for Al: interference lines on the radar-scope reflecting electronic noise. “Hey,” she said to Hal, “where’d you get that?” a dark blue blazer with gold buttons.

“We can’t change on the ship,” Al said. “In the public library here if you’re in your blues people look at you, and you can’t concentrate.”

He’s begun memorizing poems from a paperback treasury and he reads world almanacs. This small northeast coast city is the same one Bob and Petty will move to the outskirts of a year from now, the living room on the mainland, the island camp a few years later.

“But why not tailor-mades?” said Gail. She rolled her eyes and grinned sweetly. “They’re pretty.”

“You got to if you don’t wear civvies,” said Al. “The regulation blues’r like overalls, and tailor-mades don’t cost so much but they cost enough. We split the rent three ways, it’s only ten bucks a month, so don’t give me a hard time.”

“I’m not saying anything,” said Gail, and asked about linen.

I asked her how she knew about radar. It was late afternoon, October, I hadn’t seen Gail for three years at least, probably not since the start of Al’s hitch.

“I’m the one he writes,” she said. “Besides you.”

“If you’re not saying anything,” Al kept at her, “tell me which of your brothers is paying your hotel room this weekend?”

“I should phone for a room,” I said, but I knew Gail’s hotel would be half empty.

We watched Al tie his big cordovans, putting one foot and then the other up on the straight chair. Then he pulled on pressed khakis tucking in the tails of his white Oxford button-down.

“My only brother, if you must know,” Gail said to Al and got off the bed.