Joseph McElroy - Ancient History - A Paraphrase

There wasn’t anything wrong, I said. But Bob said I had a funny idea of what he and Leo did. I asked what Leo was up to this weekend. Lewiston on business, Bob said. I said Yes of course I knew they were committed to the gross national progress, the central notion of America, the individual pursuit of the truth about national enterprise, the life of companies, the coast-to-coast miracle. And Bob said quietly, O.K. that was it if I wanted to put it like that, I saw my irony had made the bullshit sound intellectual; so he wasn’t unpleased. And just as the denim tar came to see if we wanted another martini Bob interrupted his bemused — even mystical — concurrence sharply asking if that was “coast” or “cost”—had I picked up a brogue doing field studies in Brooklyn? But when the waiter left, Bob went on from Brooklyn to say that you really couldn’t go home again after your “center” had shifted, and I pointed out that though I carried my present investigations into eastern Brooklyn I after all did live in the center of Manhattan now.

And ye gods my words have blown a bell-jar vacuum before me with inside it Bob’s white-knuckled fist, and my stolen Junior Corona, and Bohack Joey’s horny hand and a dim, slim form in corduroys that should be me coming between that pushing, grasping hand and its angry object the indescribably supple, now sweaty Perpetua, just in time for my intervening jawbone to catch Joey’s dim thumbnail: but though Bob’s fist is here — and Dom you know I could describe Petty’s neck and arms if I chose — I now see I can’t merely get to that white-knuckled fist

(that has so little to do with those groin-impaled captives who added savor to my early acquisition of the Assyrian postal system; so little to do with the hunted lioness, a live relief in stone, dying from her paralyzed hindquarters on up her great edificial slant to the fierce head and shoulders above the muscled struts of her forelegs; so little to do with Sennacherib’s library of clay who, though at the Egyptian borders his iron armies were frustrated to decimation-point by some Delta pest subsequently identified by the Hebrews as the angel of the Lord, found cleaner fields on the eastern arc of the Fertile Crescent crushing once and for all the Babylon of my old Hammurapi)

no indeed, I find I must earn that white-knuckled fist by equidistancing such other forces as slipped into my field while I was merely minding my own parabola.

Bob’s idea of you was standard all-purpose, from the media, and he knows what is said of you. But there in the graveyard I felt with wondrous Calm and Elasticity the Force and Truth of your achieved doctrines, Dom, now once more (albeit in jagged fragments) laid neutrally out. You were putting on your abortive Italian rhythm: “We gotta get away from centralized privacy , stop try’n’a keep a hold of our sen timents — wait I mean— no —our sentiments make us hold onto this crap about our owna centrality — this city gotta be deunified, everybody gotta see the city from one big helicopter. If elected that’s where I begin , pal, everyone rides that helicopter, see the city as a coördinate field of force, not a series of kitchens subordinated to living rooms subordinated to underpants on the bedpost.”

Were you faintly Irish answering the first of their questions? Who’s financing your campaign? “Cost-to-cost cross-section.” What you really running for? “Want win in a walk.” A tall thin prematurely gray man in a clerical collar said with a rueful smile, “He’s high, the man’s high,” and in steady Spanish you called him a couple of names and said you were almost in the end-zone and he was still looking around for his balls.

But while I measured the volting ergs of famous future you were pulse after pulse bringing back to homely Gotham from your own moving void your American interior rafting Colorado rapids, judging a drum majorette final, placing (a slightly injured) last in a celebrity trampoline event, and, high in a Houston office complex, cooling a thousand-dollar-a-plate cadre of the underground Counter-Blast Org — somehow the immeasurable familiarity of the bone-white nick on Bob’s cheek displayed your daring territory. The same with the tough low moccasin-toe boots that like his father he ordered from L. L. Bean in Freeport, Maine, and the same with the green-gray tweed whose quality he’d have spotted at a sale in Boston, and likewise the tiny edge of roughness where he’d worn his Nixon button last year; yes and your ergs were displaced, too, by Bob’s blank gaze behind the gold rims waiting for a violent intuition to take hold (a habit that so sets him apart from my country friend Al that they could never get along). And while these details of Bob displaced the loud wilderness of your life, Dom, I endeavored successfully to remember again what I had in common with you, and simultaneously, or you might say “equi-valently,” I felt next to me the fatal familiarity of this friend Bob whom I’m so unlike.

Bob shook his head. “He’s running for a nomination he doesn’t want. Did you read the piece in Time?” (I read most of those depth-studies knowing they never come close.) “It’s easy,” said Bob, “to see where his ideas come from; his wife left him, his son and daughter disowned him, the student movements are dropping him left and right — so he decides to enshrine chaos.” Bob lighted a cigarette and said again, “He enshrines chaos.”

“Which came first?” I said; “the ideas or the personal screw-up?”

“There’s no center,” said Bob. “That’s the point. Let’s go get a drink.” So we are not at The Whaler yet.

We had come back to the east porch of the church and were looking into the long turning cleft of Wall Street. I ought to think up some entertainment, but I wondered why Bob had mentioned Al so casually as if Al were some mere matter of fact in (say) that poly-grid of equi-valent phenomena you, Dom, have profoundly outlined for your public if your public would only think and see. People hurried down Broadway toward Bowling Green, some no doubt toward South Ferry, people coming the other way dropped down subway stairs, a man named Breen we’d gone to Poly with and hadn’t seen for years saw us and waved, men grabbed their newspapers at the corner-stands without seeming to stop. Bob quoted Nahum — or, as I later learned, Father Sedgwick quoting Nahum in an ecological context: “Locusts and grasshoppers.” We had both waved back to Breen. Bob probably regretted missing his regular Friday doubles at the club.

In his pronouncements that Friday afternoon and evening for all their force I felt some absence of priorities puzzlingly similar to what you’ve preached and displayed (at least till tonight, when you did away with your options). Bob never once acknowledged my comment that our new apartment was still a mess, nor mentioned Ev (who I’d said was home with Emma and painting a second bathroom); in the cab going uptown to The Whaler, he asked about my work in Strictural Anthroponoia; but later downtown in the middle of his second plate of octopus he stared hard at me and said this octopus was “terrifyingly insignificant” stuff. He seemed then to want to get away from the long, strewn table-cloths of Puglia’s but not exactly because he was afraid we’d miss the lady archaeologist I was introducing him to. To you, Dom, I needn’t describe Puglia’s, its local posters of combos coming, its grizzled Sicilians chewing roast chicken, and the veteran waitress with brittle-black coif eating her supper out of a carton she’s brought back from a Chinese place — for, that platform day of your Hester Street climax, your oil-dark brown-paper sheepshead came from Puglia’s.

Bob said no one understood the mystery at the heart of the State of Maine or had any visible pride in New York, at least the people he looked at around here, and he said, “Let’s go see your friend and ask him what he’s running for”—as if you were my friend! — which startled me because I now saw that I’d been treating Bob like a visitor, not a New Yorker, and he really was a visitor.