William Gass - Middle C

For the first time in his life, Joseph began to read like a rodent. He chewed his way through the school’s few books on music, ate his way into history and almost out again, and was groped by Professor Ludens in the organ loft. The professor’s hand, he felt, was no nicer than his own.

On Sunday, over his shabby ordinary clothing, Joseph Skizzen donned a gown. Under the gown he grew to be a man; he seemed renewed; he was transported to another realm — that of the imagination. His hands emerged from his gown’s dark sleeves and with rare purpose touched the organ from whose pipes vast sounds emerged like the voice — to be sure — of a local god, but not confined thereby to that modest space — no — capable of calming chaos. The chapel was small and undistinguished, as was the campus as a whole, as were the students — their brains inactive yet otherwise unharmed beneath the mulch of superstition that lay thickly over them — as was the staff: inept without exception, inadequately trained, incapable of advancement anywhere else in the world, all of them like swollen sacks leaking envy and malice, yet convinced of their dedication, their wisdom, the hone of their skills as well as their vigorous application, while sharing a sanctity they extravagantly admired.

Joseph Skizzen’s soul (which he had been assured by the community he very likely had) was fed, for the first time, with words, so that his mind grew, weedlike, in a dozen different directions. Whatever fell in front of his eye he read, read with both wonder and acceptance, ingesting a great deal of nonsense along with what was wise and sending it into a system not immediately able to discern any difference. The book disappeared from his hands and he was in Savonarola’s Florence or Conrad’s Central America or Gibbon’s Rome. He failed Faulkner, he flunked Carlyle, he rejected Joyce, and at Hopkins simply blinked, but Tennyson he could tolerate, and Shelley appealed to an ideal he could admire so long as it remained romantically vague — which it did. Thomas Wolfe triumphed over him the way a masterful man, he thought, took a woman, an attitude his lack of experience allowed him to entertain because it included the novel’s jousts with the Jewess Mrs. Jack, as well as his dim remembrance of his father’s shrouded grunts in a bombed-around bed. He would further confess, as if he had a confessor, that steamy scenes simply embarrassed him. Writers must have to write them, they appeared with such regularity, and Joey felt sorry for the sordid obligations of the profession.

Paragraphs imprinted themselves as if he were in fact the first blank tablet manufactured by the human race. You Can’t Go Home Again was a title to turn his head, and he sailed toward book 5, “Exile and Discovery,” like Columbus, his mouth watering from the dream of wealth, his eyes likewise moist at the thought of fame, only to be slowed by chapter 31: “The Promise of America.” Which he knew beforehand was the chance at an unnoticed life. Joseph so far forgot himself as to corner schoolmates, his finger at the ready where the honored passage was, in order to read aloud in their direction with such heat and vehemence they were at first held in ear range by surprise and trepidation before annoyance released them. Just listen to this! Isn’t this it? Really, isn’t it? Just listen!

The Chinese hate the Japanese, the Japanese the Russians, the Russians also hate the Japanese, and the hordes of India the English. The Germans hate the French, the French hate the Germans, and then look wildly around to find other nations to help them hate the Germans, but find they hate almost everyone as much as they hate Germans; they can’t find enough to hate outside of France, and so divide themselves into thirty-seven different cliques and hate each other bitterly from Calais to Menton—

In Joseph’s enthusiasm — Wolfe’s words had struck such a chord, he could have been hearing an opera sung for the second time — it didn’t occur to him that his auditors didn’t care about the feelings of the French for the Japanese or the Germans, or the hordes of India for the English, especially since, in early ’Nam time, this rant seemed oddly out of place; or that “Calais” might as well have been a cheer they could expect to hear at a football game — Cal-ay! Cal-ay! — or that none of it had any significance for them since they deeply and dearly believed what Jesus had taught — to love — only to love — just to love — or that they had been victims of Skizzy’s hectoring habit ten times too many already — so it was despite their drifting eyes that he pressed on, perhaps a bit more noisily than was normal.

— the Leftists hate Rightists, the Centrists hate Leftists, the Royalists hate Socialists, the Socialists hate Communists, the Communists hate Capitalists, and all unite in hatred of one another.

Sometimes Joseph would slow himself up and remember to say, This was published in 1934, this …! Think of it! … ’34! Hey—

In Russia, the Stalinites hate Trotskyites, the Trotskyites hate Stalinites, and both hate Republicans and Democrats. Everywhere the Communists (so they say) hate their cousin fascists, and the fascists hate the Jews.

Though his quotes were pearls, his auditors were the swine the occasion called for, and they were indifferent to anything they decided they couldn’t eat. Why do you read such stuff, Athletic Sweater pretended to wonder. He’s a ruffian … a ranter, this Wolf. What was that about Stalin, the Giant Beanpole wondered, suspicious. There are writers more agreeable, Miss Pleat Skirt smirked. She knew she and her friends were better dressed. I hate him, whoever he is, Fat Blouse said, stumbling into the text. Stinking baloney, decided Mr. Yellow Corduroy. Keep it in your sandwich. To every gesture of disrespect Joseph would say: There’s more. With you, Skizzy — they’d generally share a giggle before turning their backs and walking away, only to toss a shout over their collective shoulder — with you, Skizzy, there’s always more.

You never left high school, Joseph would volley after them. In retreat from the truth! All of you! Book-bag babies! But then he would realize — it would stop his shouts — that he was making a scene, becoming a character, and, as a minor nuisance, entangling himself in their lives.

Often Joseph just wanted to hear the words in their first form, their real guise — hear them said aloud, promulgated — and he didn’t need listeners, just as years later he would prefer the absence of an audience when he recited scripture in the company of the clippings that sanctified — muralized — his church.

In the center of that future room, amid strips of bad news like shags of animal hair — dangles ready to applaud a bellow — cans to kick like points after touchdowns — Joseph Skizzen would call out Wolfe’s words in the triumphant tones of “I told you so.”

And so it goes — around, around, around the tortured circumference of this aching globe — around, around, and back again, and up and down, with stitch and counterstitch until this whole earth and all the people in it are caught up in one gigantic web of hatred, greed, tyranny, injustice, war, theft, murder, lying, treachery, hunger, suffering, and devilish error!

Around and around the tortured circumference of this aching earth … the shrinking circumference of this tortured planet … Devilish error? What’s been done is done and no mistake! Round and round the mulberry bush the monkey chased the weasel. The human race thinks it runs for fun when pop bam boom bang guny gun gun —horn hid and tail tucked — Satan shoots his meal — monkey brains and veal.

But these thoughts would come later, when he’d heard more music, had been immersed in other books, and his sentence had seized him. Right now his future self was no bigger than a chrysalis, his goatee-to-be barely tickled, its womb rarely giggled. Wanna see? your baby — future you is kicking! No! I don’t want to see the bughouse bounce!