William Gass - Middle C

So you should be nice to your sister, Joey, even if she’s making a profit from potatoes because she is growing good things, too, or her husband is, since he’s always in the fields with poison to protect them. He and poison do make a pair, don’t they? Handkerchief across his face like a bandit so as not to breathe the foul fumes. But I say who can complain when it is beans and potatoes he is doing? who can put that profit down? so long as he’s there to spoon his soup and comes to bed like a person prepared to sleep, because most men aren’t like you, Joey, devoted to your mother the way you are, and I love you for it, God knows, though gardener you aren’t, but a man of peace and steady as a broom near to hand. You’ve done well by yourself and by me, with an upstanding reputation at the college, yes, you’ve grown respect, and that’s a splendid proud crop, Joey, no backseat to take there, spreading music around, too, like peat. Who knows what will come of it?

Then again it rains on sodden fields. Then again the rabbits make their meals out of my asters. Black spot and beetles, worms and rots and weevils, cut my yields. It rains on wet beds, on sodden fields. There is a sudden uncalled-for freeze. The daffs are snowed on till the stems bend, weary of the feathered weight of all those flakes. Then again the blooms brown beneath the relentless sun. Day after day goes by dry. Then again there’s hail. I want to cry and you don’t carry any sympathy for me because you think everything I do is futile, my trees and bushes fruitless as rocks. The weather will always worsen, you say. Due proportion is impossible, restraint, proper measure, are never nature’s way; it’s either heavy stillness or brief tornado. It’s either rags or riches, you say, while I curse the four corners of the sky, each one a Karlkrautkopf . Ach, but then again, Joey, in every year comes May. Gott! what did I just say? In every year May comes.

Some of us used to wonder whether the human race would escape the consequences of its own folly, but now we worry that our species will somehow go on indefinitely regardless of how wickedly it behaves.

This world is made of three kinds of stupid. The commonest stupid is so stupid it doesn’t know it is stupid but is content to be stupid; the second sort is the stupid who denies it is stupid and claims to be wiser than whiskey; the third bunch is convinced it is stupid, too, but knows it knows that much and wisely fears the worst. Among the stupidest of stupids, not knowing any better, a few will luck out because they won’t have the wit to perish properly.

Once upon a time there was a professor of music whose best instrument was hypocrisy, and who pretended to be concerned about the fate of the human race, when, in fact, he hoped it would vanish from the face of the earth the way a fog dense enough to obscure the landscape slowly diminishes, rising like steam from a damp land, so that the earth could smile again as it must have once, in the days of simple cells, titanic trees, or even reptiles with necks grown long in order to reach the leaves.

Joseph Skizzen wanted to go into his mother’s garden and shit upon the ground, but he realized that his shit would only aid the garden’s growth. Moreover, what he wished for was impossible because he could barely think shit let alone say it let alone deposit it or even shush it before it became evidently present.

The crucial problem facing any parasite is the health of the host upon which it feeds, whose substance it steals, and whose balance it upsets, because on the day that the host becomes a husk, sucked dry as dust, the parasite must be prepared to live on small bites bitten from itself, something the tapeworm may not be prepared to do but which the human worm has practiced its entire span, gnawing on the sweet knuckles of its young, cutting into small squares many of the members of its presumptive community.

Professor Skizzen was a fretter, he just couldn’t help himself, and if he was not fretting about this, he was fretting about that, because, in his experience, when things were looking their best, the worst would infallibly happen; thus it was that when he thought that the human race would come a cropper, a result it deserved and would be a boon for the earth, he fell to fretting that such a benevolent catastrophe might not occur, and if it did not, such a disaster would be, among dire consequences, the most dreadful injustice he could imagine.

Because Professor Skizzen, as he grew older and was more established in his work and community, found himself with increasingly large periods of time to spend as he pleased, he was now able to dream of improvising, while riffing the piano keys, a kind of music that would somnolize its listeners and render them serenely comatose until they quietly passed away from indolence and immobility, not having eaten any more of the earth’s provenance or ravaged another inch of its land or consumed, in their scurrying about, any additional portion of its minerals; but alas these lullabies were made of dream chords too immaterial even for angels to sound, and there was nothing to be done, not even in nightmare, to relieve the planet of its deadliest denizen — every man jack a ripper.

Justice was never served, so why shouldn’t the race of men get away with their crimes, since individuals did, more often than not, and the idea that ultimately each one of us paid the piper (by burning in hell if not through some type of anticipatory suffering) was no more than a comforting fiction promulgated by the same criminals who gave us God and the Holy Ghost and who offer us a few paintings of their Christ on the cross or one or two smug-faced Madonnas as proof that men are on balance better than weevils and have their hearts in the right place (see the Sistine Ceiling or Chartres in the moonlight) (contemplate the advance of science or our voyages to the stars); or, conversely, those who tell us that HIV is a man-made epidemic designed by puritans ashamed of our fleshly sins to get rid of us, ironically through the very copulations by which we come to be; and that this effort, when you view it from the right perspective, proves humans to be humane after all, and that they are trying their best to cleanse the world of their company before they do it irrevocable harm; but their best will not be good enough because hermits, honest priests, and ugly virgins shall survive; fat Adams, thin Eves, shall take up nakedness as nature’s way, and, although they will look round then and see the world gloriously alive and lush and orderly, warning erections will not prevent the opportunity, and the formerly chaste will fall to fornicating with a glee the world before has never entertained.

The Inhumanity Museum made Professor Skizzen think of death a great deal — no, rather, of the dead, of the dead in heaps, of the dead in holes, in the forks of trees, of bones in Catacombs, of a body left like the remains of a blown tire in the road, and how the body goes back to being a mere heap of stuff that might have some nutritional value to fungi. It made him think of bodies less alive than plant stems, less alive than leaves, or even streams, oak smoke, a breeze, except when the cavities are filled with little nibblefish, maggots, or a greedy eel, or when the body simply ascends as stench or turns into its underclothes; and he would now and then stand naked in front of the mirror in his bedroom door to wonder why he was standing there, why anything — his wardrobe, his bed — was there, why he was so thin and why he had let a beard appear — oh vanity! because he wanted to be thought idiosyncratic by his students — and why his hair was unkempt — oh vanity! because he wanted to be seen as quite a character on the campus; but so naked now he couldn’t look at everything that was shamelessly mirrored there disgracing any self he might have chosen as his public image; though in better moments he would argue that his reflection, apparently stripped of all subterfuge, was really a misleading appearance and not his real self, which was five foot eight and one hundred forty-two, muscular though not by much, absent his mirror’s identifying marks — for instance, the rough patch on his knee where he so often picked off scabs, and that small mole like a dot of dye on his chest — really bare of body hair and so utterly ordinary no attentions would be drawn to it even if it stood nude as a statue, loincloth unattached, in a public square.