It has become night as I write. Soft chiarascuro transforms the casement view into interior: has any painter ever made such a composition? The graveyard shift in an airplane hangar full of infernal calculating machines and peripherals. The machines themselves are as serene as Titians. But underneath the skin seethes a public chaos of crowds, a roll call crammed with as many encapsulations of misery as were ever wedged into any last judgment. The foreground is still blue, merging into a sea-green midrange nativity. But the background now takes its tones from the red of ambulance lights. About suffering, they were never wrong, the Old Masters. Even the minor ones. Even met de Bles, or Blesse. With the blaze. Or wound. You see I am thrown in over my head, asked to judge this contest between observation and invention. All I can concentrate on long enough to write about is those overlookable almosts in his aborted landscapes. I wait by windows, half-maker of the range of creation I'm supposed to describe.
Creation is at present limited to exotic holidays. Not far back, I was sitting in a buitenlanders language class full of earnest young Germans when our teacher announced that there would be no school tomorrow. Incredibly, the most towheaded kid asked why. The teacher tactfully explained that the day commemorated her exemption from obligatory German. For Hemelvaartsdag I went to Brugge, an urban time capsule, where I took part in the Procession of the Holy Blood. In the town center, along a fossil gothic-walled circuit, with the great cloth hall and belfry as backdrop, comes this procession of thousands of townspeople in costume, acting out, along the length of their parade ribbon, the history of the world from the Garden to present-day politicos. Animated time flowed past me on the street, a ritual that has been going on, unchanged except for appended length, since 1150. As the procession ended, each block of crowd milled into the street, following the flow, becoming the last, contemporary, costumed participants.
Time, static stuff, is reified here. The granddaughter of collaboration can't marry the grandson of underground. I heard a German ask a price in a bordertown bric-a-brac shop. The proprietor— Common Market be damned — gave the standard reply — allusion to the million conscripted vehicles that aided the Wehrmacht in initial blitzkrieg and sped the surviving sixteen-year-olds reeling from advancing Americans: "Give me my bicycle back and I'll answer you."
Time is a place here, a tangible landscape. Last week I took a day trip to Münster. Disconcerting: still attached to the steeple of St. Lambert's, the iron cages where they displayed the bodies of the Anabaptists. The cathedral was softly disappointing. It had its great astronomical clock: Herri's contemporary universe as flywheel. But I'd expected something more articulated, nuanced. A clause and a half into a wall plaque on the south porch, I realized I was reading English. Stone from Coventry Cathedral, given to the people of Münster. Let us forgive one another as He forgives us. Caption in two languages, each translating the other.
Stupider than my towheaded classmate, I get no closer to this place's meaning than porting over. I will never fully "understand," because I can never fully "begrijp." The verbal myth of standing under a thing is as unrealizable as that of grasping it. I came to class last week to discover that my towheaded friend had suffered an auto accident. My distraught teacher, confusing my native tongue with the victim's, blurted out, "Rudy ist tot." That much I grasped, stood under. She passed out copies of the death notice, that final declension. We students spent the morning looking up, in our wordbooks, the names of grief in translation.
It did not stand in the dictionary, but these death notices make a local spreekwoord: "He lies like a remembrance card." For they are always filled with love, these after-the-fact summaries. Is what I feel for you at this moment the distortion of loss, waiting until separation to say it? I think of you, want nothing more than to see you and hear your voice.
Instead, I send you this botched dissertation draft. This letter may be the closest I ever come to writing it. You alone are easy to write to, perfect audience, someone who will see, in the weak paraphrase I here throw together, that I am building my apology— explaining why I could not become a sketcher in this world. Now is not the time for drawing. What limited skill we've developed to describe the place we long ago consigned to the laboratory. It may take generations before we remember how big the world is, how much room it has for all sorts of observation.
According to the professor, one single science stands between us and our address. Only we don't see the link; we grasp it only in bits — the pay telescope that magnifies but constricts, and that snaps shut on your quarter after a lousy two minutes. Let me paraphrase the vulnerable Bede: what I put my hands on is the sense, but not the order of the words as the man painted them. For travel scenes, however perfectly composed, can never be ported from one world to another without loss. Perhaps neither beauty nor exactness nor profundity nor meaning, but something will not go over the bridge intact.
The words that might tell me who the fellow was are no longer the words of the original. A coat of metaphor between me and the life I want to write. Words are a treacherous sextant, a poor stand-in for the thing they lay out. But they're all I have — memory, letters, this language institute. Translation would be impossible, self-contradicting at the etymological core: there would be no translation were it not for the fact that there is only translation. Nothing means what its shorthand pattern says it does. Everything ever uttered requires cracking. So I keep busy, travel, learn some words__"I will call the world a school instituted for the purpose of teaching little children how to read." Full marks for identifying.
You may find it as hopeful as I did to discover that the Dutch for weather" and "again" are the same. Let me say at least that I love you, and all other untranslatables.
FTODD
P.S. If I were you, I would write me back quickly and affectionately, an irrefusable letter from home. Something along the lines of "The age of Europe is past. That of America is ending. Get back fast before it's all over." In the meantime: Waarom hangt je was niet op de Siegfried Lijn? Roughly ported over: Why not hang your wash out on the Siegfried Line?
XVII
Halcyon Days
Ressler's write-up is accepted by the Journal of Molecular Biology. He will appear as second author after Ulrich. Standard practice: the glass-washer takes second billing to team leader. Ulrich edits his summary liberally. Ressler initially concluded, "It has been demonstrated that hereditary information is arranged in unidirectional, nonoverlapping nucleotide triplets, each determining a single amino acid in protein synthesis. Code redundancy may favor an in vitro method of determining codon assignments over analyses of base and polypetide sequences." Ulrich softens this to "Our results further substantiate the hypothesis of a linear arrangement, perhaps with a triplet reading frame." He strikes the crucial second sentence altogether. When the red-penned draft comes back to Ressler, he springs up and walks the paper back down the hall to the old man's office, using the distance to suppress the spontaneous fight mechanism sprung in his body.
Ulrich shifts in his chair and drops into placid register. "The write-up is first-rate. But we don't want to overstate the results." Ressler volleys halfheartedly: his conclusion makes no assertion that isn't supported. "Perhaps," Ulrich holds firm. "But what counts is not what you claim for your results, but what they claim for themselves. You don't want to dictate how to run follow-ups. That would be…" The veteran breaks into a conspiratorial grin. "That would be leading trump."