Maybe one needs to think about a single detail and not an entire city. Pertaining to Mr. Yellinek, for instance. On the face of it, there’s nothing poetic about Mr. Yellinek. But in fact, when he opens his mailbox day after day it’s impossible to look directly at him, just as one can’t stare at the sun (Mr. Yellinek is five feet three inches tall and barely reaches the mailbox) without going blind.
[172]
And there’s nothing more poetic than notes from the housing committee (each person owes such and such).
Or an antenna. But then you’re tempted to put birds on it and that ruins the poem. Generally. Whatever seems like a poem isn’t a poem and what doesn’t seem like a poem is.
Tiberias, for example, is full of poems. Also Afula. And Birmingham. Especially the hotel where we got a room for twenty pounds a night but had to climb over the beds to get to the shower.
We’ve already talked about phone books. Under “H” we find our name among others, and look at it (that is, at the name) and at the number beside it and don’t understand.
All these things (that is, not putting birds on the antenna and not understanding our name) are necessary conditions for poetry. But not sufficient. Something else is needed. Perhaps a great sadness or maybe great joy. Or quiet.
[173]
Maybe this quiet we long for is a sign that the book is nearing its end. We’re not sure.
Maybe from here on in we need to do what Joyce did in his final book and write in a kind of parallel language.
Something like O my mother in Hinfich feel phaned a slanguage a slanguage and more. Piraeus isn’t far. And the stubbledom oh the stubbledom. My mother whom our mother recovers the sea covers the great sees and more across unto pain extends to the end to the end. And if and mother and father and rivers and rivers oh no once again and again, oh since she has a very great ball and a dress made of others and a wonder and brother and canals of algae and cruel stubbling like a knife that our father that very same knife and a glinting or glash. O my mother the willow the bowl.
And so on. But there’s no escaping in that direction. Why not? This our readers understand quite well on their own.
[174]
After he’d written like that, Joyce wrote no more. When they asked him why, he answered roughly as follows: I’ll write only if I find very simple words, very very simple words.
We know some simple words. For example: “There once was a rabbit / who had the bad habit / of twitching the end of his nose. / His sisters and brothers / and various others / said, ‘Look at the way he goes!’”
Not a superfluous word. And one can see it all. The rabbit. The field he’s looking for food in. His sensitive nose. And it gets better:
“But one little bunny / said ‘Isn’t it funny’ / and practiced it down in the dell. / Said the others ‘If he can, / I’m certain that we can,’ / and they all did it rather well! // Now all the world over, / where rabbits eat clover / And dig and scratch with their toes, / Each little rabbit / has got the bad habit / of twitching the end of his nose!”
If only we could write like that.
Or the way that Louis Armstrong sang. Come to think of it, he too twitched his nose.
[175]
At some point along the way (maybe when we were infants even) something got scrambled and we started putting words on top of each other (and not side by side).
At school for sure. Louis Armstrong couldn’t read music. Why did they send us there? After all, we could already talk.
On the board the teacher wrote “Shalom, first grade,” but we cried. A woman came and said my name is Tzipporah and we wanted our mother. Why did they make us sit in chairs and tell us that we couldn’t move?
When we gave things names we did so as though in a dream. But then they forced us to give the names letters, and that was too much. They placed bright lights directly before us, as though the sun weren’t enough. Why did they make us sit in those chairs?
Then came the sin of addition. How much is such and such plus such and such? Before that we were never wrong. Only afterward did we start to make mistakes.
[176]
The first-grade chairs became computer chairs. Now we’re sitting in front of large screens, our face is pale and our spine is bent, and we send each other odd signs.
Sometimes the computers crash and entire love stories vanish. Addresses can’t be recovered and the faces aren’t yet known.
Stricken with sorrow, people head into the streets, carrying clumps of metal in their hands, but the technicians aren’t able to get the names and phone numbers out of them, and since the people have lost the power of speech, they withdraw into themselves, like that gray worm that shrivels up when you touch it.
Today the storks are coming to mothers giving birth. Each beak bears a small computer, and the whole world has been destroyed by a blackout.
[177]
Yesterday Mr. Yellinek asked Mr. Nahmias (the Liverpool fan) to lower his mailbox.
First, Mr. Nahmias removed the box from the wall. He leaned it against the stairwell wall and went to get a drill.
When he returned he asked Mr. Yellinek: Where do you want it? Mr. Yellinek made an arc-like motion with his hand (as though he were opening an imaginary mailbox) and said: Here.
Mr. Nahmias drilled a hole where Mr. Yellinek had indicated and, with light taps from his hammer, he inserted a plastic dowel into the hole. With the help of a screwdriver, into the dowel he turned a large screw, on which he hung the mailbox.
Mr. Yellinek said Thank you very much and (because his head reached only to the chest of Mr. Nahmias) held out his hand toward Mr. Nahmias’s private parts. Mr. Nahmias shook the hand and said: It’s nothing. Then he gathered up the drill and the hammer and the screwdriver and the toolbox and went back to his apartment. Mr. Yellinek, on the other hand, stood there in front of his mailbox for a good long while.
[178]
In a previous life Mr. Yellinek was, no doubt, a pony and the mailbox a bale of hay or a water trough.
We’d like to come back as a bakery. As all that’s in it. As ovens. Fire. Loaves. So that our soul would become the soul of a bakery.
But our karma will undoubtedly take us in another direction. Most likely we’ll become a vole. Or, what’s it called? A broker (that is, on the stock market). Or a tragic historical figure.
Sometimes (mostly in dreams) we see something from our past lives. We were a pumpkin salesman at a market in Europe during the time of the Black Death or a Roman senator during the war with Carthage.
Once we had a nightmare. That we’d been reincarnated as ourselves and everything was happening for a second time. Step by step and word by word exactly as it had happened in our life, including our shoe size (9 1/2).
That’s why we like the way Jews bury their dead. The shrouds through which one can see the outline of the body. The sound of the corpse hitting the bottom of the hole. The prayer El Malei Rahamim — God, full of mercy. That absolute end and return to dust.
[179]
And that’s why happiness ascends from, of all places, cemeteries. No order is finer than that of those rows upon rows. And especially the great quiet, sometimes with just the sound of a hoe against the soil or the call of a crow.