Polandland, where everything began, there it would end, if only for Him, if only for now…spin the globe, point a finger; on a long Shabbos afternoon to idly flip through an atlas, then stop and, po or sham, that’s where history hails from, promise. Polandland, where everything’s, what’s the idea I’m thinking here, the ideal I’m saying, the word without chalk or board…where He can get Himself perspective that’s what, a sensibility, distance, remove — the wart of the word on the tip of the tongue, the pickled silver sliver of flesh, fishlike if headless, stilled, mounted in its setting of gold, having been excavated from the ruins of His house, dug from the scorched mouth of the earth — only for it to leave its limited time only exhibition in the Museum in the Park north from the Temple’s conversion, to make the rounds of every major metropolis, wandering city to city in its lingual stump, an equatorial twisting…to outlive infamy, outlasting even reality, on its way to becoming a symbol — with the mensch to whom it belonged to be remembered as a relic Himself, to be embraced but only in His toothy demise, its humiliation, whiteshrouded. A sickly veil. To then ask with this severance of His for another, if only He could, to wag its length into a question, to curl it, even at this remove, at such a sunder, around what appeaclass="underline" to ask with it permission to leave, for leave to escape, to beg, beseech, bow down, to humble myself in the midst — a tongue that would be the brother of the snake of Eden treed before its Fall, a tongue with knees, I’m talking. Think of it, how to leave affairs all up in the air, rain-bowlike and at their highest arc, promising only the undecided unmade, the still unthought and forever unknown…redemption necessary to any expatriation, Him needing to be released from this bondage before He binds Himself anew (don’t begin when you haven’t finished, or — Hanna would often harangue along these lines); it’s maybe pitiful, perhaps abject, but faithful, respectful, honoring — this seeking of maternal permission, this wanting of a brotherly consent. To obtain His freedom from any Pharaoh with a heart significantly unhardened, melted to any sympathetic wet. To ask with a burnt, coalslowed tongue the only question to which an answer might be permitted, the answer of — do what you want, what you will, up to you. Affirming maturity. Independence. You’re on your own, grown up. I have a response. Anyone have a query? And if none would oblige? I’ll let myself go. Even more than I already have.
It’s tenable, many think, it holds — though so very difficult, involved to argue, but since when has that stopped any of us — that all of history’s happened to effect Him in the negative, much as it did Adam, time’s wearying wear on the first mensch, with everything his fault, faulting him, nothing to blame, with no brother whose mark would keep him; that when another first of a kind, Napoleon, suppose, he rode through the desert upon the horses of the great Alexander, thinking to conquer the bondage that was Egypt if only to bind it to him, to the West, then, and so to a few argue an even greater oppression — and you won’t find this in your al-Jabarti, try as you might — that one of the goys in his army went and stole a date from a stall huddled up against the edge of Cairo under the citadel of Saladin, stole a date that was poisonous, a date that it’s said killed the goy when he went to it for sustenance, this goy formerly a Venetian sbirro who’d been courting an Affiliated back home in the Republic once serene, them groping each other on the outskirts of the Ghetto Nuovo no longer gated what with the emancipation and this thanks to the campaign of that very conqueror being served in the east — the two of them Venetian and Affiliated still sheltered, though, hidden from all, declaring their love for one another under the protective ring of the Terza, a bell echoing far from the San Marco campanile; him stealing kisses and hugs and loving words from this ghetto maydel who after having waited for his return from the fight and having had none for a while went and married another Unaffiliated, who he was the dead goy’s brother who’d urged her to give up on his own brother for dead then took her soon pregnant west to an America that promised an ocean between them and the continent warring, which union of theirs and its consummating birth upon Manhattan Island led directly, some say, believe it or not, through splinteringly infinite causes of causality, gevalt, and through subsequent effects too numerously and, too, numinously insane to even allude to here, ask them, they seem to have all the answers, the charts and the trees, the graphs and riverflows — all leading to Hanna and Israel, a Developed cedar far from its Lebanon, palmed nearer to New Egypt, Joysey, and its tiny pines, branching out to bloom Him with the winter…a culmination, if culminating in disappointment, and for at least this Garden’s root, this trunk, final, that’s that.
And not just the past, others have argued, not just our history, no, that in truth everything’s been created for B — B as culmination, as the created creating, natura naturans who He hasn’t yet exorcised that particular endowment, impotently, a potentiality shed; B as an apotheosized beneficiary of all mundanity from Bereishit’s beginning to now, an old heresy: that even Genesis had been begun for His sake alone; that water, too, had been created then divided upon the division of the second day expressly for His tears at this, His departure; the moon made only for His night, the sun made only for His day, then the air smoking around Him, it feels to Him, American Him, decadent as excessively holy and holying Him — and then shoes, hymn, them as well, having been created for the sake of His feet alone, though cobbled too tightly, nu, though loosened without laces, the proctologist’s spare pair He’s walking in on His way south through what once was the Village; and then the snap-brim cap on His head, how that’d been taken from the proctologist, that also and maladjustedly tight, had been created only so that it would fly from His head on the wind as He makes His way down toward the Battery — His head uplifted, Him passing questioning unquestioned through the gate new at Wall Street, which had once been a wall erected to keep out the natives of Manhattan raised again with its name remained to limit the traffic of the Unaffiliated from the marketstalls trading Downtown; domain of woolybearded carders and dyers, tanners and tinsmiths, the young, fritcheeked blowers of glass and they, too, who drive no trade at all save that crazy and begging — that indeed, many believe, and though only lately, which is too late for most, that life entire had been created for the sake of His life alone; His existence in the world the world’s justification, its one and only its hosting of Him’s the heretical thought: interpretively, He didn’t die for our sins, and He won’t — it’s even worse, He’s lived for them; and the evil in this is that before He can question, He believes, becomes His own answer, and so swears by His own singularity, this deathly uniqueness, Hanna’s baby boy reflected in the mirror of sewerward ice, Israel’s special son in the shopfront windows that store for a moment His passage — this one life of His that’d once been advertised to all as a model, exemplary as itself emulatory, marketed to ever as symbol; an idol to be held high, Godlike exalted, and there worshipped as ideal, and yet still one life again, immortal, He’s thinking — the alwaysliving, don’t tempt, it’s mine.