The Arch
In the beginning as in its end — though Maimonides the Rambam might deny one — we are told Without form and void, and we listen, we respond, we repeat, Without form and void, generation after generation, Without form and void, generation Without form, generation And void…though we might add, if only now, forever late in a latening time, that it’d been soft, too, and as warm and as wet as a womb. Then the pressure from within, and then that from without, as substance separated and those separations separated; all was already old, existenced deeply. A mouth was forming, a mouth in the making — an arch. Then, the waters were divided into waters down here, waters up there, the waters were rent, the wet ripped, and hardness ensued, hardnesses, and we say — Darkness was upon the face of the deep…
An eruption down the dirtied throat, an irruption, others hold, dirtying, the blown breath of God, taking with its flow all the detritus that webbed the esophageal walls, venously scummy — ejectamenta, those spoiled little gel-fishes, and that vegetative stink, to fall laval down to the depth of the stomach’s valley. The stones, though, they went up the other way, were vomited up from where they lay like macle: there they sat as rock inside stones yea when they remembered…had been quarried up from deep in the gut, having laid there lo under layers and layers of layers maternal of rocks and the stony paternal for ages that weren’t yet ages but Then — finally to be formed, as found, unfinal, never. Verily, the finding gave them form, And it was good, then the form gave them function, and it was open, opening: these stones destined for heaps, which were found in other heaps, founded in heaps predating heaps, preterite piles, they were arranged, they’d be arranged — in an arch…into two arches facing each other, these arches of soaked stones rocking in vomit up from the gut, whites surfaced from the gutted river of tongue, not yet forked between the good, the bad, and the unsayable flow of the middle, which itself is never to fork. Rocks, punishments exacted to yellow. Gravestones. Teeth to lose.
B stands in front of an arched gateway once passingly ornate whose doming gold can now be found within the mouths of those around Him, those asking of Him, questioning with smiles that can’t comfort but glow, the untrustworthy wrinkles of the pious. It’s the opening here to a town with no name and, too, with every name they’re speaking in glinty hints, who knows the nyms, the polyonymous endos and exos, I don’t, onomastics masticating on and how, either, it doesn’t matter to nostalgia, never does…east from whence the world came from the belly of the bestial valley, vulvar and dark with a breath of its own that blows cold. He speaks none of the languages, I speak nothing. B yawns stumped, standing at its guardhouse, its gatehouse, passage’s home without guard, at least none that I’ve noticed, noticing me…His legs arched open to walk through the arch, to walk through this gate’s village, which town, then out its arch opposite, to flee toward the horizon then into the rise of the sun, from its set — all the while casting His own arch, against the day’s brightness, its shadow arcing His shade, behind Him then ahead its towns and its villages, toward the horizon that’s the rise of all arching and His, which wanders on with Him even while He’s fleeing it, too, and so arriving and departing forever, and never.
Hold on a moment, though, langsam, slow down, says the Guide — it’s that there’s this interesting thing about arches.
The Group quiets.
It’s that they’re built with crosses, just follow me here, the Crucifix…there’s mumbling, a snarky grumble — the cross being the frame, he says by way of quick explanation, hurried, hurrying FYI; they’re the gallows for the gallows, if you will, the construction of an arch involving the use of a scaffold, have patience, usually of wood, until the placement of the central voussior, the quoin as it’s often called, the keystone, or crown: a cantilever, that’s the stone that’s in the middle, to be placed at the highest peak of the arch, the stone that negotiates, that mediates, that bears every burden…the pressure, you with me — without it, all would fall.
A cross, the Guide says, it’s the form of the body — and the floorplan, too, of every ruined church that doesn’t awe, just disgusts…
A Crucifix, their Guide guiding on, but without any symbolism: only think of it now as two lengths of wood, how it’s urged…one just longer than the other, laid across it then nailed.
A cross, the Guide says again, call the crossbeam the lintel, then mirror that by nailing another board, as long as the lintel, across the bottom, down by the knees.
A hammer and nails.
Good, says the Guide, everyone with me?
Or should I wait?
Almost too easy to get a laugh out of them (it’s the nerves).
Now, he says, the workers here — gesturing to a group of overweight, overalled types who they grunt in response to their introduction, then make a show to roll up their sleeves…they’ll place two posts there, to form a V between the lintels, the upper and lower; then, they’ll nail two more between the upper and the very top of the arch, which is the keystone, remember — the crown.
Now we have two Vs, openfacing…imagine a diamond.
Can-ti-le-ver. Can’t you leave it? Here?
We’re touring an arch today, is what the next Group’s Guide explains.
Why? To support? to strengthen? what else?
To open, his opening goes.
As the Group nods.
The cross, the Guide explains now and again, it’s the wooden frame for the arch, erected to support the structure before the last stone’s placed at its peak.
These stones (Jerusalem stone was used here — a goodwill gift from friends former, they’re doublefistsized, about the hurt of a head if they’d tumble atop), they exert pressure, they push and they pull up against each other from both sides, from every; they ache, one against another, along their ways to the top.
They’re irregularly shaped, rough’s the word and unmortared.
Ages of pressure, of all this madinsane I’m talking tectoniclike pushpull — like, too, the process by which coal becomes diamond, it’s offered by way of example — will eventually annul the arch, destroy it, lay it to waste…will finally let’s say excommunicate the stone of the crown, casting it forward to B’s feet, without sin; and then with it, the other stones they’ll fall, too, with nothing to hold them up anymore, how they’ll fall to lie in two piles loose at the feet, as He turns to wander His on…
On the Island, amid the ruins of the Garden, which have been at pains staked preserved, made rubblesafe, they tour the subterranean tunnels, take in the vaults: arches barreling high, the groined crosses, lancet and ogee, passing through passages of all possible lean, of every potentiality for their own destruction; they walk in the dark, feeling their way toward a voice, following its light, that of their Guide what with the microphone and the miniature speaker clasped to his belt and the flash, the sentinel of his hardhat. As they’d descended from the floor of the Great Hall, there’s a sign: Mind Your Step, and God how they’re minding…you’d be proud; this way, please.