poet, novelist, tower :an allegory of experience at millsaps college Charles Mock I am refusing to use adjectives. I am trying to say what meaning means to say without meaning beside that meaning. The adjectives I mean. Woman beside stage. Stage silent without woman. A curtain, torn with disuse. I sat near the exit trying not to cry. The poem comes to him in the dark, telling him that whatever the dream says, he must write. He awakes the next morning and walks towards the tower, thinking of sleep. His hands move furiously over the paper. Footnotes made in language, for language. The professor stands in front of other men. The professor appears to be speaking. His appearance is speaking. The poet is writing this. I am translating. He was reading later, alone in his room. He remembered novels that he had read years before and the new ones that had been assigned to him which he was anticipating. He thinks the novel is something that has been taught, something that will exist when he stops typing, yet unrecognizable as such. As a child he wondered if the stars could still be seen from the observatory if he closed his eyes. The observatory is defunct. I am trying to identify. I am trying to make things with my hands. Waving with my hand. The words come in waves. Air is made for breathing. I would crawl out of the cave if only I could count my steps. Leave a trail of crumbs. Plato is a dead. The sun looms above the desert. The sun is the desert. Tower of the austere. The mind may or may not be a blackboard. There are people writing on the blackboard in English, in French, in mathematics. I do not speak French. The professor knows this. He does not comment, yet continues to write. I have lost the ability to pause. A fly landed on the window and the novelist swatted it, smiled, and began to talk of Aristotle. He said he knew who he was. His hand bled when he found out his sister had married a telephone pole south of Boston. The telephone. A voice that is not a voice, screaming profusely prior to sunrise. Someone dies, someone is married. Someone dies. Everything is necessary. It is the nearness that matters. It is the language of distance that we have devised for company.
The grass forms half of a bowl where women gather sun on blankets like gleaners in an orchard. They are sweating. They are gleaming. They are reading magazines for women, written by men who are sunburned. Her hand extended. I grasped it and we began to walk along the promenade, beside the streetlights near the apartments. I am still thinking that I am real. Certain winds are known to inhabit the mind. Its thoughts appear like leaves, rushing aimlessly past a gutter. Sometimes he remembers raking through her hair with his fingers and what this meant later in a dream. The dream was of trees littered with ribbon. Her hairs were on his pillow in the morning. Thinking of flowers. It is not spring. There are faces everywhere. There are flowers everywhere for those who stop to look. The faces are averted. The faces are blank. I prefer flowers. Emotions are excuses for speech. The speaking is an excuse for dancing. I was building books for years that could have amounted to nothing in particular. The thinking centers itself at the center of the book and begins to ask questions. I am traveling to the place the questions allude to. Actions that end up as other actions and so on. Life as then. I realize I will be standing in front of others, speaking these words again, which will lead to questions I remembered the answers to when I thought there were none. I pang. The gates surrounding this place provide a container for knowledge. A boundary. A margin he must rub like ink across a page. There is a knowledge of when and there is a knowledge of this. When I say these words he knows this. I am constantly reminding him to breathe. I am writing this behind you. You look back occasionally and comment. We are driving somewhere. I cannot control this. I can only comment. I look backwards out the window and the road is a confession. This knowledge is loneliness. You are not allowed to apologize. Bring on the real. The poem is the real. The poem is the place and time. The poem says this and that, makes gestures with its fingers, and burns. This place is made of words. The words appear on screens, streaming below other words that collapse skyscrapers. Words that came from her mouth while she came. Words asking words for directions. Words lost among the sentences. I am the words. A voice beside a voice inside a voice between voices. A voice that betrays one voice to another. His voice is spilling out of him like vomit. The disgust is not a product of aesthetics.
Years ago, on a plane to Paris, he was afraid to fall asleep for fear that he would wake up only minutes behind everyone, speaking in myth. It was only later, among these voices, that the myth became real. He speaks in an attempt to become present. To be is to be heard. So, he speaks as if his life depended on it. He thinks that the novels will one day appear as real text that has emerged from this place. There are words that mean the same thing even if you’re talking to yourself. The novel says, “Life equals death divided by zero.” Was the novel tangible? The characters speak like they already know the answers to their own questions. Feet moving towards each other but passing, speechless. I am writing all of this for my health. The benefits of the word. The circles. Familiarity breeds contempt. I’ll go on. Then there are questions of distance. He has arms with which to love. He has memories which correspond to the novels and he is unable to tell the difference between them. He is thinking. He is writing what he thinks. His typing annoys the neighbors and he smokes too many cigarettes, but there is still time. Steel against paper. In the street he could see figures moving to the motion of his fingers. There were women rubbing their bodies against the rain. They were writing sonnets with their hair. The novel is a book of appearances. Its children are feeding each other plums and honeysuckle. The children appear to be happy. They know sunlight is a gift and rain is not something as bad as they were originally told. The sky is a repetition. The circles they imagined are of expectation and disappointment. They cry. They know that ambition was invented by trees. Trees that grow thicker and taller with circles. The children become angry. They cut down the trees. Creation is excruciating. It requires destruction. It requires a self that looks in the mirror and screams. The mirror is not what is real. The mirror told him turn around. He stared at the wall and decided to leave the room. I am destroying this as I am writing it. Reading is a sacrifice pagans make to their selves. The reading causes change. It says yes and no, and then says that it is a liar. I have to think. I have to remember to think. The tower creates a shadow. The shadow tells time, moves to the left, answers questions. The tower controls movement, while not moving. Its hands represent births, the arrival of trains, and when to begin speaking. The tower told me it would tell me everything. It sings songs at the
wrong time of the day. There is no way I can verify this though. At the base of the tower there is a set of stairs. The stairs only extend halfway up the tower. He must imagine the rest of her body. He does. Then he feels guilty and walks back to his room. The poet thinks the tower is the center. He revolves around it. He finds it comforting and occasionally sleeps at its base in an attempt to end space. The poet is hallucinating all of this. He cannot possibly imagine what the tower points to. He is unable to look directly at the sun. After seven days, he stopped talking to himself and walked back to his room. Knowledge is responsibility. I am acting like I am thinking. The poet imagines the Alps. He imagines the lakes among the mountains as islands. I am writing to you from an island. The mind is an island. Women swim to this island at night and light bonfires on it. They dance. In the morning, their happiness appears like a cry for help etched in the sand. I am alone in the morning. They have returned to their islands. He was whispering to himself in the library. He was making a film of his whispering. The novelist tore through the volumes on the desk, searching frantically for a sentence, a word. He began to run through the library, tearing his hair out. His searching was as if he were a swimmer, suffocating, ascending from the deep toward the surface of the water, trying to come up for air. He threw the biographies from the shelf. The dictionaries. The histories. At some point past midnight he stopped. The lamp above his head shone upon him and his eyes fixed. He pulled the book from the shelf and opened it. Its pages were blank. And yet he began to read. Signs that led to other signs. Smiles that led to other faces. Faces that originally belonged to flowers. Petals floating on the surface of that mud puddle. Streetlights flowing endlessly through neighborhoods that remain like colonies amidst the darkness. The tower, rising like an eye in the mist. A train whistled and everything shivered. It began to hail. The hail accumulated in the gutters. The gutters forgot about the hail. The night continued. The night was a place where he opened doors. The doors led to other nights. The tower is really a woman. A woman that builds things in the night, leaving no explanation. Tonight I am writing this and she is braiding stars into her hair. A night no different from any other within which she kissed me and said that this is it.
This is it. There is no such thing as a beginning.
