The Cataracts Page 7
but we cannot see for her a way out
a way she sees in Zatoichi the drunkard the gangster
who when she asks him if he will marry her and leave this place
and go elsewhere though all of Edo is at this time corrupt and unkind
responds with a look or a sequence of looks
that depict clearly a blind man looking forward
into a future he has not allowed himself to imagine
for imagining it would force him to admit
the Zatoichi behind Zatoichi
that hope before the rage.
And that after rage the remorse
that now disallows his looking forward
and his sublime face is many faces
and all the ways one can be afraid
for Zatoichi the blind swordsman knows
that a life of indignity and squalor is nothing
compared to the humiliation of revealing his hope
that he could be seen or known as good or as desiring to be good
and watching we know that the number of faces a blind man must make
to remain unseen by those who cannot see
is agony
is a number without end.
When the blind swordsman pledges out loud to renounce
the ways Yayoi knows him
even though Yayoi needs no such pledge nor asks for one
we know and she knows that Zatoichi is doomed
and that she is doomed thereby.
For Yayoi seeing her brother as without worth
and Zatoichi of great worth needs nothing
but to go away from this Edo to another Edo
to neither of which she owes anything
but Zatoichi being blind to this must ask of his teacher Banno
a man in every way less than he
permission and forgiveness and having asked
receives the contempt and disgust that he has allowed himself to believe
he deserves.
In this forbearance even Yasuhiko the brother of the murdered man
whose murder sets in motion the whole tale
the ending of which we now know and cannot help but know
even Yasuhiko sees that Zatoichi is honorable and decent
and would rather quit his claim on his life
as Zatoichi himself would relinquish that life
rather than disappoint Yayoi whom he knows he will but cannot disappoint
this leaves only Banno
who because he cannot know what he is
but can only believe that he is something other than what he is
destroys everything
his blindness to his own pettiness and lust for dominion forcing Zatoichi
to do that which he has sworn not to do.
“I have cut those I should not have cut, killed those I should not have killed”
Having seen the one good man she knows prove to himself
that he can never be the man she knows him to be
Yayoi pauses and in pausing sets the tableau at whose center rests Zatoichi
who has returned to the posture he took before killing
the posture like the killing indistinguishable from what it punctuates
Yayoi the heartbroken flees into an Edo unknown
and Zatoichi the blind swordsman who cannot see her go
knows she is going and cannot, cannot allow himself to know that she goes
not because of what he is but because of what he will not believe he is.
In New Tale of Zatoichi the sublime Shintaro Katsu
depicts Zatoichi the blind swordsman
drunkard beggar lowest and least
stands in a tableau he makes but cannot see
cannot see who is he and who he cannot believe he is
Zatoichi, the blind man, the man who cannot see.
“Is There in Truth No Beauty?”
Don’t get excited; it’s an episode of Star Trek.
People recall them via the formula whereby
x happens to Spock or Spock does x,
so it’s the one where Spock goes blind from looking directly into
a box so alien that humans go mad at the mere sight of it—
so that happens, too, he goes blind and he goes mad.
He’s helped from the latter condition by someone who shares the former,
Dr. Miranda Jones, who is fascinating and never appears again.
She is a little bit telepathic and a lot blind, but disguises that last fact
with the best and most useful dress in the galaxy,
beaded and jeweled, a machine that is also a garment,
a veil that reads the world.
You can tell from the skin of it that it glitters—
from fingers across the texture the illumination whispers itself.
Flawed pearl, which is pearl, and steel, which is sheets of steel, folded.
Diamond, the making of pearl inverted.
God, I prayed, give it to me, so that I may never be caught unawares again.
Over skin or in sheathes or affixed to surfaces,
lacquered and layered, bound
& likewise a lie of the uniform, the absolute.
The discerning costume jewelry, like a bejeweled box of jewels,
like a book barnacled with trinkets.
Pearls placed on my wrists would be receivers
with which I could hear rivers and bays,
and from stellar steel I could acquire signals
floated on magnetic waves,
diamonds that would transmit harmonies
from the hottest, heaviest weather of the moving mantle
of alternate earths, each one fantastic.
Like the good doctor, I wanted to be equipped not for one plane
but for planets, immersed, detecting and undetectable,
delectable, beset by data,
with a net flung over the box of the skull,
its every point a jewel or a miniature and perfectly tooled device.
And equidistant from each point the music or mind,
held together with clasps or clefts or thoughts
that when opened and scattered
go from precious to semiprecious to base.
Please God let me slip into something more comfortable.
Though it would be lovely, too, just to be lovely
and at the end of the day cast off all information,
like the doctor, intuit no more than what others offer,
in darkness, naked, unknowing save for what
the world would have to touch me to tell.
Structural Color
The broken blue eyes do not work well
but offer excellent optical illusions,
like the feathers of the jay and the peacock,
like the motion of mother of pearl
or the flash of butterfly wings,
the industrial sheen of beetle shells
and the oil slicks they resemble,
like the iridescent surface of bubbles
floating in the optical illusion of the sky,
which is not blue, but only looks that way.
Hothouse
A rose, rose. A violet, violet. A jade, jade.
No. The architecture of each, a refusal.
Rose is not rose nor violet violet nor jade jade.
But each is what it is, not what it seems.
What each seems is what of each gets seen.
Though what we see isn’t the thing seen.
The petals of the rose are violet and jade.
Thus the petals of the rose look, to us, rose.
The shape of the violet absorbs all but violet.
The violet we see is the violet a violet rejects.
A rose is a rose is a rose, but not as a rose.
Jade is the name of jade, not the jade named.
The Concealed
To express an essence of the dead to the living
&nb
sp; takes storytelling, and the story I like best to tell is this:
that once when my sister and I were meowing
at our cat, who obligingly meowed back,
our father turned quickly upon us and said
Don’t do that, and struck by his vehemence
we stopped but also could not help but ask him
Why not, and he answered, Because you don’t know
what you are saying, and this was so true
that we were struck dumb, which is both what we were
and what he wanted us to be. To say you don’t know
what you are saying makes sense but it does not
make sense to say do not look, you do not know
what you are looking at, because it is unclear
that looking is something you do in the way
that saying is something you do though clearly
you can be mistaken in both, you can say the wrong
thing, you can see incorrectly. Galen describes the eye
as a series of tunicae—garments—and like garments
they are not all of the same weight or color or substance.
When you say you like what someone is wearing
you don’t say “I like how your jacket occludes your blouse,
I like how your scarf almost but not entirely obscures
your skin.” You don’t know what you are saying because
you don’t know what you are looking at, because the thing
with which you are looking is not one thing but several,
as are the things at which you look. If you disrobe the eye
the eye disappears before its parts do, though as it goes
it goes strangely, for if you peel from the eye its lens
the eye that remains sees into ultraviolet, and thus
by removal sees what was always there. You don’t know
what you are seeing. There are only so many tunics
to discard. A cat can see into the ultraviolet, which is why
its attention seems focused on what is not apparent.
Not every garment is like every other garment.
In the complex arrangement of family relationships
relayed by Matthew the Apostle, what precedes
the execution of John the Baptist is either his ability
or inability to accurately perceive the nature
of the relationships before him: it is the daughter
of Herod and Herodias who dances
for her father at the behest of her mother
who desires vengeance on John the Baptist, and so bidden
dances so well or so powerfully or so compellingly
that her father Herod, the king, grants her whatever
she wishes (that is whatever her mother, his wife, wishes)
and thus the beheading of the Baptist. Her name is Salome.
You don’t know what you are saying: the name of Salome
is spoken neither by Matthew nor Mark but rather
by Flavius Josephus in his Judean Antiquities,
a term that surely includes the Bible but is not
equivalent to it. A feature of the Gospels that strikes
as strange only those who have bothered to read
them is that they tell different versions of the same
stories, each version adding or removing a layer
of detail, so that what constitutes the Bible is in fact
the relationship of many parts to a whole although
that whole in sum includes apocrypha and histories
like those of Flavius Josephus. When you say
Salome, it is equally true and false that you refer
to the biblical character, though everyone will know
what you mean even if you don’t know quite
what you are saying. Salome, yes, Salome
who danced the dance of the seven veils,
the erotic implication of which is that whomever
gazes upon Salome sees Salome as veiled
but also obscured, so that the fewer garments
she wears the more clearly she can be seen
but also that not seeing her unveiled becomes
the entire point of gazing upon her. Salome,
the girl from the Bible, who danced the dance
of the seven veils, whose veils are not in the Bible
and who is herself only in the Bible
if you do not look and if you look, disappears
and reappears depending on what you are looking with.
When we say you do not know what you are saying
we are seeing that you do not know what you see,
that how you see and what you see are severed,
a head from a body, a sound from a sense,
a careful arrangement of surfaces, shifting,
just because seen are not the same as same.
& Juliet
Sclera, the collagen of the eye, thickens with time. It is the ciliary muscle that must move the lens but the lens, if given enough time, would harden into a geode, a rock iris, too dense for any muscle to move. And if it ceased to move, the eye would cease to see, for it evolved to detect motion, or difference, one form of which is the relationship between darkness and light. Eyes are born in the dark but not all of the dark. They are born in dusk, in dimness. The collagens of the cornea are arranged with such perfect geometrical regularity that it admits light, but the retina is what sees. The retina is brain. Wanting to be close, we built a blackout room as an experiment during that summer an eclipse threw crescent shadows on the ground and reminded us we had no idea how our eyes worked because we depended on them to do so much work for us. Two bodies in a black room, dependent on proprioception, erase all concept of distance, since distance depends on shadow, perspective on occlusion. Some forms of sight are only mapping, so that whatever moves, disappears; in other forms, anything stable projected on the retina vanishes. It was a dark room, the room that contained our bodies, but not perfectly black. The closest to perfect black is a substance of vertically aligned carbon nanotubes that absorb 99.965% of visible radiation. The sight of it confuses the mind, but light can be deferred in many ways. Some fall into fevers, and when they awake are blind.
Sidewinder
Down there. Something gleams,
a snake in grass, a stream in granite,
the murmur of motion conversant
with less motion, of animals and water
with trees and grass. It all moves
whether we note it or not,
the markers of what we made
identical to whatever we made them out of,
the interruption of the place
now the place itself. Above:
noise and life, glasses ringing
before they are shards, bolts
fixing that which, once fallen,
will leave the bolts that bound
the beams to rust in the grass.
I am never sad. I don’t wish to miss this,
which means that I am glad
I saw it but will not regret
that it is gone. I want nothing,
not even to be free of desire.
Kwaidan
But sometimes the dead are awful,
their demands.
This is the lesson of Hoichi
the Earless.
The painted set is somehow larger
than the world.
The seas give way to paintings
of the sea.
Stories of death on the sea
become songs.
Hoichi the blind biwa player
performs them.
It is not above the dead
to trick the blind.
The dead are imperious
and compel servant ghosts.
Ghosts are imperious
and compel Hoichi.
He yields to the dead,
their vanity.
He cannot see the sutra
His ears, forgotten,
are forsaken.