‘The child squints,’ said Mama when I was born.
‘She will be a poet,’ said Papa, who was a student of physiognomy.
A Knife and Fork
A Bottle and a Cork
That’s the way to spell
New York.
That was the first poem that I learned by heart from a child whose father sold bagels. Mama despaired and bought me an illuminated copy of Faust. Papa said, ‘Look up.’
Not at the skyscrapers being built overnight from nothing out of Manhattan bedrock. Not at the fierce cranes preying over the sky. He said, ‘Every blade of grass that grows here on earth has its corresponding influence in the stars. This is the Mazalot.’
He said, ‘Intensity is the Desire to Receive. Open yourself to light and you will become light.’
I did not understand my mystical Papa, who each morning bound on tefillin, the small black boxes containing portions of the Torah which would contain and direct his energy.
‘Is it magic?’ I asked Mama, who shrugged and seemed to find no spells in the stacks of aluminium pots and pans burnt with food she didn’t like to cook.
My Teutonic Mama, Brünnhilde in her belly, her own spell the ring of fire that surrounded her. No man could approach. She was the woman on the burning rock, waiting, waiting, for the hero who would be worthy of her. It was not my Papa. Hadn’t she been the one to rescue him? And so the dream burned.
New York was pulling itself up by its own pigtail. In those days, after the war, cement mixers used to trawl around the city, ready to jack their load at a whistle from a gang-man. Higher up, on the steel frames of the giant buildings, men with monkey courage tossed red-hot rivets into steel buckets. We were bolting together the future. Rich and poor alike, the rivets of a new world.
I read William Wordsworth: ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven.’
I read William Blake: ‘How do you know but every bird that cuts the airy way / Is an immense world of delight, closed by your senses five?’
I read Whitman: ‘I moisten the roots of all that has grown.’
The streets. The cross-streets. The Hudson river where the cattle came up on freight trains. The smell of the abattoir. The smell of cement. Hot metal. Hot bagels. Cold water on the new-cast buildings. The courtyard of our apartment block. The dark young men, deep eyed, nesting on the shelves of our bookstore. Mama in her dress of red polka dots outside the Woolworth Building. The long coats of the old Russian Jews. Fresh grated horseradish. Schapiro’s ‘Wines you can almost cut with a knife’. Papa’s yellowing copies of the Jewish Daily Forward. Our upright piano. The chauffeurs dressed in double-breasted jackets and leather leggings in Central Park. Papa, walking, walking, the twelve and a half miles along, two and a half miles wide of this Aladdin island where anyone might be lucky enough to turn up a magic lamp.
Papa’s friends were in the Lower East Side, piled-up streets of Jewish busyness, where thin men with dybbuks in their eyes gave me challah bread to eat while they sold water-stained books to Papa, who carried them to the store in a huge carpet bag.
Mama’s friends on the Upper East Side, all Germans, with unfinishable supplies of pea and ham broth and whopper sausage. Mama in her neat feather hat and buttoned suit. Mama and her secret promise that one day we would go back to Vienna or maybe Berlin.
The years fold up neatly into single images, single words, and what went between was like a glue or a resin that held the important things in place, until, now, later, when they stand alone, the rest decayed, leaving certain moments as time’s souvenirs.
Should it daunt me that the things I thought would be important, my list of singularities and tide marks, is as useless as the inventory of a demolished house? I no longer recognise the urgency of my old diaries with their careful recording of what mattered. What I wrote down is in another person’s handwriting. What has held me are the things I did not say, the things I put away. What returns, softly, or in floods, disturbs me by its newness. Its vividness. What returns are not the well-worn memories I have carefully recorded, but spots of time that badge me out as the dull red J did Papa. I am marked by those stubborn parts of me.
Perhaps I did know it would be so. I remember walking with Papa on one of his dogged night leads, after some book or other, and coming up into Times Square just as the lights were switched off. Papa, guided by the Light Within, strode on unperturbed. I, in the second’s translation from brilliantness to nothingness, felt the world disappear. And if it could disappear so easily, what was it?
‘Shadows, signs, wonders,’ said Papa.
I read Whitman: ‘The sense of what is real, the thought if after all it should prove unreal.’
Against Papa’s Kabbalah, his worship at the Temple Emanu-El on Fifth Avenue, his strange friendships and the visits of the cantors, Mama set her Germanness. She was not a mystic, though her real quarrel with Papa’s more arcane experiments was that he undertook them in her saucepans. She did not want to fry her latkes over the remains of a potion to restrain klippot (demons, shells, evil husks, whatever separates man from G-d).
Her father had been a butcher, a lapsed Catholic turned cleaver atheist, ‘When I chop this up where is the soul?’ She had disliked his Bavarian brutality and moved to Vienna to study painting and drawing, supporting herself by selling lightning sketches in cafés. She had been timidly intellectual and attracted to Papa because he made vast systems out of nothing. Her religion was faint, his was hidden. He seemed to be fleeing his Jewishness, and only a few years after they were married did he begin to study Kabbalah, late night, burnt-eyed. As he turned inwards she turned outwards, but while he wore his intensity like a garment, she slept in hers. Both denied what was real to the other. To her he was mad. To him she was cold.
For a little while, in New York, they remembered each other for each other. They were happy. Then both began to warm themselves at different fires.
Into this unlikely blaze came their child. Squint-eyed. Poetical. The one defect of vision has corrected itself. And the other?
Defect of vision. Do I mean affect of vision? At the beginning of the twentieth century when Picasso, Matisse and Cézanne were turning their faces towards a new manner of light, there was a theory spawned by science and tadpoled by certain art critics that frog-marched the picture towards the view that this new art was an optical confusion. Nothing but a defect of vision. The painters were astigmatic; an abnormality of the retina that unfocuses rays of light. That was why they could not paint realistically. They could not see that a cat is a cat is a cat.
Recently I heard the same argument advanced against El Greco. His elongations and foreshortenings had nothing to do with genius, they were an eye problem.
Perhaps art is an eye problem; world apparent, world perceived.
Signs, shadows, wonders.
What you see is not what you think you see.
Papa in the dark room above the bookstore, waiting for the fifteenth of the month when the moon would be full. Papa with his stones of topaz. What was the light that shone in the darkness? What was the stone-glow, the living asterisk that made the bare room into a battery, Papa’s holy voltaic cell. Climb the stairs and listen outside the door to his half-singing, half-chanting, a thin wire of sound connecting him to the encircling light, the Or Makif, that must be drawn in.
Climb the stairs. Mama in the shop below making order out of the piles of books dumped by Papa, exhausted, excited, after another night’s walking to mekubalim behind hidden doors.
Mama on her little wooden ladder, seams straight, Count Basie on the radio, the slight swing of her bottom, and the lamp showing her underslip beneath her blouse.
Papa, his parchments, his gems, his dark lit-up face.
Mama, blonde and blue, gold-fingered and almost still.
I was afraid. I ran outside.
Mama said, ‘Watch where you go.’
Papa said, ‘What you see is not what you think you see.’
&nbs
p; Defect of vision. Do I mean affect of vision?
‘Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature because we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery we are trying to solve.’ (Max Planck)
‘It appears unavoidable that physical reality must be described in terms of continuous functions in space. The material point can hardly be conceived anymore.’ (Albert Einstein)
‘If we ask whether the position of the electron remains the same we must say no. If we ask whether the electron’s position changes with time, we must say no. If we ask whether the electron is at rest we must say no. If we ask whether it is in motion we must say no.’ (Robert Oppenheimer)
Is truth what we do not know?
What we know does not satisfy us. What we know constantly reveals itself as partial. What we know, generation by generation, is discarded into new knowings which in their turn slowly cease to interest us.
In the Torah, the Hebrew ‘to know’, often used in a sexual context, is not about facts but about connections. Knowledge, not as accumulation but as charge and discharge. A release of energy from one site to another. Instead of a hoard of certainties, bug-collected, to make me feel secure, I can give up taxonomy and invite myself to the dance: the patterns, rhythms, multiplicities, paradoxes, shifts, currents, cross-currents, irregularities, irrationalities, geniuses, joints, pivots, worked over time, and through time, to find the lines of thought that still transmit.
The facts cut me off. The clean boxes of history, geography, science, art. What is the separateness of things when the current that flows each to each is live? It is the livingness I want. Not mummification. Livingness. I suppose that is why I fell in love with Jove. Or to be accurate, why I knew I would fall in love with Jove, when I first saw him, on the day that I was born.
Energy precedes matter.
The day I was born.
It was a cold snowy winter New York. Cold was master. Heat was servant. Cold landlorded it in every tenement block, pushing the heat into smaller and smaller corners, throwing the heat out onto the streets where it disappeared in freezes of steam. No one could get warm. Furnaces and boilers committed suicide under the strain and were dragged lifeless from the zero basements by frozen men in frozen overalls. The traffic cops, trying to keep order in the chaos-cold, felt their semaphoring arm stiffen away from their bodies. It was a common sight, at shift change, to see them lifted like statues off their podiums, and laid horizontal in a wheezing truck.
The cars and wagons and trolley buses moved slower and slower, valves faltering, carburettors icing, until with a protesting phut! they slept in the falling snow, their black painted out to white.
One man got himself a big pre-war fire truck with eighteen gears, engine so high off the ground that a child could stand underneath. He fixed up an asbestos platform with a tiny woodsman’s stove on top and bolted the lot under the engine. By fuelling the stove he could keep his truck warm enough to be driven and he started a brisk business in grocery delivery. When anyone heard the clang of the fire bell or saw the great chrome radiator grille pushing towards their block, they ran out, limbs and overcoats, stopping him for milk and potatoes. From a distance, because the engine was so high off the ground, you could see the stove eye burning, glowing down the blanked-out streets and past the forgotten cars.
There was another man had six huskies that he harnessed to a home-made sledge. He was Polish and had come to New York to escape the war. No one was exactly sure how he had sneaked six huskies past Immigration but the story goes that the dogs were puppies and the officer, a born and bred city man, didn’t believe they would grow any bigger. Besides, didn’t his own wife love her chihuahua?
Around the markets of Orchard Street and Essex Street, everyone knew Raphael and his dogs. He made a living selling fruit-flavoured cheeses, his own secret recipe handed down from an uncle who had worked in the kitchens of the Tsar. If Raphael seemed eccentric, he was no more so than all the others who had been blown off their natural course and were learning new orbits around new suns.
When the snow started to fall, Raphael, under his vegetable sacks stuffed with dog hair and feathers, remembered a time before he was born, before his father was born, when someone who was still in his blood had travelled over the ice plains and the stilled rivers to fill a sledge with furs. The dogs growled at the snow falling in whispers, snow in flakes, snow in footballs, snow in avalanches, gaining mastery over the most modern city in the world. They too began to remember, and under their paws were the white rocks of the Eskimo, and stunted wind-mad plants, and volcanic sulphurous geysers, and outside, the short-fringed ponies, and other creatures, unseen, howling in the night. They were ready.
All night Raphael worked, hammering, sawing, bending, shaping, oiling, planing, fining, and there was wood, rope, metal and leather, and the dogs fetching in their mouths the things he needed.
By morning they were ready. In the raw dawn of a dead day, along deserted Fifth Avenue, the sound of bells, the sound of dogs barking, a whip in the cracking air, and a cry as old as winter itself. Raphael in his chariot, his hair black as coal, his eyes bright as living coal, spinning the snow under the rails of the sled.
People crowded out to him to get black tea or pea and ham soup from the two gleaming samovars. He sold bagels with his own fruit cheeses. He sold bars of dark chocolate and a patent chest ointment made of peppermint oil. The dogs, shaking the snow from their ruffs, were popular with the children, and bared their gleaming teeth and steaming tongues in greeting.
People called his sled and team ‘The Angel Car’. He ran errands for the oldest and the youngest hitched lifts, piled in childish heaps behind the hissing copper cylinders.
New York, city of motion, could not go forward, and so, because it hated to stand still, it went backwards. Went backwards into its past, individual and collective, the past of the place; the Hudson river and the trappers, the Indians and their piebald horses, the Dutch Stuyvesants, trading, building, navigating, dealing. The past of its people, now from so many parts of the globe, but all knowing what it was to struggle, to pioneer. To make the difficulty into the dream.
The snow recast the buildings into mountains. Tiny figures huddled in all of their clothes and all of their bedclothes, padded without sound in the shadow of these mountains. They were hunting food, hunting company, they were bartering what they had for what they wanted.
To defy the silence of the snow people began to sing. The layers-deep of snow baffled the acoustics, so that someone a few streets away from a song, could not hear the notes, but could feel the vibration. The sound of the city singing shook its foundations so seismically that after the snow melted, a number of buildings were found to have lost their tops.
Anyone going about in those days would come upon fires lit on the sidewalks where groups of men and women congregated for warmth away from their swooned apartments. Then somebody else would arrive with a stone jar of Schnapps, and somebody else with a hod of chestnuts and somebody else with a mouth organ, and there was Raphael running up and down with red-hot pitchers, filling the mugs we all carried with us in those days.
I say ‘we all’ for I was about to be born.
My mother, big with child, had strange longings; she wanted to eat diamonds. This gastronomic extravagance could hardly have been more than a fantasy for all but the very rich and Papa could not afford a Guggenheim bagel. We were not rich, nor were Papa’s many friends but some of them were diamond dealers, trading silently, secretively in a huddle of patched-up buildings around Canal Street and the Bowery.
One evening, when I was six months old, pre-born, bouncing my hands and feet off Mama’s womb wall, I heard the voices of Papa’s business friends, talking quietly in our warm low kitchen. Mama shouldn’t have been present at all, but she cared very little for the strict protocol of his Orthodox friends and banged about the kitchen, sometimes openly hostile, sometimes serving towers of blinis tall as the Empire State. She did as she pleased and no one
dared to challenge her because she had saved Papa’s life and risked her own. They called her Rahab.
Somewhere from deep inside their coats, their jackets, their shirts, their vests, their skin, their bones, the men unfolded felt pouches and spread the contents, glittering. It was not their value that they were discussing with Papa, it was their capacity to stimulate the soul’s deeper life. To a Jew, stones have meaning beyond value. The twelve jewels of the High Priest’s breastplate were energy not hoard. The stones live.
Mama turned round from her usual awning of aluminium saucepans and saw the diamonds. I saw their light and pressed myself as close as I could to the membrane of my genial prison. The light struck through Mama’s belly and fed me.
She stepped forward, picked up a diamond between thumb and finger, and swallowed it.
Then she swallowed another, and another, a voluntary force-feeding into a priceless pâté: Mama’s oesophagus larded with light.
Papa’s people are a patient people who have known adversity. They have wept by the waters of Babylon. They have crossed the Red Sea. They have sat in the desert with their camels and their concubines. They have wandered in the wilderness forty years. They have bargained with their God. Yet not even Job in all his affliction had his inheritance eaten by a woman with child. There was some debate about what to do next.
Papa’s people are a patient people. It was agreed that Papa would lock the door to our only lavatory on the landing and persuade Mama to use a commode.
A twenty-four-hour watch was rota’d in the kitchen and one of the off-duty men went out to buy surgical gloves.
Mama had no objection. She wanted only to eat the diamonds not to digest them. No one thought about me.
And I did not think, turning in the weightless water, charmed by cut faces of light.