Obligations of the Harp. Arthur Saltzman
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would produce pots or cobblers shoes. They are all reflexive gestures—stanzas, ceramics, soles. So are Christo’s canvas installations, his curtained valleys, battened-down beachfronts, and wrapped woods. So is Alain Arias-Misson’s Pamplona text, an extensive deployment of gigantic punctuation marks intended to manifest the city’s underlying grammar. So are the sales of stars as birthday gifts, which the purchasers can register in honor of loved ones. (One might buy a nebula to commemorate a nephew’s graduation, a constellation for a special cousin’s bar mitzvah, or a whole swath of astrology for a twenty-fifth anniversary, as his budget allows.) So is the naming of every rise and declivity on the moon, not to mention every other boulder big enough to detect up there. And so is “Black on Black,” a ten-foot-square black canvas painted black, which dominates the west wall in a room of the Chicago Art Institute, where it draws in and spooks the patrons, anticipating by example the announcement of “Lights Out.” All craft and supplication pitted against the void, which has all the room in the world and all the time.
And if all that weren’t unsettling enough, rumor has it that the universe keeps retreating from us, somewhat the way millions of Russians did from the incursions of would-be conquerors during war, leading them ever deeper into the zero. Science is pretty frank and unforgiving about this, and we don’t need all that much science to find out how far we fall short in our approximations. Even a layman’s appreciation of Einstein is enough to tell us that the clocks and rulers we might carry into subatomic interstices or the endless uttermost prove useless, there where an hour is not an hour after all, and not an inch an inch. Instead of formulating space, we merely alter the terms of our futility. One might say we’re down to desperate measures, had that not always been the case.
A monarchy of darkness. An obscure constitution. But no matter.
If all goes according to one current theory, Creation will come down to an omnivorous black hole, the final Final Solution and last collapse. There will have been nothing so ecumenical in existence as the end of it, which might be envisioned as an inhalation so complete that even our ghosts will get sucked in. Our holy and unwholesome ghosts, our inconspicuous and colloquial, our silent and sociable ghosts; the abject and the unacknowledged along with the indomitable ghosts; the familiar and the faint, the teasing and the malignant, the availing and the uninvoked, the intimate and the exiled alike; our wistful and forbidding spirits, those that leave spectral evidence behind and those that remove all sign; all the carping, cloying, coy, incorrigible, and unaccounted for ghosts, all at once and all together; the ghosts we were and those we’ll become, accumulated and compounded into the one period put to space and time.
In the meantime—which by that implacable definition, it always is—on afternoon television, they are consulting with the dead. Reality may be escaping in every direction every instant, but the premise of this particular show is that dying is centripetal. Our own ghosts return to us like repercussions, and apparently they can be encouraged to do so on cue. It’s a comfort—one way of countering the expanding universe by reeling something personal back in. They seize eagerly upon their namesakes to secure themselves, much as etymologists clutch words by their roots. Even if their departed have come back to complain or to punish them, the audience welcomes those possibilities over an eternity of the silent treatment.
Not a single guest judges. It’s as Don DeLillo wrote in Mao II: “Only shallow people insist on disbelief.” Why assume that a television studio is less conducive to rarefied visits than a chapel or a cemetery? Spirits might insinuate themselves anywhere. Consider the portable auras saints wore in old paintings like high collars turned up against the wind. It stands to reason that like everything else in Creation, divinity can come upon us out of nowhere, from behind.
The uniquely accessible host is the only one who’s actually occupied by the ghosts, and he translates for the studio audience their queries and talismanic memories, their jokes and concerns, their good wishes and regrets. The posthumous rush he reports occasionally befuddles him, and it occasionally takes him a minute or two for him to connect a given ghost to its family—afterworld traffic is snarled, and entities are crammed like commuters on a subway car. Eventually, though, he is able to home in on one or more idiosyncrasies recognized by selected members of the gallery. And so, this hour’s arbitration between incorporeal and carnal Callisons, followed by a reunion of a departed Furillo and some who’ve arrived in the flesh, is under way.
Tickets to the show are hard to come by. The disappointment and envy of those whose missing familiars do not show up is obvious. Everyone hopes to be summoned (by the host, by the impalpable—there is no discernible difference). Before the program goes to air, their prayers are abstract—customary petitions, more or less equally divided between “Please” and “Please don’t.” On camera, however, hopes grow as precise as a child’s Christmas list. People wish for a little specificity in their immanence, something sensible to fix their awe upon. A little preliminary data and identifying detail—is that too much to ask?
Cynics may quibble, but science is no different, really, when it goes pioneering, trying to snag something unprecedented on a radio frequency or an algorithm. A reassuring density is what everyone is after. A verification of more than we are. “What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab?” asks Annie Dillard in Teaching a Stone to Talk. “Are not they both saying: Hello?” Mass consciousness is equally on the minds of the forensic and the faithful in the end. In the end, everyone wants to be haunted.
The host of the show tunes in a distant channel and is not amazed. He is never amazed on any other episode, either. He treats his supernatural endowment much the way a professional basketball player might his gift for elevation or a musician his perfect pitch. In an epilogue, he soberly reviews the messages left by the dead. His recap does not vary much from show to show. We are witnessed. We are loved. Even if we feel neglected or ourselves neglect, no one is ever lost or lonely, no one left out or left behind.
“I knew that if anyone would come through the other side, it would be Phil,” explains one member of the Callison family. She is tearful but content. “He’s the type to, you know, barge to the front of the line.” Then four Furillos, representing three generations of descent from their own deceased, congratulate one another on having cajoled Anthony out of the atmosphere like a convict hidden in the woods. “As soon as I heard ‘poker chips,’ I nudged Connie—didn’t I, Con?—and said, ‘That’s got to be Anthony. Absolutely him.’” It is always a good visit and always too short.
Watching them rejoice over the reemergence of vanished family members, I perversely think of my brother’s appointment books. When Jeff completes a task, he doesn’t just check it off the calendar, he obliterates it with a vengeance. When he does something that he had not previously noted down as a thing that needed doing, he goes back to the appropriate date, inscribes the assignment, then annihilates it, too. He shrouds September and soaks October in shade; he chars March, eradicates May, wipes July from sight, plunges December in drear. Ultimately, all of his weekends are overcast, his holidays sunk in mourning, his weeks featureless. He refuses even one hour of illumination. What remains is month after month of uninterrupted murk, entire seasons of tar. Eventually, every day is filled in like a grave.
Jeff isn’t trying to impress posterity—he trashes his annual record as soon as the new January arrives, when he starts a new book with pristine resolutions. He means only to consummate the year in total gloom, grinding out the hours, the well spent together with the squandered, smothering every circled, underscored, and arrowed errand and dousing every irritating asterisk in black. He leaves no doubt: what’s past is past and without horizon. My brother’s brutal bookkeeping reminds me of Beckett’s Clov, with his dream of ideal proportions and immutable order, which only extinction can guarantee: “A world where all would be silent and still and each thing in its last place, under the last dust.” My brother’s Doomsday Books, his yearly installments of shadow, appreciate in much the same way individual days in nature do: the steady, predictable evacuation of all the world we’ve known, until it is inked in to its edges with night.
Maybe he’s imitating the kind of timeless sky God sought, too, showing off His supreme elevation, blowing us away with His perfect pitch. If that’s the case, it’s strange