My digression betrays itself because I wanted to share something, but then I realized that the significance behind the shared object would have to be explained, would take away life from whatever I was meaning to show and tell about previously. Therefore, I had to tell of how I came upon the Poetics, and then I felt strongly the urge to tell so much more about my attendance at Hollins, but I realized it had nothing to do with what I was sharing before. I think I can save myself by digging into my Poetics, finding the exact quotation regarding recognition.]
Chapter 2
When I first met Butch, he was a baby in a bulrush basket, and I held him to my breast to suckle; he didn’t especially want it, kept asking me to point the way to Charon. To the ferryman or the moon? I asked before knowing that in these times Pluto is still a god somewhere and not a planet. In this story, my womb is cold and old, and my ovaries sag, deformed like the moons of Pluto. Butch is a baby, and he’s in a bulrush basket. I am the way, I say.
In fiction, digression means promise. I promise this will fit in somehow; I’ll return to this in a way that will allow sense to be made; the diamond ring is the missing puzzle piece; the jackrabbit gnawing on our celery isn’t a diversion from (as Robert Kelly warns in his book Doctor of Silence: beware of animals when they appear in fictions) what really eats us up when we’re in love. So when the novelist suddenly drops her coveted plot like an expensive vase, beware—love is in the air.
In love, it is easy to forget one’s promises to one’s self. To be in love means to sleepwalk when the lights are on—to lie wide awake when the lights are out, engaged in some other kind of dreaming. In his essay “Riddled,” David Weiss says that love is dangerous behavior. Jeannette Winterson says that those in the most need of change choose to fall in love and then blame it all on fate. To suffer Romeo’s woe, professed at the beginning of the play, of no love to bemoan means simply that one has yet to invent a white rabbit.
Chapter 3
In my lying-awake dreams, he has already left me. I don’t find out I’m pregnant until a week later. Picking up the phone to call him, I stop myself, and think that because my heart hurts so much, I’d rather do this tragically and, therefore, alone. Years later, he calls me, only because he’d heard, through a mutual acquaintance, that I was dying and that I had a beautiful daughter who had his eyes. I confess that she is his and Would you like to meet her? We set up a dinner meeting at my apartment. I dress my daughter in red velvet and ballerina slippers. She eats her peas, plucking them off the plate with her fork. She doesn’t speak much, but when she does, he looks at her as if she had wings. I send her to bed promptly after the bread pudding. She is confused by the word copse in Anna Karenina; he is impressed, as she is only four. I explain, and she goes back to her room, closing the door behind her. When he leaves, he can hear her footsteps approaching; he kisses her good-bye. Behind the closed door, he overhears her ask, “Mommy, was that man my daddy?” “No,” I say. “You were sent to me in a bulrush basket.” All night, she sleeps, and I eat celery in small bites, by the refrigerator door, to keep me slightly alive.
PART 3
Chapter 1
What the magicians know will hurt you, as it is they who possess the knowledge of from whence objects come and whither they go. The white rabbit never exists until summoned, and the place where the white rabbit existed before being summoned never existed—only in the spectator’s mind do these places exist. When the doves fly forth from the magician’s breast pocket, they do not enter our world to perch on random branches of earthbound trees—we only see them briefly for the sake of the trick. When I meet whomever it is I meet, this person never existed before and exists then, at the meeting, simply for the sake of the trick. What the magicians know will hurt you, because when whomever it is I meet flies forth from my breast, as they will and as they must, these beings do not enter this world, but go where only the magicians know they belong. Into the black hat of disappearances so many loves go and reemerge as playing cards and the animal manifestations of the symbols of fecundity or hope.
[Digression for the sake of inclusion: One in ten persons aged sixty-five and over has some form of Alzheimer’s disease. Nearly half of persons aged eighty-five and over is also affected. There exist chemical agents in these patients’ brains that trigger memory loss, and according to researchers,
