BOOK ONE : LISTENERS AND READERS

:: WINTER 2001

deep mechanisms :: 1/29/01

Spider plants hang in a row, parallel to the cafe’s front windows. They hang in a space colored by music. Acoustic guitar, no vocals. The music has a sparse delicacy— it’s pretty —yet Jakob thinks he can hear complex parts in it. Pale green in the wan winter light. The woman behind the register (the barrista, Jakob thinks, although he cannot think this word without irony) readies his coffee at the back counter, and as she turns to place it and his apple spice muffin in front of him, he looks at her, smiles, says “thanks,” and tries to assess the links between her and this music. She has neck-length hair (light brown), glasses with tortoiseshell frames, a face that holds hints of that elegant Eastern European bone structure that he sees around the city fairly often. A little too skinny for his tastes, but attractive; looks smart. She taps the register awake, it responds by emitting a short series of blips and crunches.

—That’s $3.59, she says.

He pays with a five, she gives him his change.

—Thanks, he says, and she smiles. He throws the forty-one cents in the jar.

—Thanks, she says.

He heads for the table (Fletcher is already sitting there, eating his way through a salad), still listening to the pretty plantlike music and thinking about the barrista. When you control the CD player in a space, you control a limited sort of broadcast range; what you broadcast must reveal something about you. Choosing to play a piece of music to a group reveals what kind of music you like; the kind of music that you like probably reveals some sorts of deep structures in your mind, mechanisms of enjoyment and pleasure. Jakob can recognize that there’s a relationship there but he can also recognize that he doesn’t know how to decode it; there’s a kind of translation that he would need to perform and he simply can’t; he doesn’t know enough about music. He wonders if romantic relationships between musicians tend to be successful, because they have the advantageous ability to glimpse the structures that move deeply in one another’s minds. He wishes that he had played an instrument in high school, when everyone seemed to be doing it; an image here of a cute girl he knew who played the clarinet; he had wanted terribly to go out with her, but all of their conversations had been characterized by failed attempts at connection. The clarinet lived in a small opaque black box with latches. Maybe if he had played the clarinet himself. All those voices coming together.

Fletcher pauses his fork midway to his mouth.

—Hey, man, what’s on your mind?

—What? Oh. Girls who rejected me in high school.

—Ha!

—How I could have won their love, that sort of thing.

—Come up with any good strategies?

—Oh, sure, plenty of good strategies. Fifteen years too late, but plenty of strategies.

—That’s memory, man. Fucking interferes.

He places the fork in his mouth by way of punctuation.

—How do you mean?

He holds up a finger until he’s finished chewing.

—I mean, look at you, man: you’re so busy thinking about how you could have done things differently back in whenever, fucking 1988, that you don’t even get an opportunity to think about how you might be doing things differently now. We’re enslaved to our memories.

—Hm.

—I think that’s part of what poets are doing: trying to free themselves from that. Poets write a lot— I mean a lot —on the theme of memory. You’d think that we were all constantly walking around living in the past. But I think— well, here’s what I think— I think writing poems is a way to create an external repository for those memories, to get them outside of you, to free up some of the space in your head, so you can be attentive to what’s going on around you: you know, “the now.”

—Very Buddhist.

—Fuck right it’s Buddhist. But let me make this point clear: poetry isn’t Buddhist; poets are Buddhist. A book of poems isn’t part of the poet anymore: it’s pieces that he’s deliberately released. A reliquary.

—That’s what you should call your book.

—Reliquary? Fuck, maybe I will. And he takes out a pen and writes RELIQUARY across his napkin in huge letters.

—That’s interesting, you know, what you said.

—Was it? I was making it up as I went along. Tomorrow I’ll say something completely different.

Jakob has to laugh at this.

—That’s what living in the now is all about, says Fletcher. And, for a moment, Jakob listens again to the music.