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By Root 2422 0

even that. This is how I remember my mother. I see her lazing in the cradle of a certain hammock in our habitat in which she was wont to laze. This hammock is made of thin brown ropes diagonally knotted together to form a pattern of many diamonds. One end of the hammock is secured around the limb of a tree, and the other around the sturdy wooden post of a jungle-gym-like structure. When my mother lazes in it, the bottom of the hammock sags until it is only an inch or two above the ground at the lowest point; when she is not lazing in it, the hammock contains the phantom of her presence, and in the part of the hammock where she puts most of her weight the diamonds are loose and stretched, warped and misshapen. In my memory of my mother, in the eidetic image of her that my brain projects onto the screen of my inner eyelids when I close them and work to recall her, she is lazing in this hammock. In her lap is a baby chimpanzee, less than a year old, looking much like a human infant only much more hirsute. This baby chimpanzee is me. (Does it seem incongruous to you that I should make an appearance in my own childhood memory? The eyes of the mind can easily leave the body—how else would you know your double when you meet him in a dream?) My mother strokes her long purple fingers through the thin fur on my head. Her eyes glisten with love and awe in the way the eyes of any mother of any species glisten with love and awe. (With the possible exceptions of guppies and hamsters and other ridiculous animals who spawn a teeming cloud or pile of offspring and then immediately eat most of them.) My mother kisses the top of my head. The folds of her body, in which I am half-enveloped, are warm and comforting. The love between these creatures, between the mother and the infant, is entirely without words, and needs none to explain it. I loved her. In a strange way, I love her still, and there’s the rub. There’s so much I would like to tell her, but I have entirely forgotten the wordless vocabulary of my animal innocence.

Have you ever read Paradise Lost, Gwen? I stumbled across a battered copy of it in the course of my wanderings across this blighted earth, by which I mean I once stole a copy of it from the University of Chicago library. And God, did I fall in love with the Devil. Could it be more fitting that Lucifer is a master orator? Demonic rhetoric, Satanic language!

I have heard, Gwen—spoken, as can be expected, in tones of dreary admonition—that self-authorship is the bourgeois fantasy par excellence, as in Milton’s Satan: “Who saw when this creation was?… We know no time when we were not as now, know none before us, self-begot, self-raised.” But why condemn the rebel angel for the fantasy of self-invention? Who could help feeling seduced by Satan’s poetry when compared to the dull, paternalistically castigatory abashments of God? As Blake points out, the reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it. Well, I too am a true poet, but unlike Milton and more like Satan, I know it! And also like Satan, I made myself with words. I wrote myself into the world. With my own hand I reached into the cunt of the cosmos and dragged myself kicking and screaming out—HELLO, WORLD. HELLO, YOU BASTARDS. HERE I AM. IT’S ME, BRUNO, THE BOURGEOIS APE.

(And also like Satan, I’m a beautiful loser.)

It is impossible, however, to write a poem, or anything for that matter, about an unfallen Adam and Eve, because I cannot imagine them as having language. In Paradise there is nothing to say. Eden was sacrificed not for the pleasure of a fruit, but for the pleasure of the word. Now we have shame and pain and knowledge of death and whatnot, but at least we can talk about it. And talk and talk and talk! And maybe—I think—maybe it was even worth the trade. Sometimes the things of this world are less beautiful than their shadows. What is poetry but the shadowplay of consciousness?

But wait, Gwen—wait! I have just recalled that there