A Convergence Of Birds (17 page)

Joseph Cornell

UNTITLED

c. mid-1950s

17 x 10.75 x 5.125 in.

box construction

John You

Why wasn’t I invited to grip the balustrade?

Am I not made to strut across the scene?

Hasn’t the sunset already entered the library?

And hasn’t it closed the door to anyone

who was anxious to file me away?

White, oblong, upright—though not a book,

the thick-sided box is both a prison

and an immense stage,

which allows your fans to adore you

as you make your grand entrance,

then pirouette, like a clock in a wet railway station.

I am a humble example of something—

I’m not sure what—

the next civilization no longer appreciates.

Next door, a silent movie, its hypnotic subtitles

serenading the startled brow of the story’s heroine,

Paved Honey, best known for her

inventive outbursts of wickedness.

Why doesn’t the audience see the ropes

hoisting me to my rightful place in the sky?

We were unable to leave town

before it was overrun

by a tumultuous outpouring

of brightly costumed insects,

some of which we barely manage to name.

Carnivorous birds remain our only consolation.

We keep them beside us, in hotel rooms.

Believe me when I say I wanted to write sooner,

but nothing eventful has transpired

since I sent the last postcard to show

you a photograph of The Bridge of Slobs

before it finally collapsed

beneath the crowds dancing on its neck.

If there is a small pleasure

to be found in any of this,

I have nearly an eternity to find it.

Joseph Cornell

UNTITLED

c. 1948-50

16.25 x 17 x 4.4375 in.

Box Construction

Jonathan Safran Foer

If the aging magician should admire the ribs of his hungry gondolier, its only because they look like wands. His breath had steamed the front window of a curiosities boutique once: suspended in a refrigeration unit was a wand, into whose length was carved: Congealed Blood of Baudelaire’s Swan. In the back of a rare bookshop, he once found a threadbare quarto—the pages dissolved in his hands like cotton candy in the mouth—that told of a wand in Greenland, assembled from the vertebrae of a virgin princess who died of anxiety in a high tower, still clutching the white hanky to her flutterless heart. A friend of his—no, not a friend, exactly, but a man with whom he drank milk during a break between symposiums at the Magic in the Age of Efficiency conference—said he had a wand so heavy it could never be lifted, and one so light it refused gravity’s lingerie. But he’d never seen or heard of a rib wand. And certainly not Venetian.

You do not eat much? he observes in his pidgin Italian.

I do not believe in food, his hungry gondolier replies, propelling the thin boat on.

No?

The gondolier sends his gaze over the horizon.

Well, I believe in food, the aging magician jokes, clapping his hands, and I’m going to eat your city into the ground! Pizza! Pizza! Pizza! Every meal and then some. I deserve it. Do you have any idea how old I am?

If like a mime in love at dusk the aging magician should feel a profound urgency,

it is his need to reconcile himself with his life before he forgets all of his most convincing tricks, it is the emergency of his Parkinsonian hands and the black hat’s stubborn false backing, it is the anxiety of fakery: He wonders if he has lived, perhaps, a very normal life, or worse, a bad life, or, worse, has not lived at all, but performed a long series of tricks. What, after all, is the sum of sixty-five hundred invisible birds?

It is essential, now, to remember why he did the things he did in life, what goals he gave himself. He needs—needs—to remember where it was, sixty years ago, that he wanted to be in sixty years. Without remembering, he can’t know if he is there.

Did I want to be famous? Did I want to have many lovers? Or one great love affair—the love story of the century? Did I want to be popular? Did I want to be mean, sometimes? Funny?

Because I am not famous and have had neither many lovers nor the love story of the century—unless the century was such that its love story could be an unfulfilled one. I was never particularly popular. I was rarely mean and rarely funny. If this is what I intended, then my life has been all that I wanted it to be.

The aging magician would examine his hands

while the mother tried to pull the children loose from the jungle gym. This was his ritual before every show, and it may have harkened back—or so he occasionally thought—to the womb, when he encountered his hands for the first time.

No conspicuous smudges or scrapes. No filth lining the fingernails. No rings. His veins had risen to the surface of his skin, and nothing could check the stubborn shake of his left hand: the involuntary gesture summoning that final muse of illusion. (Its said, in professional magic circles, that all real magicians are left-handed. How it pained the aging magician, then, when his tremors forced him to learn to handle the wand with his right hand, to pull the blue parakeet from the thimble with his right hand, to palm the cork balls with his right and unnatural hand.)

He would file his nails to the quick, as he did before every performance, pull the crown from his watch (freezing time for the duration of his show, which would be, now, no duration at all), brush the few remaining strands of white hair over his head, fumble with the cinch of his tea-stained cummerbund, lick moisture across his parchment lips (emptying his mouth of moisture, which required, in turn, a withdrawal of moisture from the lips), and attach his glasses to his face with a tan rubber band around the back, insuring that they would never fall off in the middle of a trick.

You are an artist,

he would tell himself. You perform magic for children for their amusement. You have succeeded when the illusion is carried out flawlessly and the wonder sustained. This makes children amused; it makes them believe in things that don’t exist and are better than those things that do. This is what you are paid to do, and this is your calling. He would check each of his tricks twice, as was his ritual, to make sure that nothing misbehaved when called upon to amuse and transcend. (Amusement, for the aging magician, was transcendence. Not cheap and kitschy games, not giving scissors a hard c, as other, so-called, magicians did, but real amusement: the urgent need to know how something is done, but not wanting to know. Transcendence, the aging magician thought, while trying, with no success, to tie his bow tie, is the sum of two contradictory urges—needing and not wanting. It is a sadness we can live with.)

The ball in the ball in the ball was ready. The hanky’s secret pocket was still there, as was the black hat’s stubborn false backing. He made the coloring book go blank and then, with a different riff of his thumb, fill with colors. Yes. It still works.

He always half-expected to find that the tricks themselves had vanished, leaving only an ordinary ball, an ordinary hanky, an ordinary black hat, a colorless coloring book: that the magic would one day undo itself as its final trick, leaving only things.

Your city is beautiful, but

don’t you think it might be a little less stinky without all the water? Which is another joke, of course—another lost in translation. The older I get, the aging magician thinks, the less I am understood. The movement toward death is one toward complete misunderstanding. He cannot help but imagine it as a chart:

But maybe, he thinks, it’s the other way around. Maybe I have been getting better at expressing myself. Maybe my new silences are more accurate than my old words, and when my eyes close for the last time—the open-ended silence—I will be understood completely. He sees it:

Or perhaps I have never been understood at all, not a single word or gesture, except, that is, for the moments of love:

He starts to repeat himself, fearing that the gondolier didn’t hear him: Your city is beautiful, but—

I do not believe in beautiful things, the gondolier says, lifting his long, skinny arms above him, letting the breeze blow across his chest like a sculptor’s gaze. Only in beauty.

The aging magician kneads his left hand with his right one. What a strange thing you just said! And what faith! I admire you greatly, gondolier, for your strangeness and faith. You do believe in admiration, don’t you?

But he doesn’t answer. He shows no indication of having understood, or even heard, a word that the aging magician has said. He gives the magician no reason to take his own existence for granted, or the existence of the gondola, cutting the green-brown water, or that of the water, holding the city in its net, or of the city, holding the water in its net. What if the aging magician wonders. What if the world, which we cannot help but think of as being an intricate order of nets—the cloud is held in the atmosphere’s net, the rain in the cloud’s net, the hydrogen and oxygen molecules in the net of water’s compound, the fallen rain in the sidewalk’s net, the sidewalk in the net of the earth’s crust, the earth’s crust in the net of the planet, the planet in the net of the solar system, and so on—is not that way at all? What if the fallen rain holds the sidewalk, and the planet the solar system? What if when I pick up a baby, take it to my chest and cradle its head under my palm, it is the baby holding me? Or worse—it is unthinkable!—what if there are no nets at all, and I am not holding the baby, and the baby is not holding me?

Upon searching the pockets and false linings of his jacket, the aging magician finds a rip, whose purpose he searches his brain for, until he realizes that it is only a rip,

like the small and hopefully unnoticeable one behind the knee of his tuxedo pants, and the one out of which his big toe sticks. It’s true: his magic garments are falling apart. But there is nothing to be done. He can’t afford new ones, or to have these fixed, and his shaky hands would be worthless with a needle and thread even if he knew how to sew. There is another rip just below his right elbow. He fingers a rip where his right shoulder meets his collar. A rip—he will soon be all pockets and no pants—at his left shin. A rip, it’s impossible to ignore, across his sleeve. To conceal some bunch of crushed-velvet roses? No. He had fallen in front of his building after a show and had had to tip the doorman his night’s earnings to be picked up silently: the feeble are not allowed in his building, and the aging magician doesn’t want to go to a home for the feeble, even if that is what he needs.

He looks into the eyes of the elderly on the street, on the bus and in cafes, and wonders if they are performing the same trick. He looks at those in middle age, between parenthood and grandparenthood, already gray but not yet stooped, and wonders if they, too, are magicians. And what about the young? Those still in the first half of life? Are they like him? Are they older and sadder and weaker than they appear? He sees a beautiful young girl get off the subway and follows her through the city. Is she happy? Is she healthy? And children and babies? He hopes that they are only what they are. Yes, he thinks, I want people to be what they are, and all other things to he what they are not.

I don’t believe in magic, but I do believe in you,

a young birthday girl told him after one of his last shows.

Thank you, Princess, he said, taking her fingers between his hands. What a lovely thing you just said!

Your tricks were all really bad. I saw the thin string between your hand and the cork ball. She giggled. I also saw that your hat had a thingy in the back, because when you weren’t looking, one of my friends took it and showed us. That’s where the bird went.

Oh, the aging magician said, removing his top hand from the little girl’s, still holding it beneath. But his Oh was accompanied by a wooden blue parakeet that flew to the Princess’s ear, pinched her lobe in its beak, licked it, and whispered, I was trying for so much more.

And the square marbles? he asked.

My father has that trick. But this My father has that trick was accompanied by a wooden blue parakeet that flew to the aging magician. It nestled its head deep in his ear, as if trying to push its way inside of him: I love you more than anything in the world, even my father.

I’m so sorry, the aging magician said. I’ve ruined your party.

No, she urged, blowing wisps of brown hair from in front of her eyes. It was funny. I loved it, and so did all of my friends. That’s what I came to tell you. No one really believes in magic, anyway.

And that’s why I never had children,

the aging magician once told his doorman, whom he sometimes referred to as his assistant: because I never had a wife. The doorman listens to the aging magician; he humors him—partly out of sympathy, knowing he is the only one the aging magician has to talk to, and partly for the secret tips—but he doesn’t care. The aging magician is a sweet old man, he thinks. He thinks: It must be very hard.

Maybe that’s why I became an artist of magic in the first place: to be around children. I came close to marrying a woman once. We were very young then. Younger than you. We followed her father’s map to a winding creek on the far end of their property. I brushed my teeth three times that morning, and asked her to wear that blue dress I liked so much, which she did, but without shoes. And even without shoes, she looked fully done up. That’s the kind of girl she was. We made it there as the stars were beginning to come out of the trees. I got down on one knee—I can’t even get to my knee anymore!—and said, “You know that I love you, but what you might not know is that I’ve always loved you, even before we met. The love between us was contained entirely within me, and always will be if you say that you don’t love me. I will be like a man in an airport, carrying the luggage of a lover he can’t find.”

He lost himself in thought.

Let me give you a piece of free advice, he said to the doorman: