(Day 2 of this year’s Advent series. Yesterday’s piece was about leaving space for uncertainty; today we consider time, beasts, and problem children.)
Looking For Those Who Have Time
I’m looking for those
Who have time –
The mythical beasts and angels
Complex
In rest.
Now, in a moment –
No stirring dawn before its rise;
No shadow
From gravity’s sunlit dance
Spun round too soon;
And the breath rises out
And the cells turn their rhyme
For the heart of the blood
Should be peace.
You have heard, I am sure, of the phrase “problem child.”
It is not exactly a phrase any parent uses. No, it is the phrase other people use when discussing a specific family dynamic at that point in the gossip session where complete candor has melted unctuously into its juiciest, densest center.
No names are ever specified. Instead: “Oh, yes, that’s the problem child.” (It is possible, given the context, that no names ever need be attached because everyone present has…already read Calvin and Hobbes, as it were.)
My point here is that the “problem child” (that tiny entity rendered transcendent by lack of name) generally serves as the perfect raison d’être for any problem being discussed. This little creature becomes the hinge for – everything.
Under The Sign Of The Problem Child
Now. Since I am happily childless, let us consider this in the context of things I care about. The above piece, “Looking For Those Who Have Time,” has been a bit of a “problem child” since its inception. It’s not even the whole piece; my choking instinct is specifically triggered by the last two lines (“For the heart of the blood/Should be peace.”), every single read-through.
And what am I to do about that? Every time I try to change it – through tiniest surgery or blazing keyboard strokes – the whole thing collapses. It does not want to change.
But I can’t get over the deafening triteness of “peace” as the conclusion to – all that comes before. Really? Really? –
Well, no, not really. I lately realized that the problem isn’t the last two lines per se. Instead, the last two lines are linked to the actual core of the piece: “The mythical beasts and angels/Complex/In rest.”
I love that phrase. It’s the opposite of my choke response, every time I read it.
That line is the hinge, the center about which everything else swings. (I do not subscribe to the “kill your darlings” philosophy, that’s how you end up with Othello.)
So after everything, finally, I left – everything. Whole, as-is, intact, nothing changed. I still wince every time I read the last part and then end up staring miserably at my poor mythical beasts and angels, happy in their complex rest and serenely not giving me any ideas.
Creature Feature
It’s worth noting here that ever since I was a kid (not a problem child, you can’t be “the” problem child if you’re also “an only child”) – I’ve loved Creatures. I was firmly on the side of the Harpies, the Sphinx, and Scylla and Charybdis (which are technically two sides at once?) – I was furious with Heracles/Hercules for ecological vandalism and accelerating multiple species along the endangered-to-extinct pipeline; and I hate many versions of Beauty and the Beast because…who the hell wouldn’t stay a Beast? Talk about de-evolution.
When Suddenly, A Borges Appeared
Obviously, then, given this and my elsewhere-noted penchant for Borges, I double-love The Book of Imaginary Beings. It is a collection of creatures, across cultures and time, who are defined by impossibility.
The interesting thing about Borges is that he often does this shell-game effect with the real and the unreal, symbol and source. He conflates the library and the labyrinth.
He habitually writes of encyclopedias with bogus entries (Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius); words that contain language and the end of language (The Aleph); fictitious writers of books which are then alluded to by other, equally fictitious writers – set in entirely different stories (notably The Secret Miracle’s Jaromir Hladík (which I write about here) is mentioned by a (nonexistent) theologian in Three Versions of Judas).
The translator’s note to my edition of Imaginary Beings (trans. by Andrew Hurley) neatly sums this effect:
“…the creatures…are stitched together, like Dr. Frankenstein’s creation, out of the parts of real creatures, but the whole is a whole that is impossible, ‘fantastic,’ never seen in nature.”
And, immediately following, the linked observation that the act of detailing these “impossible” beasts effects that most alchemical of transformations, tipping them into the possible:
“…This fantastic encyclopedia, like that earlier alphabetized universe, has ‘penetrated’ our own: the imaginary beings it chronicles are creatures we have lived with and think of as ‘normal’ aspects of our world – if not our real world, then the inner world of our fantasies and dreams and fears.”
That is to say, refer to a fiction often enough, and a sort of shell of “nonfiction” will eventually form, by virtue of its inclusion in many nonfictional things. The opposite, of course, is also true: many facts have an entire apparatus of accepted non-facts (if not outright lies) orbiting their unseen nucleus.
It is these shells that Borges is most adept at swapping around, spinning in ever-more-complex patterns of image and idea, before letting them come to rest – tantalizingly still (tantalizingly identical) – on the table of our contemplation. Pick one.
I recently picked one.
That is to say: “Looking For Those Who Have Time” was written in 2022, part of a series of Advent poems I shoveled into envelopes and mailed off to my parents throughout December.
Yet I recently looked at it again, looked differently at its real/unreal shell. As happens when one turns over a shell, I found something that was – part of the same game, yes, but utterly different. An Imaginary Being.
Three Winged
A bird’s wing on
Concrete. Fanned
Like unmatched angels’ un-
Steady
Beat –
Later: mesquite leaves’ perfect
Flared pair, green and neat.
Together, these make trinity
For some rare
New beast;
Three-winged,
Singing
And
afloat
Where
Bodies known
End.
Rare New Beast: Bodies, Time, Peace
It isn’t really as neat as the first shell it wore. I’m not really as neat about many things these days, insofar as my ability to say what anything means has vanished even further away than it once was. However:
It seems the idea of time – having it, not having it, losing or savoring it – is always tied to bodies.
They may be mythical, they may be real; composite, Frankensteined, perfect, failing, falling, floating, difficult, or draining. But it is through bodies that time is had: bodies are the sense by which time is perceived. We cup our hands, so time can pour through.
Bodies are, of course, eventually lost to time – or perhaps bodies eventually become overwhelmed with their sense of time.
Or perhaps the more one thinks about time, looks and tastes and pokes at it (as it were) – the idea of using a body to experience time becomes stranger and stranger:
“…This fantastic encyclopedia, like that earlier alphabetized universe, has ‘penetrated’ our own: the imaginary beings it chronicles are creatures we have lived with and think of as ‘normal’ aspects of our world…”
Bodies, time, peace; each of these are reality’s “problem children,” the imaginary beings, the hinges, the raisons d’être for everything else: tiny entities rendered transcendent by lack of better names. They are each the symbol and the source: we cup our hands, so that they can pour through.
It’s certainly a strange shell game to play. At least you’re guaranteed something is under the shell, figuratively speaking: finding “peace” rather than “the piece you were looking for” is still…pretty good.
Now after all that, I’m off to read Calvin and Hobbes. In case I need backup theories for handling any more “problem children” – imaginary or otherwise.
Citations
Borges, Jorge Luis, and Margarita Guerrero. The Book of Imaginary Beings. Translated by Andrew Hurley. Illustrated by Peter Sís. New York: Penguin Books, 2006.
Skeleton At The Feast 
One thought on “Advent, Day 2: Looking For Those Who Have Time”