History is His, is ours, and not as a fixed sum, a known, but as a continuum, if darkened, a forever beginning, an unvoided void. And so it’s with a mind for this history, this past we might date and time by the deaths, inevitably, joyously, of our many martyrs, that B plots an end of His own. A Zionless plotz. Without these losses, no gains might be ours. Immortality is abominable to memory, also to banks and to the capacities of even our greatest synagogue and shuls, their oppugnant schools. But how to have an end to call His own, having been forbidden from calling, without tongue, His mouth the grave of a name. A death itself shrouded in the as yet unknown, graven upon tomorrow, buried in future, a coffin if falsely bottomed to the day before that…the thought now is Polandland, far toward the east, it having become too dangerous over here, too hostile, exposed. America, what’s next. America,
Polandland, where everything began, there it would end, if only for Him, if only for now…spin the globe, point a finger; on a long Shabbos afternoon to idly flip through an atlas, then stop and, po or sham, that’s where history hails from, promise. Polandland, where everything’s, what’s the idea I’m thinking here, the ideal I’m saying, the word without chalk or board…where He can get Himself perspective that’s what, a sensibility, distance, remove — the wart of the word on the tip of the tongue, the pickled silver sliver of flesh, fishlike if headless, stilled, mounted in its setting of gold, having been excavated from the ruins of His house, dug from the scorched mouth of the earth — only for it to leave its limited time only exhibition in the Museum in the Park north from the Temple’s conversion, to make the rounds of every major metropolis, wandering city to city in its lingual stump, an equatorial twisting…to outlive infamy, outlasting even reality, on its way to becoming a symbol — with the mensch to whom it belonged to be remembered as a relic Himself, to be embraced but only in His toothy demise, its humiliation, whiteshrouded. A sickly veil. To then ask with this severance of His for another, if only He could, to wag its length into a question, to curl it, even at this remove, at such a sunder, around what appeal: to ask with it permission to leave, for leave to escape, to beg, beseech, bow down, to humble myself in the midst — a tongue that would be the brother of the snake of Eden treed before its Fall, a tongue with knees, I’m talking. Think of it, how to leave affairs all up in the air, rain-bowlike and at their highest arc, promising only the undecided unmade, the still unthought and forever unknown…redemption necessary to any expatriation, Him needing to be released from this bondage before He binds Himself anew (don’t begin when you haven’t finished, or — Hanna would often harangue along these lines); it’s maybe pitiful, perhaps abject, but faithful, respectful, honoring — this seeking of maternal permission, this wanting of a brotherly consent. To obtain His freedom from any Pharaoh with a heart significantly unhardened, melted to any sympathetic wet. To ask with a burnt, coalslowed tongue the only question to which an answer might be permitted, the answer of — do what you want, what you will, up to you. Affirming maturity. Independence. You’re on your own, grown up. I have a response. Anyone have a query? And if none would oblige? I’ll let myself go. Even more than I already have.
