Berild moved. She went inward into the ruin, slowly, carefully, and then she put out her hand as though she was touching the long-vanished wall, as though she was feeling along it for a doorway that had not been there for ages. It almost seemed to Stark as though she could see the vanished walls, and was following them.
—Leigh Brackett, Eric John Stark: Outlaw of Mars
1.
Ancient Earth’s a boomboom afternoon
in the video game-room of a local mall, compared
to ancient Mars in the sci-fi novels of Leigh Brackett.
Her red planet was immeasurably old—I mean
the life there was, its science, and its loud, somewhat Moroccan,
desert fierceness—when the closest thing to human life
down here was a cowering thing in its first cave.
We were learning to coordinate our fingers,
we were first distinguishing other from self, and up
there in the marketplaces of Valkis, Jekkara,
and Barrakesh, and the other towns along the dying canals,
the barges unfreighted their wares to the gaudily saddled backs
of huge dunes lizards, and the warriors warred,
the sages were sagacious, and the dancing girls in their finery
(and out of it), in ankle bells and with their invisible,
viable hooks of floral musk, created a life
that Brackett tells us overspilled its skin
with a “wicked vitality.” And yet even this world only thrives
by sucking on the sloughings of an earlier age of wonder
—is a small thing in the weedy debris
of the formerly glorious era of the Ramas,
when their alabaster palaces seemed to rival Mars’s moons
in size and scintillance, and since-lost psycho-astral physics
meant that the elect could send their minds to live in other,
younger bodies, and so never truly die. It turns out Berild
(from my epigraph) is one of only three Ramas left alive
millennia later. In the double Martian moonlight of a knotty plot,
our hero, Stark, uncomprehendingly witnesses this svelte seductress
(elderly, really, by thousands of years) extend her hands
to feel her way among the walls and statues of a city
that no longer exists. The prose is bewitchingly eerie.
I was sixteen when I read that book: the right age, evidently,
for its fecund and escapist charm to shape me
(well, my yearnings; not my gawky, daffy actual outer being)
in its image. I was sixteen, I was yolk, and mist,
and milk, and so I daydreamed I was steel.
I was sixteen, and the thought of Berild’s empress body
somehow entered my genome. Ever since,
her simple gesture there amid the desert emptiness
returns to me a few times every year in weird mimesis.
Like last night, down at The Chugger Lounge. A vet from ’Nam
was alternately staring into blottospace and telling me about
the things he’d seen—and this was real
shit-your-johnnies combat duty, not some little wipe-ass
paper-shuffling office job. Well, after one especially
unexpected rain of enemy firepower, there
was his friend, his best friend, Eddie D’amato, feeling
gingerly over the ground with one arm
for his other arm, that had been torn off in the darkness. Only seconds
had gone by, but already he reached out into that past
of himself as if it were countless centuries.
2.
“Man!—there’s lots of me out there”—in which I hear,
across the dreary wires of long-distance, my friend Delrae’s
sadly whimsical shrug. It’s six months now,
he says, since Cindy found him (“and the boys were with her:
that’s the part I can’t stand”) in the farther unkempt tangles
of their back lot, on his knees, out by the boundary marker,
weeping. “Not for any special reason. Just . . . oh, weeping;
and unable to stop. The more that Sammy said, ‘Please, daddy,
stop,’ the more . . . well, you get the picture.” Yes,
I get this very American, commonly grievous, senseless, diagnosis-of-bipolar
picture. “Now I spend most afternoons at the downtown library:
R and R.” That’s where the population of “me” comes in—the retiree guy
whose reigning fear is he might fall in the cracks between the all-too-many
hours a day holds. Plus, the shufflers. The starers. The readers
afloat on books like rafts across some dread abyss. “My brothers
and sisters. The Delraes—” then “—a dynamite name for a rock group, right?”
He’s been reacquainting himself with the texts of his early undergraduate love,
prehistory. It turns out that my friend Delrae can take me from
the oldest chunk of vomit that we know of (it’s an ichthyosaur’s,
160 million upchuck years ago) to the ocher-and-cinnabar-bodied gods
and animal-headed shaman (?) [maybe] presences on the stone
of the Paleolithic . . . on the stone of our first duplicated awe.
“And, yowza: those goddesses . . . !”—he means the bulbous statuettes that look
as stuffed with fecundity as udders, only scored with small abrasion-faces—
“ . . . !” and once again my friend is wordless, struck dumb by the boyish
enthusiasms I remember roiling inside him from twenty years back. Which is
the point of these leisurely afternoons . . . Delrae’s attempt to recover
a previous self and its web of connections. And so Berild
enters the poem once more . . . . Delrae reaching back to an earlier
Delrae-prime: who reaches toward a paleontologist hero of his: who
enters the cave, and stretches out his hands to trace the red
and readied spear-arm of a hunter: who, in the “real world,” is staring
empathetically (and chrono-regressively) into the eyes of the grazing beasts,
the shambling beasts, the howling beasts way out in the hills: who turn
their gaze at night to the pinpoint star-show overhead in the heavens
and yowl in a reunion with the elements we were at the start:
before there was mind, before there were solids.
3.
Speaking of stars . . . in one review: “If a Goldbarth poem is a real
‘Goldbarth poem,’ you know ‘the universe’ is going to be brought onstage,
with the full duties of a protagonist.” Well, okay; so as not to keep you
waiting: here she is. She’s here, she enters in the proto-radiation
of her youngest existence—so far back, the particles of space
were just her dream life; and breath, and fire, and really anything
approaching “combination,” was the craziest fancy. This is the X,
the ur-speck, that astronomers would call the “singularity”
at the origin-tick of “inflation,” and what I call (after all,
the “every” of “everything” is waiting in here to clamber out
in wings of flame and jolts of electricity and bodies of carbon)
the pupaverse. It’s this all-radiant dot that the astronomers
are attempting to reach, by following the background
of “inflationary gravitational waves” across the entire 15 billion years of time
that Time consists of. And this urge to extend
our most sensitive feelers retroward, to the birth of the stars,
then past the birth of the stars . . . is strong, is satellites
and ground observatory installations that by now can dwarf
the grandeur of the Babylonian ziggurats to Monopoly pieces.
Then again, the promise, the wow, is equally strong . . . that some day
these astronomers will dig their hands inside the astonishing contents of the sky
with the easy intimacy of feeling around the golden fill
of a feed bag. As for me, at the end of a day of this
and that and talking to Delrae, it’s enough to rub my eyes
—these tiny packets where a partum of the stuff of stars
has come to rest—and watch what German frankly and euphoniously
calls eigenlicht, in its manageable (but none the less
blazing) display. Now, having entered the poem
myself . . . it isn’t about the cosmos any more. It’s all
about me. —Although I hope that means it’s also all
about you, as I stumble from bed for another sixteen waking hours
of who-knows-what, and see for a moment, or think I see
for a moment . . . there . . . no, there . . . a fog . . . a flimmer . . . and I reach out
toward that sixteen-year-old boy from forty years ago,
who’s only a hole in the air now, that the wind blows through,
the wind of Mars, in its immemorial quarrel with stone
and skin and the scurf of the planet itself
and our on-loan solar resplendence.
--Albert Goldbarth, 2004