Poem commissioned by Yeshiva University at the Jewish Center Museum, delivered last week.
Jennifer Michael Hecht
The Thesis Is that There Was a Beginning
In the begin there was heaven and earth
but the earth was void and darkness had the sea.
When there was light it was good.
The waters gathered together and dry land appeared.
The waters swarmed with living creatures,
sea-monsters. On Earth, every creature that creepeth.
Fill the waters, fill the earth.
Bring forth the living creature, creeping thing,
I have given you every seed upon the face of the earth.
Finished, the host of them. Rested.
These are the generations of heaven and earth.
*
Good people of Yeshiva University
and the Jewish Center Museum
You ask me for a poem in conversation
with an art installation
on the theme of Genesis, as in:
In the begin.
There was light. It was good,
but there was also a lot of darkness.
*
The art I’m responding to is seven
TV screens, each showing one word
from Genesis in somewhat random order.
The phrase showing when I took a photograph
was: “The earth was an open living seed.”
In this flicker poetry, when a monitor
lands on the word “God,”
the serene black screen flashes bright-white
in your mellowed, museum eyes,
crashes in your soft museum ears.
The viewer tells the five screens
when to whirl words by, and when to stop
but hasn’t any control over the sentence.
You stand there like Captain Picard
and an ensign all in one, and tap the big
red and green buttons.
*
In the begin there is darkness,
then there is some kind of light.
Then a kind of darkness again.
Then light. In the end there will be
darkness again
and then light.
This flickering is like a candle
sputtering, pretty and frightening.
*
The earth was an open living seed.
There are millions of sea creatures
and millions of stars in the galaxy
and millions of galaxies.
There are billions of years.
*
Yet.
Yet it is uncharacteristic for us
to change our minds. Despite
how wrong we obviously all
must be, about so many things,
odds are, disagreeing as we do,
a lot of us are wrong a lot of the time.
Yet we rarely change our minds.
We get our actual hearts replaced
more often than we change our minds.
And our metaphorical hearts also change
faster than we change our minds.
Yet every generation changes,
tips a flip on what they grew up believing
then stick with that forever.
Yet we love life.
*
Ever answer a question asked by a museum
and a yeshiva?
I’m a poet and a minor-famous atheist.
Seven tv screens flicker chaotically the Bible’s
first eight-hundred words.
In the begin there was no beginning. When you
walk over to it, it’s already going.
Even the biggest bang Tangos somehow
with others, say, a former and another after.
*
When a screen flashes “God” and thunder
crashes, it is an interruption.
I was trying to think.
Hoping the text might be oracular
for me, hoping for ideas to help me.
We are Diaspora and post-garment district
which makes us both post-exilic
and post-textilic. Our late elders
wrote Russian as well as Yiddish
so we are also post-Cyrillic.
*
In the beginning there was darkness
and then there was light.
Later again there was that
darkness I mentioned.
Then that light again.
The young people speak of the light.
The older people darken, the sky lights.
*
We are in this together.
There are billions of stars.
There is darkness and light.
There are generations.
They begin in darkness.
They get light.
A kind of darkness returns.
By the waters of Babylon
and in Brooklyn.
By the waters of the Gowanus Canal
we sat down and wept. Born into
these ideas and flipped into those,
everybody’s an exile. Everybody
drums themselves out, sits at the edge
of the Hudson or the East River
and weeps for some lost temple,
wails on a turnpike wall.
*
Adam drummed out,
and Eve drummed out too.
*
All of us so tired.
With or without the holocaust.
An unusually ancient
people, within a century
of an attempt at our eradication
on a scale beyond scale.
It makes you sad. Ask
any Ute or an Inuit.
This is a very strange land
between Proxima Centauri
and the fat old sun, absurd even.
If someone asks you, frankly,
How can we sing in a strange land?
Answer by patting yourself down
as if to find a pen. It will keep you
from going up in flames.
*
I’m important, it matters what I do.
Everything I do matters only to me.
It’s in the Talmud somewhere –
A person should at all times have
a note in one pocket reading: You
are the most important person
and a note in another pocket that reads:
You are no more important than anyone.
Between these, there is land
where nothing matters.
Between passions, there is land
where nothing matters.
Between passions, there is a terrible
land, beautiful if you can bear it, but
you can’t, where nothing matters.
This is recovery. You are not dying.
Between passions, there is a terrible
land, beautiful if you can bear it, but
you can’t (yet) where nothing matters.
*
The older people speak of the light.
The young people darken, the sky lights.
The thesis is that there was a beginning.
*
Yet there was unformed void
and darkness. Then there was light,
then land, then animals, and sea creatures.
Dominion creeping over everything.
Male and female. Replenish the earth. Fish.
Finished, the host of them. Rested.
These are the generations of heaven and earth.
These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise.
*
The thesis is that there was an ending and the ending
was exile, the thesis is that something sweet
came before all the horror. Something Edenic
before the ash and flood.
How does it feel to be post-exilic, post-textilic,
and post-Cyrillic?
It’s not idyllic.
They were from someplace dangerous.
We are from someplace dangerous too.
A world with a holocaust in it is never
without it. I hate to break it to me
but it’s true. I want to do strange things
with you either today or tomorrow
it’s up to you as I am ready right now.
*
Everything changes and changes.
*
The air felt like his voice before he lost
his hair, sounded like your father
looking right at you and smiling.
Then you did something you shouldn’t have done,
ate something you shouldn’t have eaten.
You are always eating, aren’t you?
*
Voltaire’s Enlightenment was nice
but Spinoza led the Jews into light
a good two centuries prior.
Which set us on fire.
Which set us on fire.
*
As Eve said to Adam,
“If this is the beginning
why am I already so tired?”
*
Museum and Yeshiva University,
there is a flicker poetry to the universe
and it had already started when we
got here. Yet we can star in it,
standing there like Captain Picard.
Our hearts on our sleeves like Commander Troi
There are millions of galaxies to change our minds,
yet we get our hearts replaced more often.
Leonard Nimoy and Bill Shatner are both Jewish;
the “live long and prosper” hand gesture rabbinical,
a secret sign a young Nimoy spotted in shul
when his father told him to close his eyes
and he peeked instead.
There they are on the bridge, Kirk and Spock,
sailing into the universe
where no one has ever gone before,
exile upon exile,
until nothing feels like home as much
as further exile, further out, further on,
ancient secrets furling secrets like fractals.
By the waters of the Babylon Turnpike,
we sat down and wept.
Two-thousand and ten used to feel
impossibly far in the future
but here it is. No one thought the Berlin Wall
would ever come down, not in our lifetimes.
There are people born
in the year two thousand and one who could already
beat most of us in a game of chess.
Everything changes, everybody’s an exile,
wailing on a turnpike wall.
Between passions, there is a terrible
land, beautiful if you can bear it, and you
can, where nothing matters
but that we look after one another
in the terrifying darkness and the weird
interruption that is light. Walls rise and fall.
The earth is an open living seed
and so is the mind.
This, such as it is, is our time on camera.
Our time on the screen.
Animals and every creeping thing.
Man and Replenish the earth. Fish.
Finished, the host of them. Rested.
These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise.
We are tired, but still, go forth and multiply,
live long and prosper.
These are the generations of heaven and earth.
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