I’ve been thinking about the world for a while now Michael – thinking of it not as a network of true or false propositions but as the inside of a gigantic whale tunnelling through time and darkness. Etymologically, as you know, whales and architecture come from the opposite end of the linguistic spectrum – but there is architecture in the whale as surely as there are whale pods migrating through downtown Los Angeles. Just because things aren’t brightly lit, doesn’t make them invisible, Michael.
Michael Silverblatt, to be honest I thirst for your tears as voraciously as a car whose little orange gas-icon has been lit up for the last thirty miles. I feel like we could get there, Michael. I really do. You interview authors on the radio and I am an author not on the radio, and together we are travelling through a series of interlocking whales that make up existence. One whale is America, another is Earth, then others that are God, Los Angeles, etc.
You remember the grade-school exercise that asked us to write our exact location on an undelivered envelope? Well, I think it’s time you opened that envelope and delivered the message that America has been promising the world for years. We’re ready for it – we’ve waited long enough, anyway, and the message is burning through the thin blue sheath like a coal. Messages, messages: we’ve been promised these for centuries, Michael. But your country’s hesitancy has made the rest of the world suspect her.
Michael, I believe I have made progress along these lines, and though I may not be the first person to say this to you, I want you to listen very closely: the thing that will make you cry is brotherhood.
“Brotherhood?” says Michael Silverblatt. “Just last night I talked to Junot Diaz. Jonathan Williams sat on that exact stool – you’re speaking into the microphone that once touched the lips of Seamus Heaney!”
What, exactly, is Michael’s point here? An older guard might pull out the over-rich consistency of the bourgeois worldview – but I like Michael, and more importantly I am like Michael, specifically in my reverence for the sacred and the high. I believe that we are all in the same whale and therefore hope to answer him, not with the scorn of the working class, or the kiss of the whip, but with a vision as pure and simple as a rose in winter. A ROSE IN WINTER MICHAEL! Am I speaking loud enough yet? Lower this partition, take off your headphones and I will show you how passion can make a rose blossom from your forehead and vines drip from your nose like shoelaces; thorns pierce your eyelids. I will show you the world you’ve been longing for.
Should Michael trust me on this one? Should he put down his collected works and chop wood with the rest of the sun-bronzed demi-gods? More importantly will the whale ever dock and the message dribble off its lips to collapse exhausted on the ivory sand?
Alright, I admit it Michael, you are making me cry now, which is not exactly what I was aiming for, but which I like anyway. Delicious tears of the people, or the person! Rosewater on my upper lip! I feel that we are halfway there – Communism works, Michael Silverblatt! Say it with me, and by saying throw off the fetters of your life and ambition and find yourself in the real utopia that we’ve been planning for generations, whose groundwork we laid before you were born and whose spires will continue their putsch long after you yourself have disintegrated. You may die, but the world you bequeath to your children will live on into the night.
Are you crying yet, Michael Silverblatt? Because listen, people, if Michael isn’t crying we haven’t done our job. Rend your clothes and don hairshirt after hairshirt, for an unmoved Michael is the surest indication that everything we have worked for is lost. The winter is upon us. The vast Russian winter. Take refuge in your rabbit holes. Because from now on the only things that you will experience in common are death and sleep and maybe not even the second of these, because the world we have made respects nothing and lurches gradually towards the twenty-four hour work week. The man on which nothing is lost looses everything, and this is the secret Michael. This is the switch you must flip to extricate yourself from this madness of industry, nightmare of endless books…
I know you can do it Michael. I have faith in you, I hear a spark travelling through your vast and deeply-sonorous naval cavities, making its way towards the light, moving as it not-moves, like Jonah in his whale. Longtime listener, first time caller, Michael. Take me into your heart and I won’t disappoint.
