The problem of the many, p.1
The Problem of the Many, page 1
The Problem of the Many
Timothy Donnelly
for Lucie Brock-Broido
(1956–2018)
Contents
What Is Real
1
The Stars Down to Earth
Stunt
Prometheus
Gifted
All Through the War
The Endless
Apologies from the Ground Up
Unlimited Soup and Salad
Diet Mountain Dew
Solvitur Ambulando
Fascination
Malamute
The Problem of the Many
2
Arrows from the Sun
Smartwater
By Night with Torch and Spear
Cursum Perficio
Wasted
Shame
Nebuchadnezzar
A Habitation of Jackals, a Court for Ostriches
Chemical Life
The Radiance of a Thousand Suns
All the Shrimp I Can Eat
Golden
Lunch in a Town Named After a Company Slowly Poisoning Its Residents
After Callimachus
3
The Earth Itself
Happiness
Hymn to Edmond Albius
Escape into Time
Traveler
Jonah
The Death of Print Culture
The Death of the Author
The Death of Truth
November Paraphrase
NyQuil
Leviathan
Mutual Life
4
Lycopodium Obscurum
Lapis Lazuli
Levitation
Some Comforts at the Expense of Others
Poem Interrupted by Whitesnake
Poem on a Stair
Poem Written with a Pinecone in My Hand
Poem Written with an Arrowhead in My Mouth
Flamin’ Hot Cheetos
The Lighthouse of Alexandria
Roof
Burning Lichen from a Bronze Age Megalith
Insomnia
Hymn to Life
Notes & Acknowledgments
I will not eat my heart alone
What Is Real
And though we had fed long and well at the table
the talk always turned to whether to go on
regardless of what it might say about our moral sense,
regardless of what it might cost us in the end,
or whether the time had come to surrender,
let the sum of our particles back into the flow
hoping they might in the longview recombine
into something of value, or of beauty, but humbler
than the human—not that we’d ever be able
to judge, not that we’ll ever be able to know
what comes of what we did, or whether it was
worth it, like the towering alien humanoid at the start
of Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, how it paces
to the edge of a powerful waterfall somewhere on what
appears to be a still primarily mineral Earth,
takes one last look at its oblong mothership
surveilling from a mist, removes its monklike robe
and drinks as if in ceremony from a cup
of animate metallic ooze that quickly disintegrates
its all too pale flesh, unleashing new organic matter
into the ecosystem, strands of DNA unzipping
haphazardly in the rush to mix it up with Earth’s
own chemistry and into offspring whose tumble
up it will never witness—not the earliest infinite-
simal blips or suppertime in old Persepolis, not opaque
dawn in Beijing or any single sentient being
separated a moment from the chaos, wholly
unobserved, in whom life sank down as if to test itself,
limitless, dark, spreading, unfathomably deep
and free. As if at play in ether, a meadow of
possibility skittering as axons of foam across the surface
swell of the North Sea. I felt once I belonged to
it in a way I would collapse the instant I began
measuring it in words: waves in blue profusion
dissolving into geological undulations and then
pulses in yellow sand. Here a snake crosses
my path again in Texas, the length of it like a dew-
damp privilege wriggled by a cloud-hid hand
conveying deep troughs and amplitudes back to the sun.
We do go on. Near movie’s end, the last known
humanoid of the type to seed life on Earth
is uprooted from cryogenic sleep on a made-up moon
by a crew of corporate human blunderers it then
looks down on with informed disgust, killing off
in minutes all but one. In America, Baudrillard
says the products of our imagination remind us
what is real, the way weariness of existence is
how we come to feel, buried in all this abundance,
we are still alive. Hold on tight, my circumstance.
Tonight we’re diving in. Tonight we’ll find the bassline
subatomic-style, let particles of us entangle
knowingly with those of a gold encyclopedia
in the ruins of Vienna or an ear of teosinte across
an open border, a common source of being, before I
die—let us be, let being be, continuous, continuous.
The Stars Down to Earth
The sea is pewter gray with green in it like music.
The green is lit in places where the waves begin to rise.
They rise and thin and curve, sieving sunlight through them.
They beat against the rocks until they flatten into froth.
The froth is white like wool. The froth is white like thought
that catches in the hedge or on the barbed-wire fence
strung between the pasture and a narrow gravel road.
The froth is white like wool that stretches into glistening
through the milder rains of March, or in a fog that feeds it
constant countless droplets borrowed from the sea.
The sea is bluer now, with less green in it than earlier.
The sea is architectural but the froth is more like thought
that catches on a thorn and stretches into glistening
after mizzle, after fog, conducting sunlight in the morning
when lambs are in the dew asleep on deep green clover,
when stars fade out of view without a sound but of the earth.
The sea is even bluer, closer to the color I would think
to paint the sea, then something living underneath it,
something rumored of and large, shaken into wakefulness
as clouds arrive like lambs awakened from damp clover.
The hillside is on fire. The smoke is darker than the clouds
and darker than froth. It rises on an angle like a thought
that knits its aerosols into the clouds, almost successfully.
The sea darkens its brow. The sea is blurred brocade
on the sofa in a basement a face is forced into. The lambs
are pinned down by the forelimbs, shackled and hoisted.
The froth is voiceless. What is manipulable is manipulated
almost endlessly. The sea is at its darkest, having eaten
its shadow backwards. It drags the earth it spits out back
into itself like pewter music. Time is on the narrow
gravel road and wool is on the barbed-wire fence as stars
force the wakening into history. The sea is indistinguishable
from sky now, the headlights approaching like a thought
beaten against the mizzle, beaten into droplets hoisted
up like stars from the sea. Something living underneath it
rises from the basement, glistening through the froth as time
feeds itself itself on the hillside, conducting the music
of the sea up to the heavens, and of the stars down to earth.
Stunt
Early on in the undertaking I imagined
backing out of it. This allowed me to continue
outwardly while inwardly I had stopped.
Not to make too much of it but everything
followed accordingly. The human in my experience
will speak until you agree. Agree,
or it will lean too close and bring its hands.
Protect what refuses by corrupting it
into something scarce. I don’t want to ruin it,
but in reality there’s no choice. I agree
about the weather. I agree to the human voice
in its red declamation. But when what
punishes has penned itself in sleep, I reduce
what words it uses into a toxin I can sing.
Prometheus
From a breadth of time so nonmonetizable it lies beyond
human perception, from an airspace no nation has ever
laid claim to, emitting intel from the year’s first snowflake
intermixed with its last known rose, not yet rankled,
not irrevocably, naked of foot or in expressive hosiery,
pumped-up thirsty or morose for data—I will reenter
Earth’s orbit with game plan readied a lifetime in advance,
but open to debate, chance, obliteration and its opposite.
I have been sent here to warn you. The gum splotches
ubiquitous on sidewalks house sufficient genetic whatnot
to repopulate a desert planet. The brussels sprout
is best if boiled, buttered, and salted. The current mania
for roasting it unrecognizable is a construct of hatred.
The Rosicrucians were a boy band. Everyone else
was entourage, cataloguing footage of failures to synthesize.
Love is not love when it insists on comprehending itself.
This is love—and it’s spreading outward, as with umbels
of uncertain plants. Science has not yet caught up with
what I’m about to do to that sandwich. Look away:
trust some instinct in the hand to choose your best defense.
I have just now swallowed a tremendous mouthful
of pickled herring. Am I running a bath here, or a brothel?
Whatever I do next, it will be this, or not this: I can’t
do otherwise. In this respect, I can be said to be a fatalist
in disguise, bound to textiles I can’t predict, incapable
as the goldfinch last to hit the thistle patch, or as implacable.
Vividness is not accuracy. I couldn’t be in two places
at once, unless I were a bird. A burning sensation is often
first to notice the salt, to notice wind, to notice a salt
wind rattling at night the house’s loose-most casements.
Casualty has its moments. Pandora’s box was just a jar
before Erasmus mangled it. A hope kept deep inside, iron-
winged, might well be delusion. I have been sent here
on a mission. What I lack in discipline I will make up for
in stamina. I’m looking into the matter, the mirror, the abyss.
I’m looking into the camera: it’s hidden in a rambling
plastic philodendron, escalating my soliloquy up the face
of Mount Olympus. Comeuppance is informal. Music is
from the Greek. The gravity is palpable, the gravity and light
septifurcating endlessly into threads like felt mathematics
or an ordinary sunset shredded by surfactants in a birdbath
made of clay. Hephaestus shaped Pandora out of that.
Athena taught her to weave. Aphrodite gave her grace
and, at Zeus’s behest, a bitter longing through the limbs.
We are her children. It must have felt like hoisting up
from the sea’s bottom a big blonde octopus, pinning wide
her baffled arms, then staining them an unreal white.
The highest point the podcast said of wisdom is to know
what you don’t, which is everything, which was a quote.
I have filled the feeder up but the word still hasn’t gotten out.
Persistence of the past depends largely on technology,
including one’s offspring and the four-poster bed.
I have come to notice, to understand, and bearing light
snaffled from a star so minor only Alpha Centauri doesn’t
take pity on us. I am here to take pity on us. I am here
on a dare, a dime, a lark. The universe tends inexorably
toward disorder. I have come to set fire to and come to set
things right. I am hovering over the flame like a father
assembling a cradle, or as Prometheus did it with it stuck
in a fennel stalk, an aroma of smoldering anise trailing
behind him the whole way down, knowing he could turn
around before anyone noticed, cover his tracks, return
things back where they belonged, and what didn’t belong
anywhere could be destroyed, but that’s not what he did.
Gifted
My breath sounded more like a recording of breath
than actual breathing, and not a high-quality
studio recording, but something cheap and muffled,
something made on a small, lightweight device
designed to be placed inside a plush white bear
presented to a child on some special occasion—
plush white bear with the sound of my breath in it,
a gift for a child with such low expectations
a toy of this kind should be cherished instantly
and for a long time to come, but no, not this child,
child who isn’t quite what we thought, child who takes on
inhuman proportions, who damages surfaces,
who tears the bear apart with both hands and holds
the recording device in victory against the sun.
What comfort is it that the child is ambidextrous?
What he will do with those hands is unspeakable.
All Through the War
I couldn’t remember any of it any more than I could feel
the corporate brotherhood at work among my breakfast flakes
or in those protein shakes I drank to keep my strength up.
I couldn’t feel the toxicity the way I thought I should:
little silver pinpricks in my liver and then all over my body
steadily proceeding to a brownout in my limbic system,
the not knowing when I was, if or where we were at war with
and for what reason now. All the time I stopped eating
meat again. I stopped eating sugar. I bought four watches,
each watch stopped. I bought a pound of raw rough bulk
lapis lazuli from Afghanistan and I couldn’t stop my tongue
from licking a certain piece of it like a dirty blue wedge
of Toblerone to know how it would feel. As for time, I didn’t
always feel right with it, especially when alone especially
by the sea, where time widens to include more of itself,
partly because of the motion and partly because of sound,
which is also motion. A decade of drone strikes in the north
couldn’t stop Pakistani street vendors from salt-roasting
sweet corn in pans like steep-sided woks. My eyesight grew
worrisome, I felt light tingling in my extremities and left cheek
I imagined meant diabetes, but it turned out to be nothing.
I turned out to be fine. Last week an airstrike in Somalia
targeting an insurrectionist youth group killed a dozen or so.
Yesterday they seized a village in the center of the country.
After my father’s surgery, I went to Ireland on my own.
I told the lighthouse keeper I was worried something was
wrong with me because I couldn’t stop looking at the water
with all its changing shapes and color. She said we are all
the same here love, all the same. Often in quiet I can still feel
the stone’s abrasion on my tongue. I pulled a lichen from
the bronze age megalith with intent to burn it back home.
I made Syrian red pepper and walnut dip flavored with cumin
and pomegranate molasses. There is nothing more delicious
when eating this. How many seeds did Persephone take?
I thought I could cry for my friend no further until I opened
her armoire to lay to rest her scented shirts in an appliance box:
white, off-white, shell pink, true pink, lilac, lavender, blue.
As polar seas warm up, the shrinking difference in air pressure
between the poles and the equator weakens the jet stream
and makes its path wobblier, explaining all this erratic weather
we’ve been up to. The Senate voted against the resolution
to stop support of the Saudi intervention in Yemen as Trump
took lunch with the Saudi crown prince. I wake with scratches
I can’t explain. I order herbal supplements at night online
and forget what for by the time they get here: ashwagandha,
schizandra. I read objects are more like events with longevity.
On average 130 Yemini children died each day last year
of extreme hunger and disease. A Saudi blockade on seaports
stops the ships delivering aid. These are casualties of war.
The instant the technician’s needle found a vein, the seascape
on the wall rattled uncontrollably. She whispered the clinic
used to be a funeral home. Trump showed the prince posters
of the assorted planes, tanks, ships and munitions his oily
billions might buy him like an infomercial in the Oval Office.
What use is an adaptogen when I worry my own daughter
