Liberties

Yesterday P. asked: “Do you think the children from Job’s second chance could actually be happy?”                                  – Anna Kamieńska, A Nest of Quiet: A notebook, translated by Clare Cavanagh   But then amid the helplessness of Lives and corrugated sewage, underneath the heavens’                  cold and hatchbacked tabernacle, absolute, at night and then in the tubercular dawn, the Man who had                  been locked in Place, shocked by his loss of Face and Family, was loosed: and then the World donated to                  him twice what had been gone.  His Children (whom he’d seen the fired pyres stripping of their nakedness and every woolly                  talisman) came back, came bringing groceries: and they said, this is what a bad trip feels like, we were                  never dead, you only thought we were: and though he had mislaid his Face in tumuli of boils, had                  dropped his Eyes in lozenge-bottles crouched behind the ziggurats of shipping boxes at the docks,                  screamed at Life’s fair unfairness, they beatified him, decorated him with Reassurances that tugged like                  ugly gold hoops at his ears.  So in the End he was more blessed (which in some Tongues translates as wounded) than in                  the Beginning: but he cried I said, I said, I know you’re as dead as the oxen the asses the camels